ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

In Oregon both the pro-land use and anti-land use forces seem to have at last exhausted themselves. Now that those of us who fancy ourselves land use advocates are freed from the burden of automatically rising to the defense of a planning program that’s constantly under siege, we can finally admit to ourselves that it’s mostly indefensible.

Our land use laws force us to do the wrong things.

In prepping for a meeting about planning issues in the Lane County community of Blue River, I have been reviewing the rules governing unincorporated communities. Unincorporated communities are defined as those which existed at some time in the past – which means that new ones aren’t possible. The rules are written to ensure that unincorporated communities mostly remain “rural” – development shouldn’t detract from development within UGBs. Only unincorporated communities specifically designated as “urban” are allowed to plan for and accommodate population growth. Of course population growth is assumed to be accompanied by growth of the car population – when you plan for population growth, you have to plan for and provide an enhanced road system as well.

While state law does not impose any minimum lot or parcel size inside unincorporated communities, Lane Code does. And the zoning rules don’t allow for a mix of uses. No tiny streets, lined with narrow three-story buildings with a bakery on the ground floor and apartments above, like in French villages. And Land Code also imposes minimum parking space standards, for residential and other uses alike. Every building and use implies and requires space for cars.

So what’s wrong with this? It locks into place development patterns that were established under historical conditions that may no longer exist. It makes the necessary transition to a relocalized and less energy-dependent way of life more difficult or even impossible. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1975 Kenneth Mellanby published a book titled ‘Can Britain Feed Itself.’ Rob at Transition Culture reports that British planning reform campaigner Simon Fairlie has taken another look at that work and done an admittedly “back of an envelope” update. His conclusion is similar to Mellanby’s:  yes, but the key is the amount of meat we consume.

In the scenario he  calls the “Permaculture approach,” he allocates land for meat (83 grams of red meat per person per day, the equivalent of a family roast on a Sunday, and about half what people eat now, as well as some pigs, chickens, fish and sheep), for intensive horticulture and fruit, for wheat (both for grain and for thatching), for textiles, firewood and for biomass, and argues that this can all be done organically, with 2.8 million hectares left over to play with.

The key finding is that the more people we put on the land, the more productive it will become. This means Britain would need 8 million people to support a post-oil agriculture, compared to the half a million at present.

Nate Hagans in a piece at The Oil Drum asks a question that raises the same issue about agriculture in the U.S.:  does less energy mean more farmers?

Only about two percent (5,802,000/295,410,000 in 2004) of the U.S. population is part of a farm family, and the average age of principal owners of farms is about 60 years. Since mechanization and the fuels that power machines are what enable such a small agricultural labor force, is it reasonable to assume that a decline in fossil fuels will require more farmers?

In the pre-industrial economic system of the early United States, about a third of the population engaged in agriculture. Adjusted for current population size, 50 to 100 million farmers (or members of farming families) would be needed to feed a population of 300 million. Given the age of current farmers, a rapid and massive education of youth will be required.

Hagans attempts a different, comparative approve, but cautions that answering this one simple question provokes a series of more difficult ones:

“I am mistrustful of studying this issue in isolation. Nagging at me is the question of whether the globalized industrial system is inherently unstable in the face of multiple challenges, including energy scarcity but also the converging crises spawned by the surging weight of humanity. Climate change, financial wobbles, violent conflicts and related spin-offs can unpredictably disrupt the vast system of trade that moves fertilizers, seeds and replacement parts that keep industrial agriculture humming. I think we are already seeing hints of this scenario in the U.S., as farmers run short of diesel fuel during harvest season and end up leaving crops in the ground.”

Hagans concludes that we just don’t know enough yet to even approach certainty about an answer – we need better research that connects the dots credibly between energy depletion, climate change, food security, and demographics. But he warns that uncertainty cannot be allowed to keep us from acting.

“I believe the broad vision of what needs to be done already exists—food that is more local, organic, produced, processed and distributed by renewable energy systems, and using cultivation methods that put the soil health first.”

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book explores the transition in agriculture that will be inevitable as a consequence of peak oil and asks:

“[I]s a shift to a new kind of agriculture likely to be inherently disruptive? Are food prices likely to rise out of control, and shortages occur, creating famines and malnutrition?”

Her answer: “It depends.”

She argues that system failure is only one possible outcome, and spins out a plausible alternative, based on a transition to a sustainable agriculture that includes large numbers of gardens; an increase number of farmers making a real and adequate living; eliminating middlemen, processing, shipping and supermarkets; increased food quality; and a decrease in shrinkage throughout the production and distribution chains.

