"Polyface Farm
– farmer Joel Salatin,
quoted in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s
Dilemma
I want to say this right up front: I believe
our nation is headed for what the Chinese euphemistically
call "interesting times." In fact, I believe
they’ve already begun.
I’m not talking about global warming.
I’m talking about a gathering oil crisis.
Oil is a finite resource and as such is a
one-time gift of incalculable wealth to the human race.
Our response, apparently, has been to spend this unique
inheritance as quickly as possible. When world oil production
passes its "peak" and begins to decline, which
is about happen according to the experts, the destabilizing
effects of the crisis will accelerate. That’s because,
as one oil expert has put it, there is no Plan B.
Technology will not save us. That’s
because fundamental issues of entropy, physical limits
and human nature are at work. The laws of physics don’t
bend.
Hybrid cars, more efficient home appliances,
nanotechnology, even the Internet cannot beget more oil.
At best technology and alternate fuels can help ease the
pain of what is being called the “powerdown”
of society. But they are inadequate replacements for the
bounty we call "black gold."
Also, every course of action, whether it is
the expansion of an alternate energy source (wind, solar,
hydrogen, nuclear) or the implementation of a change in
policy (conservation, a carbon tax, increased automotive
fuel efficiency) carries an economic, environmental, or
political cost that makes it unpalatable to many Americans
and nearly every national leader.
Complicating physics is human nature. We’ve
become so addicted to the easy life brought to us by cheap
oil that we’ll resist mightily any disruption to
our comfort. And not just comfort – our co-dependence
on cars and trucks for work requires cheap fuel. For both
reasons, resistance will saturate nearly everything we
do in the upcoming decades. As the vice president of the
United States put it recently “The American way
of life is non-negotiable.” According to the experts,
this is why a global struggle among nations over access
to oil has already begun and is likely to escalate.
The Industrial Age is synonymous with oil.
Nearly all of the miracles of modern life, including the
food we eat, the medicines we take, the vehicles we drive,
the skyscrapers we work in, the suburbs we go home to,
the movies we watch, the clothes we wear, even the water
we drink, have their origin in cheap fossil fuel.
For all its miracles, however, industrialism
produced plenty of sin too. Take the human carnage of
World War I, for instance. It was the first industrial
war in history – a tragic confluence of 19th century
military strategy and 20th century industrial technology,
featuring tanks, airplanes, massive guns, and chemical
poisons. The result was the efficient slaughter of more
than 35 million people.
It is not a coincidence that nearly every
alarm bell we hear today is tolling for some aspect of
industrialism, whether it is obesity, globalization, endangered
species, toxic dumps, or another modern predicament. If
cheap oil gave us penicillin and the family vacation,
it also is responsible for DDT and melting glaciers.
My point is this: the end of cheap oil means
the end of Industrialism – the good along with the
bad – and we will enter a new era.
This should not be news. As any student of
history or archaeology can tell you, all societies, whether
they ultimately endure or collapse, move through definable
periods, eras, and Ages – each with a discernable
beginning and end. Populations rise and fall along with
empires and democracies. Cycles of stagnation, decline,
renaissance, and progress create tangible boundaries to
the histories of every society.
What will the Postindustrial period be like?
No one knows – that’s because nobody can accurately
presage what’s coming next. Possible scenarios range
from the inconvenient to the apocalyptic – from
nothing more than rising energy prices forcing unhappy
changes in our lifestyles, to whole societies breaking
down. Either way, it is clear life as we know it will
be different in the Post-industrial era.
Just how different it will be depends on what
we do today. That’s why I’ve begun to call
the current era "Pre-Postindustrial" –
in other words, we live in the "run-up" to what’s
coming next. The main premise of Pre-Postindustrialism
is not how to avoid the upcoming contraction of society
– because its arrival looks to be inevitable –
but how to prepare for it properly.
As futurist Lester Brown wrote recently, “We
are entering a new world. Of that there can be little
doubt…The real question, for anyone truly concerned
about our future, is not whether change is going to come,
but whether the shift will be peaceful and orderly or
chaotic and violent because we waited too long to begin
planning for it.”
Going Local
A place to start is with conventional ideas
of sustainability. To prepare properly we need to ask
ourselves: what are we actually trying to ‘sustain?’
If it’s a standard of living built on a foundation
of cheap oil, then we’re in for a rude awakening.
I suspect that significant portions of modern life are
not sustainable – at least not at the levels to
which we are comfortably accustomed.
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The
Next West may mean producing some of your
food in your backyard.
Photo courtesy of Courtney
White.
