Peak Everything (10 page)

How dramatic a pullback are we talking about? No one knows. It depends to a large degree on how we manage the inevitable collapse in financial and governance systems, and whether the nations of the world can be persuaded to adopt a global Oil Depletion Protocol; or whether instead they fight mercilessly over the last petroleum reserves until even the “winners” are utterly spent and the resources in dispute have been used up or destroyed in the conflict itself.

In the worst case, Zerzan's ideal of a return to hunting and gathering may be realized — though not by moral choice, but by cruel fate.

If Class D tools fueled by cheap oil eliminated drudgery, life without abundant extrasomatic energy will imply more labor — certainly for food production. The return of slavery is a frighteningly real possibility. Such nightmare scenarios can only be averted by careful, hard, cooperative work.

In the meantime, what should we expect and what should we do?

Realistically, I think we can expect to see some of the worst excesses of human history, but perhaps only briefly and in certain places. Within a few decades the governmental and corporate structures capable of perpetrating such outrages will have crumbled for lack of fuel. We can also anticipate — and participate in — localized cooperative attempts to reorganize society at a smaller scale.

Under the circumstances, efforts to
try
to bring industrialism to ruin prematurely seem to be pointless and wrongheaded: ruin will come soon enough on its own. Better to invest time and effort in personal and community preparedness. Enhance your survival prospects. Learn practical skills, including the manufacture and use of Paleolithic tools. Learn to understand and repair (as much as possible) existing tools — including water pumps, farm implements, and woodworking tools — that are likely still to be useful when there is no gasoline or electricity.

Preserve whatever is beautiful, sane, and intelligent. That includes scientific and cultural knowledge, and examples of human achievement in the arts. Nobody can preserve it all, or even a substantial portion; choose what appeals to you. A great deal of it is currently captured on media with dubious survival prospects — magnetic disc or tape, compact laser disc, or acid-soaked paper. If someone doesn't make the effort, the best of what we have achieved over the past centuries and decades will be gone along with the worst.

In the best instance, the next generations will find themselves in a low-energy regime in which moral lessons from the fossil-fuel era and its demise have been seared into cultural memory. Like the Native Americans, who learned from the Pleistocene extinctions
that over-hunting results in famine, they will have discovered that growth is not always good, that modest material goals are usually better for everyone in the long run than extravagant ones, and that every technology has a hidden cost. There is no free lunch. One hopes that, like the Iroquois, who long ago concluded that fighting over scarce land and resources only means the endless perpetuation of violence, they will also have learned the methods and culture of peacemaking.

We humans tend to learn really tough lessons only by bitter experience. These are tough lessons indeed. If we learn them, perhaps the bitter experience of addicting ourselves to fossil fuels and then having to go cold turkey will not have been entirely pointless.

T
HERE WAS A TIME not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not accepted, part of life. Until the 19
^th
century — whether in China, France, India, or Britain — food came almost entirely from local sources and harvests were variable. In good years, there was plenty — enough for seasonal feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come. In bad years, starvation cut down the poorest and the weakest — the very young, the old, and the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size of the population by several percent. This was the
normal
condition of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.
¹

Today in America, such a state of affairs is hard to imagine. Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked from hundreds of miles away. Many people in America did go hungry during the Great Depression, but those were times that only the elderly can recall. In the current regime, the desperately poor may experience chronic malnutrition and may miss meals, but for most the dilemma is finding time in the day's hectic schedule to go to the grocery store or to cook. As a result, fast-food restaurants proliferate: the fare may not be particularly
nutritious, but even an hour's earnings at minimum wage will buy a meal or two. The average American family spent 20 percent of its income on food in 1950; today the figure is 10 percent.
²

While this is an extraordinary situation, it is the only one that most Americans alive today have ever experienced, and so we tend to assume that it will continue indefinitely. However, there are reasons to think that our current anomalous abundance of inexpensive food may be only temporary; if so, present and future generations may become acquainted with that old, formerly familiar but unwelcome houseguest — famine.

The following are the four principal bases (there are others) for this gloomy forecast.

The first factor has to with
looming fuel shortages.
This is a subject I have written about extensively elsewhere, so I shall not repeat myself in any detail. Suffice it to say that the era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak around the year 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America's petroleum-dependent food system.

Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using soil to turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make fertilizer. We use oil to fuel farm machinery and power irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for pesticides and herbicides, in the maintenance of animal operations, in crop storage and drying, and for transportation of farm inputs and outputs. Agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of the US annual energy budget; it is the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared to other industries. By comparison, the US military, in all of its operations, uses less than half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500 liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American each year, and every calorie of food produced requires, on average, ten calories of fossil-fuel inputs. This is a food system profoundly vulnerable, at every level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. And both are inevitable.

An attempt to make up for fuel shortfalls by producing more biofuels — ethanol, butanol, and biodiesel — will put even more pressure on the food system, and will likely result in a competition
between food and fuel uses of land and the other resources needed for agricultural production. Already 14 percent of the US corn crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and government mandates.
³

The second factor potentially leading to famine is
a shortage of farmers.
Much of the success of industrial agriculture lies in its labor efficiency: far less human work is required to produce a given amount of food today than was the case decades ago (the actual fraction, comparing the year 2000 with 1900, is about one seventh). But that very success implies a growing vulnerability. We don't need as many farmers, as a percentage of the population, as we used to; so, throughout the past century, most farming families — including hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions that would have preferred to maintain their rural, self-sufficient way of life — were forced to move to cities and find jobs. Today so few people farm that vital knowledge of
how
to farm is disappearing. The average age of American farmers is over 55 and approaching 60. The proportion of principal farm operators younger than 35 has dropped from 15.9 percent in 1982 to 5.8 percent in 2002. Of all the dismal statistics I know, these are surely among the most frightening. Who will be growing our food 20 years from now? With less oil and gas available, we will need far
more
knowledge and muscle power devoted to food production, and thus far more people on the farm, than we have currently.

The third worrisome trend is
an increasing scarcity of fresh water.
Over 80 percent of fresh water consumed nationally goes toward agriculture. California's Central Valley, which produces the substantial bulk of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables, receives virtually no rainfall during summer months and relies overwhelmingly on irrigation. But the snowpack on the Sierras, which provides much of that irrigation water, is declining, and the aquifer that supplies much of the rest is being drawn down at many times its recharge rate. If these trends continue, the Central Valley may be incapable of producing food in any substantial quantities within two or three decades. Other parts of the country are similarly overspending their
water budgets, and very little is being done to deal with this looming catastrophe.

Fourth and finally, there is the problem of
global Climate Change.
Often the phrase used for this is “global warming,” which implies only that the world's average temperature will be increasing by a couple of degrees or more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for farmers is destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer climate, but
climate chaos:
droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general (hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms) — unpredictable weather of all kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of rain and sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers' ability to grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can destroy an entire year's production. Given the fact that modern American agriculture has become highly centralized due to cheap transport and economies of scale (almost the entire national spinach crop, for example, comes from a single valley in California), the damage from that freak storm is today potentially continental or even global in scope. We have embarked on a century in which, increasingly, freakish weather is normal.

I am not pointing out these problems, and their likely consequences, in order to cause panic. As I propose below, there is a solution to at least two of these dilemmas, one that may also help us address the remaining two. It is not a simple or easy strategy and it will require a coordinated and sustained national effort. But in addition to averting famine, this strategy may permit us to solve a host of other, seemingly unrelated social and environmental problems.

In order to get a better grasp of the problems and the solution being proposed, it is essential that we understand how our present exceptional situation of cheap abundance came about. In order to do that, we must go back not just a few decades, but at least ten thousand years.

The origins of agriculture are shrouded in mystery, though archaeologists have been whittling away at that mystery for decades.
We know that horticulture (gardening) began independently at somewhat different periods, in at least three regions — the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America. Following the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years ago, much of humanity experienced a centuries-long food crisis brought on by over-hunting the megafauna that had been at the center of the human diet. The subsequent domestication of plants and animals brought relative food security, as well as the ability to support larger and more sedentary populations.

Compared to hunting and gathering, horticulture intensified the process of obtaining food — that is, it produced more food per unit of land, using more labor. Intensification (because it led to increased population density — i.e., more mouths to feed), then led to the need for even more intensification: thus horticulture (gardening) eventually led to agriculture (field cropping). The latter produced still more food per unit of land, which enabled more population growth, which meant still more demand for food. We are describing a classic self-reinforcing feedback loop.

As a social regime, horticulture did not represent a decisive break with hunting and gathering. Just as women had previously participated in essential productive activities by foraging for plants and hunting small animals, they now played a prominent role in planting, tending, and harvesting the garden — activities that were all compatible with caring for infants and small children. Thus women's status remained relatively high in most horticultural societies. Seasonal surpluses were relatively small and there was no full-time division of labor.