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

The worst of the cold weather is probably behind us, as spring approaches. The sun is out, and thoughts once again turn to the garden. It’s timely to review: how did our solarium perform over the short days and freezing nights of winter?

Adding thermal mass proved not to be enough to protect tender plants if outside temperatures dropped below ~25°. For the coldest nights, we needed to come up with a supplementary heat source. We use brooder lamps for ducklings. Why wouldn’t the same concept work for plants?

Electricity was the primary problem: a source wasn’t readily available, and providing a permanent hookup didn’t seem worth the cost or effort since power was needed only a few nights out of the year. So I wired an outlet at the solarium ceiling for two heat lamps to hang above our most sensitive citrus, an Improved Meyer Lemon and an Owari Satsuma Mandarin from One Green World that we planted right in the ground.

Power is provided when needed by plugging as extension cord into a male receptacle in a weatherproof exterior “inlet”.

This system works so well that we’ve moved into the solarium all of the cold-sensitive plants that we previously overwintered in the greenhouse. Space is at a premium in this 7? x 7? structure, so we’ve had to be inventive. Around the Yuzu Ichandrin, we installed shelving for pots . . .

. . . and above, a piece of ¾” pipe serves to hang containers.

Staggering the height of the plants allows more to be squeezed in along the pipe.

In the ground within the solarium, we’ve been growing herbs all winter long, herbs that otherwise wouldn’t grow in winter: cilantro, parsley, and an herb form of celery.

Fresh “cutting” or “soup” celery is great to have in the garden as celery, along with carrots and onions, are the three essential aromatic vegetables used in making stocks and sauces. Buying a whole head of celery in the store is wasteful. Although a good market will let you buy one stalk at a time, we’re a long way from a market. So keeping fresh celery on hand would otherwise be a challenge. Now all we have to do when celery is called for is wander outside -  with the solarium, any time of the year – pluck a few stalks, and tie them together with other herbs in a bouquet garni. Nichols has the seeds: VCE185, Afina. Plant seeds once, and from then on the celery will self-seed prolifically.

An added benefit: as long as I was wiring the solarium, I installed an outlet in the adjacent greenhouse to provide power for a heat mat. A heat mat will enable us to begin sprouting seeds in early February, a month earlier than would otherwise be possible. So it’s now time to begin perusing the seed catalogs and planning for spring plantings. Nichols and Territorial, here we come!

Friday night. What could be better for a simple dinner on a frosty night, while sitting on the sofa watching a DVD, than Flammkuchen – German pizza?

Flammkuchen – literally, “flame cake” – is a dish from the Alsace-Lorraine region (much of which bounced back and forth between France and Germany over the last couple of centuries).

Flammkuchen is made like a thin-crust pizza, topped with crème fraîche, onions, and Speck - a salt-cured and lightly smoked ham. My first taste of Flammkuchen came about two decades ago while Irina and I were staying in Cousin Alexander’s Bauernhof, right in the heart of the small German village of Oberotterbach.

Elements of Cousin Alexander’s “farm” house – like the rear wall, which the house shares with the town Catholic church and cemetery – date from the 13th century. All the while we stayed there those church bells pealed every fifteen minutes, day and night, ringing out the quarter-hour and the hour. It’s enough to make one an atheist.

It really was (and is still) a farmhouse, dead square in the middle of town. Behind those big doors are a central courtyard; barns, stalls, and sheds; tractors and wagons; a well; a kitchen garden; and a wine and root cellar beneath the living quarters. Farmers live in the village, and sortie out to their fields each day.

Oberotterbach lies just across the border from the French town of Wissembourg, which marks the start of the Deutsche Weinstrasse. Here’s the Deutsches Weintor through which we drove back and forth between Germany and France in our ancient, borrowed Fiat Cinquecento.

The border control station was just on the other side of the “wine gate”. The border controls were a joke, as they were easily circumvented. Rather than staying on the main road, instead take one of the numerous back roads that crisscross the border through the vineyards. During our stay there, EU borders were opened and the inspection stations between Germany and France shuttered.

We often walked the ~4 km to Wissembourg from Oberotterbach through the vineyards and over a shoulder of the Sonnenberg, avoiding roads completely, ending up in a bar where the Gitanes and Gauloises smoke hung so thick and heavy you had to crawl on you hands and knees to see and to breath. But I digress.