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I worry that the public has conflated "sustainability"
with the desire to stretch out the Industrial Age as far
as possible. Buying a biodiesel vehicle, eating organic
lamb flown in from New Zealand, or even installing solar
panels on your roof are not acts of sustainability if
they don’t help us get from "here to there"–
with "there" being what’s coming next.
If we do these things to merely "sustain" an
entropic status quo, then I think we’re not preparing
ourselves for the turmoil ahead.
As an engineering friend of mine likes to
note, in the physical sciences sustainability is a principle,
not a value. “Either way,” he told me, “practices
that are unsustainable will stop regardless of how we
feel about them.”
What is truly sustainable then?
For clues – and inspiration –
we can look to those individuals and enterprises choosing
to “opt out” of Industrialism, to borrow a
phrase from farmer Joel Salatin (some, such as the Amish,
never “opted in” of course). Why they chose
to “opt out” is not as important as how they
did it, and what lessons they can teach the rest of us.
Take Polyface Farm, for instance. Together
with his father, Joel Salatin took 550 acres of industrially-degraded
land in the western hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah
Valley and revitalized it with an innovative mix of cows,
pigs, chickens, turkeys, rabbits and humans all working
in concert and in harmony within nature’s model.
According to Michael Pollan, on one 100 acres
of grassland and 450 acres of woods, Salatin and his family
now produce:
• 30,000 dozen eggs
• 10,000 broilers
• 800 stewing hens
• 50 beeves (25,000 pounds of beef)
• 250 hogs
• 1,000 turkeys
• 500 rabbits
And they do so without the use of ANY chemical
fertilizer, pesticide, or other industrial product, other
than a little diesel. Salatin calls himself a "grass
farmer"– through the miracle of photosynthesis
he helps nature transform "free" solar energy
into high-value food energy. And he sells this energy
locally in the form of good food.
As an economic, social, and moral enterprise,
Polyface Farm is the mirror opposite of Industrialism.
“Grass farming done well,” writes
Pollan, “depends almost entirely on a wealth of
nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest
of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite:
the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal
intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines.”
To demonstrate this contrast, Pollan compares
Polyface Farm to a Corn-belt farm in Iowa that he visited:
Iowa Farm |
Polyface Farm |
Industrial |
Pastoral |
Annual Species |
Perennial Species |
Monoculture |
Polyculture |
Global Market |
Local Market |
Fossil Fuel |
Solar Energy |
Specialized |
Diversified |
Mechanical |
Biological |
Imported Fertility |
Local Fertility |
Myriad Inputs |
Chicken Feed |
The key is to go local, which, Pollan writes,
“by definition is a hard thing to sell in a global
marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies
a new economy as well as a new agriculture – new
social and economic relationships as well as new ecological
ones.”
Creating healthy, local food isn’t the
only way to “opt out” of the Industrial Age.
In my work with The Quivira Coalition over the past nine
years, I’ve seen many other inspiring examples of
genuine sustainability, both social and ecological, including
the progressive ranching practices of many landowners,
the rise of democratically-enthused collaborative groups,
creative ideas for the production of local energy, new
water harvesting techniques, and the innovative restoration
methodologies of a new generation of scientists, consultants
and entrepreneurs.
Much of this “opting out” began
in the mid-1990s, and although it happened for a variety
of reasons, many shared Salatin’s core rejection
of the Industrial status quo.
The rise of watershed groups around the region
is particularly illustrative. Not only is this collaborative
movement embracing many of the nonindustrial models listed
above, but if an energy crisis does result in a societal
contraction at some scale, then watershed groups will
be on the front lines of the hard, but necessary, task
of ‘relocalizing’ our food, fuel, and economic
needs.
That’s why I take heart in the work
of groups such as the Rio Puerco Management Committee
(RMPC), a multi-party collaborative effort focused on
the 4.5- million-acre Rio Puerco watershed, located northwest
of Albuquerque.
Once called the "breadbasket" of
New Mexico, the Rio Puerco watershed degraded so alarmingly
over the decades, due to the industrial effects of highway
construction, overgrazing, and other forms of overuse,
that Congress officially authorized its restoration in
1996. Since then, the RPMC has employed a variety of innovative
"Best Management Practices" to revive the land
and the people who depend on it.
As part of their effort to realize their goals,
the RPMC recently completed a vision for the watershed
for the next 50 years – a declaration that could
easily be the mission statement for Pre-Postindustrialism.
It reads in part:
“It is 2006, and we are a group of people
learning how to live on the land. As residents in the
watershed, we are working together to restore the land,
to complete a transition from a wornout watershed to a
healthy stream system, and to maintain a healthy way of
life in harmony with the Earth…We want to build
understanding of what a watershed is, how it works, and
how it nourishes the community. The result will be native
grasses and springs in abundance, to protect the land,
and to provide for its use by all living beings.”
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