Gold & Silver Forum - Pfeiffer- free Ebook: Grassroots Ideas To Surviving (GRITS)

Oil, Food, and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture
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"Without your support I would have given up on this long ago. And without your positive input, I would have drowned in pessimism."

The lines quoted above were written by Dale Allen Pfeiffer to his wife in the dedication to his book Eating Fossil Fuels. What does it mean when an author begins a work with an allusion to his "drowning in pessimism" and ends with a chapter entitled "Twelve Fun Activities for Activists"? With Dale Allen Pfeifer, it must be an insight into how gravely he views his subject and how hard he has worked to gain any kind of positive perspective on it. What his book describes regarding world food production is as sobering as the darkest side of global warming. It warrants this kind of grim concern.

Eating Fossil Fuels begins and ends with a very basic assessment, something that too few people completely understand or think about, and yet is absolutely critical to our well-being on planet Earth: our food supply is highly dependent on hydrocarbons, whether as fossil fuel or petrochemical additives. In the 1950s and 1960s when population growth threatened to outrun food stores, an international agricultural program, now referred to as the Green Revolution, was initiated to increase farm production all around the world through the intensified use of petrochemical fertilizers and irrigation. The results were impressive. Production nearly tripled. In the years since, low cost fossil fuels have increasingly become a critical part of all facets of industrial agriculture from the growing to the packaging to the transportation to the preparation of the product, to the extent, as Mr. Pfeiffer would say, we are all but eating fossil fuel.

Unfortunately, this kind of petrochemical farming has proven unsustainable as a long term strategy. It depletes the natural life of the topsoil, compromises the water supply, and with peak oil on the horizon, will soon be too expensive to maintain. Pfeiffer makes it very clear that if we don't change the way we grow food, peak oil will do more than increase the price of gasoline. It will take food off the table of significant portions of the world. Clearly his own deep concerns for the situation are at least part of the reason for the pessimism we should all be glad he overcame. His book is an important one.

Pfeiffer is a geologist and a scientist as well a writer. In the process of making his argument, he lays a lot of numbers on the reader. Statistics can make slow reading, but in this case they are critical to the material. Any real analysis of our environment must include numbers. Stewarding the planet is an engineering task. Maximize this, minimize that. How to best make use of the resources at hand is a numbers game. Eating Fossil Fuels is not a novel; it's a technical book. You have to stop and think when you read it.

Pfeiffer has long written on the subject of Peak Oil. To be sure, his work awakened quite a few of us to the realities of petroleum depletion. The idea that an economic recession would accompany the back end of the bell curve of petroleum production is widely held. A related agricultural crisis and population die-off are also part of the scenario. This is what Pfeifer is trying to prepare us for. To elucidate what we will have to know and do, he uses the nations of North Korea and Cuba as examples of countries that have already had to face severe cuts in their fuel supply. This analysis is some of the most unique and provocative material in the book.

The industrialization of North Korea was enabled by its relationship with the two giant communist powers, China and the Soviet Union. In particular, large amounts of North Korea's oil and natural gas came from the Soviet Union through trade. Like other nations during the Green Revolution, North Korea relied on petrochemical fertilizers and irrigation to increase its food production in step with its growing population. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, however, due to financial difficulties and its renegade politics, North Korea has experienced a precipitous drop in oil and natural gas availability and currently exists on less than half what it did in the 1980s. As a result North Korea now relies heavily on coal to produce energy and facilitate food production and distribution. Unfortunately coal is considerably less efficient than either oil or natural gas for just about any task. It also can not fulfill North Korea's energy needs. The results have been obvious. Over the last 15 years, we have watched a steady economic and agricultural collapse in North Korea. Energy for agricultural machinery, electricity for irrigation pumps, natural gas additives for fertilizer, and fuel for transportation are just not adequately available any more in North Korea. There has been a substantial population recession associated with related food shortages and infrastructure decline. North Korea has become a nation reduced to bargaining for energy with nuclear threats.