The oldest building in Oberotterbach contains a Zehntkeller (literally, “10th cellar”), which was used for storing the local baron’s “10th” share of the harvest from the surrounding area. Kind of like a 13th century version of a local IRS. Centuries later, a cramped corner of that vaulted cellar housed a jazz club called the Musikantebuckl.

Along with the music they served local beer, local wine, and Flammkuchen baked in a wood-fired pizza oven. Love at first bite: I was closer to heaven than a kid from Sacramento could ever reasonably expect to find himself.

Though the Musikantebuckl is still jumping, getting there on a Friday night is now out of reach for us. But it’s easy to recreate a bit of that heaven right here. The biggest challenge is to find a substitute for Speck, which isn’t readily available here. Some recipes call for bacon, but we find bacon too fatty and too smoky. We’ve found that the uncured side of pork we get when we buy a half a hog (which would be bacon if it were smoked) works just fine once it’s trimmed of all fat.

Flammkuchen à La Ferme Noire

For two 12? Flammkuchen:

1 lb Irina’s bread dough
½ lb well-trimmed pork belly, cut into small cubes
1 medium red onion
6 oz crème fraîche (we use the delicious crema Mexicana that is available locally)
Sea salt
Crushed black pepper
A small piece of a whole nutmeg, crushed.

Place the dough on a well-floured surface. Divide into two pieces and roll into balls, coating liberally with flour. Flatten a bit with the palm of your hand, and roll out with a pizza roller, dusting with additional flour as necessary.

This dough is really wet, so it demands a bit of special care for the process to go smoothly. When you’ve finished rolling the skins out, make sure they are well dusted with flour. Fold into halves, then quarters; place on a board covered with wax paper (we use a couple of pieces of Masonite cut into 12″ x 12″ squares), unfold, and set aside to rise for an hour or so and to dry on top a bit.

While the dough is resting, rising, and drying, trim any fat off the pork and cut the meat into small cubes. Put the cubes of meat in a bowl, add salt, crushed pepper, and crushed nutmeg, and toss until the meat is evenly coated. Peel the onion and cut into thin strips, separating the layers.

About half an hour before cooking, put your pizza stone into the oven to pre-heat. You’ll want to use a very hot oven (like 500°). We most often cook pizza outdoors on a gas barbeque, especially in the summer when you don’t want to be heating up the kitchen.

While the oven and pizza stone are getting hot, prepare the Flammkuchen. The pizza skins must be transferred to a make-up board. We use larger and thicker pieces of Masonite for this purpose, 16? x 24? x ¼”; Masonite has a slick and slippery surface, and the ample size of the make-up board allows plenty of room to get the pizza sliding around freely before sliding it onto the hot pizza stone to bake. First sprinkle the make-up board liberally with corn meal (the corn meal acts like little ball bearings). Then flip the pizza skin on top of the corn meal so it’s waxed-paper side up, and peel off the wax paper.

Spread the crème fraîche over the pizza skins. Sprinkle evenly with the onions, then with the seasoned meat. Tap the side of the make-up board to make sure the pizza is sliding free, then slide the pizza off the make-up board and onto the hot pizza stone.

Close the cover (or the oven door) and bake until the crust is browned and crispy. As my dear departed father would say, video camera in hand, here we are.

We had planned to save one of the two Flammkuchen in the freezer for another day, but it tasted so darn irresistible we ate them both!

We have made vegetarian versions of Flammkuchen too, substituting local wild mushrooms (from The Mushroomery) for the pork. While not traditional, it’s really delicious, too.

After a barren spell in November, our Muscovy ducks are laying again. Keeping a light on in the duck shed until 10:00 every night seems to have made a difference, as they began laying again shortly after we began that regimen.

Some of the ducks are content to lay in the duck shed. When we open the doors to let the ducks out in the morning (having been shut in over night to protect them from predators) there the eggs are, in the nests the ducks nestle into the straw in the corners of the shed. All we have to do is bend down and pick them up.

For other ducks, laying their eggs in the duck shed simply won’t do. So they seek out less convenient places. Some locations become semi-permanent, and they revisit them regularly: underneath the outdoor workbench behind the potting soil containers, behind the garbage and recycling cans, underneath the tarp covering the compost pile.

