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

With the greenhouse project done, it’s time to put it to use. We’re going to try growing tender herbs (chervil, parsley, cilantro, even basil) over winter, and experiment with tomatoes.

In the past, I’ve been using our own compost for planting seeds. Everything goes into the compost pile: food scraps, garden waste, grape stems and pomace. Turn it over once, and a year later it’s transformed itself into beautiful rich, black, and crumbly soil. Our compost bin is to the right in this photo.

That’s composted bedding straw from the sheep barn on the left, under cover to keep it from getting saturated over winter.  It will go into the garden and vineyard next spring.

I got some used seedling trays, cheap, from the Red Barn Nursery in Stayton. Perfect for starting seedlings for transplant into larger containers as they grow. But the compost as it comes out of the bin is a little too coarse than it ought to be for starting seeds. I tried putting it in a blender, but that didn’t work. The solution: a big blender, in the form of a Steinmax 1800 electric chipper/shredder.

The Steinmax 1800 sold in 1986 for $230. I found one on Craigslist for $75. It needed a bit of refurbishing – welding, hammering, patching, rewiring, lubricating, painting. The results?

Beautiful stuff, the texture and color of coffee grounds.

We used to have a big, gas-powered chipper/shredder, thinking that we’d shred plant material before it went into the compost bin. But that didn’t work well, it was too much work, and the machine was hard to start and noisy to run. We soon sold it. But after a year of composting, the course compost (fine for amending soil in the garden as is) slides readily into the maws of the shredder. Letting all the heavy lifting happen by itself in the compost bin is definitely the way to go. Do seeds like it? See for yourself.

We’re still getting fresh peas out of the garden, despite repeated frosts and rains. Here’s how.

A similar cold frame will enable us to harvest lettuces all winter – as long as the gophers don’t move in.

We experimented with Brassica for the first time in our garden this year – cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages – with mixed success.

The cauliflower – yellow, purple, and white – ripened first, and all at once. What do you do with all that cauliflower?  But the orange-yellow and beta carotene rich  Cheddar was particularly flavorful and delicious.

We discovered deer love broccoli and brussels sprouts. We were lucky to eke out enough for a couple of meals. For next year, we have an idea for a portable deer fence, made with steel T-posts and 6? welded wire mesh (normally used to reinforce concrete). The fence would be cheap, light, and easy to move around as needed and to get out of the way when not needed. Portable fencing could keep the deer away from the peas and beans, as well.

The cabbage was a total triumph, yielding a dozen or so huge heads. We made a little slaw. But I’m not crazy about coleslaw, and how much can you eat anyway while the cabbage is still fresh? So with the last half dozen heads, we determined to try preserving the cabbage as sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is finely shredded cabbage that has been fermented by various lactic acid bacteria, including Leuconostoc, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. No special culture of lactic acid bacteria is needed because these bacteria already are present on raw cabbage.  Traditionally fermented sauerkraut has lots nutritional value, as it contains beneficial digestive enzymes and lactic acid bacteria and is high in vitamin C. (There may be an added bonus, as well. A study by nutritionist Lejla Kazinic Kreho at King’s College found that sauerkraut is as effective as Viagra at increasing sexual function.)

Sauerkraut has a long shelf life and a distinctive sour flavor, both of which result from the lactic acid that forms when the bacteria ferment the sugars in the cabbage. The name comes directly from the German, which literally translates to sour cabbage. Sauerkraut is traditional throughout northern and central Europe, where it provided a vital source of important nutrients during the winter before the days of refrigeration and global food transport.

We borrowed an 8-gallon ceramic crock from friends Jan and Pete, scanned the net for a look at kraut recipes (like here, here, and here), and got to work. Sterilize the crock. Shred the cabbage. Toss with kosher salt. Throw the shredded cabbage in the crock. Tamp firmly – the punch down we use for wine worked perfectly – and as the cabbage was really fresh out of the garden, it was almost instantly submerged in its own juices, safe from oxygen. Cover with a food-grade plastic lid that luckily fit snugly in the crock. Weigh down with a plastic bag filled with water that also served to seal out air. And put in the root cellar, to wait for six weeks or so.