Cuba's position at the time of the Soviet Union's fall was similar to North Korea's. Cuba relied on its sugar trade with the Soviet block countries for oil, natural gas, and many food stuffs. Without the Soviet Union's support and encumbered by the U.S. embargo, Cuba has been forced to live with less. In the first half of the 1990s, Cuba’s agriculture output, like North Korea's, suffered badly, but in recent years, unlike North Korea, Cuba has found a way to come to grips with its energy deficits. Using a series of agricultural reforms that changed the way the land was managed by the state and the way the land was managed by the farmers, Cuba has made steady progress toward a new self-sufficiency through relocalized and sustainable food production. While Cuba is still a nation amid difficult times, it represents a light at the end of the petrochemical tunnel.

For Pfeiffer, Cuba is a real life model for what the entire world must learn to do. That is, steadily change over from industrial farming to a relocalized and sustainable husbandry. This is a refrain repeated by nearly all alternative farming commentators: minimize the use of fossil fuels in agriculture by using manure and other natural methods to eliminate the petrochemical additives and relocalize markets and the community to cut down on the long distances food must travel from field to table. The problem Pfeiffer foresees is that without the hydrocarbons we will be hard pressed to produce as much food as we do today. In the third paragraph of the book’s sixth chapter, entitled "The Collapse of Agriculture," Pfeiffer asks the following question:

"The abundance of cheap food given to us by the Green Revolution has resulted in an exponential population boom. So we must now address a very serious question. Without the cheap, abundant supply of fossil fuels that has made possible the industrialization of agriculture, and that has allowed an explosion in food production at an energy net deficit of ten to one, has the human population exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet?"

This may be the most difficult question of our times: How many of us best fit the planet?

The United Nations projects a maximizing of Earth"s population at just less than ten billion, occurring sometime during this century. What this number really means, in terms of human transitions, is going past a population peak of maybe eleven billion and receding to a tentative equilibrium between nine and ten billion. There are many other projections in the population trend forum, but almost all scenarios include a peaking and a recession of some kind.

Pfeiffer suggests this painful period of population recession, whether sooner or later than the United Nations projects, could be ameliorated by forward thinking. If we could relocalize, if we could gather ourselves together at the grass roots level and practice sustainable agricultural as part of our community, we might gradually reduce population simply by the way we live. In other words, he offers a way to consciously work toward a population that would be optimum for the biosphere, instead of blindly stumbling toward some untenable maximum of human lives and dealing with the related problems later.

If we really want to be stewards of the planet and manage its resources, Eating Fossil Fuels reveals some of the difficult questions that must soon be asked. What would a thirty percent increase in our number mean to clean air, clean water, energy needs, and food reserves? Is six billion people already too many? How many is just right?

In his book, How Many People Can the Earth Support, noted demographics writer, Joel Cohen, suggests that five billion is a reasonable number. Buckminster Fuller felt that even 12 billion was possible if we managed the planet properly. Pfeiffer puts the number at two billion. This is a radical assessment to some. But if no preparation is made for climate changes and rapidly rising petroleum costs, the population question is likely to be answered in the most uncomfortable of ways. Changing the way we farm in a manner that also changes the way we live could lessen the pain while also healing an already stressed planet.

Can humans actually attain such awareness for themselves and the planet? Can humans really muster the will to change the status quo? Before external pressures do it for them? Pfeiffer has his doubts and a contained pessimism. But wouldn’t an attempt at mindful management of the planet be better than allowing wars or famine to determine who lives and who dies or how resources are divided? Eating Fossil Fuels takes a courageous swing at answering this question.