A few hens, however, are really secretive. They don’t want you to know where they are laying their eggs, and if you discover one location they tend to abandon it and find yet another. When the duck shed door is opened in the morning these secretive hens set off: alone, determined, and with a purpose. If you want to find their eggs, you have to follow them, and do so carefully and innocuously.  If they see they’re being followed, they will abort their clandestine mission. And if you divert your attention for just a moment they can vanish, disappearing into the brush.

Meet one of our surreptitious hens.

After watching this hen for several mornings I finally succeeded in tracing her to her nest right in the middle of a pile of brush and prunings waiting to be burned. And I do mean right in the middle. I had to carve my way in, using hand shears to tunnel a passageway through the bramble. Stretched out flat on my belly with only my ankles hanging out, I retrieved eight eggs.

Crawling on my belly like a reptile to find eggs simply wouldn’t do. I set a torch to that pile. She’ll never use that nest again.

The next day, that hen once more set out for her burn pile. What few coals remained of that pile were still smoldering. She circled it again and again, repeatedly coming back to and stopping at what had been her entrance. You could almost see her scratching her head: what the hell happened here?

Still, every morning she’s setting off towards where her burn pile used to be. There’s got to be a new nest. One morning I’m trying to follow two hens. Our burn pile hen disappears behind a copse of trees and brush. I rush to see where she’s gone. Damn, lost them both!

This morning, she’s off again. I’m keeping a loose tail. When I see her round that copse, I high-tail it over there. She sees me, pretends she’s just out on a stroll. But I’ve seen where she’s been looking, where she was headed.

That’s an abandoned wood rat mound, next to an old, rotting Douglas-fir stump. A little searching, and there it is, nestled under and inside the wood rat mound: her latest nest, containing a half a dozen eggs.

Another victory, albeit temporary. Tomorrow the game begins anew.

When you buy a whole or a half lamb from a local farmer, it’s not like going to the supermarket where you can pick out the exact cut you want, whether it be shoulder chops, loin chops, or a leg. Around here, you’re lucky to find a store that carries any lamb at all. In the mid-valley, the nearest place to buy a choice cut like a leg or a rack is probably Corvallis, at an upscale market such as Market of Choice.

When you buy local locker lamb, (half or whole) you get everything – from the neck to the shanks. You have to know how to cook the various cuts, as they each demand to be treated differently. And when it comes to an valuable cut like a rack, you don’t want to ruin it. Unlike a rack you buy at a market that’s been trimmed by a butcher, you cannot simply throw it in the oven and roast it. The rack has to be prepped for cooking first. If your rack comes wrapped in white paper from your local slaughterhouse, you have to prep it yourself.

A rack of lamb comes with a thick layer of fat across the back.

You have to take that layer of fat off. Leave it on and the rack will be impossible to cook properly. What’s more, the result will be a rack that is difficult to cut and serve; and the meat will be drenched in excess, unpleasant-tasting fat.

Fortunately, removing the layer of fat is easy. Simply grab it by one corner and rip it off – it comes off in one piece.  Begin by separating the fat from the meat with a knife at a corner, then pull on the fat, continuing to cut between the fat and the meat with a knife as necessary as you pull the fat off.

Now doesn’t that look better?

There’s some meat embedded within that layer of fat that shouldn’t be wasted. Trim it out rather than throwing it away.

There’s more . . .

You’ll end up with a nicely trimmed rack, a little pile of lamb meat – enough for maybe a soup or a burrito or a stir fry – and a big chunk of fat to be thrown out.

If you want, you can cut out a little of the meat between the rib bones, leaving little bone handles to grab onto when eating. Add that meat to your pile of saved meat trimmings.

We’ve trained our butcher to cut off the chine bone, and he mostly gets it right. With the chine bone off, it’s a simple thing to cut between the ribs, carving off individual chops for serving when the rack is done. If the chine bone is left on the rack, this is impossible – so you have to make sure the chine bone is removed completely at this stage. If some of it is still there you’d best cut it off. A hacksaw works. The picture above shows the chine bone properly removed.

Now the rack is almost ready for roasting. Rub it with sea salt and freshly crushed pepper. Chop up a clove of garlic or two, and the leaves from a nice sprig of rosemary. Put in a bowl with a teaspoon of prepared stone-ground mustard and a splash of red wine.  Whisk in an ounce or so of olive oil. Coat the rack on all sides with the marinade and let sit at room temperature for a while, until you’re ready to pop it in the oven.

