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

A recent post talked about how high gas prices could lead to the draining of population from small towns in rural areas as people moved closer to jobs and amenities in urban areas. But there is another possibility: the rebuilding of local, rural, agriculture-based economies that rely on human labor rather than fossil fuels.

That’s the objective of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, which aims at the transformation of agriculture in Lane, Linn, Benton, and Lincoln counties at the south end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This bioregion contains roughly 700,000 acres of farmland, approximately 400,000 acres of which is used for cropland. It once produced a wide array of grains, fruits, and vegetables. At times wheat represented almost a third of what was harvested. The region had the agricultural capacity and food system infrastructure to feed itself.

Now, the region is dominated by farms growing fescue and rye grass for the global grass seed market. Less than 20% of its cropland acreage is utilized for food.

The Bean and Grain Project seeks to convert grass seed acreage into plots for organic beans, grains, and edible seeds as a critical first step to reinvigorating the regional food system. Harry MacCormack, co-founder of Oregon Tilth and owner of Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon, provides the vision and inspiration.

The project aims to rebuild a complete regional food system, growing food first for local markets and then for global markets only if surpluses are available.

The project sees peak oil as a force driving the relocalization of agriculture:

“It is often overlooked, but nearly every aspect of our current food system is based on petroleum and other carbon-based inputs. Soil nitrogen levels are maintained by fertilizers made from hydrocarbon gases. Pests are fought with petroleum-based pesticides. Weeds are eliminated by petroleum-based herbicides. Fields are cultivated and harvested by machinery powered by petroleum-based fuels. Food products are transported by trucks or trains or airplanes powered by petroleum-based fuels. Foods are processed with machines run by electricity generated by fossil fuels. Foods are packages in plastics made from petrochemical products. We cook with fossil fuel derivatives. From field to distributor to store to kitchen cabinet to stove, our entire food system flows upon a stream of petroleum. This system has evolved and grown through a period when petroleum and natural gas were irrationally cheap. That era appears to be over. The cost of a barrel of petroleum has increased ten fold in the last ten years. Oil production has or will soon peak. Hydrocarbon-based agriculture and its global food system is a literal and figurative dinosaur. Freight costs alone ensure that our food systems must change.

“Add the detrimental environmental impacts of industrial farming techniques–aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, petrochemical contamination of the watershed and other biota, toxic residues on or in crops themselves, and it is becoming increasingly clear that changing the way we farm is both sensible and necessary. Creating sustainable regional food systems based as much as possible on organic inputs and as independent as possible of petroleum fuels, should be one of humanity’s highest priorities. That is the exact purpose of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, rebuilding a regional food system in the Willamette Valley.

Jeffvail at The Oil Drum attacks our enshrinement of “growth” from a novel direction.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a post by Jason Bradford at The Oil Drum that provides a pretty good introduction to ecological economics.

This chart shows the basic concept: that our economy is a subset of the Earth system, and is dependent on that ecosystem for sources and sinks. There are feedback loops between the economy and the Earth ecosystem, and scale becomes increasingly important as limits to source and sink capacity are approached.

click to enlarge

One measure of whether the human economy is too large is the ecological footprint, which relates the consumption of resources and the build-up of wastes relative to resource regeneration rates and the waste-absorbing capacity of the environment. The human economy (population plus consumption and waste generation) is currently in a state of overshoot, meaning it is too large relative to the long-term capacity of the planet to cope.

A significant portion of our overdraft is the result of fossil fuel consumption and the resulting greenhouse gas wastes.

Fossil fuel extraction is reaching limits (peak oil) sooner than expected. Similarly, we’re seeing climate change (think “sinks”) arrive much more quickly than anticipated.

Bradford then looks at agricultural practices, and reports that the greatest energy savings could be achieved by:

• reduced use of petroleum-based fertilizers and fuel on farms,
• a decline in the consumption of highly processed foods, meat, and sugar,
• a reduction in excessive and energy intensive packaging,
• more efficient practices by consumers in shopping and cooking at home,
• and a shift toward the production of some foods (such as fruits and vegetables) closer to their point of consumption.