One comment raises a question that isn’t yet being asked in our political discourse:

“Were we, for example, in America to give up the project of empire, keep a defense-suited only, smaller military, and move the same tax subsidies into food price stabilization and (vastly cheaper) investments in agricultural job training for the young men and women who now go into the military, we could expect to see several million new young, healthy farmers, lower overhead costs for their training, medical care and lifetime disability from being blown up or blowing people up, and an enormous new body of food producers, with stable prices.

When did we take on the project of empire? Although the roots of American empire go way back (for example, the genocide of the Native American populations and Manifest Destiny, the wars with Mexico resulting in the annexation of Texas, California and the entire Southwest, the Spanish-American War in which we seized the Philippines and Puerto Rico and installed “friendly” regimes throughout Central and South America), the imperial project really got going after WWII when we found ourselves the “last man standing.”

click to enlarge

U.S. Military Bases in the World 2007

Where is the call for America to return to its republican principles, to dismantle the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against and the web of military installations, and to slash war spending to a small fraction of the current 51% of the Federal government’s budget? Not even Dennis Kucinich is promising to shrink – much less radically slash – “defense” spending. His bright idea is to establish another department, the Department of Peace, as a “counterbalance.”

For 2007, the DOD budget was US$532.8 billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, e.g. $120 billion in 2007). In addition, the United States has black budget – military spending which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures.

The USA is responsible for about 46% of the world’s military expenditures, distantly followed by the UK, France, Japan and China with 4-5 per cent each.

Here’s the bottom line: we won’t be able to afford to make the changes required to deal with our energy/climate crises as long as we’re squandering what remaining wealth we have on trying to bully the rest of the world into submission.

John Michael Greer is one our clearest thinkers and best writers on the issues of peak oil and transition culture. A pithy comment in another of his discourses once again nails the situation we’re facing:

“Those who insist that the first priority in an age of declining petroleum production is finding some other way to fuel a suburban SUV lifestyle, or who hope to see some favorite technology – the internet, say, or space travel – privileged in the same way, risk finding out the hard way that other things come first.

“At the top of the list of those other things are the immediate necessities of human life: breathable air, drinkable water, edible food. Lacking those, nothing else matters much.”

He points out that nearly every resource currently used in industrial agriculture, from the petroleum that powers tractors and provides raw materials for pesticides, through the natural gas and phosphate rock that go into fertilizer, to the topsoil that underlies the whole process, is being depleted at radically unsustainable rates. A consequence of declining petroleum production could include the collapse of industrial agriculture and resulting worldwide starvation. How can our agriculture adapt?

Elanor Starmer in a post at Gristmill does an excellent job of showing how the U.S. industrial agriculture system is structured – and it’s not for the benefit of farmers, but rather for a few integrated conglomerates. In this system farmers are nothing more than powerless peons. The policy and legislative changes she suggests seem pretty thin gruel. They don’t begin to address our dilemma as laid out by Greer.

Making a successful transition to a different kind of agriculture is going to require a lot of legislative tinkering over the coming decades. Making good policy choices requires that we understand not only where we are, but also where we need to go.

One of my best friends was offered a job working for the city of Los Alamos, New Mexico. He needed to drive from Eugene to his new place of employment so I went along for the ride. We had a week to make the trip so that meant we could do a bit of meandering, which we did.

We arrived to Los Alamos a week later and the experience has left me with a number of impressions of what we saw of both the natural landscape and the “humanscape.” We passed through a variety of towns and small cities, and I found two chance conversations in Santa Fe to be particularly interesting.

My comments are strictly impressions. The few facts and figures are accurate, the impressions based on what I saw and not on rigorous research. Further, I should add my own prejudices as an advocate of deep changes in our culture in a far more ecological direction. I am a critic of global capitalism and the mass consumption culture.

My friend Paul and I have collaborated on travels before to exotic places like Baja and Key West. Our world views are similar and we both have a great appreciation for throwing the frisbee.

We left Eugene driving down the coast from Coos Bay to Arcata, then east through Redding, a meander through Reno and across Nevada on the “World’s Loneliest Road”. Then to Green River, Utah, Moab, Durango and finally across the flats of northwest New Mexico to Los Alamos. For the most part, we avoided the interstate highways.

Overall impression- although the towns are diverse in size, history and geography, they seem to share a common condition. None would look to have a prayer of survival in any way remotely resembling their current affluent status in a resource constrained future. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Heinberg, speaking in Davis, CA,  said we should regulate fossil fuels – the source of the emissions, not the emissions themselves – by capping both production and consumption. In addition to reducing emissions, this would reduce the probability of international conflicts over the earth’s remaining resources and distribute them equitably among the world’s nations.