Roast the rack in a pre-heated 450° oven for 20 minutes or so, or until the internal temperature reaches 116° (check with an instant-reading thermometer).  Do not overcook! Rack of lamb should be served rare. Remove the rack to a serving dish and let it rest for a few minutes while you get the rest of the meal on the table and prepare the sauce. The sauce can be really simple -deglaze the roasting pan with a healthy splash of red wine, scraping up all the tasty brown bits.  Carve the rack, cutting between and separating the individual riblets. Pour the sauce around the rack and serve.

Bon Appétit!

Old friends from Seattle days, who now live near Hillsboro, were coming to visit this last weekend, along with their son home from college during break. As a special treat, we pulled a package of moose roast, labeled “strap steak”, from the freezer. Saturday morning, I unwrapped it to begin preparing it for cooking. Lo and behold, a flank steak! Of moose!

Flank steak holds special status in our home. The first meal I fixed for Irina back when we were courting was a beef flank steak, cooked over coals on little hibachi at my bachelor pad in Winslow, cooked rare and sliced thin, served with Brussels sprouts, steamed just crisp. Guys: quite the thing to impress the ladies. It worked!

Three exclamation points already, a bit much. But the sentences are true and righteous exclamations – and it gets better. We had already procured special mushrooms for the meal: white elm, and wild hedgehog and chanterelles from The Mushroomery. Grilled flank steak of moose, served with a rich mushroom sauce and mashed potatoes.

First, the sauce.

Wild Mushroom Sauce

4 T goose fat (or duck fat, or butter)
¾ lb. wild or good quality mushrooms, brushed and coarsely chopped
1 large shallot, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2 T flour
1 C red wine
1 C beef stock
½ C tomato purée
bouquet garni (parsley, celery greens, thyme, bay leaf)
1 whole clove
2-3 carrots, whole
Salt & pepper to taste

Heat the fat in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add shallot and sauté until softened and translucent. Add garlic, cook for a minute or two, then add mushrooms. Cook, stirring, for a few minutes, then add flour. Mix well and cook for a few minutes, scraping the bottom of the pan so the flour doesn’t scorch. Add wine a splash at a time, stirring to form a smooth, thick paste. Continue adding wine, stirring, then add the beef stock and tomato purée. Add bouquet garni, clove, and whole carrots. Bring to boil and simmer for 1 – 1½ hours until reduced to desired consistency. Remove and discard bouquet garni and carrots and season with salt and pepper to taste. May be done ahead of time and re-heated just before serving.

Fresh vegetables are scarce this time of year, but lightly cooked sauerkraut tastes crisp and fresh.

Light winter sauerkraut

1 lb sauerkraut, rinsed three times in fresh water to remove salt
1 small yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 large apple, peeled, cored and cut into chunks
2 T butter
1 clove
1 small chunk of a nutmeg
6 juniper berries
1 bay leaf
½ C white wine (riesling or gewürztraminer are perfect)
Salt and white pepper to taste

In a saucepan, heat the butter and sauté the onion until softened and translucent. Add apple and cook a bit. Add the rinsed and drained sauerkraut and toss until well mixed and cooked a bit. Smash the clove, nutmeg, and juniper berries and add to sauerkraut along with bay leaf, salt, and crushed white peppercorns.  Add white wine and cook, covered, for ½hour. Remove bay leaf and serve.

The moose flank steak was simplicity itself: rub with a little sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper, and goose fat which we happened to have on hand; let sit out at room temperature for a couple of hours before cooking; and cook over a hot barbeque until just rare (116° internal temperature at thickest part). Slice thinly and serve.

We began with a little salad made with fresh lettuces from the garden, dressed with a choice of local olive oil or local hazelnut oil. Our guests brought a bottle of Cliff Creek Cellars 2005 Syrah, made from grapes from Sams Valley Vineyard in the Rogue Valley. The wine was big, robust and full-fruited, a perfect accompaniment to the rich and deeply flavored moose.

