Lynas clearly has been swayed by Stewart Brand, whose new book ‘Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto’ argues that it is time greens got real and embraced both nuclear power and GM. He appears to be arguing that we need now, given the immensity of climate change, to accept things we might otherwise have questioned; however, for me, in the case of GM, this would represent a jettisoning of ethics, values and principles. I believe absolutely that GM has no place whatsoever in a world responding responsibly to climate change and peak oil, and in saying so, I am not rejecting a “science-led assessment of the likely risks and benefits”, rather am basing it very much on the science. So, lets take a look at the claims Lynas makes for GM.

It’s Safe to Eat.

Lynas states that there is “zero evidence that any genetically modified foods in existence today pose a health risk to anyone. Millions of people in the US and Canada have eaten GM corn and soya for years now”. This is a highly contentious statement. Has anyone actually done such a study, a longitudinal study that looks at the health impacts of GM foods? GM is in foods in various ways, through animal feeds, through all the various foodstuffs extracted from GM foods, especially corn, which as Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ so brilliantly reveals, are now prevalent in processed foods, as well as through our eating them directly.

The central issue here for me is the Precautionary Principle, a fundamental principle in any decision making process. This suggests that we understand and test new technologies before we implement them on any meaningful scale. There are now hundreds of thousands of man-made chemical compounds in the world that weren’t there 50 years ago, few of which have been adequately tested, and even fewer tested in the diverse cocktails in which we are exposed to them. I would argue that the current state of the world has arisen, in part, from a failure to apply the Precautionary Principle, climate change being a case in point. Why now, when faced with the climate challenge, would we once again abandon precautionary thinking? It is one thing to state that there is no evidence of any health impacts arising from GM, but this a “no news is good news” approach has failed us spectacularly with other industrial food products, such as trans fats, which have been in our food for years before the harmful impacts they were having were identified.

Corporate Control

Lynas is dismissive of the argument that GM leads to the increasing corporate control of agriculture. He writes of greens that “their concern was that new, genetically engineered seeds would allow big corporations such as Monsanto to monopolise the world’s food supply, to the detriment of poor countries. However, this should not be an argument to oppose the technology. It would more rationally suggest the need for an open-source approach, where the benefits of GM technology could be developed within, and for the benefit of, poorer countries (drought-tolerant, more nutritious and nitrogen-fixing subsistence crops are some examples under development)”.

Handing food and farming over to vast agribusiness corporations in order to save the planet is a completely self-defeating ‘compromise’. Let’s be clear, Monsanto and other bio-tech corporations did not start genetically modifying seeds in order to feed the world, they did it in order to privatise genetic information, to hold patents for the very stuff of life. They also didn’t invent GM in order to save the world from climate change, that has been a much more recent piece of sales spin. A low carbon food and farming system will need to be based on a re-empowering of small farmers, a re-valuing of farming as a profession, a democratising of agriculture, not a bowing down of food and farming to corporate wishes. As we shall see below, this is potentially highly dangerous.

Lynas’s idea that making GM open source would somehow make it OK also needs questioning. Personally speaking, I feel that GM is simply unnecessary, there is no need to interfere with plants and animals in that way, that we are tinkering in a way that we barely understand, and have no sense of the long term consequences of, and we are abandoning the Precautionary Principle. I don’t have scientific papers to back that up, it is an instinctive revulsion at the very concept. The idea that making GM open source makes it fine was also discussed in Charles Leadbeater’s book ‘WeThink’, which argued that we could develop Wiki approaches to the modification of plants. Some obvious questions arise though, beyond whether the technology itself is ethically dubious or not.

Is Lynas really suggesting that remote agrarian communities, linked only by the web, would have the knowledge of genetics to be able to contribute to an international wiki GM design project, bringing genetically modified organisms to the point of being commercially viable? That they would be able to do this without the research funding, laboratory and testing facilities of large biotech companies, without those companies wanting a financial stake in the outputs? Huge money has already gone in to the GM products already on the market, I find it very hard to imagine that they are going to be philanthropically handed over as Creative Commons to the farmers of the developing world.

His proposal also ignores issues of power and money, failing to ask whether, in a corporate-dominated food economy shaped by power, greed, the maximising of profits and centralising of control and intellectual property, Lynas and Leadbeater’s concept of the intellectual property of seeds being handed back to farmers at the lowest level is fundamentally misconceived. What sort of knowledge and practice do we want to underpin our activities during this ‘make-or-break’ period in human evolution? I would argue that solutions which promote centralisation and dependency, such as geoengineering, GM and nuclear power, lock us into the same technofix thinking that got us here in the first place. As Einstein put it, “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them”.

Who’s Supported by the Science Here?

The recent IAASTD report, the product of what was, in effect, an IPCC on agriculture, with over 400 contributing scientists, the findings of which was endorsed by 60 world governments including the UK, was a scientifically rigorous look at the question of how to feed the world while reducing carbon emissions from agriculture. One of its chairmen was Bob Watson of DEFRA, a man whose openness to GM has been explored before here at Transition Culture, yet even so, the report is fairly dismissive of GM, arguing instead that the future of agriculture lies in “agro-ecological methods” and small scale farming. It argues for changing patterns of consumption so that farming doesn’t rely on oil and mined water.

At this year’s Soil Association conference, Dr. Mike Bushell from Syngenta was asked by Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association why it was that Syngenta, one of the world’s leading biotech companies, had walked out of the IAASTD process. He replied that they had been unhappy with the process, and felt that it hadn’t represented their views fully. This was a rigorous process, which applied the scientific analysis Lynas advocates for climate change to agriculture, and concluded that GM has little if no role to play, and that what will produce more significant cuts in carbon will be agro-ecological measures and small farmers. So, is rejecting GM still looking like a rejection of science? Let’s continue. After all, Mark’s case is principally based on the argument not that GM is good for climate change, not whether or not it is morally repugnant.

Low Carbon Farming

Lynas’s bold conversion to GM is, in his article, based solely on those two arguments, that it has never made anyone sick and that there are ways round the corporate control thing and is it really such a problem anyway? There are however many other arguments that he sidesteps, which cannot be ignored in this discussion. One of the key ones is what a low carbon farming system actually looks like. In the 2009 UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, agriculture is set a measly target of 6% reductions in emissions by 2020, but can it do better, given that it needs to? A recent major report from the Soil Association brought together the research on soil carbon, and found that soils under organic management have 28% higher levels of carbon than conventionally farmed soils in Northern Europe, and 20% higher in the rest of the world.

It showed that under organic management, soils can produce carbon sequestration of 2 tons per hectare per year, and that for the UK that would lead to the sequestration of 64 million tons of carbon over the next 20 years, equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road. This would lead to agriculture producing a 23% cut in emissions, not the 6% currently proposed. Beyond soil management, a low carbon farming system would be more diverse, incorporate more perennial plants, be more localised. If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of food, I would suggest that you start by tackling the fact that 50% of what global agriculture produces is thrown away, and the importing and exporting of produce that could just as easily have been grown close to the consumer.

Creating a Culture of Dependency

Drug dealers often work by creating a dependency that they can then serve, initially appearing generous, their true intentions and motivation becoming clear only over time. Similarly, supermarkets are often accused of opening new stores with cheap offers and loss-leaders, undercutting local competition until it withers away, and then raising prices. Farmers using GM seeds have found themselves in a similar position. The idea that GM was invented for the benefit of anyone other than Monsanto shareholders withers quickly on further examination.

US farmers buying Monsanto’s Roundup Ready 2 Soybean seeds in 2010 will be paying 42% more for those seeds than last year. Between 1975 and 1996, the cost of non-GM cotton seeds doubled, the cost of GM seeds rose from $73 to $589. For farmers in both the developed and the developing worlds, GM often leads farmers into a spiral of debt, as the recent film ‘Food Inc.’ identified. Vandana Shiva also links this spiral of debt with farmers suicides in India, which are still rising. US soya farmers usually spend between 4 and 8% of their income on seed.

In 2009, farms growing GM soya were spending 16.4%, and these costs have been driving cotton farmers into the red since 2008.

GM also increases, rather than diminishes, dependency on pesticide use. The idea behind paying more for GM seeds is that you then save money on the need to spray so often. However, a recent study found that overall, GM crops needed 26% more pesticides per acre than non-GM crops. We need agricultural systems that need less chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, not more. We need farming systems that rely less on artificial nitrogen, given the major contribution to climate change caused by nitrous oxide. GM would appear to fail on both counts.

Transition Food and Farming

So what does a low carbon farming system actually look like? Perhaps the best description I have yet come across is Colin Tudge’s, who in ‘So Shall We Reap’ describes it like this;

“The general answer (by and large) is to give the best, most suitable land to pulses, cereals and tubers (that is, to arable farming); to fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses; to allow the livestock to slot in as best it can …. in short, farms in general should be mixed: even the most committedly arable areas would in general benefit from at least some livestock, as all traditional farmers knew … the areas that are truly marginal – too high, too steep, too rocky, too dry, too wet – can be ideal for ruminants, notably sheep and cattle … some cereal and pulse can be grown expressly for livestock – but in general, only enough to keep them going through the winter, so they can make better use of the grazing in the summer.”

The model of agriculture that offers food security is not one that places control over how food is produced in the distant boardroom or with the share holder. This is too important. However, Lynas appears to have completely given up on the idea that any change in consumption patterns might be possible, our aim is to service business-as-usual in the most efficient way possible.

One of the problems with Lynas’s argument is that he purely sees this from a climate change perspective. When you add in peak oil and a Crash Course analysis of where the world’s economy is headed, the idea that we rely on experimental, potentially harmful, untested, distantly owned technologies becomes absurd. Food security is about creating an agriculture which is more diverse, more intimately linked to local economies, and based on a more seasonal diet. GM seeds are designed, at present, not to even grow stuff we eat directly, like potatoes or lettuces, but to produce the base from which processed foods can be created.

