Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  Permaculture integrates domestic animals with the production of fruits and vegetables, as well as fiber and fuel crops, as on this small-scale organic farm on the Swabian Mountains in Germany.

  Like Holmgren and Mollison, Jeavons has worked for the past three decades in anticipation of the need to de-industrialize food production due to accumulating environmental damage and fossil fuel depletion. Currently, Biointensive farming is being taught extensively in Africa and South America as a sustainable alternative to globalized monocropping. The term “biointensive” suggests that what we are discussing here is not a de-intensification of food production, but rather the development of production along entirely different lines. While both Permaculture and Biointensive have shown themselves capable of dramatically improving yields-per-acre, their developers clearly understand that even these methods will eventually fail us unless we also limit demand for food by gradually and humanely limiting the size of the human population.

  In short, it is possible in principle for industrial nations like the US to make the transition to smaller-scale, non-petroleum food production, given certain conditions. There are both precedents and models.

  However, all of them imply more farmers. Here’s the catch — and here’s where the ancillary benefits kick in.

  The Key: More Farmers!

  One way or another, re-ruralization will be the dominant social trend of the 21st century. Thirty or forty years from now — again, one way or another — we will see a more historically normal ratio of rural to urban population, with the majority once again living in small, farming communities, despite current trends in the other direction. More food will be produced in cities than is the case today, but cities will be smaller. Millions more people than today will be in the countryside growing food.

  They won’t be doing so the way farmers do it today, and perhaps not the way farmers did it in 1900.

  Indeed, we need perhaps to redefine the term farmer. We have come to think of a farmer as someone with 500 acres and a big tractor and other expensive machinery. But this is not what farmers looked like a hundred years ago, and it’s not an accurate picture of most current farmers in less-industrialized countries. Nor does it coincide with what will be needed in the coming decades. We should perhaps start thinking of a farmer as someone with 3 to 50 acres, who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a small tractor which she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced on-site.

  How many more farmers are we talking about? Currently the US has three or four million of them, depending on how we define the term.

  Let’s again consider Cuba’s experience: in its transition away from fossil-fueled agriculture, that nation found that it required 15 to 25 percent of its population to become involved in food production. In America in 1900, nearly 40 percent of the population farmed; the current proportion is close to one percent.

  Do the math for yourself. Extrapolated to this country’s future requirements, this implies the need for a minimum of 40 to 50 million additional farmers as oil and gas availability declines.

  How soon will the need arise? Assuming that the peak of global oil production occurs within the next five years, and that North American natural gas is already in decline, we are looking at a transition that must occur over the next 20 to 30 years, and that must begin approximately now.

  Fortunately there are some hopeful trends to point to. The stereotypical American farmer is a middle-aged, Euro-American male, but the millions of new farmers in our future will have to include a broad mix of people, reflecting America’s increasing diversity. Already the fastest growth in farm operators in America is among female full-time farmers, as well as Hispanic, Asian, and Native American farm operators.

  Another positive trend worth noting: in the Northeast US, where the soil is acidic and giant agribusiness has not established as much of a foothold as elsewhere, the number of small farms is increasing. Young adults — not in the millions, but at least in the hundreds — are aspiring to become Permaculture or organic or Biointensive farmers. Farmers markets and community-supported agriculture farms (CSAs) are established or springing up throughout the region. This is also somewhat the case on the Pacific coast, although much less so in the Midwest and South.

  What will it take to make these tentative trends the predominant ones? Among other things we will need good, helpful policies. The USDA will need to cease supporting and encouraging industrial monocropping for export, and begin supporting smaller farms, rewarding those that make the effort to reduce inputs and to grow for local consumption. In the absence of USDA policy along these lines, we need to pursue state, county, and municipal efforts to support small farms in various ways, through favorable zoning, by purchasing local food for school lunches, and so on.

  We will also require land reform. Those millions of new farmers will need access to the soil, and there must be some means of making land available for this purpose. Here we might take inspiration from Indian Line Farm, a model for farmland preservation and conservation, which pioneered the use of conservation easements and community land trusts to make farmland available to working farmers.8

  Since so few people currently know much about farming, education will be essential. Universities and community colleges have both the opportunity and responsibility to quickly develop programs in small-scale ecological farming methods — programs that also include training in other skills that farmers will need, such as marketing and formulating business plans.

  Since few if any farms are financially successful the first year or even the second or third, loans and grants will also be necessary to help farmers get started.

  These new farmers will need higher, stabilized food prices. But high food prices, and likely food scarcities, will pose enormous problems for consumers. As difficult as it may be to imagine now, food rationing may be required at some point in the next two or three decades. That quota system needs to be organized in such a way as to make sure everyone has the bare essentials, and to support the people at the base of the food system — the farmers.