Next morning before our guests departed, we fixed a brunch of scrambled duck eggs, yellow potatoes fried in goose fat, and Irina’s bread toasted and served with raspberry/pinot noir jam. A dozen duck eggs, and duck eggs are big. 20- year-old young men eat a lot – no leftover moose from dinner for a lunch burrito.

Life is hard on the farm. I’m going to miss that goose fat when it’s gone.

One advantage of having a great goat dairy in the neighborhood (Fraga Farm) is the ready availability of a by-product: young male goats. While you can’t get milk and make cheese without a doe, almost all bucklings are as redundant as American labor – but unlike unwanted workers, good at least for the table.

Goat cuts closely resemble lamb, only a little smaller. We’ve found that for cooking, you can treat goat just like lamb. And what better than goat loin chops for solstice dinner?

Grilled Goat Chops with Fresh Rosemary and Garlic

For two:

4 goat loin chops, preferably 1¼ – 1½ inches thick
1 clove garlic
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 T olive oil
1 T tamari
Sea salt and freshly cracked pepper, to taste

Strip the leaves from the sprig of rosemary and chop. Peel and chop the garlic. Mix the rosemary, garlic, olive oil, and tamari in a flat-bottomed container large enough for the goat chops to lie flat. Coat the goat chops on all sides, and add salt and pepper to taste. Let rest at room temperature for an hour or so, or at least while the barbeque is getting hot. Cook until rare or medium rare, turning to get nice crossed grill marks on both sides.

We served the goat chops with small, whole grilled potatoes that we had first par-boiled, and with a salad made with fresh lettuces from the garden with dried tomato chips, toasted squash seeds, crushed hazelnuts, and a hazelnut oil dressing. Simple, local, and festive.

We used to trim the chops of fat before cooking so we won’t have to mess with it at the table. But now, we can’t leave Zooey out – she’s part of the party and deserves not to be ignored. She loves the fatty bits, and potatoes and vegetables too.

And even though the chops had were really small – not more than 4 oz each, with only a couple of ounces of meat – two were plenty for the three of us. We just don’t each much meat any more. So two chops were left over for burritos  the next day, for lunch. Carve off the meat, trim off any fat and gristle, and cut into small cubes; sauté in a bit of olive oil just until warm; and serve in a heated flour tortilla with beans, grated cheese. Yum!

By Irina

Ever since we began keeping a small flock of sheep, mostly for meat and barter, we’ve been lamenting the fact there is no market for wool, gratis or otherwise. Our sheep get shorn once a year, and their wool always landed in the burn pile. A shame, and a waste.

At long last we have found a wonderful solution to this problem. The Creekside Fiber Mill recently opened in Lebanon, providing the much-needed service of accepting raw fiber (from sheep, llamas, alpacas and goats) from anywhere in the U.S. and processing it into yarn, batts, rovings, or needle-felted fiber products. Living nearby, we save shipping costs, which in the past have been substantial enough to make wool a losing proposition.

I took last year’s wool from four ewes in various non-white colors and had it processed into rovings for spinning.

After I saw the needle-felted blankets they produce at the mill, I gathered all my scraps, old pieces, odds and ends and had 2 blankets made. The results were so beautiful that a friend offered to buy both of them at first sight.

Needle felting is particularly appropriate for less than prime fiber or left over wool as any size pieces can be used to create these felted pieces. The sheets of felt can be used as is, or the felt can be cut to create garments, pillow covers, hats, purses – your imagination is the only limit.

Having a local fiber mill means I may be able to develop a great niche market for my wool. In 2011, we’ll have nine ewes to be shorn. I can hardly wait to create some interesting designs and projects.

At long last, our poultry project is beginning to yield results.

Facilities are through the shake-down period and running smoothly, and we’ve been collecting an increasing number of eggs over the last few weeks.

Muscovies are at the water trough (there are automatic waterers inside the shed).

The trough is big enough so that the ducks can get in and swim around a bit, which they seem to enjoy immensely. This trough used to be right on the other side of the fence, belonging to the sheep. But the ducks much preferred the large trough to their small tub, and were constantly going under, over, around and through the fence to get at the sheep’s water. So we gave up and switched. Note the “duck deck” under the trough. Turns out ducks love to eat mud. The trough quickly came to be perched on a mesa. Putting a 4? x 8? deck under the trough solved the problem.

Two Khaki Campbell drakes and Khaki Campbell and Rouen hens are at the outside feeder.