Six weeks later it’s October, and the kraut should be about ready. Serendipitously, Irina’s cousin Doris and her Mann Bernd arrived from Germany. Who better to consult about actually cooking the stuff?

Berndt said his favorite recipe was with Polish sausage. Slice and brown the sausages. Add julienned onions. Cook with the kraut for about a half hour.

Doris told a story of Irina’s mother’s favorite, a dish that Doris would often cook for her when visiting her in Darmstadt. Cut some big – like 2? – cubes of nice fatty speck (bacon that’s cured but not smoked). Brown a bit, then add onions and cook until soft. Add the kraut, then simmer gently for a couple of hours. Mother was in heaven.

So we tried a fusion – sauerkraut with sausages and speck. We had some speck from Michael at the Pepper Tree Sausage House, and we used his bratwurst, as we didn’t have any of his Polish sausages lying around. Bernd first did the pork belly bit, then add the browned sausages for the last half hour of simmering.

The result was a revelation. The sauerkraut was tangy, tasty, and crisp, and the meats were tender and rich. Accompanying the main dish were mashed Yukon Gold potatoes with sweet butter from the Noris dairy in Crabtree and a fresh green salad from our garden with fresh herb dressing. The potatoes, lettuces and herbs were all from our garden.  A bottle of own Pinot Noir, of course, from the fresh and fruity 2008 vintage. A simple meal with delicious, nutritious food and good friends – life doesn’t get any better than this.

Voilà – a smashingly successful demonstration. Winter doesn’t have to mean deprivation, even in the absence of refrigeration.

Almost a month ago I wrote about building a passive solar greenhouse at the farm. It’s now complete and in use.

Here’s the view of the south side. From a heating and cooling efficiency standpoint, it may have been better to limit the glass solely to the south side – but aesthetically, I couldn’t resist a window on the east side and a glass door.

Here’s a shot showing the back interior wall, painted black to absorb heat, with a work bench/plant shelf over the water-filled barrels that serve as a heat sink.

And this photo shows the plant shelves along the south-facing windows. More water-filled containers support the lower shelf and provide additional heat storage.

So far, the greenhouse has not dropped below 60 degrees at night and has maintained a comfy mid- 60s during the day, with a plant-friendly humidity. We’ll see how it performs in the depths of winter – and later next year, during the long hot days of summer.

We’ve moved the herbs – basil, parsley, chives – into the greenhouse, hoping to grow them all winter. The seedling tray has been planted with more basil, cilantro, and chervil.

Outside, the tomatoes have been draped with plastic to husband the last vestiges of summer heat (and protect them from hungry deer). The lettuces will get their cold frame at the first hint of frost. The fall sugar and snow peas are coming on, as is the second raspberry crop. Winter squash is just waiting on the vine. The sauerkraut should be ready to sample in another week. The sheep are taking care of themselves. Hopefully our new ram has done his work freshening the ewes and we’ll see new lambs come late December, early January.

The grapes are approaching 20° brix – another week or so of sun and they’ll be ready. Harvest is tentatively set for Saturday October 10.

It’s been an unusually long time since my last post. But I’ve been busy at work on a passive solar greenhouse. The basic structure is now up.

That’s double-pane glass on the south side (and one panel on the west), gleaned from the Lebanon Re-Store run by Habitat for Humanity. Total price for four 4 x 5 double-glazed windows and a 36? glass door: $175.

Roof and walls will be well insulated (roof R-29, walls R-19). Building materials – lumber and metal roofing – are recycled, saved from earlier remodeling projects around the house. Except for the purchased pressure-treated, the lumber is full-dimension Douglas fir harvested from the property and milled at the old Gaines Mill on Fish Hatchery Road, just a few miles away. Water-filled barrels will provide thermal mass. The biggest expenses were for insulation, a few pieces of metal trim for the roof, and screws and nails, which came to a bit over $300. The gravel for the pad was extra from the road-building project (to the left in the photo, going out to the barn).

We intend to use the greenhouse beginning in late winter as a place to start seeds and grow seedlings for transplanting into the garden, and then throughout the growing season for starting crops such as lettuces which need to be constantly replanted to maintain production. We’ve found that lettuces do great even in the midsummer heat, if they’re grown under a shade cloth.

