[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] In The Dark With Both Hands

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 27 2008)

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


Composting, the theme of the last two Archdruid Report posts, has turned
out to be unusually timely as the current winter draws toward its end.
The prospects for this year's wheat crop, a topic of discussion until
recently relegated to Grange halls and local newspapers in small western
towns, have recently become the focus of news stories and punditry in
business media worldwide.

There's good reason for this unexpected shift of attention. A sequence
of jarring upward leaps in the commodity markets have brought wheat
prices up to levels never before seen in modern times, with no visible
end in sight. Other grains and, for that matter, a wide range of other
agricultural commodities, have posted vertiginous price hikes of their
own. Unlike so many of the booms and busts that have enlivened recent
economic history, the current surge in grain prices isn't insulated from
the real economy of goods and services, and has already begun to play
out in rising food costs worldwide.

The boom in grain prices is the product of many factors. At the top of
the list belongs the simple if awkward fact that the world's capacity to
produce grain in recent years has failed to keep up with increasing
demand. Despite all the handwaving of cornucopian economists, it turns
out, the world really is finite, and rising demand for grain-fed
livestock in newly prosperous India and China turned out to be the
proverbial one straw too many for the world's agricultural system. Add
to that the impact of climate instability on grain harvests, the
activities of speculators, and the bizarre spectacle of the current
biofuel boom, in which large portions of the industrial world are
attempting to cope with rising petroleum prices by pouring their food
supply into their gas tanks, and you have a fine recipe for chaos in the
grain market.

Still, there's another factor at work, one that will likely play a major
role in the agricultural history of the next century or so. The
fertilizers that make modern industrial agriculture work derive almost
entirely from nonrenewable sources. Nitrate and ammonia fertilizers are
manufactured from natural gas; phosphates come from rock phosphate, and
potassium from mineral potash deposits - and global supplies of the
first two of these, at least, are beginning to run short.

It's been argued that this isn't a problem, because improvements in
technology make it possible to extract economically useful amounts of
minerals from ever more dilute source materials. In theory, this is
quite true. In practice, though, a crucial ingredient usually gets left
out of the mix: the more dilute the source material, the more energy
needs to be invested per unit of refined product. During the last two
decades of the 20th century, when energy prices reached their lowest
levels in human history, nobody needed to pay attention to the energy
side of the equation, and this fostered a climate of thought in which
futurists could picture future industrial societies that met all their
material needs by extracting dissolved minerals from seawater.

As the age of cheap abundant energy comes to an end, though, this sort
of thinking makes bad science fiction and worse propaganda. As energy
supplies dwindle, using ever increasing among energy to extract ever
smaller fractions of minerals from the ground quickly becomes a losing
bet. At the same time, without significant inputs of nitrogen,
phosphorus, and other minerals, it becomes impossible to maintain soil
fertility at levels high enough to matter. Unless the world can find
some other abundant, concentrated source of plant nutrients in time to
matter, it may not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that large
parts of the world may face a Hobson's choice between starving to death
and freezing in the dark.

This is where the perspectives of the last few Archdruid Report posts
become relevant, because such an abundant, concentrated source of plant
nutrients already exists. The methods needed to obtain the raw material
and process it into high-grade fertilizer are mature technologies,
readily available and thoroughly tested. The only reason the source in
question is not already being exploited on a large scale in the
industrial world is that most people nowadays don't seem to be able to
distinguish it from a hole in the ground.

We are talking, of course, about human feces - or, as one book on the
subject has usefully labeled it, "humanure". The average human being in
the industrial world produces between 2.5 and three pounds of fecal
matter a day, along with about a third of a gallon of urine. Over one
year, that works out to approximately half a ton of feces and a hundred
gallons of urine per person; multiply this by the 300 million residents
of the United States, and then factor in the equally massive waste
streams generated by domestic animals and livestock, and you may get
some sense of the scale of the resource that we are, quite literally,
flushing down the toilet.