Most GM in agriculture is just four crops, soya, maize, cotton and rapeseed, and these are mostly grown to be processed into the bewildering array of additives that make up today’s processed food. Maize that humans actually eat as corn on the cob is not GM. The glucose syrup, fructose, and extensive list of corn-derived additions to processed food, are derived from GM corn. Although there may not be any direct evidence linking GM with ill health in humans (although some does exist from trials with rats), there is plenty to suggest that cheap processed food is killing us, and that a simpler, less processed diet would be to everyone’s benefit.

“Admitting mistakes is difficult, especially when one’s claimed position if the moral high ground”

I have long held that GM has no place in a low carbon farming system. This is not based on taking a moral high ground, or on intentionally rejecting science, rather it is based on taking a broader picture than merely whether it is harmful to eat or not. Does GM technology promote better soil health and carbon sequestration? Does it support farmers in creating sustainable livelihoods which they are in control of? Does it nurture healthier eating practices and a move away from processed foods? Does it improve and sustain biodiversity? Does it make us more or less dependent on cheap fossil fuels? Until the answer is yes to those questions, GM, for me, is out.

In a nutshell, the key question for me is does GM make us and the natural world healthier and more food secure? Surely, if climate science teaches us one thing, it is the need for the application of the precautionary principle. If there is a significant chance that a particular course of action will have harmful effects, then it makes sense to avoid it, even if it isn’t 100% certain. Likewise, so much is as yet unknown about GM, and so much could go wrong that we are far better off, I would argue, giving it a very wide berth. I don’t feel the greens have got it wrong, and it would take a far more compelling case than that set out by Lynas to convince me that they have.

So why has Lynas had this turnaround? Of course, we can’t know, but I get a sense that in the desperate search for a solution to the crisis we are in, there is a sense that this is still a soluble problem if only that one big solution can be found to sort it out. I think that if there is a way through, it will be composed of lots of smaller solutions, driven by those that feel ownership of it. There is a huge danger in embracing large scale, untested, remotely-owned solutions, that we end up turning a problem into a predicament, not sensible when so many, time-proven, smaller scale solutions exist.

Enter Change.org and their 10 Ideas for Change in America. Taking advantage of the concept of “the wisdom of crowds,” Change.org launched a campaign to find 10 great ideas. It began with thousands that were submitted by ordinary individuals and organized interest groups alike. These were whittled down through online voting to a more manageable 70 or so, and right now the voting is getting down to the wire to choose which 10 ideas will be presented to the White House – as in formally presented to senior people there, not just sent in an envelope to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You can (and should!) vote too.

All, or nearly all at least, are worthy ideas. Each has its merit and is worthy of consideration. But for those with an interest in food, three of them rise to the top quickly, and first among equals is Slow Money.

The idea is a simple one: invest as if food, farms and fertility actually mattered. Get anyone who invests money (and if you have a 401k or an IRA, that’s you too) to direct just 1% of it toward small food enterprises and local food systems. Get at least that small sum of money out of the hands of Wall Street, huge banks and multinationals and use it, quite literally, as seed money. Invest in local farms, food systems, artisans, brewers, bakers, cheesemakers and so on and keep that money close to home.

We’d create a thriving economy that makes real, healthy food, instead of a fake one that just makes money for bankers. One that invests in people and the land, not in some distant amorphous concept called Wall Street.

In their book Inside the Apple, a Streetwise History of New York City, this is how Michelle and James Nevius describe the building of the palisade for which Wall Street was named: “The wall had two major problems: it wasn’t needed and it didn’t work.”

Also interested in investing in the land is the American Farmland Trust, whose idea for saving farm and ranchland is doing quite well in the balloting, as well as an initiative to put a garden in every school. Both are important concepts you’ve heard me advocate for vociferously for years.

Slow Money is new and novel though, and needs more votes before this thing wraps up at 5pm EST this Friday, 3/12. Please visit Change.org, vote for these 3 ideas and any other 7 you feel are worthy. It’s fun, important, and it only takes a couple minutes. Thank you.

The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as “white-coated prima donnas and narcissists… pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks… The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”

Views like this can be explained partly as the revenge of the humanities students. There is scarcely an editor or executive in any major media company—and precious few journalists—with a science degree, yet everyone knows that the anoraks are taking over the world. But the problem is compounded by complexity. Arthur C Clarke remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He might have added that any sufficiently advanced expertise is indistinguishable from gobbledegook. Scientific specialisation is now so extreme that even people studying neighbouring subjects within the same discipline can no longer understand each other. The detail of modern science is incomprehensible to almost everyone, which means that we have to take what scientists say on trust. Yet science tells us to trust nothing, to believe only what can be demonstrated. This contradiction is fatal to public confidence.

Distrust has been multiplied by the publishers of scientific journals, whose monopolistic practices make the supermarkets look like angels, and which are long overdue for a referral to the Competition Commission. They pay nothing for most of the material they publish, yet, unless you are attached to an academic institute, they’ll charge you £20 or more for access to a single article. In some cases they charge libraries tens of thousands for an annual subscription. If scientists want people at least to try to understand their work, they should raise a full-scale revolt against the journals that publish them. It is no longer acceptable for the guardians of knowledge to behave like 19th-century gamekeepers, chasing the proles out of the grand estates.

But there’s a deeper suspicion here as well. Popular mythology—from Faust through Frankenstein to Dr No – casts scientists as sinister schemers, harnessing the dark arts to further their diabolical powers. Sometimes this isn’t far from the truth. Some use their genius to weaponise anthrax for the US and Russian governments. Some isolate terminator genes for biotech companies, to prevent farmers from saving their own seed. Some lend their names to articles ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies, which mislead doctors about the drugs they sell. Until there is a global code of practice or a Hippocratic oath binding scientists to do no harm, the reputation of science will be dragged through the dirt by researchers who devise new means of hurting us.

Yesterday in the Guardian Peter Preston called for a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness. “We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince … We need to be taught to believe by a true believer.” Would it work? No. Look at the hatred and derision the passionate and persuasive Al Gore attracts. The problem is not only that most climate scientists can speak no recognisable human language, but also the expectation that people are amenable to persuasion.

In 2008 the Washington Post summarised recent psychological research on misinformation. This shows that in some cases debunking a false story can increase the number of people who believe it. In one study, 34% of conservatives who were told about the Bush government’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were inclined to believe them. But among those who were shown that the government’s claims were later comprehensively refuted by the Duelfer report, 64% ended up believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

There’s a possible explanation in an article published by Nature in January. It shows that people tend to “take their cue about what they should feel, and hence believe, from the cheers and boos of the home crowd”. Those who see themselves as individualists and those who respect authority, for instance, “tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire”. Those with more egalitarian values are “more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted”.

These divisions, researchers have found, are better at explaining different responses to information than any other factor. Our ideological filters encourage us to interpret new evidence in ways that reinforce our beliefs. “As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarised, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information.” The conservatives in the Iraq experiment might have reacted against something they associated with the Duelfer report, rather than the information it contained.

While this analysis rings true, the description of where the dividing line lies isn’t quite right. It doesn’t describe the odd position in which I find myself. Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I’ve ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.

This doesn’t bother me—I have a hide like a glyptodon—but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.

Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

But my disappointment in government leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere is matched by my admiration for a new influential group of Americans, whom I call lifestyle leaders—for they are taking matters into their own hands, such as through building gardens, weatherizing their homes, getting rid of their cars, moving off-grid, bartering with neighbors and joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs.

Believing this group may hold the key to the rapid dissemination of low-energy lifestyles among the general public, I conducted an online survey on two sustainability-oriented listservs in late 2009 of 2,005 of those who have made changes to their lifestyles in response to climate change, peak oil and other environmental threats.

What have these early adopters done in response to these threats? More than two-thirds of survey takers said they cut purchases, bought more local goods and services, conserved energy in their homes and put in a garden. One-sixth have started new careers, such as a truck driver who became a permaculture teacher.

And these early adopters are reaching out to others. Nine out of ten are helping others to make similar changes, mostly by talking to people and modeling sustainable behaviors. Take the case of a 40-year-old man from Pennsylvania, who helps his neighbors grow their own food. “Our goal is to produce an example of what suburbanites must do to survive the collapse of our current system,” he wrote.

What were the hardest changes to make? Driving less and changing their diet, both a product of bad habits. “Not jumping into a car every time I turned around,” was how one respondent, a 52-year old man from rural Wisconsin, explained it.

Other barriers to effective action were cost, especially financing expensive home retrofits and renewable energy systems, lack of support from one’s family, especially when it comes to diet change, and lack of community and societal support, particularly when local food products and mass transit services were not available.

Understanding these barriers is critical—for if these exceptionally motivated individuals are held back, we can assume other people will have similar difficulties. These findings may help us all to learn what to expect.

The good news is that it hasn’t been all hard times for these lifestyle leaders. Many changes have made their lives better, like adopting a low-energy and local diet, gardening (which was frequently described as “fun”) and walking and bicycling more. More than three-quarters of respondents reported greater happiness satisfaction or personal growth since embracing new ways of living.

Those lifestyle change leaders making the more significant reductions in fossil fuel use are pioneering a new way to live on this planet that everyone will eventually have to adopt to preserve climate stability and survive the end of the fossil fuel age. Some survey findings that may help those working to accelerate awareness and action among the general public are:

• People are driven to act in the face of global threats largely by a sense of right and wrong – their conscience – with some encouragement and inspiration from books, movies, media programs and articles.
• Emphasizing the positive consequences of particular lifestyle changes, and focusing on health and wellness benefits and a simpler, more satisfying life may be more effective ways to encourage change than promoting financial savings.
• The lack of support from one’s community and family and lack of assistance with overcoming unhelpful personal habits and attitudes are more significant roadblocks to effective response than not having enough information on what actions to take.
• Growing one’s own food is a popular and transformative way to begin living a more sustainable lifestyle, and may lead to a new career opportunity and the development of more community support.
• Most people do not feel they need to measure the impact of their lifestyle changes, but some think such feedback would motivate and assist them with doing more. Setting goals, even without measurement, is extremely helpful.
• Nine out of ten people plan to make additional changes, including starting or expanding a garden, installing a renewable energy system, or working with others in their local community to make broader, more systemic changes.