The ducks are finally getting old enough to begin laying eggs. And this week, off some went to the slaughterhouse – all seven Pekins, and all but one of the Rouen and Khaki Campbell drakes. Or at least that was the intent. One of the Khaki Campbell males slipped out the door while I was gathering them all up (I had neglected to install a latch that could be operated from the inside, an oversight that has since been corrected) and, in the dim light of pre-dawn, I inadvertently replaced it with an unlucky Rouen drake. Which is why you see two Khaki Cambell drakes and no Rouen drake in the photo.

fortunately for us Scio Poultry Processing is just up the road a piece. It’s a soon-to-be USDA-inspected facility owned and operated by our friends Joe and Karen Schueller at Rain Shadow El Rancho.

The ducks arrive in crates.

Go in the front door, and come out in cryovac packages.

That’s a dozen ducks, which should be plenty for holiday dinners and more.

We chose to raise ducks rather than chickens because free-range chickens are readily available and affordable, whereas ducks are a delicacy, a luxury item we couldn’t otherwise afford. Getting the infrastructure in place was neither quick or nor particularly cheap, but now we have in place durable, efficient, predator-proof facilities adaptable for a wide variety of poultry.

The mobile slaughterhouse could play a critical role in the burgeoning local food movement. This photo of a “slaughtermobile” is from an article in the Washington Post. The article reports the USDA is paying more attention to small and mid-size farms, encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture, and investing in projects to bring locally grown meat and produce to consumers.

A mobile slaughterhouse, with a team composed of a butcher and a federal meat inspector, travels from farm to farm.

USDA’s efforts to help small farmers are focused within its “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, which seeks to help make the link between local production and local consumption.

USDA has published a Mobile Slaughter Unit Compliance Guide to help those who want to establish a mobile slaughter unit under Federal inspection and operate in accordance with Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulations.

A few days of blue skies and warm sunshine is all it takes to turn one’s thoughts to spring.

Over the last week of clear weather, temperatures have been cool at night – like in the low twenties – but have been getting up to the low or even mid-sixties during the day. In the greenhouse, minimums are in the low forties, with maximums reaching the low seventies. Time to plant seeds!

Two weeks ago I planted seeds left over from last year: the first batch of lettuces, and herbs – parsley, chervil, cilantro. Those seeds have already sprouted. As soon as the plants are big enough, they’ll be set out in cold frames, where we’re still harvesting lettuces planted last fall.

This weekend, after a seed-buying expedition to Nichols in Albany, it was an orgy of planting. Six types of lettuces: Australian Yellow, Black-Seeded Simpson, Flashy Butter Oak, New Red Fire, Red Velvet, and our old favorite Merlot. Artichokes, to replace any that may not have survived the brutal cold of early December (at least some old plants show signs of new growth, too soon to know how many). Two new varieties of cabbages – Megaton and Stonehead – to expand on last year’s very successful experiment with sauerkraut. Cauliflower: Snow Crown and Cheddar. Lemon cucumbers. Tomatoes: Oregon Spring, Siletz (would have planted Legend, but I proved to have saved an empty seed packet). Peas, snap and sugar pod. Winter squash – Cornell’s Bush Delicata, our favorite (I know, it seems awfully early, but you catch the planting bug . . . ). And flowers! Sunflowers, pansies, violas, nasturtiums, all in several varieties and mixes. All to be set out at the appropriate time.

Even with all this planting, the greenhouse isn’t even near full. No more seed trays in the windowsills in the house!

We got a whole selection of commercial-grade seed trays in various plug sizes from Yarnell’s Red Barn nursery in Stayton – for a mere dollar each. The planting mix we made ourselves, from compost run through our Steinmax chipper-shredder.

Garlic, onions, and shallots have been in the ground since last fall. Oops, forgot the leeks! Put that on the list for the next visit to Nichols, along with Legend tomato seeds and doubtless a few others we’ve overlooked.

Over the weekend we raised the borders of the herb garden and added several inches of compost. Got the raspberries pruned, and dug up a couple of dozen plants to give away to friends.

Now comes the true test of the greenhouse, to see if we can sprout all these seeds with no heat other than from passive solar gain, and no protection from cold other than thermal mass and insulation.

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

• Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
• Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
• Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
• Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
• Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
• Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
• Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
• Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.