The U.S. could reduce 50 percent of its CO2 emissions through strict conservation using electrified public transport, new housing codes, and subsidized energy retrofit programs, Heinberg said. Another 25 percent could be reduced through renewable energy programs. The last 25 percent will be the most difficult.

Heinberg warned that change will come whether we want it to or not. Steep declines in living standards for citizens of wealthy nations due to the depletion of energy sources are looming, and the only way to avert massive social chaos is to prepare.

We can mitigate the worst effects if we begin to plan and work right now to live with limited supplies of oil-based energy and products.  Communities must think about alternatives to cars like electrified rail, walking and biking, Heinberg said. Re-localizing the food supply  may also help the transition.

Heinberg dismissed “cap and trade” programs as “an elaborate shell game.” These carbon markets work by creating artificial scarcity of rights to emit carbon, and then allocating that commodity by price. The problem is that the depletion of fossil fuels means that carbon emissions will be declining anyway, Rights to emit carbon will cease to be scarce because people will buy these rights only if they can afford the expensive fuel in the first place, rendering the carbon market irrelevant through lack of demand.

This post by Glenn at The Oil Drum: Local looks at statistics on the percentage of people who walk to work by zip code in different locations around the U.S.

Glenn’s findings? The highest percentage of walkers are found in locations centered around an institution, like a university or military academy where many people are housed very close to their classes or jobs and the concentration of people and buildings conspires to reduce the amount of spaces that could be used for roads and parking of automobiles: universities, military bases & pre-auto urban areas.

The piece contains three really interesting tables showing location by population. What leaped out at me was the inverse correlation between population size and the percentage of people walking. When the population of an area is under about 7,500, you can get a high, sometimes really high percentage of people walking. But raise the population to over 250,000, and even the best performing urban areas can’t get more than about 13% of people out of their cars and on foot.

So what’s the lesson? Should we start thinking about putting people in new, small villages and towns rather than trying to stuff ever more people into existing urban areas? Might it be possible to redesign our existing cities to function more like a collection of self-contained villages?

I’ve finally gotten a copy of Richard Heinberg’s new book, Peak Everything. He starts off in the introduction pulling no punches:

“it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have caught ourselves on the horns of the Universal Ecological Dilemma, consisting of the interlinked elements of population pressure, resource depletion, and habitat destruction – on a scale unprecedented in history.”

The growth – economic and otherwise – that we have come to take for granted as the natural order of things is over. Most of us just haven’t realized it yet. Rather than expansion and the increase in complexity we’ve come to expect, the 21st century will see contraction and simplification. Heinberg poses the question that we’ve got to come to grips with:

“The only question is whether societies will contract and simplify intelligently or in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.”

For humans, decline isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Heinberg lists a few of the things that might actually lead to a better, more satisfying life in the times to come: community, personal autonomy, satisfaction from honest work well done, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, leisure time, happiness, ingenuity, artistry, beauty of the built environment.

He lays out our task:

“People will not willingly accept the new message of “less, slower, and smaller,” unless they have new goals toward which to aspire. They must feel that their efforts will lead to a better world, with tangible improvements in life for themselves and their families. The massive public education campaigns that will be required must be credible, and will therefore be vastly more successful if they give people a sense of investment and involvement in formulating those goals. There is a much-abused word that describes the necessary process – democracy.

I’ll be giving a chapter-by-chapter report over the next few days.

In an interview in the National Catholic Reporter, environmentalist and author Bill McKibben says we’re in dire straits and have probably only 10 years in which to begin serious efforts at putting less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.

“That means gearing up now to make the most ambitious changes we’ve ever had to make in our economy, and in our personal habits. It’s going to be difficult; much of the world is using more fossil fuel all the time. It’s a test for human beings, and hopefully not a final exam.

“For the first time in human history “more” is no longer synonymous with “better.”

“A recent sampling of Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans” showed they have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai hunters in Africa.

“As we got more affluent, we lost a lot of our social connections and communities. We moved to the suburbs, built big houses and filled them with screens to stare into. It’s no wonder the average American has half as many close friends as 50 years ago.”

McKibben says we have to move beyond “growth” as the paramount economic ideal and begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment.