Instead of waiting for the results of the next climate change summit in Mexico, why not get to work as individuals and communities? Ultimately whether we meet carbon dioxide reduction targets or not comes down to what we do, or not do, as energy consumers.

As a 59-year-old rural Kentucky man said in the survey, “Though I don’t have much faith that we as a nation, or world, are willing to make the needed changes, I believe we must work toward those changes…The only true way to fail is to not try.”

Read the full survey report here: Lessons from Lifestyle Change Leaders – Megan Bachman – February 2010

Ethanol plant, Yuma CO

Before I get into the presentation, a few words about where I’m coming from. As it happens, I grew up in a little farming community in northeastern Colorado—Yuma—where my family owned the local drug store (complete with soda fountain).

I’m a journalist and communicator at heart, and I started working for the local newspaper in Yuma when I was in the sixth grade. I watched the landscape and the town change with deep changes in agriculture.

For nearly the last five years I’ve been working on relocalization in Boulder County and more recently across the state, working towards our communities being able to meet their essential needs locally, and in the process to become more resilient and self-reliant.

To begin this presentation, I’m going to give the briefest possible summary I can of the situation, our potential response, and what’s possible—maybe five minutes—then back it up with some details. Then I’ll talk about the involvement of the Transition movement in food and agriculture, along with some of the things we’re working on in Boulder County. Afterwards, I hope we can discuss all this together for a little while.

I’m probably going to step on a few landmines here, maybe break some taboos. But I ask for your patience.

Here’s my quick, thumbnail sketch of the situation, the highly condensed version:

Because the way we eat and the way we grow our food is a major contributor to climate change and global warming…

Because industrial food production is so energy-intensive and so dependent on oil for fertilizer, pesticides, planting and harvesting, processing, packaging, and transportation…

Because global oil production likely peaked in July 2008, which means that energy will be increasingly expensive in the future…

Because the age of cheap fossil fuels has come to an end…

Because the economy has been based on an abundant supply of cheap fossil fuels…

Because therefore food prices will soon increase dramatically, and food shortages will begin to happen—even here—perhaps in the next couple of years…

Because the U.S. is becoming a net food importer…

Because humanity is now consuming more food than we are producing…

Because industrial agriculture—like the globalized economy—is at a crossroads and is about to go into an unexpected decline…

Because much of the food that industrial agriculture produces is destroying our national’s health …

Because the way we grow much of our food is destroying and washing away our precious topsoil…

Because we can no longer conscionably support a food system that causes hunger, starvation, and disease in other parts of the world…

Because the way we eat is destroying our connection with the earth, with the natural processes and cycles of earth and sky, with those who grow our food, with the essence of life…

Because the way we eat has seriously weakened our communities…

Because maybe less than one percent of our current diet is local…

Because in Colorado we spend more than ten billion dollars on food each year, almost all of which is fleeing outside the state, lost to our local economies…

And because we know all this…

We must learn everything we can about our food predicament. We must all learn to grow at least some of our own food. We must all support the revitalization of local agriculture. We must end our dependence on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and mechanization in our food production. We must commit to healing and rebuilding the soil everywhere we can. We must dramatically increase local food production for local consumption.

We must rebuild the local food infrastructure for processing and distribution. We must stop supporting and consuming non-local food. We must support local farmers, local producers, local grocers, and local restaurants.

We must learn how to eat seasonally. We must learn how to preserve and store food. We must plan how we’re going to build food security in our communities, and plan how we’re going to feed our people when things get tough. We must be prepared to share what we have to eat.

We must develop new skills and knowledge—composting, vermiculture, permaculture, soil-building, seed-saving, cultivating, canning and preserving, cooking, nutrition planning, herbal medicine.

We must make our foodshed as local as possible.

And we must do all this rather quickly.

If all this sounds like hard work, well, it is! But what would happen if we did this?

Our health would improve greatly, especially the health of our children. We’d feel more connected, more alive, more engaged, living more meaningful and more satisfying lives. We’d be devoted to rebuilding the soil in our farmlands. Our local farmers would be able to buy the land on which they farm. We’d transform the landscape. Our agricultural land would mostly be used for food production for local consumption. We’d produce thousands of new jobs; our local economies would be robust! We’d dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. We’d be sequestering carbon in the soil, in plant growth. We’d have plans and food stores in place to feed all our people in times of crisis or emergency. We’d all have a far greater degree of food security and food sovereignty; major corporations would no longer be in control of what and how we eat. Our foodshed would be resilient and self-reliant.

This would be a revolution!

The Food and Farming Predicament

Okay, now let me back up and go into a little more depth.

We face a daunting predicament with the way we’re producing and consuming our food. We could frame the heart of our predicament around a key concept that we’re all learning about these days: sustainability. Now, mostly we’ve been forced into learning about sustainability because modern industrial agriculture has some real problems here, and these have kind of crept up on us. We didn’t see all this coming, but here’s some of what we’ve been discovering (of course, most of you already know these things; I’m just trying to put it into some kind of context):

First, industrial agriculture is having serious and unexpected environmental impacts: fertilizer runoff has created dead zones in our oceans; the search for more arable land has devastated our forests; irrigation methods have depleted surface and ground water; the way we farm is eroding our topsoil and reducing soil fertility; pesticides and herbicides have polluted our air and water; monocropping has resulted in loss of habitat for many species.

And agriculture has become a major contributor to climate change. If we consider the manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers; fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping; electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating; and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other green house gases—the total impact of farming and food production may be between 25 and 30 percent of the U.S.’s collective carbon footprint.

If we add to this the carbon sequestration that is lost every year through deforestation to increase land for agricultural use, the total contribution of industrial agriculture to climate change is simply enormous.

At the same time, it seems that much of the food we have been producing has actually been decreasing in quality. Food is too cheap! We spend only 10% of our income to feed ourselves; we don’t value food enough. We’ve seen an epidemic of obesity and malnutrition (in Boulder County, 49% of our residents are overweight or obese), along with a dramatic increase in chronic food-related diseases and food-borne illnesses.

These impacts are serious enough, but may not even be the most significant impacts of industrial agriculture. We’ve also witnessed the loss of the web of connections at the heart of our society. Our towns and cities do not function as communities any more. People are disconnected from food, from the people who grow it, and from the land. There is a profound lack of public awareness of environmental costs and health consequences of processed foods. Rural economies have been left in shambles, as agricultural outputs are shipped to distant markets. Our communities can no longer feed themselves.

At the same time, on top of all this, there is a growing global food crisis that is symptomatic of our predicament. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen runaway inflation of food prices, growing inequities in the availability of food staples, food riots in at least 30 nations, and scientists calling for a moratorium on biofuel production.

The food crisis is also local. In 2008, we witnessed 40,000 people show up at the Miller Farm by Platteville when they opened their fields for gleaning. Hunger is on the increase even in America, and it’s extending well into the middle class. Poorer families often have to choose between food, medical care, or heat. They just can’t afford them all.

The Coming “Perfect Global Storm”

Gleaning at Miller Farm

Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that I’ve mentioned so far.

The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil depletion—and to oil price spikes.

The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.

The application of fossil fuels to the food system has supported a human population growing from fewer than two billion in 1990 to nearly seven billion today. In the process, the way we feed ourselves has changed profoundly.

The population is expected to grow to about nine billion by the middle of this century, and there is great concern about how we’re going to feed all those people. The system is already straining to keep up.

What’s not on the radar of most people—including governments and industry—is that our supply of cheap oil on which we all depend (most especially in agriculture) is shrinking.

We’ve likely already reached the peak of global oil production, and are facing an irreversible decline rate that will be somewhere between three and nine percent per year. We’re at the tipping point right now.

So, the bottom line is not good news: Oil is going to become increasingly scarce and increasingly expensive over time—beginning very soon. This will fundamentally change how we farm and how we eat, and the local food and farming revolution is in many ways an attempt to anticipate and prepare for what’s inevitably coming.

Of course, it’s not just farming that’s going to be impacted, because our entire globalized economy is based on an abundant supply of fossil fuels, especially oil. The economic downturn we’ve recently experienced is directly related to this dynamic. In 2008, oil rose to $147/barrel, precipitating a global recession, and we’re still reeling from it.

There are now 98 oil producing nations in the world—and at least 64 of them have already reached their peak in oil production and are in decline. That is fundamentally why oil prices have been rising so dramatically.

Yes, it’s true that there is a bit more oil to be discovered and developed and produced in various parts of the world. But oil discoveries peaked globally around 1960, and have fallen off dramatically despite plenty of investment in exploration. We’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit, the easy inexpensive oil. From here on in, oil is going to be increasingly expensive and harder to get out of the ground. All the cheap oil has already been burned.

And in a way, this is a very good thing. Because if we had unlimited quantities of cheap oil to burn, and continued doing so, we would quickly overwhelm the atmosphere with carbon to the point that it would be very difficult to grow anything anywhere. Climate change at that level would be devastating to all life on this planet.

Peak oil is an enormous predicament. Our ability to grow food to feed our population has been based on cheap fossil fuels. In fact, our entire global economy is based on cheap fossil fuels. And now we’re bumping into a very fundamental resource limitation that will force us to change how we do almost everything. Worse, though most economists don’t want to consider this yet, peak oil signals the end of economic growth. We are learning that economic growth as we have known it is profoundly unsustainable.

The implications for food and agriculture are staggering, and they are urgent. Last year, the Soil Association in the UK published a key paper, “Food Futures: Strategies for resilient food and farming.” In that document, they say:

“Over the next 20 years we must make fundamental changes to the way we farm, process, distribute, prepare and eat our food. Global food shortages will be inevitable unless we act now to change our food and farming systems.”

One of the key researchers in this area is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at Post Carbon Institute, author of a number of important books that have helped us understand our predicament. Last year, he co-authored a very important paper, which I highly recommend to you, “The Food & Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon Food System.” Here he maps the pathways to a much-needed revolution in agriculture.