  Finally, we need a revitalization of farming communities and farming culture. A century ago, even in the absence of the air and auto transport systems we now take for granted, small towns across this land strove to provide their citizens with lectures, concerts, libraries, and yearly chautauquas. Over the past decades these same towns have seen their best and brightest young people flee first to distant colleges and then to the cities. The folks left behind have done their best to maintain a cultural environment, but in all too many cases that now consists of a movie theater and a couple of video rental stores. Farming communities must be interesting, attractive places if we expect people to inhabit them and for children to want to stay there.

  If We Do This Well

  We have been trained to admire the benefits of intensification and industrialization. But, as I’ve already indicated, we have paid an enormous price for these benefits — a price that includes alienation from nature, loss of community and tradition, and the acceptance of the anonymity and loss of autonomy implied by mass society. In essence, this tradeoff has its origins in the beginnings of urbanization and agriculture.

  Could we regain much of what we have lost? Yes, perhaps by going back, at least in large part, to horticulture. Recall that the shift from horticulture to agriculture was, as best we can tell, a fateful turning point in cultural history. It represented the beginning of full-time division of labor, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

  Biointensive farming and Permaculture are primarily horticultural rather than agricultural systems. These new, intelligent forms of horticulture could, then, offer an alternative to a new feudalism with a new peasantry. In addition, they emphasize biodiversity, averting many of the environmental impacts of field cropping. They use various strategies to make hand labor as efficient as possible, minimizing toil and drudgery. And they typically slash water requirements for crops grown in arid regions.

  We have gotten used to a situation wher
e most farmers rely on non-farm income. As of 2002 only a bit less than 60 percent of farm operators reported that their primary work is on the farm. Only nine percent of primary operators on farms with one operator, and ten percent on farms with multiple operators, reported all of their income as coming from the farm.

  The bad side of this is that it’s hard to make a living farming these days. The good side is that we don’t have to think of farming as an exclusive occupation. As people return to small communities and to farming, they could bring other interests with them. Rather than a new peasantry that spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new population of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology — in short, the whole range of pursuits than make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile.

  Moreover, the re-ruralization program I am describing could be a springboard for the rebirth of democracy in this nation. Over the past few years democracy in America has become little more than a slogan. In fact this erosion of our democratic traditions has been going on for some time. As Kirkpatrick Sale showed in his wonderful book Human Scale, as communities grow in size, individuals’ abilities to influence the affairs within them tend to shrink.9 Sociological research now shows that people who have the ability to influence policy in their communities show a much higher sense of satisfaction with life in general.10 In short, the re-ruralization of America could represent the fulfillment of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian democracy — but without the slaves.

  If we do this well, it could mean the revitalization not only of democracy, but of the family and of authentic, place-based culture. It could also serve as the basis for a new, genuine conservatism to replace the ersatz conservatism of the current ruling political elites.

  What I am proposing is nothing less than a new alliance among environmental organizations, farmers, gardeners, organizations promoting economic justice, the anti-globalization movement, universities and colleges, local businesses, churches, and other social organizations. Moreover, the efforts of this alliance would have to be coordinated at the national, state, and local level. This is clearly a tall order. However, we are not talking about merely a good idea. This is a survival strategy.

  It may seem that I am describing and advocating a reversion to the world of 1800, or even that of 8000 BCE. This is not really the case. We will of course need to relearn much of what our ancestors knew. But we have discovered a great deal about biology, geology, hydrology, and other relevant subjects in recent decades, and we should be applying that knowledge — as Holmgren, Mollison, Jeavons, and others have done — to the project of producing food for ourselves.

  Cultural anthropology teaches us that the way people get their food is the most reliable determinant of virtually all other social characteristics. Thus, as we build a different food system we will inevitably be building a new kind of culture, certainly very different from industrial urbanism but probably also from what preceded it. As always before in human history, we will make it up as we go along, in response to necessity and opportunity.

  Perhaps these great changes won’t take place until the need is obvious and irresistibly pressing. Maybe gasoline needs to get to $10 a gallon. Perhaps unemployment will have to rise to 10 or 20 or 40 percent, with families begging for food in the streets, before embattled policy makers begin to reconsider their commitment to industrial agriculture.

  But even in that case, as in Cuba, all may depend upon having another option already articulated. Without that, we will be left to the worst possible outcome.

  Rather than consigning ourselves to that fate, let us accept the current challenge — the next great energy transition — as an opportunity not to try vainly to preserve business as usual (the American Way of Life that, we are told, is not up for negotiation), but rather to re-imagine human culture from the ground up, using our intelligence and passion for the welfare of the next generations, and the integrity of nature’s web, as our primary guides.