Carolyn Baker at Speaking Truth to Power writes:

“No one who asks “What can I do?” really wants an answer-at least not a real answer. For this reason, the charade of political candidates, elections, and the corporate media that guarantees the success of that particular con game has hypnotically entranced the electorate who overwhelmingly prefer to remain delusional. The majority take little interest in the candidates anyway, perceiving them as yet another group of celebrities. Yet even more delusional are those who call themselves progressive. These individuals are desperate to keep the show on the road and sanction its validity, and they are the ones who least want to know the answer to “What can I do?” because of what it would cost them. Consequently, they must pre-occupy themselves with “solutions” that have nothing to do with the actual state of the earth and its inhabitants but which offer a false sense of making a difference.”

Baker pleads for the end of “solution obsession,” suggesting instead that we re-focus on options. We cannot “solve” the issues of climate change, energy depletion, species die-off, global pandemics, global government, or the rampant proliferation of fascism. Focusing on “mass” anything is the opposite of where our attention must be, namely, local and community survival.

John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report points out that transitioning to a more sustainable will be a long and difficult process – one that we can’t foresee, and the outcome of which is unknowable.

“[N]obody alive today knows what a truly sustainable technological society would look like, much less how to build one. The only form of technic society we’ve yet seen is the industrialism of the last 300 years, and nearly everything that makes that latter system work will be going away as the age of cheap abundant energy draws to an end. The Long Descent ahead of us is, among other things, an opportunity for social evolution, in which various populations will try out many different forms of technical, economic, and social organization, some of which will turn out to be more successful than others. Out of that process will evolve the successful ecotechnic forms of the far future.”

A successor program to the neoconservative debacle cannot be expected to and will not bring on any full-formed ecotechnic age, nor will it prevent the end of industrial society. What wise policies could do is cushion the coming of the deindustrial age, allow a good many more people to have something approaching quality of life in the decades to come, and build foundations on which future generations can build further. We need to focus on the process of managing the transition, rather than trying to impose an arbitrary shape on the societies that will come after it.

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book writes about the movement Riot for Austerity:

The Riot is different from other environmental groups because we’re not mostly talking about buying high tech gadgets or expensive solutions. Oh, I’m sure there’s some of that, but mostly the question is how to transform our lives now, today, with what we have – and how to keep living this life year in and year out. We argue sometimes, but mostly we provide support, encouragement, solutions, ideas, analysis, suggestions.

It wasn’t until I began describing the Riot for Austerity to a room full of Peak Oil activists, including Richard Heinberg, Megan Quinn, Kurt Cobb, Peter Bane, Building expert Linda Wigington and others that I began to realize just how potentially powerful the Riot is. I was perhaps too close to it to realize how exciting it was that people were having fun, creating a self-organized democracy to support one another and enable them to make real change.

Rioters have set a goal of reducing personal impacts – by 90%, to 10% of the American average – in 7 categories: heat, electricity and gas, food, garbage, water and consumer goods. They realize all of them may never reach that goal in every category. But here’s the really important part:

“[W] are doing something potentially powerful and transformative, that offers up the hope that other people might do it too. Because if I can do it . . then there is no one who can’t. And if all of us are doing it in part because we find fun, and pleasure and joy and delight in the rituals of non-consumption we’re engaged in, it is just possible that millions of other people might not only be able to do it, but want to.

Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture points out that renewable energy is about much more than just cutting carbon emissions – or at least it should be.

Renewables are also about building resilience, about putting in place the ability of our communities and of the country as a whole, to withstand the shocks that peak oil will inevitably cause. If done properly, renewables can also strengthen local economies, support local currencies, provide a focus for community investment, and lead to the decentralisation of energy generation, which gives power (both literally and figuratively) to the local scale rather than centralising it in distant nuclear or coal-fired power stations.

Hopkins is writing about his outrage at U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reneging on Britain’s commitment to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Hopkins quotes Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks: “at the end of the day, renewables is a means to an end. The end is bringing down carbon emissions.”

No, it’s about more than emissions. It’s about the way we live with and within the world and all its communities.

Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights reflects on the frustration with the slow pace of change in Willets, CA – one of the first American communities to try to come to grips with peak oil.

Teaching people how to use a chainsaw can take only a few minutes. That’s fast knowledge. Teaching people the importance of trees in creating and protecting the soil, encouraging biodiversity, preventing runoff, storing carbon and influencing climate is a task that requires time, concentration and reflection. It assumes a body of knowledge about the natural world that most people simply don’t have and therefore must acquire. And, it assumes an eye trained to look for subtleties in the natural landscape. Moreover, such learning does not yield the immediate and visible economic benefits of the chainsaw. . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Bill McKibben in his book Deep Economy argues that the “growth economy” we idolize and worship is unequal, unsustainable, and – perhaps most importantly – depressing.

