Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  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.

  Intensifying Food Production

  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.

  But as agriculture developed — with field crops, plows, and draft animals — societies inevitably mutated in response. Plowing fields was men’s work; women were forced to stay at home and lost social power. Larger seasonal surpluses required management as well as protection from raiders; full-time managers and specialists in violence proliferated as a result. Societies became multi-layered: wealthy ruling classes (which had never existed among hunter-gatherers, and were rare among gardeners) sat atop an economic pyramid that came to include scribes, soldiers, and religious functionaries, and that was supported at its base by the vastly more numerous peasants — who produced all the food, for themselves and everyone else as well. Writing, mathematics, metallurgy, and, ultimately, the trappings of modern life as we know it thus followed not so much from planting in general, as from agriculture in particular.

  As important an instance of intensification as agriculture was, in many respects it pales in comparison with what has occurred within the past century or so, with the application of fossil fuels to farming. Petroleum-fed tractors replaced horses and oxen, freeing up more land to grow food for far more people. The Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia from fossil fuels, invented just prior to World War I, has doubled the amount of nitrogen available to green plants — with nearly all of that increase going directly to food crops. New hybrid plant varieties also led to higher yields. Technologies for food storage improved radically. And fuel-fed transport systems enabled local surpluses to be sold not just regionally, but nationally and even globally. Through all of these strategies, we have developed the wherewithal to feed seven times the population that existed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And, in the process, we have made farming uneconomical and unattractive to all but a few.

  That’s the broad, global overview. In America, whose history as an independent nation begins at the dawn of the industrial era, the story of agriculture comprises three distinct periods:

  The Expansion Period (1600 to 1920): Increases in food production during these three centuries came simply from putting more land into production; technological change played only a minor role.

  The Mechanization Period (1920 to 1970): In this half-century, technological advances issuing from cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy resulted in a dramatic increase in productivity as measured by output per worker hour. Meanwhile, farm machinery, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, new hybrid crops, and synthetic fertilizers allowed for the doubling and tripling of crop production per acre. Also during this time, US Department of

  Agriculture policy began favoring larger farms (the average US farm size grew from 100 acres in 1930 to almost 500 acres by 1990), and production for export.

  The Saturation Period (1970-present): In recent decades, the application of still greater amounts of energy has produced smaller relative increases in crop yields; meanwhile, an ever-growing amount of energy is being expended just to maintain the functioning of the overall system. For example, about ten percent of the energy in agriculture is used to offset the negative effects of soil erosion, while increasing amounts of pesticides must be sprayed each year as pests develop resistances. In short, strategies that had recently produced dramatic increases in productivity became subject to the law of diminishing returns.

  While we were achieving miracles of productivity, agriculture’s impact on the natural world was also growing; indeed it is now the single greatest source of human damage to the global environment. That damage takes a number of forms: erosion and salinization of soils; deforestation (a strategy for bringing more land into cultivation); fertilizer runoff (which ultimately creates enormous “dead zones” around the mouths of many rivers); other agrochemical pollution of water and soil; loss of biodiversity; and fresh water scarcity.

  In short, we created unprecedented abundance while ignoring the long-term consequences of our actions. This is more than a little reminiscent of how some previous agricultural societies — the Greeks, Babylonians, and Romans — destroyed soil and habitat in their mania to feed growing urban populations, and collapsed as a result.

  Fortunately, during the past century or two we have also developed the disciplines of archaeology and ecology, which teach us how and why those ancient societies failed, and how the diversity of the web of life sustains us. In principle, if we avail ourselves of this knowledge, we need not mindlessly repeat yet again the time-worn tale of catastrophic civilizational collapse.

  The 21st Century: De-Industrialization

  How might we avoid such a fate?

  Surely the dilemmas we have outlined above are understood by the managers of the current industrial food system. They must have some solutions in mind.