Richard is one of the most grounded and most incisive researchers and communicators in the world regarding these issues. I’ve come to deeply trust his perspective and his insights. In a paper titled, “What Will We Eat When the Oil Runs Out?,” Richard says,

“To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels…”

A non-fossil-fuel agricultural system! Well, the situation we’re facing does mandate radical changes. Heinberg continues:

“The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society.”

This is all part of a convergence of global crises—fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic turmoil—which James Howard Kunstler has called “The Long Emergency.” We need to understand that The Long Emergency is not a problem that can be solved. It is a predicament, a long-term consequence of our own actions to which we must now adapt.

Now, at first this might all sound like a disaster. But it doesn’t have to be. It might turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to food and agriculture.

Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, says

“The Long Emergency is an opportunity to pause, to think through our present course, and to adjust to a saner path for the future. We had best face facts: we really have no choice. The Long Emergency is a horrible predicament. It is also a wonderful opportunity to do a lot better. Let’s not squander this moment.”

As Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition movement, says:

“Inherent within the challenges of peak oil and climate change is an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent, rethink and rebuild the world around us.”

In the face of all this, one of the most important things we can do—and must do—is to completely rebuild our local foodsheds—from multiplying backyard and frontyard gardens, to converting our local agricultural lands to growing food for local consumption, to rebuilding local food storage and distribution systems, to training people to learn farming as a wise and essential—and sustainable—career choice.

Not only will all this help reduce the amount of fossil fuels embedded in today’s food from fertilizer, pesticides and transport, but adopting a more local organic diet will greatly contribute to our health, and our children’s health. It will also reconnect us with those who grow our food, with the land that supports and nurtures us, with the seasons, and with the natural processes and cycles that are fundamental to all life. In the process, we’ll rediscover what community really means. And for most of us, that will be an unexpected and inspiring revelation.

Of course, what I’m pointing to here are qualities of sustainability that can’t be measured, but which we know in our hearts are essential to humanness—qualities and experiences that have been lost to our communities for a long time.

This means that we have no choice but to quickly transition to a world no longer dependent on fossil fuels, a world made up of communities and economies that function within ecological limits. The age of economic growth driven by cheap fossil fuels is over.

And the age of agriculture driven by cheap fossil fuels is over, too.

The Worldwatch Institute recently published its report, 2010 State of the World: Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability. In this book, in an article titled “From Agriculture to Permaculture,” Albert Bates and Toby Hemenway (both farmers and teachers of Permaculture) say:

“Humanity now confronts a critical challenge: to develop methods of agriculture that sequester carbon, enhance soil fertility, preserve ecosystem services, use less water, and hold more water in the landscape—all while productively using a steadily compounding supply of human labor. In short, a sustainable agriculture.”

Another perspective is from Sharon Astyk, a farmer and mother and writer. In her latest book, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil, she writes:

“Oil has replaced people in industrial agriculture, and now people have to come back and replace the oil.”

Sharon calls for a food and farming revolution that is based on simply choosing to change the nature of what we grow and what we eat.

“It is a call for more participation in the food system—100 million new farmers and 200 million new cooks in the U.S., and many more worldwide.”

Agriculture is entering into a profound transition, and fundamentally it’s an energy transition that will be unfolding over the next 10 to 15 years—and there probably will be some pretty big bumps along the way. We will have less available energy in the future. And renewables will not be able to come on stream quickly enough or at sufficient scale to avoid fairly drastic changes.

The opportunity we have is to design our descent down this energy curve. Now, the transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take some time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned.

But if we do this right, we have an opportunity to build a food and farming system that is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, resilient and self-reliant, that ensures food security and sovereignty for all, that contributes to the health and happiness of our citizenry, and that revitalizes our communities across the nation.

If we do this right, as Sharon Astyk says:

“Not only can we cease to do the harm that industrial agriculture does, but we can replace it with something better—a better way of growing and preparing food—and also a democracy of the sort that Thomas Jefferson imagined for his nation, a democracy that is not vulnerable to being stolen or sold, as our present one is.”

The Transition Movement

While you’re digesting that, I now want to shift gears for a moment and tell you a little about the Transition movement.

In the fall of 2004, in Kinsale, Ireland—the oldest town in that country—Rob Hopkins was teaching the world’s first two-year Permaculture course at a community college there. On the first day of class, he did two things that rocked his world, and his students’, and which led to the birth of an international movement that is focused on designing our way down the energy descent curve.

The first thing Rob did was to show a brand new documentary film to his class, “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream.” Has anyone here seen it? The film lays out the coming oil crisis in very compelling terms, and for many it comes as quite a shock at first—as it did for Rob and his students.

The other thing he did was to invite a guest speaker into the class, Colin Campbell, a highly-respected petroleum geologist who happened to live just up the road from the college. Campbell spent decades working for some of the biggest oil companies in the world, and he founded the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). Well, Campbell pushed Rob over the edge with his analysis. Here’s a brief sample:

“The second half of the Age of Oil now dawns and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital. It heralds the collapse of the present financial system, and the related political structures… I am speaking of a second Great Depression.”

As Rob and his students explored the implications of what they had seen and heard, they began considering how vulnerable the town of Kinsale was to the coming energy shocks, and economic shocks, and even food shocks. Rob had the insight that it might be possible to apply the principles and ethics of Permaculture to design a plan for the community to transition off of fossil fuel dependence, learn how to meet its essential needs locally, and in the process become more resilient and self-reliant. Designing such a plan became a very ambitious class project.

As they took it on, they envisioned what a truly sustainable Kinsale would look like, set a target of the year 2021, and through a process of backcasting began figuring out what would need to happen each year to get to that goal.

They did an impressive job, and put it into an historical document, the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan. In fact, they did such a good job with this that the town council adopted their plan as the plan for the town of Kinsale, and that plan is being implemented there today.

This experience got Rob Hopkins thinking. In fact, it got a lot of us thinking, who were looking at the coming challenges, as we were here in Colorado, watching what was going on in Kinsale. Rob saw that it might just be possible to use the principles and ethics of Permaculture to empower whole communities—even entire cities—to enter into an inspirational community-wide process together to design their own energy descent plans and become resilient and self-reliant.

In 2006, he began prototyping that process in Totnes, England in 2006. And now the Transition process he developed there is being replicated—more or less officially—in more than 280 communities in 16 nations. And informally, there are at least another 2,000 communities who are experimenting with the process. Transition is a bottom-up, grassroots-to-grasstops movement that is rapidly expanding, and generating enormous interest and enthusiasm around the world.

Hopkins’ book, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local Resilience, published in March 2008, has been a powerful force in galvanizing this movement.

Hopkins says we must quickly make our communities more resilient, less vulnerable to the profound changes that are coming, because we’re learning that resilient communities—“self-reliant for the greatest possible number of their needs—will be infinitely better prepared than those who are dependent on globalized systems for food, energy, transportation, health, and housing.”

The essence of resilience is relocalization, which means moving steadily in the direction of local production of food, energy and goods; local development of currency, government and culture; reducing consumption while improving environmental and social conditions; and developing exemplary communities that can be working models for other communities when the effects of energy decline become more intense.

In May 2008, our organization became the first officially recognized Transition Initiative in the U.S.—and the first in North America, for that matter. By that time, we had already for three years been working towards relocalization in Boulder County.

The movement in the U.S. has grown significantly, and as of today there are 58 officially recognized Transition Initiatives in the U.S., five of them here in Colorado.

Meanwhile, we have become a statewide hub to catalyze, inspire, train and support the adoption of the Transition process in communities across the state (some 20 initiatives are already under way in Colorado).

Nearly everywhere that Transition is getting traction, we’re all working on the relocalization of food and farming, the rebuilding of our local food systems, our local foodsheds.

After the Transition Handbook, the first book published by the Transition Network was Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Community. It‘s an inspirational and very practical guide for rebuilding a diverse, resilient local food network, drawing on the experience of dozens of Transition initiatives and other community projects around the world.

Rob Hopkins and his co-author set the tone for Local Food early on in the book. They say:

“…By collectively demystifying the contents of the global pantry and by sourcing, growing and producing food independently of centralized, fragile and detrimental food trades, we are rediscovering our own worth as community members—people capable of interacting with and shaping the food landscapes around us… We are bringing our food culture home because we have to. And while we know we can’t move mountains, we are remembering that we can plant seeds.”

Bringing It Home

Let’s bring it back home to the state of Colorado.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006 we Coloradans spent nearly $10 billion on food per year—$9.5 billion, $5.4 of which was food to eat at home (we eat out a lot).

97% of food consumed in Colorado is imported from outside the state. Very little of what we consume is organic.

Nearly $2 billion of our 2006 food budget for home consumption was on meat and dairy products, more than a third of the total. (Since that time, our meat consumption has of course increased.)

In Boulder County alone, we spent more than $660 million on food in 2006, almost all of which went outside the local economy.

If we could increase our local food purchases, particularly organic food, this would not only have profound benefits on our health and greatly reduce our contribution to global warming, but would also greatly boost our local economies.

I think we’re severely underestimating the economic power of local organic farming. This is part of what we’re thinking about in relocalizing food and farming.

To be sustaining and sustainable, agriculture must make the transition from an oil-based industrial model to a more labor-intensive, knowledge-intensive, localized, organic model. This means a radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption.

A key strategy for building a resilient food and farming system is relocalization. It’s not the only answer, but it’s a powerful step forward. Other strategies include: converting farms to powering with renewable energy; increasing soil fertility through crop rotation, recycling nutrients, natural fertilizers; shifting consumers to local, seasonal diet; switching to diverse multi-enterprise farming systems; adopting organic and biointensive methods of farming; shifting to labor-intensive methods; increasing the number of farmers; seed-saving; rebuilding local processing and distribution systems.

Permaculture and the Transition

As it happens, the entire Transition process of relocalization is based on a deep understanding of a particular form of agriculture—called Permaculture, which you’ve now heard me mention several times.

So what’s Permaculture? It’s a contraction of two words, permanent and agriculture. It’s really about permanent or sustainable agriculture.

As Wendell Berry says, “A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.”

You could say that Permaculture is the art of making it possible for humans to live in harmony with the Earth, with the biosphere, and with each other.