The technology that converts this resource into fertilizer happens to be
the one we've been examining in the last few posts. Composting uses
natural biological processes to break down fecal material and other
wastes, converting them into a concentrated, odorless source of plant
nutrients. In the process, composting kills pathogenic bacteria by sheer
biological competition - a compost pile is a fiercely Darwinian
environment in which organisms bred in the sheltered setting of a human
body's insides don't last long. Study after study has shown that fecal
matter, after it has been competently composted, contains no more human
pathogens than ordinary soil.

So why haven't we been able to get our fertilizer together on this
issue? What keeps composted humanure from being an obvious resource to
help replace dwindling inorganic sources of plant nutrients? Part of the
reason reaches deep into the crawlspaces of the industrial world's
collective imagination. People who object to composting humanure quite
often cite concerns about pathogens or odors, but it rarely takes more
than a short discussion to get down to the level of a five-year-old
clenching his eyes shut and squealing "Ewww, ick!"

This invites satire, but beneath it lies a set of very widespread
attitudes far less appealing than simple human waste. C S Lewis pointed
out quite a while ago in The Abolition of Man (1943), and with far more
power in his fantasy novel That Hideous Strength (1946), that a great
many modern attitudes have their source in what might as well be called
biophobia - a pathological fear and hatred of the realities of
biological life, coupled with an obsessive fascination with the sterile,
the mechanical and the lifeless.

Biophobia guides the creation of human environments so biologically
sterile that, according to recent research, many currently widespread
illnesses may be caused by understimulated immune systems; it also
inspires the absurd fantasies of so-called "transhumanists" who look
forward to the day when they can put their personalities into robots and
do away with biological existence altogether. (Back in the Sixties, Ira
Levin crafted a smart horror novel, The Stepford Wives, about the
replacement of human beings by robots programmed with imitations of
their personalities, but not even he seems to have imagined that people
might set out to do that to themselves.) The same attitude, I'm
convinced, drives the horror many people feel when faced with the
prospect of eating food fertilized with composted humanure.

The same aversion to biological realities, it may be, has shaped another
factor that makes the commonsense use of human waste as plant food
difficult for many people to contemplate. The economic thinking that
guides the industrial world has long been stuck in a linear rut,
imposing patterns of one-way flow on a universe that consistently moves
in circles. Our economists sort out the tangled exchanges, multiple
roles, and mixed motives of real market economies into neat flowcharts
that move matter from suppliers to producers, to distributors, and then
to consumers, before vanishing into thin air.

Food systems built on the same pattern take nutrients from natural
deposits, put them into soil, haul the resulting crops into a baroque
system of manufacturing and distribution before they get to people, and
then dump the resulting waste into the world's fresh water supply. That
sort of straight-line pattern is the way most people in the industrial
world think; it's a measure of how pervasive such thinking is that
following nature's patterns, and cycling "waste" back around to become a
resource, seems so unthinkable to most people.

Now it deserves to be said that there are valid reasons why composting,
with or without humanure, would be difficult to apply to the kind of
industrial farming that produces most bulk agricultural commodities in
the western world these days. The infrastructure necessary to collect
150 million tons of humanure a year, plus an amount of compostable
animal manure that may well be larger still, and convert it en masse
into fertilizer for Iowa corn and North Dakota winter wheat simply
doesn't exist; it would be extremely expensive to construct, and
resources put into that project would have to be diverted from many
other pressing needs.

Still, the kind of industrial farming we have nowadays is a creation of
the age of cheap abundant energy. As fossil fuels deplete, that kind of
farming will become less and less economically viable, until it finally
ceases altogether. It's quite true, as some writers on peak oil have
argued recently, that the current agricultural economy won't simply
revert to the agriculture of an earlier time; that's not how change
happens in the real world of economics - or ecology. What will happen
instead, of course, is that new patterns will evolve in the interstices
of the old.

In ecological terms, these new patterns will fill available niches the
old system no longer occupies; in economic terms, they will use
resources and fill marketable needs outside the scope of existing
economic activity. Arguably, these patterns have already started taking
shape, in the form of the thriving economy of small organic farms and
truck gardens that sprang up around most cities in the western half of
North America beginning in the 1970s. As I hope to show in next week's
post, this new farming economy offers a glimpse at the agriculture of
the future - if, that is, we can get our heads out of our fertilizer
supply long enough to notice.
_____

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/in-dark-with-both-hands.html


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