  Indeed they do, and, perhaps predictably, those solutions involve a further intensification of the food production process. Since we cannot achieve much by applying more energy directly to that process, the most promising strategy on the horizon seems to be the genetic engineering of new crop varieties. If, for example, we could design crops to grow with less water, or in unfavorable climate and soil conditions, we could perhaps find our way out of the current mess.

  Unfortunately, there are some flaws with this plan. Our collective experience with genetically modifying crops so far shows that glowing promises of higher yields, or of the reduced need for herbicides, have seldom been fulfilled. At the same time, new genetic technologies carry with them the potential for horrific unintended consequences in the forms of negative impacts on human health and the integrity of ecosystems. We have been gradually modifying plants and animals through selective breeding for millennia, but new gen
e-splicing techniques enable the re-mixing of genomes in ways and to degrees impossible heretofore. One serious error could result in biological tragedy on an unprecedented scale.

  In France, the potager, or kitchen garden, has a long tradition and is still extremely popular.

  Yet even if future genetically modified commercial crops prove to be much more successful than past ones, and even if we manage to avert a genetic apocalypse, the means of producing and distributing genetically engineered seeds is itself reliant on the very fuel-fed industrial system that is in question.

  Is it possible, then, that a solution lies in another direction altogether — perhaps in deliberately de-industrializing production, but doing so intelligently, using information we have gained from the science of ecology, as well as from traditional and indigenous farming methods, in order to reduce environmental impacts while maintaining total yields at a level high enough to avert widespread famine?

  This is not an entirely new idea (the organic and ecological farming movements have been around for decades), but up to this point the managers of the current system have resisted it. This is no doubt largely because those managers are heavily influenced by giant corporations that profit from centralized industrial production for distant markets. Nevertheless, the fact that we have reached the end of the era of cheap oil and gas demands that we re-examine the potential costs and benefits of our current trajectory and its alternatives.

  I believe we must and can de-industrialize agriculture. The general outline of what I mean by de-industrialization is simple enough: a radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs to agriculture, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption.

  Once again, fossil fuel depletion almost ensures that this will happen. But at the same time, it is fairly obvious that if we don’t plan for de-industrialization, the result could be catastrophic. It’s worth taking a moment to think about how events might unfold if the process occurs without intelligent management, driven simply by oil and gas depletion.

  Facing high fuel prices, family farms would declare bankruptcy in record numbers. Older farmers (the majority, in other words) would probably choose simply to retire, whether they could afford to or not. However, giant corporate farms would also confront rising costs — which they would pass along to consumers by way of dramatically higher food prices.

  Yields would begin to decline — in fits and starts — as weather anomalies and water shortages affected one crop after another.

  Meanwhile, people in the cities would also feel the effects of skyrocketing energy prices. Entire industries would falter, precipitating a general economic collapse. Massive unemployment would lead to unprecedented levels of homelessness and hunger.

  Many people would leave cities looking for places to live where they could grow some food. Yet they might find all of the available land already owned by banks or the government. Without experience of farming, even those who succeeded in gaining access to acreage would fail to produce much food and would ruin large tracts of land in the process.

  Eventually these problems would sort themselves out; people and social systems would adapt — but probably not before an immense human and environmental tragedy had ensued.

  I wish I could say that this forecast is exaggerated for effect. Yet the actual events could be far more violent and disruptive than it is possible to suggest in so short a summary.

  Examples and Strategies

  Things don’t have to turn out that way. As I have already said, I believe that the de-industrialization of agriculture could be carried out in a way that is not catastrophic and that in fact substantially benefits society and the environment in the long run. But to be convinced of the thesis we need more than promises — we need historic examples and proven strategies. Fortunately, we have two of each.

  In some respects the most relevant example is that of Cuba’s Special Period.4 In the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its source of cheap oil. Its industrialized agricultural system, which was heavily fuel-dependent, immediately faltered. Very quickly, Cuban leaders abandoned the Soviet industrial model of production, changing from a fuel- and petrochemical-intensive farming method to a more localized, labor-intensive, organic mode of production.

