[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Little Steps That Matter

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 13 2008)

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


Over the last few months, the uncomfortable phrase "peak oil" has
started to appear more and more frequently in the mainstream media, and
the usual denunciations by the usual suspects are starting to wear
noticeably thin. It's been more than half a century since M King Hubbert
first started trying to sound the alarm, granted, but better late than
never.

Still, as I suggested in an earlier post {1}, the process of coming to
terms with peak oil has more than a little in common with the five
stages of grief famously outlined some years back by Dr Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross. We've already seen two of those stages displayed in living
color in recent years, and of course both are still very much with us.

The poster child for denial just now is Cambridge Energy Research
Associates (CERA), a petroleum industry-funded think tank that has
nonchalantly churned out predictions of soaring oil production and
declining oil prices for years now, while production and prices in the
real world have been headed the other way. For anger, you can hardly do
better than watching the current US administration, brandishing its
gargantuan war machine and bellowing its rage at Arabs, Venezuelans, and
anybody else arrogant enough to think that they have some sort of right
to the oil underneath their own territories.

At this point, though, we're beginning to see the next stage in the
process, which is bargaining. The recent rush to pour our food supply
into our gas tanks via ethanol and various flavors of biodiesel is one
example; another is the belated attempt to launch a crash program of
nuclear power plant construction. These and others partake of the basic
logic of bargaining: we promise to mend our ways in some sufficiently
large, loud, and colorful fashion that the wolf at the door will be
satisfied with the puppy biscuit we throw its way, and let us go on with
our lives.

It doesn't work for the dying, and it won't work for modern industrial
society, either, but it's not hard to see this logic in the two examples
I've already cited, and many other grandiose proposals of the same sort.
The results of this distorting factor have not been good. The rush to
ethanol and biodiesel has already played a significant role in sending
grain prices to record levels and, as Stuart Staniford pointed out in a
recent post {2} on The Oil Drum, will quite probably cause mass
starvation in the Third World within a decade or so if it continues at
its present pace.

Attempting to revive the nuclear industry on a large scale is, if
anything, a more misguided proposition. Even aside from the highly
dubious economics of nuclear power, the severe and ongoing depletion of
fissionable uranium reserves, the risks of nuclear weapons
proliferation, and the far from minor point that nuclear reactors
produce wastes so lethal that they have to be isolated from the
environment for geologic time scales, the sheer cost of building enough
nuclear plants to matter in the relatively narrow window of opportunity
left to us could easily bankrupt any industrial society that attempted it.

What makes these and similar projects as destructive as they are futile
is precisely that they are meant to allow us to continue living our
lives in something like their present form. That fantasy, it seems to
me, is the single largest obstacle in the path of a reasoned response to
the predicament of peak oil. The hard reality we have to face is the
fact that the extravagant, energy-wasting lifestyles of the recent past
cannot be sustained by any amount of bargaining or any number of grand
projects. Accept that reality, on the other hand, and redefine the
situation in terms of managing a controlled descent from the giddy
heights of the late industrial age, and the range of technological
options widens out dramatically.

I want to talk about one of those less dramatic options here, partly
because it's among the simplest and most accessible technologies in the
toolkit of the ecotechnic age, partly because it could relatively easily
become part of an effective response to one of the most pressing
challenges the coming of peak oil poses us, and partly because it makes
a good introduction to principles that will likely be central to many,
perhaps most, of the key technologies of the future. The option I have
in mind is the homely art of composting.

So far I've been unable to find an even remotely plausible figure for
the total amount of compostable food, garden, and farm waste generated
annually in the United States, or any other industrial country for that
matter. It's certainly a very large volume, and the amount of it that
goes into landfills rather than being recycled into fertile soil through
composting is not much smaller. Those of my readers who have compost
bins know how much of their own kitchen, garden, and yard waste goes
into it; my wife and I generate between two and four cubic feet of
compostable waste in an average week.

All of it goes into a compost bin of black recycled plastic in the back
yard. So does another cubic foot or so per week from a friend's kitchen;
his living situation doesn't permit him to have his own compost bin, so
he contributes to ours. All the peelings and scraps and moldy bits from
the produce that passes through our kitchen and his go into the compost
pile, along with garden weeds, plants that have passed their season, and
other forms of yard and garden waste, leavened with double handfuls of
dried leaves saved from last autumn. Those are the only inputs, other
than a little labor with a shovel once a month or so to keep the pile
turned and working. Once a year, the hatch at the bottom of the compost
bin disgorges the output - black, damp, sweet-smelling compost, ready to
be worked into our garden beds.