Visit Dale Allen Pfeiffer's website The Mountain Sentinel <HTTP: www.mountainsentinel.com>.
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A CLOSER LOOK AT "ESCAPE FROM SUBURBIA"

By Dale Allen Pfeiffer Monday, 20 August 2007 http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/90/

Solutions And Positive Assessments

http://carolynbaker.net/site/images/...20suburbia.jpg

I was asked to review Escape from Suburbia, the latest effort by the team that made The End of Suburbia. Now, I could have offered up a bit of saccharine dripping prose and let it go at that. It would have pleased everyone connected with the film without making waves. But it would not be honest. It is too late in the game to simply go on pleasing people. It is time to be honest, even if it hurts.

Escape from Suburbia was supposed to show how people who are aware of energy depletion and the other problems that threaten to destroy our civilization are dealing with it. The film follows the efforts of three groups of people, a gay couple from New York, a single mother from Toronto, and a couple of well-educated hippies from Oregon. It also looks at the fate of a community garden in LA and the efforts of a small town in California. Along the way there are lots of blurbs by the talking heads of peak oil.

The most honest and informative segments of the documentary are the portions following the couple from New York and the scenes about the South Central Community Farm in LA. The couple in New York came across as very concerned, both for themselves and for others. They could find no easy answers, and their efforts at community organizing and learning essential skills only served to make them aware of how truly desperate the situation is. They do not want to be trapped in New York when things start breaking down, yet they do not know where to go or how to provide for themselves once they get there. In the end, their situation remains unresolved. They continue to take what steps they can, learning survival skills while looking for a way out of New York.

The portion of the film dealing with South Central Community Farm illustrates both the vulnerability of community gardens within our socioeconomic system and the plight of poorer people in dealing with what is to come. The story of the SCC Farm should stand as a warning beacon to all community farms. They only exist by the grace of corporations and government. Until community gardens are recognized as vital to community health and are protected by law, they will remain vulnerable whenever the government or some powerful investor wishes to appropriate the land. As long as we continue to live under the current socioeconomic system, then community gardens will require strong legal protections to keep them safe.

The fate of SCC Farm, taken in conjunction with the fate of New Orleans' poorer residents, demonstrates that the poor will not be cared for. Instead they will be preyed upon and will suffer the brunt of the coming collapse. In truth, the working class, and in particular the lower working class, is the alternative energy source the elite intend to use to replace their consumption of fossil fuels. And this is the system they are quietly working to set in place.

I have said elsewhere (Mountain Sentinel Vol. 1, No. 4) that we must recognize that relocalization is a radical idea. It is radical because it seeks to replace the dominant system with one that is more healthy and equitable for all. And whenever a radical movement rises to threaten the dominant system, it must fight for its survival or be crushed ruthlessly.

So far, relocalization has posed no threat to the dominant system. Where it is happening at all, it is marginalized. Most people are not even aware of it, and it holds little appeal to them. They prefer to shop at Walmart, drive their SUVs and yak on their cell phones. But when relocalization efforts do become visible, and when society has collapsed to the point that relocalization begins to appeal to the masses, then you can be certain that government and corporations will do their best to stamp it out. Either that or subvert it so that it is made profitable to them.

The other two case studies in the documentary are less realistic. The single mother in Toronto is a successful ad exec, who is turning her attention to preparing the city and its suburbs for the transition. She seems to believe that the best solution can only come from within the dominant system. Her efforts are to enhance the greening of energy depletion preparedness. We see her chumming up with optimistic local politicians. In one scene, she drives through a suburb while talking about how the people there will be fortunate that they can grow food on their yards.

Such might be the case if technological collapse were as simple as turning off a light switch and waking up one morning aware of what needs to be done and possessing all the skills and experience necessary to do so. On the contrary, the collapse of complex systems is a very messy thing where each little failure has unforeseen consequences, until many such failures manage to bring the whole system crashing down.

Maybe people in the suburbs will be able grow food on their yards, if they can keep their houses. The problem is that most of them will lose their houses in the economic crash which will probably be the first major effect of energy depletion. This is already happening. Once gasoline prices rise to the point that they can no longer afford to drive to work (if they have a job left), then they will not be able to make their house payments. Nor will they have the money to invest in turning their yard into a garden, or to pay their water bills so they can irrigate that garden.