Essentially, Permaculture is a design approach based on a deep understanding of the principles of how living systems naturally work; it shows us how to design and build (and rebuild) human systems based on those same living systems, and to do that in such a way that sustains human life and the life of the biosphere.

Permaculture shows us how to restore the balance between human life and the biosphere, which as we now know has gotten wildly out of balance.

Permaculture was first developed in the early ‘70s, by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in Australia, largely in response to the oil crisis of that era, drawing upon indigenous wisdom from all over the world. Now it’s being practiced by farmers small and large, tens of thousands of them, around the globe. And all of those practitioners together have been evolving an enormous body of knowledge and experience that I believe is going to be extremely important to all of us in the coming years.

As many of you may know, when in 1990 Cuba’s supply of oil was cut off almost overnight with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the Permaculturists who stepped forward to completely transform that country’s agricultural system to feed its people. They demonstrated how farming could be done on a large scale without fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers. They converted the nation to an 80% organic, mostly vegetarian diet in 18 months. Urban gardens there now produce 50% of the nation’s produce.

There’s a powerful documentary film about this, “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.” Significantly, to make the rapid transition from fossil-fueled agriculture, Cuba involved 15 – 25% of its population in food production.

When we started our relocalization work in Boulder in 2005, we could only find two people who were teaching Permaculture. Now there are at least 32 Permaculture teachers in the county, who are training scores of new practitioners every year. How many people in this room have taken a Permaculture course? Get to know a Permaculturist!

Designing the Transition (Boulder County Case Study)

In Boulder County, we’ve been asking, “What will it take to build a resilient, sustainable, localized food system? What will replace industrial agriculture?”

Here’s some of what we think it’s going to take: more Open Space acreage devoted to crops for food (not fuel or silage); more farms producing food; more biointensive, organic food production; more farmers (a lot more); more CSAs; more/bigger farmers’ markets; more local infrastructure for storage, distribution, and preservation; more local financial resources; more education and training; more backyard and frontyard gardening; more community greenhouses; more commitment by our communities to bring new awareness, energy, and vitality to the local food system, promoting closer connections between members of the community and those who grow our food

In short, we know we need to relocalize our local foodshed, and begin acting as if that local foodshed is just as important as our local watershed.

But how could a grassroots, community-based movement possibly help to accomplish all this?

Well, one of the principles of relocalization—and Permaculture—is that you begin in your own back yard. And a lot of people are doing just that. I love the story of Boulder’s Kipp Nash, a city-bound school bus driver who so desperately wanted to be a farmer that he finally began persuading his suburban neighbors to let him plow up their yards to grow vegetables.

I think it’s fair to say that he had no idea what he was getting into. He now has a thriving neighborhood CSA—he calls it an “NSA,” neighborhood supported agriculture—and has been selling produce at the Boulder Farmers Market. He’s a real farmer now, all right—an urban farmer, with all the challenges that rural farmers face. And what he’s doing is contagious. Transition Louisville, for instance, is implementing the same model in their community with a series of “urban farms.”

And hundreds of other people in the area are learning to grow some of their own food, from renting small plots in a community garden, to plowing up their yards and sheet-mulching on an ambitious scale, to raising chickens. Now, we might be slightly amused by all of this, as we witness a whole lot of people suddenly taking up gardening. But there’s something far deeper going on here.

Municipalities such as Longmont and Greeley have had to change local laws recently to accommodate growing public demand to be able to raise chickens. And arcane water laws are being challenged as more and more people are learning that they could greatly reduce their water consumption for backyard and frontyard food production by catching and storing water. “Illegal!?” they say. “It’s what makes the most sense!”

Also, we’ve got the likes of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Joel Salatin, Wes Jackson, Richard Heinberg, Sharon Astyk, and a host of other authors and documentary filmmakers working hard to change the way we all think about food and agriculture, and the way we eat and the way we grow our food.

And we’ve got local people like Ann Cooper who is determined to bring healthy, organic, local food into school cafeterias throughout the Boulder Valley School District, and others who are working to infiltrate other institutions like our hospitals and corporate cafeterias.

And we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of restaurants who are serving truly local food—more than 70 that we’ve identified in Boulder County so far, probably a ten-times increase from 2006. More and more chefs and restaurateurs are building gardens, and some of them are actually investing in farms.

We’ve also seen an enormous increase in the number of CSA subscriptions in Boulder County. Nobody knows the number today, but when we started in 2006 we could identify only about 150 available CSA subscriptions. Now we have individual farms in the county that have more than 300 CSA subscribers, and Grant Family Farms is going for thousands of subscribers. This is a big change! I think we could call that exponential growth.

Meanwhile, farmers markets are growing and multiplying…

A local food system gets built from the ground up, starting at the grassroots level. All of us have something to contribute to this process, and our skills and knowledge and passion are very much needed now—for the current realities are sobering:

Approximately 34,000 people in Boulder County are food insecure (don’t know where next meal will come from). That’s almost 12% of the county population. As energy prices increase and the economy slides, more will join their ranks.

In 2006, our food working group calculated that with the current food and agriculture system, we could feed only about 20,000 people in Boulder County.

Then they looked at the upside. They estimated that with greatly expanded individual and community plots, greatly increased farming for food, bio-intensive methods, reduced calorie intake and simplified diet—basically, doing everything we could think of to increase local food production—this maybe could be increased to ~185,000 people.

But the Boulder County population is 300,000 people. So we know that we’re vulnerable, like most communities. (We heard from a farmer recently that an entire season’s sales at the Boulder Farmers’ Market would only feed Boulder County for half a day!)

EAT LOCAL! Campaign

So, at Transition Colorado, right now we’re focusing both on expanding the market for local consumption and rebuilding our local food production capacity in Boulder County. It’s a kind of classic chicken-and-egg challenge, for we certainly can’t have one without the other. So we’re trying to build both at the same time.

On the market side, we’ve launched a public education and awareness campaign under the theme of EAT LOCAL!

A key strategy in this is our EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide and Directory, now in its second edition, published just a couple of weeks ago with 10,000 copies being distributed throughout the county. Copies are available here in the back of the room (please take several and share with others).

This is all supported by a rapidly-growing and continually-updated website (www.EatLocalGuide.com).

Through the Guide, and throughout the EAT LOCAL! Campaign, we’re explaining why eating local is so important, and connecting people with all the available sources in the county in a comprehensive directory so they can find what they’re looking for—whether it’s local food producers, or local food supporters. This directory is online, too.

But giving people the reasons and the sources isn’t enough. So we’re helping to provide some incentive, through a 10% Local Food Shift Challenge and Pledge.

And we’re showing people some of the many things they can do to increase their local food consumption and help support local agriculture.

We’re also helping people learn new skills, because shifting to lower-carbon, mixed-farming organic systems that are less dependent on oil and chemicals will require a lot more people with the right skills working on the land again. So we’ve launched an ambitious Reskilling program—providing instruction in the basic practical life skills we have largely lost, from growing, cooking and canning food, to permaculture design courses. We’ve delivered about 10,000 people hours of Great Reskilling instruction in the last two years.

At the same time, besides driving the market for local food, we’re working to help increase local food production capacity by:

• Getting people to see local organic agriculture as economic development.
• Encouraging people, especially youth, to consider farming as a viable and sustainable career choice.
• Training people in food production, especially Permaculture.
• Helping to organize and support a Boulder County Farmer Cultivation Center.
• Working with the Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Parks and Open Space Department to find ways to convert much of the county’s 17,000 acres of open space ag land to food production for local consumption, and to develop or change policies to support and encourage local agriculture.
• Working with county and municipal governments as they reconsider their comprehensive plans and land use policies, to ensure that local food and agriculture are supported by those plans and policies.
• Working with Slow Money, the massive capital pool being organized by Woody Tasch, an effort to direct local capital into financing local food and farming enterprises.
• Working with local entrepreneurs to exploit new opportunities that are emerging as we seek to rebuild local infrastructure of distribution, storage, processing, and marketing.
• Working with companies like Farmland LP and organizations like Post Carbon Institute, who are developing a far-reaching program of buying conventional farmland and converting it to organic food production as a significant investment opportunity.
• Collaborating with Everybody Eats! and other stakeholders to cultivate a county-wide coalition of governmental and non-governmental agencies, farmers, businesses and individuals to plan and implement a local food and farming system. Call it a local foodshed alliance, if you will.

All this is a massive process that’s going to take some time. Transition suggests a systematic approach that we’re doing our best to follow. But we’re not in control of the process. The community itself is. We’re acting primarily as a catalyst for collaboration, and as a provider of information, insight, and inspiration. It’s an experiment, and as Rob Hopkins says in his “cheerful disclaimer”: We really don’t know if it’s going to work. But we do know that if we wait for the governments or big industry, it’ll be too little too late. And if we just act as individuals, changing our lifestyles, it’ll surely be too little. But if we act together, as communities, it might be just enough just in time!

Conclusion

Clearly, the food and agricultural revolution is already getting underway. Fundamentally, it’s not about simply about lifestyle choices or mere differences in values. It’s arising in response to a growing predicament that is at the heart of our industrial agriculture system and the heart of our globalized economy.

This transition is coming whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready or not.

I know there’s a lot of controversy around all this, and a lot of emotions. I suspect a lot of dust is going to get kicked up along the way.

Much of the debate seems to hinge around the goals of sustainability seemingly interfering with farmers’ and industry’s goals of profitability. But sustainable agriculture must of course include economic viability. And that doesn’t necessarily mean “big.”

We sometimes hear “small farming” used as a pejorative term. Small organic farmers often get pigeonholed and tossed aside as a probable relic of the past.

But at the 19^th annual Farming for the Future conference in Pennsylvania earlier this month, Bryan Snyder, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture said something very significant, and I want to close with his words. He said:

“People like to hear about lots of acres or large numbers of animals and bushels of corn per acre measured in the hundreds. But models of farming that can gross $50,000 to $100,000 on a single acre—or CSA programs that, in some cases and on relatively small acreage, are able to count their customers in the thousands and bank $1 million or more in the spring before even planting a seed—are anything but small!”