This output is potent stuff. The first garden my wife and I planted
started out as a patch of bare dirt on the north side of an urban
apartment building, so poor and barren that even the most rugged of the
local weeds made only half-hearted forays into it. Two years of
double-digging beds with homebrewed compost turned it into a lush
cottage garden that yielded shade-tolerant vegetables and medicinal
herbs three seasons of the year, and supported some of the biggest
earthworms I've ever had the pleasure of encountering. Given a
reasonably good mix of raw materials – which an ordinary kitchen and
garden provide quite well – compost is a balanced soil amendment that
works over the long term, improving fertility, tilth, and pH balance
while providing a good mix of soil nutrients.

Properly handled, the composting process also takes out unwanted seeds
and pathogens. Decomposition generates heat – 150 to 160 degrees
Fahrenheit is a fairly common temperature for the core of a good compost
pile – and that sort of heat over weeks or months will kill anything in
your compost you don't want there. If you live in a warm climate, in
fact, it's usually wise to put your compost bin where the summer sun
won't shine on it, and you may have to wet it down on hot days; compost
heaps have been known to burst into flames when the heat of
decomposition rose past the ignition temperature of the pile's more
flammable ingredients. (The possibility that this heat could be used in
other ways seems to have gotten little notice, even from the appropriate
technology crowd; we'll discuss it, and other uses for "waste" heat, in
a later post.)

Is compost a replacement for fossil fuel-based fertilizers? In the
straightforward sense of this question, of course not. It's possible to
make compost on an industrial scale - and there are businesses and
public utilities that do this - but compost is not well suited to the
industrial model of agriculture. It works best when applied in intensive
small-scale truck gardening, where it can be combined with other
low-energy but labor-intensive techniques for maximizing soil fertility
and productivity. Composting is not, in other words, an effective way to
maintain business as usual.

Instead, it's a bridge – or part of a bridge – that reaches beyond the
end of the industrial age. The industrial model of agriculture, for
reasons rooted primarily in current economic and political arrangements,
has established a stranglehold on food production in the developed
world. Barring drastic political intervention – a new Homestead Act,
say, meant to repopulate the abandoned farm country of the Great Plains
– that situation is unlikely to change suddenly or soon.

At the same time, this doesn't mean that the industrial model of
agriculture will actually work well in a postpeak world. Far more likely
is a situation in which soaring fossil fuel prices cascade down the food
chain, turning industrial farms and their far-flung distribution
networks into economic basket cases propped up by government subsidies,
sky-high food prices, and trade barriers that keep other options out of
the existing marketplace. In such a context, local microfarms and market
gardens, and the cooperatives, farmers markets, and community-supported
agriculture schemes that give them a market outside the existing system,
are guaranteed steady and dramatic growth.

In a decade or so, in fact, American agriculture may well resemble
nothing so much as the agricultural system of the Soviet Union in its
last years, with huge and dysfunctional corporate farms filling the role
of the sprawling industrialized kolkhozii while a large proportion of
the food people actually eat comes from backyard garden plots. It's in
that secondary economy of small gardens and microfarms that composting
has its place – and just as the collapse of the Soviet Union would have
been far more devastating in human terms without the underground economy
that kept people fed, the downward arc of the industrial age can be made
less traumatic if technologies such as composting, relevant to an
underground food economy already being born, become widely distributed
and practiced in the near future.

Thus the homely, humdrum, and vital art of composting offers a model for
the kinds of adaptive, flexible, and scalable responses to the
predicament of industrial society we need to locate and deploy. It's not
a total solution, and it makes a very poor bargaining chip in the sort
of haggling with fate I discussed earlier in this post. Rather, if the
twilight of the industrial age is going to be anything but an
uncontrolled crash, it's one of the little steps that could actually
make a difference. In the months to come I plan on talking about more of
these. In next week's post, however, I want to talk a little more about
composting, because it offers several crucial insights to the ground
rules that will very likely define the successful technologies of the
deindustrial age.

Links:

{1} http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/08/twelfth-hour.html

{2} http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431

_____

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/2008/02/little-steps-that-matter.html#links

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