[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Pieces of the Puzzle

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (March 12 2008)

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


One of the more interesting things highlighted by recent debates about
the future of agriculture after peak oil is the pervasive modern
tendency to seek single solutions for complex problems. We had an
example here on The Archdruid Report a few weeks back, when a reader
responded to a discussion of composting by putting up a comment saying,
in effect, that composting was a waste of time and we ought to be
talking about sheet mulching instead.

For those who don't keep up with the state of the art in organic
growing, sheet mulching means spreading a thin layer of uncomposted
organic material - leaves, straw, or what have you - over the top of the
soil. This keeps moisture in the soil, keeps weeds down, and cycles
organic matter back into humus to improve soil tilth and fertility. In
dryland bioregions, in particular, it's a key technique for intensive
organic food production.

On the other hand, it's not a panacea, and there are other bioregions
where it doesn't work anything like so well. In the part of the Pacific
Northwest where I live, for example, slugs are serious garden pests, and
sheet mulch is a slug magnet; if you use mulch early in the growing
season, in particular, you can expect to lose much of your crop to
slugs. Like many local organic growers, therefore, I use sheet mulching
to overwinter the garden, from harvest's end to planting time, and then
dig the mulch under when it's time to prepare the beds for the new crops.

Like many local organic growers, too, I also compost, and so organic
material enters the soil by both routes. Different materials follow
their own trajectories: kitchen scraps go into the compost bin, for
example, while autumn leaves get raked up into heaps for use as sheet
mulching, then finish rotting into humus once they're turned under in
spring. The two methods don't conflict with one another at all, and the
same springtime digging that turns the mulch under also works in the
year's dose of compost from the bin.

Nor are these the only options for closing the loop and cycling organic
matter back into the soil. You can use green manure - this, for the
organically uneducated, means planting a cover crop of clover or some
other nitrogen-fixing plant in the fall, letting it grow all winter, and
then turning it under in the spring. You can feed your kitchen scraps to
chickens, rabbits, or some other livestock and turn their manure into
plant food. You can use a worm bin instead of the usual composting
methods, using redworms to break down the organic matter in place of
bacteria. You can even borrow a lick from the appropriate technology
movement of the Seventies, set up an aquaculture system, feed some of
your spare organic matter to tilapia or some other tasty fish, and use
the waste water, with its load of fish feces, to irrigate your crops.

Which of these is the answer to the challenge of post-peak food
production? Put that way, the answer is obvious: none of them is the
answer. All of them, and all their various combinations, can be workable
responses to some of the needs people will have as they try to keep
themselves and their families fed as our society skids down the far side
of Hubbert's peak. Put another way, they are pieces of a puzzle; each
has its place, but no one piece completes the puzzle by itself.

This same logic can be applied more generally. One of the continuing
disputes on the end of the peak oil community concerned with agriculture
is whether farming will continue to use tractors and the like, or
whether draft horses will prove to be more viable. Both sides have good
arguments. On the one hand, a large farm running tractors on homegrown
biodiesel can keep them fueled by devoting ten percent or so of its
acreage to oilseed crops, while it takes around thirty percent of
acreage to produce fodder for draft horses to provide the same amount of
power. On the other, you don't need a factory or its substantial inputs
of energy and resources to manufacture horses - they do it themselves,
with noticeable enthusiasm and no tools other than the ones nature gave
them - and a properly fed horse also produces large amounts of excellent
organic fertilizer, a significant value that tractors don't provide.

Which is the best option? That depends on a galaxy of factors, few of
which can be predicted on the basis of abstract arguments. If enough of
today's industrial economy survives long enough into the post-peak era
that factories are still around to produce tractors and transport
networks can still get them to farmers, that makes tractors more viable;
if the industrial economy goes to pieces, chalk one up for draft horses.
Issues of scale, crop, and climate are also crucial; the option that
would work best for a 16,000-acre wheat farm on the Great Plains might
prove disastrous for a 25-acre truck farm growing vegetables on the
outskirts of a West Coast city.

For that matter, neither horses nor tractors have any place in the sort
of backyard mixed gardens that had so crucial a role in helping people
in the old Soviet Union survive its collapse, and may well play the same
role in getting Americans through a similar experience in the not too
distant future. The form of intensive organic gardening that, as David
Duhon documented some years back in One Circle (Ecology Action, 1985),
can produce a spare but adequate diet for one person on 1000 square feet
of soil, requires only hand tools and human labor. Intensive gardening
and extensive field agriculture are not the same thing, but both will
likely have important roles to play in feeding people in the post-peak era.

I suggest that this same logic can be extended much further. Consider
the ongoing debates about potential replacements for petroleum and other
fossil fuels. To some extent, of course, this sort of talk is whistling
past the graveyard. None of the proposed alternatives seem at all likely
to provide the same combination of vast abundance, low extraction and
processing cost, and protean flexibility as fossil fuels - nor is there
any good reason to think they could.

The earth's supply of fossil fuels, after all, represent hundreds of
millions of years of stored solar energy. Only sheer human egotism
justifies the presumption that, after burning through that huge and
thermodynamically improbable stockpile in a few extravagant centuries,
we can expect the universe to hand us an equivalent in some other form.
Much more likely, as I have argued here and elsewhere, is a
centuries-long period of contraction and decline, in which we as a
species must struggle to get by on much less energy than recent history
has taught us to expect.

Whether or not this turns out to be the case, though, the mismatch
between a civilization built on abundant, concentrated fossil fuels and
the relatively sparse and diffuse energy sources available to replace
them makes today's bickering about which energy source is "the answer"
an exercise in futility. Even today, coal, oil, natural gas, and other
energy sources fill different roles in the overall energy economy; the
future promises much more diversity of the same kind. Far more likely
than not, the future of energy lies in a crazy-quilt patchwork in which
each of the available energy sources is matched with its most
appropriate uses by a process of trial and error.

The point that has to be recognized, it seems to me, is that nobody
alive today has the least idea how an ecotechnic civilization - a
society that can maintain relatively advanced technology on the basis of
sustainable resources - might best be constructed. All the experience of
the last three centuries has focused on the opposite end of the possible
spectrum of technic societies, where you'll find the civilizations that
burn through nonrenewable resources at the fastest pace they can manage.
We've followed that road just about as far as it can go, far enough that
the dead end at its terminus should be visible to anyone who is willing
to notice it.

Nor can we turn to the past for conclusive answers. The societies that
existed before the industrial revolution offer hints about how
sustainability can be woven into the fabric of human life, and warnings
about the results when this fails to happen, but it's only the most
simpleminded or polemical analyses that define the task of our future as
a return to the past. The resources available to us and the limits
imposed on us by history and environment are different enough from those
of past cultures that we don't have that option. Rather, the challenge
imposed on us by the predicament of our time is that of moving into
uncharted territory.

In energy, just as in agriculture and in many other fields, all we have
are pieces of the puzzle. It will likely take ruthless sorting and a
great deal of trial and error to make those pieces fit together in any
sort of meaningful way. This makes the habit of fixating on a single
response more than usually useless just now, and makes it imperative
that any option in harmony with the wider project of building a
sustainable civilization in harmony with the biosphere needs to be taken
into account.
_____

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/2008/03/pieces-of-puzzle.html

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