Snyder’s conclusion is exactly what we have come to at Transition Colorado:

“We must encourage everyone, wherever they are and as a priority, to eat food produced as near to their own homes as possible. Secondly, feed thy neighbor as thyself. From this perspective, local food not only can feed the world, it may be the only way to ever feed the world in a healthy and just manner.”

]]> http://transition-times.com/2010/03/08/the-local-food-and-farming-revolution/feed/ 2 http://transition-times.com/2010/03/06/finding-a-cure-for-the-insidious-cancers-of-hope-and-faith/ http://transition-times.com/2010/03/06/finding-a-cure-for-the-insidious-cancers-of-hope-and-faith/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:12:12 +0000 Carolyn Baker http://transition-times.com/?p=2058 ...The damage to the ecosystem may mean that a large-scale human presence on the planet cannot continue much longer. The obsession with self-interest cultivated by capitalism may be so deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary identity that real solidarity in affluent societies is no longer possible. The deskilling and dependency that comes with a high-energy/high-technology society has eroded crucial traditional skills. Mass-media corporations have eroticized violence and commodified intimacy at an unprecedented level, globally. None of this is crazy apocalypticism, but rather a sober assessment of the reality around us. Rather than deny the despair that flows from that assessment, we need to find a way to deal with it. ]]> At the risk of being accused of declaring “I told ya so”, I must admit that three online articles made my day today—two of which I posted in Truth to Power’s Daily News Digest, and one which I posted on the website itself. The first was by one of my heroes, Chris Hedges, in which he stated “We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives.” His article is a litany of how Barack Obama, using “hope” to get elected, has revealed himself as Bush III and how voting in national elections accomplishes nothing in a society rotting in putrifying political and moral corruption.

Joe Bageant, a man after my own heart who’s hunkering down in rural Mexico making tortillas, pens a scathing article, “Americans Are Hope Fiends’ Because Honestly Looking At The Present Situation Would Destroy Just About Everything We Hold As Reality”. In it he states that hope is political pablum for an infantilized nation. He too, reluctantly voted for Obama because he thought Obama just had to be better than Bush, but now Joe is crying on his tortillas and saying things like, “Hope is magical thinking, believing that somehow, some larger unknown force is in motion to set things right.”

And a journalist for whom I hold the greatest respect, Robert Jensen, writes an article on getting rid of “hope” and “faith”, inspired by his interview of Abe Osheroff, long-time activist and documentary film maker. It opens with a short vignette by Jensen:

After a recent talk about the struggle for social justice and the threats to the ecosystem, a student lingered, waiting to talk to me alone, as if he had something to confess.

“I feel so overwhelmed,” he finally said, wondering aloud if political organizing could really make a difference. The young man said he often felt depressed, not about the circumstances of his own life but about the possibilities for change. Finally, he looked at me and asked, “Once you see what’s happening—I mean really see it—how are you supposed to act like everything is going to be OK?”

Boy do I know this one. I lived with it regularly as a professor of college history and psychology as I laid out in molten lava the state of the world which they had been programmed to ignore while drowning in the propaganda of realizing the American dream through getting a college education.

Jensen proceeds in the article to talk about how unacceptable it is among progressives to be anything less than upbeat. And he continues:

Some organizers respond to such concerns with upbeat assurances that if we just get more people on board and work a little bit harder, the problems will be solved—if not tomorrow, certainly within some reasonable period of time. I used to say things like that, but now I think it’s more honest, and potentially effective, to acknowledge how massive the obstacles that need to be overcome really are. We must not only recognize that the world’s resources distributed in a profoundly unjust way and the systems in which we live are fundamentally unsustainable ecologically, but also understand there’s no guarantee that this state of affairs can be reversed or even substantially slowed down. There are, in fact, lots of reasons to suspect that many of our fundamental problems have no solutions, at least no solutions in any framework we currently understand.

Some have challenged me: Why give in to such despair? My response: If honest emotional responses based on rational assessments lead committed activists to feel despair, why try to bury that? It’s better to grapple with those emotions and assessments than to respond with empty platitudes.

The damage to the ecosystem may mean that a large-scale human presence on the planet cannot continue much longer. The obsession with self-interest cultivated by capitalism may be so deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary identity that real solidarity in affluent societies is no longer possible. The deskilling and dependency that comes with a high-energy/high-technology society has eroded crucial traditional skills. Mass-media corporations have eroticized violence and commodified intimacy at an unprecedented level, globally.

None of this is crazy apocalypticism, but rather a sober assessment of the reality around us. Rather than deny the despair that flows from that assessment, we need to find a way to deal with it.

Jensen cites a couple of gems from Osheroff that must not be dismissed, such as, “But personally, I’m not hopeful because I think hope is a kind of religion, and religions don’t work. If you’re hopeful you’re going to suffer disappointments, whether it’s politics or your personal life. You can care about things, you can want things to happen, you can work to make things happen without being hopeful.”

Make things happen without hope?

So now we come down to the crux of the issue: What is the definition of “hope”? For an answer to this question, I’m reminded of James Howard Kunstler’s incessant vitriol about hope. After he has thoroughly bashed the notion of hope, he usually moderates a bit and defines it as something that comes from within the person, rather than from the exterior. Similarly, in Jensen’s interview of Osheroff, the latter notes the capacity of humans to be decent, kind, and compassionate. I’ve noted this as well in my 2009 review of Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster, in which the author emphasizes that in crisis situations, humans more often tend to cooperate rather than resort to violent or destructive behavior.

I want to underscore this because I am repeatedly called “pessimistic”, “fear-mongering”, or my very favorite, “cynical.” The latter is my favorite because I like to point out that the word “cynic” actually comes from a Greek word that referred to a dog chewing a bone for hours non-stop, the point being that the cynics in ancient Greece held onto an idea and “chewed” it incessantly until everyone except their fellow cynics were sick of them. Why is this important to me? Because the real cynics, in my opinion, are those joined at the hip with “hope” who refuse to look more deeply into the psychological and political history of a candidate like Barack Obama and as a result, are flummoxed in 2010 that he has become the reincarnation of George W. Bush, Jr. As I’ve said before, it’s the “high definition” definition of insanity-following the same pattern which yields negative results ad infinitum but expecting that the next time, the result will be different.

And then there’s “faith” which is a cousin to hope and also a cousin to religion. Faith is usually about violating one’s rational mind in order to feel better or to appease the gods or some tyrannical human authority figure. It is erroneously used synonymously with “trust”-erroneous because trust is about relationship whereas faith is about obedience. Therefore, I must agree with Bageant that it is indeed infantilizing.

So what is the cure for hope and faith?

The first aspect of the cure, quite simply, is total honesty. The statements by Hedges, Jensen, Osheroff, and Bageant, are replete with white-hot honesty. And whenever we get brutally honest, we are confronted with emotions-most of which are unpleasant. That said, let’s start with the most basic reality of all: Industrial civilization is in the process of collapsing which means that as a result, there is absolutely no return to normal, and our lives are also in the process of being permanently altered.

Recently, two subscribers to my website’s news digest reported that when they took my book, Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, to their local public libraries to ask the libraries to order a free copy, the response was, “We just simply can’t have a book like this in our collection.” This is the response one might hear upon requesting that the libraries include pornography in their collections. Is my book pornographic? Yes! In this culture at this moment, naming and understanding the reality of the collapse of civilization is nothing less than pornographic in the minds of infantilized Americans.

And one even witnesses the empire-programmed addiction to hope in the most well-intentioned activists. Hope is not the same as having a vision, but I believe we must be cautious about confusing the two. As my readers know, I am deeply involved in the Transition movement which offers a vision of a positive future, but that vision will only become real as a result of our commitment to make it happen. Moreover, any vision of a positive future must be open to addressing and feeling the feelings around the consequences that so few wish to contemplate, namely, that the human race is committing suicide.

If we are willing to think with much more adult minds than the two library staff persons mentioned above, and if we are willing to grapple with the reality of collapse, with what attitude, mindset, or sensibility do we persevere in the face of it? And…is persevering the most important issue? If it isn’t, what is?

I submit that after honesty comes the willingness to accept reality.

That means stopping all pretense and delusion that we can prevent collapse. News flash: Collapse now has a life of its own, and I am convinced that whether it’s 10 million activists in the streets of every country on earth or the hundredth monkey principle on steroids, collapse is an inevitable part of our future. It cannot be prevented because it is well underway. It has its own trajectory and its own velocity, but it can be slowed, and the effects can be lessened

However, before we get distracted by how to slow it down, we need to deal with the next quandary which is much less appealing, namely, our despair. As Jensen states above, rather than deny or minimize our despair, we need to find a way to deal with it. But if you can’t take a Joanna Macy “Despair and Empowerment” workshop, what can you do?

You can certainly read my book, Sacred Demise, and complete all the exercises in it, but you can also read poetry, make art and music; you can not only talk about your feelings about collapse with other people, but talk about your values and priorities—what is important to you, what is your individual purpose in life, what is your shared purpose together? And of course you can keep doing what you’re already probably doing if you’re reading this article-getting deeply involved in your community to help it become resilient and self-sufficient.

Above all, you need to spend a significant chunk of time every day—I suggest a half hour twice a day—in contemplation. If you have a meditation practice, wonderful. If not, develop one. It should be a time of stillness and restoration. It should be a time of listening to the inner wisdom of the soul/psyche—a time when thoughts and feelings are not censored but simply allowed and witnessed-and perhaps later, journaled about. While it is true that no one can navigate collapse alone, it is also true that while navigating it, the relationship with oneself may be the most crucial of all.

Civilization has robbed us of an inner life to such an extent that most people in this culture are terrified of or perplexed by the notion of one. Yet no matter how many gorgeous organic gardens we can grow, no matter how much food and water we can store, no matter how much we re-skill ourselves, no matter how many dialog circles we sit in, no matter how well we raise our chickens, if we don’t have an inner life, then we are perilously at risk of emotional and mental breakdown when the daunting stress of collapse is in our faces, and we won’t be able to answer the most important question as we navigate it: Who am I and who do I want to be during this incredibly challenging time?