He looks at Brookside Farm, a 1-acre minifarm in Willets on what used to be school lawn, as an example of how small-scale, local farms could work to reduce our ecological footprint.

I posted a piece the other day about how grass seed production in the Willamette Valley has largely displaced food production. Bradford reports some fascinating data about grass:

There are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn. This means lawns – including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc – could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all.

That means about 200 gallons of fresh, usually drinking-quality water per person per day would be required to keep up our nation’s lawn surface area. [Not to mention fertilizers and pesticides - ed.]

The 128,000 square kilometers of lawns is the same as 32 million acres. A generous portion of fruits and vegetables for a person per year is 700 lbs, or about half the total weight of food consumed in a year. Modest yields in small farms and gardens would be in the range of about 20,000 lbs per acre. Even with half the area set aside to grow compost crops each year, simple math reveals that the entire U.S. population could be fed plenty of vegetables and fruits using two thirds of the area currently in lawns.

You think we could find better things to do with Willamette Valley farm land?

There’s a great interview with Dan Armstrong, writer, activist, and owner of Mud City Press, at Carolyn Baker’s website Speaking Truth to Power.

Looking for a way to effectively come to grips with the realities of peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation – and with the loss of faith in the ability or will of a corrupt national government to address these realities – Armstrong turned to the relocalization movement.

“If you apply energy to local politics, whether in the city council or at neighborhood meetings, you have some modest chance of effecting change. Add that Peak Oil is a market issue and is changing the economic gradient of everything in the direction of relocalization.”

Relocalization may not bring salvation or change the world overnight, but it’s a place to begin.

“Nowhere else in all my involvement have I felt or seen the kind of community building that I’ve seen in the food relocalization movement. While emotional Peak Oil or climate change presentations, sadly, have done little to change business as usual, food discussions do. If you want to get involved, I suggest food security as a good place to start, not because it will change the world today, not because it will bring salvation, but because you can see incremental positive response. And if you’re fighting your state of mind, this helps.”

Lakis Polycarpou in a piece at The Energy Bulletin titled “Is the desire to relocalize merely aesthetic?” argues that aesthetics has been mistakenly dismissed as unimportant because it is not “scientific” or “practical.”

He notes that the bias against the “aesthetic” runs deep in our profoundly utilitarian age. But as we are beginning to realize, it’s that this most “utilitarian” civilization in history is paradoxically one of the most blind.

Aesthetic concerns actually get at the functionality of a system, at the very essence and meaning of life.

For example, by eliminating the smaller, human scale, modernist architecture has created both an aesthetic and a practical problem simultaneously. The architectural norms of hulking glass and soulless concrete plazas were neither scientific nor progressive; they were totemic, an expression of abstraction and ideology rather than real efficiencies of scale.

Polycarpou ends by reframing the question of industrial agriculture versus relocalization:

Given that industrial agriculture and suburban sprawl are based on scales which are so unnatural in both organic and human terms – so disconnected, so structurally compromised – maybe the proper question should be, how is something so dysfunctional sustained? So far the answer has been: with massive financial capital, huge expenditures of energy, and sheer force of will. What will happen when at least two of those three forces start to dry up? Maybe we should look to aesthetics to give as a clue.

Greg Cox of Boardman Hill Farms and a small group of citizens in South Central Vermont are re-making their community through their locally-owned and operated food co-op, featuring locally-grown produce, and a year-round farmer’s market.

In a post at Speaking Truth to Power, Carolyn Baker reports on her interview with Cox and talks about relocalization efforts in Rutland, specifically around agriculture and food.

It seems every town in Vermont pays lip service to agriculture, but there’s rarely an action plan. Because of his reputation as an organic farmer, Cox was actually contacted by a member of the planning commission and a planning staff person. Together, they began strategizing about how to recreate a vibrant agricultural community.

They believed that if they could create an incubator farm with an infrastructure that included education and have the viability of enough farmers to create a community, they could attract young folks with new ideas from all over the nation and the world. Their intention was to create an economic engine with an agriculture base. The objective was to see that the money as well as the food remains in Rutland County.