That’s our apple orchard and sheep barn in the background.

The greenhouse is another piece of our personal program to become less reliant on an increasingly unstable economic system. I’ve been thinking about how to do it for years. Solving the thermal mass problem was the key to actually getting started. We’ve got four plastic barrels used to transport apple cider concentrate from South America that we got for free from Oregon Freeze Dry years ago, just sitting in the barn (they served as emergency fermentation tanks last year when we had a bumper grape crop). Why did it take so long to see the obvious?

In October 2008 San Francisco formed a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force charged with assessing the impact of declining supplies and rising prices of fossil fuels and coming up with a plan to mitigate the ill effects. Now the Task Force has posted a working draft of its final report.

To avoid what the Task Force sees as “a much darker future,” the report makes more than 70 recommendations, including:

• Energy: conduct waste audit, develop diverse renewable wind, solar, & tidal energy plan, build smart grid, consider feed-in tariffs.
• Economy: source locally; revise tax policies (”progressive” business taxes, carbon tax, demand-sensitive parking fees, city vehicle tax, gasoline tax based on price floor), invest in infrastructure based on future viability (no “orphan” projects, invest in short-haul water freight, rail).
• Food security: buy local, create city Board of Agriculture, provide incentives to use vacant land available for food production, make city parks and golf courses available for garden plots, tax fast food to fund local food production, plant fruit & nut trees along streets, tear up concrete & plant street-side gardens, allow small-scale animal husbandry, create neighborhood compost centers.
• Transportation: impose congestion & parking charges; make intercity & regional public transit cheap, convenient, direct, reliable; build mixed-use neighborhoods, encourage telecommuting, make biking safe & convenient and establish bike-share program, promote car-free lifestyle & make it possible, switch freight from trucks to rail & water.
• Built environment: require all new buildings to be zero energy, retrofit existing buildings, include blower test in building inspections, require energy audit on sale or remodel, use solar assessment district to finance solar installations.
• Protecting vulnerable populations: Implement grow-your-own food program for low income families, eliminate all parking requirements for new residential construction & convert garage space to living space, provide discounted passes for public transit, implement bicycle & neighborhood electric vehicle plan, provide programs to reduce energy use for low-income families esp. renters, prepare rationing plan to allocate resources during shortages on per capita basis.

The task force is expected to finalize the report by today (Tuesday March 17) and then submit it to the Board of Supervisors.

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

Dave Cohen at The Energy Bulletin takes a step back from our current economic problems.

First, the Age of Fossil Fuels is just a blip:

But a blip that has side effects . . .

. . . that have taken us way beyond any recent norm:

And our biggest concern is on fixing the economy to get us back on the business-as-usual growth track?

The exponential growth that we’ve come to expect as normal since the beginning of the fossil fuel age is over. But the consequences are just beginning. We’ve sowed the wind, and are about to reap the whirlwind.

Yes we can?

It’s time to get real.

Dmitry Orlov is the only person I know who can talk seriously about collapse and make you laugh at the same time. He’s got a new piece posted on his blog, Club Orlov, titled Social Collapse Best Practices.

Orlov grew up as a child of both the Soviet Union and the U.S., and has come up with his own “comparative theory of superpower collapse.” His theory is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed due to the “superpower collapse soup,” which contains four main ingredients

• Severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies). Check. U.S. production peaked in 1970-71, and has been kept on life support ever since only due to a deal with the devil (with the Saudis, actually).
• A severe and worsening foreign trade deficit. Check. The trade deficit has grown over the Bush years from $380 billion in 2000 to $759 billion in 2007.
• A runaway military budget. Check. 50% of all federal spending – 481.4 billion in 2007 – went to cover the “base” Pentagon budget (this doesn’t include “black” spending, Iraq, or Afghanistan). That’s 47% of total world military spending. No one in the U.S. ever mentions, much less questions, the military budget. No one would ever dare propose slashing it.
• Ballooning foreign debt. Check. U.S. government debt as of the end of 2008 was over $10 trillion. 27.9% of that is held by foreigners, up from 13% (of a much smaller total) in 1988.

Orlov’s recipe also calls for non-essential “spices” such as:

• The inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens.
• A systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform.