Finally, I highly recommend my upcoming online course “Navigating The Coming Chaos” at the Post Peak Living website which runs from April 24-May 15, and there is a significant discount for early registration. This course is an ideal venue for applying all of the options stated above and more.

In any event, it’s time to become discerning, pro-active adults-forsaking our “hope” and “faith” in people and distant forces outside us to do for us what we can only do for ourselves and with others of like heart and mind whom we love and trust. The abject betrayal that most progressives in this nation are currently experiencing confirms that any hope that comes from outside us will most likely result in a force to be reckoned with that is much worse than the one our “hope” was intended to avoid.

Editor’s note: “In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.”  By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet:  the energy business.  All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains.  These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity’s role in causing it, and in its import for the planet:  a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).

What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face—from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet).  What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely.  If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth—and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves.  It’s as if we’ve landed on Pandora without any of the charm.  (By the way, don’t miss the latest TomCast, the site’s accompanying audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of climate-science scandals.) —Tom Engelhardt

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet.  Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin.  If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet.  At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it.  The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning.  So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?  That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated—a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made—that’s what Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down.  I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington D.C.  It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why We Don’t Want to Believe in Climate Change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount.  He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

“…screen the entire population regularly and… quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month… all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic—and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main reason, for the success of the climate deniers, though.  They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites.  They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade.  On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models… [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong—Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause—and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation—a world—to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen.  There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: if you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be—and, in fact, should be—infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why Data Isn’t Enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun.  One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty.  That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress—cap-and-dividend, it’s called—that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80% of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right—and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miner’s kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed—just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country.  People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through—a sunset, an hour in the garden—we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.

Copyright 2010 Bill McKibben

In late 2009 and early 2010, the economy showed some signs of renewed vigor. Understandably, everyone wants it to get “back to normal.” But here’s a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history’s timeline?

It’s an uncomfortable idea, but one that cannot be ignored: The “normal” late-20th century economy of seemingly endless growth actually emerged from an aberrant set of conditions that cannot be perpetuated.

That “normal” is gone. One way or another, a “new normal” will emerge to replace it. Can we build a different, more sustainable economy to replace the one now in tatters?

Let’s be clear: I believe we are in for some very hard times. The transitional period on our way toward a post-growth, equilibrium economy will prove to be the most challenging time any of us has ever lived through. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we can survive this collective journey, and that if we make sound choices as families and communities, life can actually be better for us in the decades ahead than it was during the heady days of seemingly endless economic expansion.

In this essay, I would like to share my conclusions on this subject and the process by which I arrived at them. It’s a bit of a long story, so please bear with me. First, the conclusions.

Four Propositions

The following summary statements are fundamental both to grasping our current situation and managing our way toward a desirable future:

1. We have reached the end of economic growth as we have known it. The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it. The economic crisis that began in 2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and that it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period in which economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. As we will see, there are fundamental constraints to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is beginning to encounter those constraints. This is not to say the U.S. or the world will never see another quarter or year of growth relative to the previous year. Rather, the point is that when the bumps are averaged out, the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consumption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on.
2. The basic factors that will inevitably shape whatever replaces the growth economy are knowable. To survive and thrive for long, societies have to operate within the planet’s budget of sustainably extractable resources. This means that even if we don’t know exactly what a desirable post-growth economy and lifestyle will look like, we know enough to begin working toward them.
3. It is possible for economies to persist for centuries or millennia with no or minimal growth. That is how most economies operated until recent times. If billions of people through countless generations lived without economic growth, we can do so as well—now and far into the future. The end of growth does not mean the end of the world.
4. Life in a non-growing economy can be fulfilling, interesting, and secure. The absence of growth does not imply a lack of change or improvement. Within a non-growing or equilibrium economy there can still be a continuous development of practical skills, artistic expression, and technology. In fact, some historians and social scientists argue that life in an equilibrium economy can be superior to life in a fast-growing economy: while growth creates opportunities for some, it also typically intensifies competition—there are big winners and big losers, and (as in most boom towns) the quality of relations within the community can suffer as a result. Within a non-growing economy it is possible to maximize benefits and reduce factors leading to decay, but doing so will require pursuing appropriate goals: instead of more, we must strive for better; rather than promoting increased economic activity for its own sake, we must emphasize whatever increases quality of life without stoking consumption. One way to do this is to reinvent and redefine growth itself.

The transition to a no-growth economy (or one in which growth is defined in a fundamentally different way) is inevitable, but it will go much better if we plan for it rather than simply watching in dismay as institutions we have come to rely upon fail, and then try to improvise a survival strategy in their absence.

In effect, we have to create a desirable “new normal” that fits the constraints imposed by depleting natural resources. Maintaining the “old normal” is not an option; if we do not find new goals for ourselves and plan our transition from a growth-based economy to a healthy equilibrium economy, we will by default create a much less desirable “new normal” whose emergence we are already beginning to see in the forms of persistent high unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, and ever more frequent and worsening financial and environmental crises—all of which translate to profound distress for individuals, families, and communities.

“Limits to Growth”

The journey that led to my formulating these propositions began in 1972, when a book called Limits to Growth was making headlines. This relatively compact volume, which went on to become the best-selling environmental book of all time, provoked the first Great Wake-up Call of my adult life, changing the course of everything I have thought and done ever since.

Let me explain why Limits to Growth impacted me so deeply.

That book, which reported on the first attempts to use computers to model the likely interactions between trends in resources, consumption, and population, was also the first major scientific study to question the assumption that economic growth can and will continue more or less uninterrupted into the foreseeable future.

The idea was heretical at the time—and still is: during the past few decades, growth has become virtually the sole index of national economic well-being. When the economy grows, jobs appear, investments yield high returns, and everyone is happy. When the economy stops growing, financial bloodletting ensues. And so predictably a book saying that growth cannot and will not continue beyond a certain point proved profoundly upsetting in some quarters, and soon Limits to Growth was prominently “debunked” by public relations efforts organized by pro-growth business interests. In reality, this “debunking” merely amounted to taking a few numbers in the book completely out of context, citing them as “predictions” (which they explicitly were not), and then claiming that these predictions had failed. The ruse was quickly exposed, but rebuttals often don’t gain nearly as much publicity as accusations, and so today millions of people mistakenly believe that the book was long ago discredited. In fact, the original Limits to Growth scenarios have held up quite well*.

In principle, the argument for eventual limits to growth is a slam-dunk. If any quantity grows steadily by a certain fixed percentage per year, this implies that it will double in size every so-many years; the higher the percentage growth rate, the quicker the doubling. A rough method of figuring doubling times is known as the rule of 70: dividing the percentage growth rate into 70 gives the approximate time required for the initial quantity to double. If a quantity is growing at 1 percent per year, it will double in 70 years; at 2 percent per year growth, it will double in 35 years; at 5 percent growth, it will double in only 14 years, and so on. If you want to be more precise, you can use the Y^x button on your calculator, but the rule of 70 works fine for most purposes.

Here’s a real-world example: Over the past two centuries, human population has grown at rates ranging from less than one percent to more than two percent per year. In 1800, world population stood at about one billion; by 1930 it had doubled to two billion. Only 30 years later (in 1960) it had doubled again to four billion; currently we are on track to achieve a third doubling, to eight billion humans, around 2025. No one seriously expects human population to continue growing for centuries into the future. But imagine if it did—at just 1.3 percent per year (its growth rate in the year 2000). By the year 2780 there would be 148 trillion humans on Earth—one person for each square meter of land on the planet’s surface.

It won’t happen, of course.

In nature, growth always slams up against non-negotiable constraints sooner or later. If a species finds that its food source has expanded, its numbers will increase to take advantage of those surplus calories—but then its food source will become depleted as more mouths consume it, and its predators will likewise become more numerous (more tasty meals for them!). Population “blooms” (that is, periods of rapid growth) are always followed by crashes and die-offs. Always.

Here’s another real-world example. In recent years China’s economy has been growing at eight percent or more per year; that means it is more than doubling in size every ten years. Indeed, China consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago—the same with iron ore and oil. The nation now has four times as many highways as it did, and almost five times as many cars. How long can this go on? How many more doublings can occur before China has used up its key resources—or has simply decided that enough is enough and has stopped growing?

It makes sense that economies should follow rules analogous to those that govern biological systems. Plants and animals tend to grow quickly when they are young, but then they reach a more or less stable mature size. In organisms, growth rates are largely controlled by genes. In economies, growth seems tied to factors such as the availability of resources—chiefly energy resources (“food” for the industrial system). During the 20th century, cheap and abundant fossil fuels enabled rapid economic expansion; at some point, therefore, fossil fuel depletion could put a brake on growth. It is also possible that industrial wastes could accumulate to the point that the biological systems that underpin economic activity (such as forests, crops, and human bodies) begin to fail.

But economists generally don’t see things this way. That’s probably because most current economic theories were formulated during an anomalous historical period of sustained growth. Economists are merely generalizing from their experience: they can point to decades of steady growth in the recent past, and so they simply project that experience into the future. Moreover, they have ways to explain why modern market economies are immune to the kinds of limits that constrain natural systems; the two main ones concern substitution and efficiency.

If a useful resource becomes scarce, its price will rise, and this creates an incentive for users of the resource to find a substitute. For example, if oil gets expensive enough, energy companies might start making liquid fuels from coal. Or they might develop other energy sources undreamed of today. Economists theorize that this process of substitution can go on forever. It’s part of the magic of the free market.

Increasing efficiency means doing more with less. In the U.S., the number of inflation-adjusted dollars generated in the economy for every unit of energy consumed has increased steadily over recent decades (the amount of energy, in British Thermal Units, required to produce a dollar of GDP has been dropping steadily, from close to 20,000 BTU per dollar in 1949 to 8,500 BTU in 2008). That’s one kind of economic efficiency. Another has to do with locating the cheapest sources of materials, and the places where workers will be most productive and work for the lowest wages. As we increase efficiency, we use less—of either resources or money—to do more. That enables more growth.