  3

  (post-) Hydrocarbon Aesthetics

  THOUGH I COULD HARDLY call myself a professional violinist these days, I still get the occasional call for a wedding or other special function, and I cherish these increasingly rare opportunities to work alongside competent players. This past April I was hired to play in a string quartet to provide the requisite “musical wallpaper” for the opening of a traveling exhibit (“International Arts and Crafts: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright”) at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. As a gratuity to the musicians, the Museum offered us each a pair of tickets to the exhibit. Since my wife Janet and I have long been fascinated by the Arts and Crafts movement, we used our tickets a few weeks later.

  The exhibit included top examples of the British, German, Scandinavian, American, and Japanese versions of the genre. There were fabric and book designs by William Morris, interiors by Frank Lloyd Wright, and furnishings by C.F.A. Yoysey and others.

  As Janet and I walked through the exhibition I couldn’t help but reflect on its implications for humanity’s aesthetic past, present, and future.

  The Arts and Crafts movement was, in essence, a critical response to the industrial revolution. William Morris, the movement’s founder, saw the industrialization of Britain and deplored the results. Farmers, craftspeople, and manual workers often could not compete economically with fuel-fed engines, and so vocations and skills that had developed over generations vanished in favor of jobs tending machines. But of course it was impossible for the machines to work intelligently or soulfully as humans do, and so the aesthetic environment of Britain became progressively more denatured and dehumanized.

  William Morris.

  William Morris designed type fonts and translated medieval and classical texts, but he was especially famed for his fabrics and wallpaper.

  During Morris’s lifetime, the usual designs of mass production merely imitated the symbolic elements of architecture and furnishings from previous eras. As the burgeoning middle class sought outer reassurance of its attainments, the factory system obliged with the ornate facades and kitsch bric-a-brac fashioned to impart an upper-class aura. Victorian buildings and cluttered parlors displayed an incoherent regurgitation of Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Egyptian, Chinese, and occasionally Aztec or Mayan themes mixed and mutilated often beyond recognition.

  Morris and his colleagues drew inspiration instead from the philosophy of John Ruskin, especially as set forth in the books The Stones of Venice and Unto this Last, which related the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and designs. For Ruskin, and subsequently for Morris and other followers of the movement, the spirit of industrialism began with the Renaissance, when the rising mercantile class devalued and destroyed the traditions of free and mostly anonymous artists and craftspeople who had worked independently throughout the medieval period to build the free cities and great cathedrals of Europe.

  Already, by the 16th century, architects, builders, painters, and carpenters had become mere hired workers whose efforts were mostly directed by — and meant to glorify — wealthy burghers. Thus, for Ruskin and Morris, inspiration had to come from an earlier era — the Gothic period, in which (in Morris’s words) “guildsmen of the Free Cities” enjoyed a “freedom of the hand and mind subordinated to the collective harmony which made freedom possible.” Morris’s aesthetic was thus politically grounded, and he, together with socialist colleagues like Walter Crane and Charles Robert Ashbee, looked not only backward in history but also forward — to an attainable, simpler way of life in which craftspeople, working in guilds, would control their own lives as well as the economies of cities and nations.

  The aesthetic sensibilities of Morris and his followers echoed those of the Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, who were similarly inspired by Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, and especially by the chapter “The Nature of Gothic.” Both movements sought to promote a practical alternative to the do
mination of humanity by its tools — and implicitly, by the enormous energies unleashed from fossil fuels.

  Louis Welden Hawkins’s “Fächer auf goldenem Grund” exemplifies the spirit of Symbolism and Art Nouveau — stylized, flowing, curvilinear, and usually based on vegetal motifs.

  The Arts and Crafts artisans aimed at a quality of design characterized by an organic simplicity that flowed from honoring both the raw materials and the skill of the individual worker. Decorative themes emerged from functional necessity and from regional vernacular design vocabularies.

  Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Art Nouveau was the Arts and Crafts movement’s decadent cousin. It produced luscious tendril- limned furniture and facades, but lacked the earnest social philosophy of Morris and his disciples.

  In North America, Frank Lloyd Wright led the “prairie school” of architecture, which sought to make buildings fit into the landscape rather than arbitrarily dominate it. Wright hated the modern industrial city and its ubiquitous symbol, the skyscraper, which he regarded as a “human filing cabinet.” “The skyscraper as the typical expression of the city,” he wrote, “is the human stable, stalls filled with the herd, all to be milked by the system that keeps the animals docile by such fodder as it puts in the manger and such warmth as the crowd instills in the crowd.” 1 Wright viewed the urban street grid and the skyscraper as mere expedients of power and social control with “no higher ideal than commercial success.” A truly democratic society, he argued, must consist of a decentralized, organic human community integrated into the landscape around it.