[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Peak Oil? Peak Soil!

[Bill Totten]

by Roger Doiron

CommonDreams.org (March 06 2008)


You don't have to be a peak oil {1} news junkie to know that something's
up with the global oil supply. Yesterday, prices went above $104 for the
first time on the announcement from OPEC nations that they were quite
satisfied with the amount of available supply (and the price that supply
is fetching), rebuffing President Bush's request to open the spigot a
little wider.

Reasonable people can disagree on the causes and the implications of
rising oil prices, but there seems to be a gathering consensus that the
era of easy and cheap oil is over. If you don't want to take my word on
that, then take it from an oil executive {2}.

What few people grasp is the connection between oil and the food supply.
Put simply, the food and farm economies of industrialized countries run
on the stuff. Oil and its derivatives are used to power farm equipment,
to create synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, to run food processing
equipment, and to transport food from field to fork, a journey of 1500
miles for the average forkful.

It has been estimated that our highly-industrialized food system in the
US requires ten calories of fossil fuel energy to create one calorie of
food energy. Needless to say, that equation just doesn't compute in the
long run.

Meanwhile, as we're depleting one natural resource, we're busy creating
an abundance of another: people. The UN estimates that the global
population will approach nine billion (up from the current 6.6 billion)
by the year 2050. Last year, an article in the British paper The
Guardian pointed out the enormity of the challenge we face in feeding
nine billion people. In order to do this, we will need to produce more
food over the course of the next fifty years than we have produced in
the past 10,000 years combined {3}.

So, what's the solution? The answer to peak oil is peak soil. The more
people who have their hands in it and have a little of it under their
fingernails, the better placed we will be to feed our communities and,
indeed, the world.

There are different things you can do to be part of the solution. If you
are a gardener already, keep up the good work this spring and try to
scale up your growing, if your time and space allow. More importantly,
try to bring some non-gardeners into the fold this year, perhaps by
organizing a backyard or community gathering on Kitchen Garden Day {4}.
If you're not a gardener, this is the year to start.

If you can't garden because of where you live, make as direct a
connection as you can with someone in your area who's growing and
selling food whether it's through regular purchases at a farmer's market
or membership in a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm. Your
support helps protect that farmland from development and helps keep that
farmer farming.

We can't change what President Bush or OPEC will do today, but we can
change our own actions and that's a good place to start.
_____

Roger Doiron is the Founding Director of Kitchen Gardeners
International, a nonprofit network of 5100 gardeners from ninety
countries. He is currently serving as a Food and Society Policy Fellow {5}.

Links

{1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

{2} http://www.chevron.com/documents/pdf/realissuesadtrillionbarrels.pdf

{3} http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/31/climatechange.food

{4} http://www.kitchengardenday.org/

{5} http://www.foodandsocietyfellows.org/

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/06/7521/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/