Cox talks about how he grows food, even in the dark and cold of a Vermont winter, and about how the Saturday winter farmers market helped revitalize the town:

“Farmers markets bring one thing wherever they go: foot traffic. That’s what downtown areas are-and what they need. Cities used to be alive-people lived and worked there. We need to re-establish that. We need to make downtowns vital. Not only do we need new businesses, but we need to have residents in the downtown area.

“People understand outsourcing and don’t like it, but they don’t understand that when they spend dollars outside of their town, they’re outsourcing their dollars. Jobs follow the money. Every dollar that stays in the community enriches it. So in the discussion of revitalizing communities, agriculture may be the introductory sentence, but it goes way beyond that.

“The winter farmers market now occurs every Saturday in what used to be an old theater, adjacent to the co-op . . .

“City officials and downtown business could have resisted the co-op/ farmers market venture, but they didn’t.”

In summing up, Baker observes that relocalization transcends our old political categories:

“I came away from my conversation with Greg Cox with two profound realizations:

1. All the stereotypes of Rutland, Vermont as “backward” and “too conservative” to relocalize its economy through local agriculture were fading into the dustbin of history, and
2. Any region in America can affect the transformation that the forward-thinking folks in Rutland are making happen with their passion, commitment, and incredibly hard work as they engineer local economic solutions and give new meaning to the word “community.”"

For the last several months I’ve been thinking about how we might go about revitalizing our local land use activist organization (Friends of Linn County), and around the issues that are most important for our future – global warming and peak oil. Land use is a primary driver of fossil fuel consumption and resultant emissions – so the connection between land use, climate change and energy is or should be readily apparent.

We used Oregon’s land use planning program as a proxy to get at what we really cared about – maintaining an ethical relationship with the land and all of its inhabitants, keeping “development” from devouring it bit by inexorable bit. It was really a pretty lousy tool for that job, but it’s all we had. Now after the passage of first Measure 37 and now Measure 49, the air is completely out of that balloon.

Focusing on land use as a tool had one benefit: we could use law to challenge and sometimes overturn or thwart bad local decision-making. But the connection between our means and our objective was tenuous at best, and difficult to explain. In the absence of a direct and obvious ethical and emotional chord, it’s proved hard to expand beyond a core group into the larger community.

We don’t care about and do land use just for the sake of land use. We do it because it furthers a moral and ethical vision of what it means to live in this world – and because using land badly (as we do now) will have catastrophic and irreparable consequences for this country, for humanity, and for all of creation.

So the first step is to bring the moral and ethical basis for good land use to the forefront. This means laying out the consequences of continuing our bad land use practices – which are becoming more evident with each passing day.

The second step is to move the movement beyond the historic land use community into the broader community.

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book has written a provocative piece about what it will take to move the “peak oil” and “climate change” groups from their present role – as thinly spread “special interest” groups and towards becoming a larger, and more powerful network. Her observations seem particularly relevant to our experience throughout rural Oregon. Read the rest of this entry »

An article in the Amherst (MA) Bulletin by Jim Oldham, a member of the Comprehensive Planning Committee, explains how the way we plan now for “development” is exactly backwards of the way we ought to go about it.

Land preservation and conservation is thought of as detrimental to economic “development.”

“Not only does this invert reality in terms of what we understand as irrevocable (we are told that the decision not to destroy a resource needs to be thoroughly vetted, whereas day after day, landowners are allowed to remove topsoil and permanently convert arable land to unproductivity), but it misses the point that sustainable economic development depends, now more than ever, on the careful use of our natural resources.”

He points out that responding effectively to the energy and climate challenges we face will require a complete re-thinking of how we look at “economic development”:

“Just as national economic strategies need to change (stop subsidizing oil and auto industries; embrace alternative energy and conservation as economic stimuli) so, too, do local strategies. We need an economy based less on the automobile, with small local businesses serving people where they live. We need local production of food and other products, as shipping goods thousands of miles becomes prohibitively expensive. Policies supporting farming, energy efficiency and public transportation will protect our economy in the long run and stimulate it in the short term.”