Even if they do manage to hang on to their homes and grow food in their yard, how will they heat that house in the winter and cool it in the summer. All houses built in the last 60 years are designed for artificial heating and cooling. Without that furnace or central air, they will be very uncomfortable places at best. Sure, a wood stove can be added to help heat the place in the winter. But if everyone living in a suburb turns to wood stoves, where will they get the wood?

And what do you do when the water and sewer system fail? Dig a community latrine. What about water for bathing and washing clothes? Never mind the water to irrigate those gardens. And don't forget that where many people dwell close together without adequate sanitation, disease and plague will rear their ugly heads.

These are only two examples of problems that communities will probably face. In the collapse of a complex technological society, there will be many such problems, some of which are simply unforeseeable. And many of these problems will reinforce each other, making the situation even worse.

Finally we have the couple moving from Oregon to an ecovillage in Canada. This story is very appealing, and it is my hope that they succeed. Those of us who are aware of what is to come would all like to join such an ecovillage. Unfortunately, most of us cannot due to various circumstances. To be honest, if all of us were able to do so, all of the existing or possible ecovillages would quickly be overpopulated. And if this inundation did not lead to their collapse, then the movement would quickly grow big enough to present that threat to the dominant society that I mentioned earlier.

Ecovillages and retreats into the wilderness will face a number of problems in the coming years. If they are not successful in making themselves self-contained, then their economic connections to the outside world will be susceptible. If they manage to succeed they will attract attention as the surrounding society decays. It is possible that they might be viewed as a threat by the elite, in which case they will have to fight for survival or risk being subverted. They may have to defend themselves from brigands and starving, homeless masses. Or they may find that their land is appropriated for its resources. They had best be prepared to defend their ecovillage with whatever it takes.

Among these various case studies there was ample commentary by the talking heads of peak oil. Much of this commentary could have been chopped from the film with little loss. None of the talking heads of peak oil featured in the film are truly experts on the subject. None of them are even scientists. Their greatest talent seems to be self-promotion.

I would like to have seen the documentary follow some case studies of people who do not have multiple degrees, lucrative jobs, or the necessary skill sets to make an easy transition. This would have made the film more honest in its portrayal. The closest thing the film offers to this substrata of society is the couple from New York and the SCC Farm.

Perhaps the poor remain unaware of the approaching crisis, or perhaps they simply do not want to know about it. It could be that they have their hands full trying to survive from day to day, much less worrying about the future. It could be that they are well indoctrinated to the dominant system and believe that our "leaders" will save us. They might think that these problems are moot because the ascension and the apocalypse will take place before resource depletion and environmental destruction ever take their toll. Or it could be that they see there is very little they can do to prepare and are so frightened of what lies ahead that they simply cannot allow themselves to think about it.

This documentary would have been much more helpful if it had looked at the majority of the public that remains unaware of the problem. It could have focused on efforts to wake people up, and explored the reasons why people try to keep their eyes closed to the approaching crisis. That would have been very informative and most helpful. Show people working through all the stages of grief, and how best to deal with them.

To be fair, that may have been beyond the mandate of this film. While I can't say for certain, I suspect that the financers of this documentary were looking for a positive message about how people are preparing for energy depletion and the environmental crisis. I know that in my own experience, the publishing industry is not interested in the story unless positive solutions can be offered. For their part, they say that the public does not want to hear about a problem without a solution. I have had to bow to this in my own writings.

What is really needed is a documentary or a book on how to wake people up, with real case studies. If the general population does not wake up to the full scope of the problem then there is no solution. Or rather, the solution which will be put into place will entail the exploitation of everyone and everything for the continued benefit and domination of the elite.

If you want an honest note of salvation then this is all that I can offer you. Everyone needs to wake up damn soon. The population needs to wake up and understand that they cannot trust the solution of this problem to anyone but themselves. And then they must act. And if this does not happen in short order, then we are all ****ed.