  How they did this is itself an interesting story. Eco-agronomists at Cuban universities had already been advocating a transition somewhat along these lines. However, they were making little or no headway. When the crisis hit, they were given free rein to, in effect, redesign the entire Cuban food system. Had these academics not had a plan waiting in the wings, the nation’s fate might have been sealed.

  Heeding their advice, the Cuban government broke up large, state-owned farms and introduced private farms, farmer co-ops, and farmer markets. Cuban farmers began breeding oxen for animal traction. The Cuban people adopted a largely vegetarian diet, mostly involuntarily (meat eating went from twice a day to twice a week). They increased their intake of vegetable sources of protein and farmers reduced the growing of wheat and rice (Green Revolution crops that required too many inputs). Urban gardens (including rooftop gardens) were encouraged, and today they produce 50 to 80 percent of vegetables consumed in cities.

  Early on, it was realized that more farmers were needed, and that this would require education. All of the nation’s colleges and universities quickly added courses on agronomy. At the same time, wages for farmers were raised to be at parity with those for engineers and doctors. Many people moved from the cities to the country; in some cases there were incentives, in others the move was forced.

  The result was survival. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight, but in the long run the overall health of the nation’s people actually improved. Today, Cuba has a stable, slowly growing economy. There are few if any luxuries, but everyone has enough to eat. Having seen the benefit of smaller-scale organic production, Cuba’s leaders have decided that even if they find another source of cheap oil, they will maintain a commitment to their new, decentralized, low-energy methods.

  I don’t want to give the impression that Cubans sailed through the Special Period unscathed. Cuba was a grim place during these years, and to this day food is far from plentiful by American standards. My point is not that Cuba is some sort of paradise, but simply that matters could have been far worse.

  Victory Gardens were a project for all age groups and involved local shows and fairs where prizes were given for the best of everything, as was the case for these school gardeners in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1944.

  It could be objected that Cuba’s experience holds few lessons for our own nation, since Cuba has a very different government and climate.

  Let us, then, consider an indigenous historical example. During both World Wars, Americans planted Victory Gardens. During both periods, gardening became a sort of spontaneous popular movement, which (at least during World War II) the USDA initially tried to suppress, believing that it would compromise the industrialization of agriculture. It wasn’t until Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden on the White House lawn that the agriculture secretary relented; his agency then began to promote Victory Gardens and take credit for them. At the height of the movement, Victory Gardens were producing roughly 40 percent of America’s vegetables, an extraordinary achievement in so short a time.5

  By 1945, Victory Gardens were being actively promoted by the US Department of Agriculture. In the early days of World War II, the USDA tried to discourage Victory Gardens out of concern that they would inhibit the development of industrial agriculture.

  In addition to these historical precedents, we have new techniques developed with the coming agricultural crisis in mind; two of the most significant are Permaculture and Biointensive farming (there are others — such as efforts by Wes Jackson of The Land Institute to breed perennial grain crops — but limitations of time and space require me to pick and choose).

  Permaculture was developed in the
late 1970s by Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in anticipation of exactly the problem we see unfolding before us. Holmgren defines Permaculture as “consciously designed landscapes that mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fiber, and energy for provision of local needs.” 6 Common Permaculture strategies include mulching, rainwater capture using earthworks such as swales, composting, and the harmonious integration of aquaculture, horticulture, and small-scale animal operations. A typical Permaculture farm may produce a small cash crop but it concentrates largely on self-sufficiency and soil building. Significantly, Permaculture has played an important role in Cuba’s adaptation to a low-energy food regime.

  Biointensive farming has been developed primarily by Californian John Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables. Like Permaculture, “Grow Biointensive” is a product of research begun in the 1970s. Biointensive farming has been defined as

  ...an organic agricultural system that focuses on maximum yields from the minimum area of land, while simultaneously improving the soil. The goal of the method is long- term sustainability on a closed-system basis. Because biointensive is practiced on a relatively small scale, it is well suited to anything from personal or family to community gardens, market gardens, or minifarms. It has also been used successfully on small scale commercial farms.7