It is unequal because, though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it. The median wage in the United States is the same as it was thirty years ago and the real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has declined steadily.

Even if we found the political to spread wealth around more evenly, that would not solve the problem of sustainability. We are using up all of the fossil fuels, especially oil, that power our current growth economy while imperiling our lives on this planet through the build up of carbon in the atmosphere – which is produced, of course, by burning all those fossil fuels in the first place. Even if we liked the economy we have now, we have little chance of keeping it.

And the growth economy and its avalanche of stuff has not made us any happier – instead, it has made us decidedly unhappier. Up to a certain point – for those living in poverty, for example – “more” increases aggregate and individual levels of happiness. After that point, though, happiness becomes subject to the laws of diminishing returns, until the returns become losses and “more” actually correlates with unhappiness. We work longer hours to buy more things to make ourselves more miserable instead of doing what does make us happy: spending time with our families and in our communities.

McKibben argues that the solution to all these economic ills – inequality, sustainability, and happiness – lies in revitalizing local economies and local communities.

John Michael Greer applies the model of succession to human ecology and finds it a remarkably useful way of looking at the predicament of industrial society.  He compares the industrial economies of the present to weeds, early succession species that maximize production at the expense of sustainability. The successful economies of the future, which will emerge in a world without today’s cheap abundant energy, will need to maximize sustainability at the expense of production, like late succession species. Read the rest of this entry »

What a beautiful morning!

The view out my bungalow window looks out over my back yard garden and the south side of my house- the sun room mostly. Amaranth looks like maroon Rasta hair pointed up, great summer for delicate winter squash, hoping the bunches of flowers on my pole beans have time to turn into beans. I need to plant favas soon for soil building and the great fresh beans in May.

Inside my sunroom in the main house, there are 100 or so pounds of walnuts drying. The 85 degree temps in there the past few days are perfect. Friends and I harvested walnuts from their back yard tree. It was a fun and practical collaboration. Tree- collect in buckets-dehusk with a pressure washer-transport here. Now the drying.

A new seasonal low in the bungalow: 62 degrees. I love the chilly but sunny mornings. The seven by twenty two feet of south facing glass in the ceiling are at their best on sunny days like this. It’s great to feel the space warm up on nothing but passive solar. Later in the fall and winter I add more layers for myself and about that time, I put up the thermal barrier between the solar and core parts of the bungalow so I only electric heat the core. On sunny days even in January, I can open the insulated drapes and import the solar heat when the temperatures are to my advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Jan Spencer has posted his complete photo-journal of his transition tour around the northwest, visiting members of the permaculture community and giving presentations. Rather than repeat the contents of his journal verbatim, I’m going to present a couple of highlights and urge readers to visit his blog for the whole thing. Jan has posted lots of great photos – including many examples in Eugene – of permaculturists at work in their neighborhoods.

Jan emphasizes that land use – where and how we live within the landscape – is inextricably intertwined with our culture: we can’t change one without the other. Land use is us.

He has a photo of Levittown, which established the model for post-WWII suburbia:

and a great ad revealing who we thought we were, or at least what we aspired to:

Be sure to check out the whole piece.

This posting is a review of a new book by Ted Trainer of the University of New South Wales.

With the focus of most mainstream debate on peak oil and energy being on the supply side- the oil is running low so what are we going to use instead?  Trainer brings a refreshing approach in which he provides a detailed and technically comprehensive analyses of existing renewable energy options – including wind, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass and energy crops, and hydrogen, as well as a look at nuclear and the issue of storing energy – and concludes:

“…we could easily have an extremely low per capita rate of energy consumption, and footprint, based on local resources- but only if we undertake vast and radical change in economic, political, geographical and cultural systems.” Read the rest of this entry »

My meeting with Methow friends in August, which I blogged about here, provided a very useful insight about sharing assets.

When it came time to go I was excited to be crossing over the Cascades even though the morning was cloudy and showery, and this on the east side. The lush west side offered spectacular views of mountains and dams. Bellingham was my destination. I arrived in Bellingham late in the afternoon, my first visit. I found Lynnette’s place in an apartment complex.

This is a testament to the level of cohesion we have in the culture change/ecological movement. I had spoken with Lynnette on the phone several times, and we had emailed. That was it. Yet she had told me where her front door key was and I let myself in. That is impressive trust. Read the rest of this entry »