We’ll soon see about these. The chances of real change happening isn’t looking good, and people’s lives are increasingly unraveling. Anyhow, these last ingredients aren’t necessary components of Orlov’s recipe. They don’t automatically lead to collapse because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality.

Obama spoke of change – but he is, of course, a politician. Orlov says politicians in reality are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what should we do? What realistic new objectives should politicians espouse? I think Orlov nails it:

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Orlov thinks the Soviet Union was much better prepared for collapse than the U.S. is – ironically, because it was much less efficient. Because it didn’t work well, people had learned to get by on their own. In the U.S., people are dependent on industrial agribusiness for their food. Our suburban single-family houses will prove to be unaffordable millstones. Once fuel shortages develop and the transportation system falls apart, people will find themselves stranded in places that aren’t survivable. As for security – well, you really have to read Orlov himself to get the flavor of the hilarity.

Orlov says it’s important for our sanity to just let go of everything.  And there’s a bright note:

While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

And because money is likely to become worthless, trade it in while you have the chance and “stockpile useful stuff.”

However distopian Orlov’s vision of collapse seems, it’s really pretty mild stuff. Orlov’s collapse would involve only the U.S. and its economy.

Buzz Holling, one of the world’s great ecologists and a originator of “panarchy” theory, sees a global, systemic collapse approaching, one involving the world’s climate and all the world’s continents. Panarchy theory’s core idea is that systems naturally grow, become more brittle, collapse, and then renew themselves in an endless cycle within a grand hierarchy of cycles.

Holling fears that rapidly rising connectivity within global systems – both economic and technological – poses an increasing risk of deep collapse, a collapse that will cascade across adaptive cycles, a kind of pancaking implosion of the entire system as the collapse of higher-level adaptive cycles causes progressive collapse at lower levels.

Holling thinks the world is reaching “a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a rare and major ‘pulse’ of social transformation.”

The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.

The Post Carbon Institute is calling for the Obama Administration to embrace a “Real New Deal.” The proposal calls for a series of bold measures to electrify the transportation system, rebuild the electricity grid, relocalize the food system, and retrofit the nation’s building stock for both energy efficiency and energy production.

The text of the “Real New Deal: Energy Scarcity and the Path to Energy, Economic, and Environmental Recovery” is available at the PCI website.

The plan’s lead author is Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg, author of “The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies.” Heinberg says:

While there are many ‘new deal’ plans being offered to President-elect Obama, our plan recognizes that declining fossil fuel supplies and rising greenhouse gas emissions put us at tremendous and immediate risk. Building more roads and bridges as a stimulus for jobs is the wrong tactic. We must re-engineer our country now to deal with the end of cheap energy and to stop catastrophic climate change.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The energy transition must not be limited to building wind turbines and solar panels. It must include the thorough redesign of our economic and societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. It must address not only our transportation system and electricity grid, but also our food system and building stock.

A group of Ashland sustainability activists is seeking to make Ashland the 9th city in the U.S. to be designated a Transition Town. Monthly meetings of the “Sustainability Leaders Dialog” have been drawing over 50 people planning to create volunteer teams to work on problem areas such as food, water, housing and energy.

Imagine all the people, living life in peace . . .

The Transition Town movement has arisen around the question: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of peak oil and climate change? Transition towners ask the big question: how do we significantly increase resilience of our community (to mitigate the effects of peak oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of climate change) while providing and even improving all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive?

Imagine all the people, sharing all the world . . .

Folks with similar aims but a different focus are behind the “slow city” movement.  The Citta Slow movement is dedicated to relaxation, sustainability, quality of life, community and preservation of tradition. This approach turns traditional planning on its head. Rather than seeing planning as a way to accommodate growth – “smart” or otherwise – its aim is to improve the quality of life for people who live in the town and for the people who visit. Imagine, fighting back against corporatism and giganticism with local food and drink, produced using local products and traditional skills. Imagine having mayors, city councilors, and planning commissions on your side.

Imagine all the people, living for today . . .

Just as you can get your town “officially” designated as a “transition town, you can get it recognized as a “slow town”, too. That’s the kind of boosterism that actually begins to make sense.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one