Finding substitutes for depleting resources and upping efficiency are undeniably effective adaptive strategies of market economies. Nevertheless, the question remains open as to how long these strategies can continue to work in the real world—which is governed less by economic theories than by the laws of physics. In the real world, some things don’t have substitutes, or the substitutes are too expensive, or don’t work as well, or can’t be produced fast enough. And efficiency follows a law of diminishing returns: the first gains in efficiency are usually cheap, but every further incremental gain tends to cost more, until further gains become prohibitively expensive.

Unlike economists, most physical scientists recognize that growth within any functioning, bounded system has to stop sometime.

But this discussion has very real implications, because the economy is not just an abstract concept; it is what determines whether we live in luxury or poverty; whether we eat or starve. If economic growth ends, everyone will be impacted, and it will take society years to adapt to this new condition. Therefore it is important to be able to forecast whether that moment is close or distant in time.

Hence the Limits to Growth study. The authors fed in data for world population growth, consumption trends, and the abundance of various important resources, ran their computer program, and concluded that the end of growth would probably arrive between 2010 and 2050. Industrial output and food production would then fall, leading to a decline in population. (By the way, the Limits to Growth scenario study has been re-run repeatedly in the years since the original publication, using more sophisticated software and updated input data. The results were similar. See Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.)

My Personal Story of Waking Up to Limits

That’s why Limits to Growth meant so much to me when I encountered it at age 21. I realized that the world in which I had been born, raised, and educated was headed toward what is politely known as a “historical discontinuity,” but more colloquially termed “collapse,” “a cliff,” or “a brick wall.” Millions of young people today are having the same experience as they learn about climate change. Welcome to the club.

At the time, I had been trying to make my way as a young musician. My father had been a chemistry and physics teacher, but I had gravitated toward the arts: after being trained as a classical violinist, I had taught myself also to play electric guitar.

As I absorbed the implications of Limits to Growth, I realized that there were more important things than band rehearsals and gigs to attend to, so I mostly left the music business (though I continue to be an avid amateur violinist) and began looking for ways to help shift society toward a more sustainable path. I became a freelance writer-editor and started pursuing projects I thought might lead me toward a better understanding of global trends and of how our species might avert an overwhelming economic and environmental disaster.

It was clear that society would need to undertake fundamental changes. But what were those changes, exactly? I thought the best way to find out would be to form an intentional community as a kind of social laboratory in which to explore alternatives in energy, food production, and lifestyles. I ended up spending most of the next 20 years living in three communities—one in Toronto that I helped establish, and others in Colorado and southern California that had already been going for some time before I joined. Intentional communities (sometimes also known as communes, with many now thriving under the banner of “eco-villages”) are a fascinating social phenomenon, and hundreds still flourish worldwide.

By the early 1990s, I was eager to reconnect with mainstream society and bring what I had learned to a wider audience. My wife, Janet Barocco, and I had met in an intentional community in southern California; together we moved to a suburban home in Santa Rosa. By the latter years of the decade I was teaching in a college program on sustainability that I had helped initiate and design, while also continuing to make my way as a freelance environmental writer.

It was at this point, in 1998, that I heard a second Great Wake-up Call.

Peak Oil

It came in the form of an article in Scientific American by veteran petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère (both of whom had overseen exploration and production in major oil companies), explaining why world oil extraction would reach a maximum around 2010 and begin its permanent decline thereafter. I quickly realized that Peak Oil would likely be the first non-negotiable global limit to growth. The hazy forecast that industrial society would hit a wall sometime in the 21st century was suddenly focused to a painful specificity. Growth had acquired a hard expiration date.

Of course, oil does not pose our only societal limit, or even the most important one in the bigger scheme of things: climate, water, and topsoil are clearly more crucial in the long run. But the peaking of world oil production could potentially bring modern industrial civilization to its knees, while also undercutting coordinated efforts to deal with all sorts of other problems.

Up to this point I had little interest in the subject of oil, or energy generally. However, as I re-read the Scientific American article, I realized the pivotal role petroleum plays in the modern world—in transportation, agriculture, and the chemicals and materials industries. I began spending hours each day studying energy history and oil production statistics. I soon realized that the Industrial Revolution was really the Fossil Fuel Revolution, and that our modern food system is based on cheap fossil energy. Further, the entire phenomenon of continuous economic growth—including the development of the financial institutions that facilitate growth, such as fractional reserve banking and the marketing of derivatives—is ultimately based on ever-increasing supplies of cheap energy. Growth requires more manufacturing, more trade, and more transport, and those all in turn require more energy. This means that if energy supplies can’t expand and energy therefore becomes significantly more expensive, economic growth will falter and the financial system built on expectations of perpetual growth will fail, possibly in a rather spectacular way.

As early as 1998, Campbell, Laherrère, and others were discussing a Peak Oil impact scenario that went like this. Sometime around the year 2010, they theorized, stagnant or falling oil supplies would lead to soaring and more volatile petroleum prices, which would precipitate a global economic crash. This rapid economic contraction would in turn lead to sharply curtailed energy demand, so oil prices would then fall; but as soon as the economy regained strength, demand for oil would recover, prices would again soar, and the economy would relapse. This cycle would continue, with each recovery phase being shorter and weaker, and each crash deeper and harder, until the economy was in ruins. Meanwhile, volatile oil prices would frustrate investments in energy alternatives: one year, oil would be so expensive that almost any other energy source would look cheap by comparison; the next year, the price of oil would have fallen so far that energy users would be flocking back to it, with investments in other energy sources looking foolish. Investment capital would be in short supply in any case because the banks would be insolvent due to the crash, and governments would be broke due to declining tax revenues. Meanwhile, international competition for dwindling oil supplies might lead to wars between petroleum importing nations, between importers and exporters, and between rival factions within exporting nations.

Naturally, I also examined the arguments against the likelihood of a near-term peak in global oil production. What if Campbell and Laherrère were simply wrong? There are those who claim that new technologies for crude oil extraction will increase the amount of oil that can be obtained from each well drilled, and that there are nearly endless reserves of alternative hydrocarbon resources (principally tar sands and oil shale) whose development will seamlessly replace conventional oil, thus delaying the inevitable peak for decades. There are also those who say that Peak Oil won’t be much of a problem even if it happens soon, because the market will find substitutes as quickly as needed—whether electric cars, hydrogen, or liquid fuel made from coal. I found all of these arguments weak: the new oil extraction technologies won’t come into wide use for several years, and will be applicable mostly to newly developed fields (of which there are fewer and fewer each year as exploration efforts continue to show mostly disappointing results), not to the old super-giant oilfields that produce the great bulk of oil that we use today. Tar sands and oil shale will be slow to extract; indeed, in the case of oil shale, we may never derive liquid fuels in any substantial quantity due to the enormous costs of processing this very low-grade material. And substitutes like electric cars, liquids from coal, and hydrogen will take a very long time to develop and will in most cases be much more costly than the equivalent elements of our current system of petroleum fuels and internal combustion engines.

I continued to study the world energy situation for the next few years. And, with every passing year, events appeared to be supporting the Peak Oil thesis and undercutting the views of the oil optimists. Oil prices were trending upward—and for entirely foreseeable reasons: discoveries of new oilfields were continuing to peter out, with most new fields being much more difficult and expensive to develop than ones found in previous years. More oil-producing countries were seeing their extraction rates peaking and beginning to decline despite efforts to maintain production growth using high-tech, expensive secondary and tertiary extraction methods like the injection of water, nitrogen, or CO2 to force more oil out of the ground. Production decline rates in the world’s old, super-giant oilfields, which are responsible for the lion’s share of the global petroleum supply, were accelerating. Production of liquid fuels from tar sands was expanding only slowly, while the development of oil shale remained a hollow promise for the distant future.

I corresponded with and met the authors of the Scientific American article, and interviewed other petroleum geologists and engineers. One expert after another offered further reasons for concluding that the thesis of “The End of Cheap Oil” was correct, that there were no ready substitutes for crude oil, and that the consequences of a near-term global oil production peak would be profound.

Given the almost complete absence of mainstream media coverage of the subject, I spent several months assessing whether I should step into the breach and write a book on Peak Oil. The fact that I had no background in the oil industry or in any relevant academic field weighed against doing so. Yet the need was clearly overwhelming, so I decided to try. I spent 2001 and 2002 writing The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, which was published the following year and went on to sell over 50,000 copies with translations in six languages. I began receiving lecture invitations, and, over the next few years, gave over 300 talks to a wide variety of audiences in a dozen countries. More books followed: PowerDown: Options and Actions for a Post Carbon World (2004); The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse (2006); Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007); and Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (2009).

I was determined to sound a warning not just to the general public, but especially to politicians and appointed government officials. Members of a burgeoning informal global network of Peak Oil activists arranged for me speak to hundreds of national, state, and local politicians and appointed officials in the U.S., to about a hundred members of the European Parliament, and to national Parliamentarians in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.

From Scary Theory to Scarier Reality

Then in 2008, the Peak Oil scenario became all too real. Global oil production had been stagnant since 2005 and petroleum prices had been soaring upward. In July, 2008, the per-barrel price shot up nearly to $150—half again higher (in inflation-adjusted terms) than the price spikes of the 1970s that had triggered the worst recession since World War II. By summer 2008, the auto industry, the trucking industry, international shipping, agriculture, and the airlines were all reeling.

But what happened next riveted the world’s attention to such a degree that the oil price spike was all but forgotten: in September 2008, the global financial system nearly collapsed. The reasons for this sudden, gripping crisis apparently had to do with housing bubbles, lack of proper regulation of the banking industry, and the over-use of bizarre financial products that almost nobody understood. However, there are reasons for concluding that the oil price spike was a much more important contributor to this economic meltdown than is generally discussed (see www.energybulletin.net/node/49798).

In the aftermath of that global financial near-death experience, both the Peak Oil impact scenario proposed a decade earlier and the Limits to Growth standard-run scenario of 1972 seemed to be confirmed with uncanny and frightening accuracy. Global trade was falling. The world’s largest auto companies were on life support. The U.S. airline industry had shrunk by almost a third. Food riots were erupting in poor nations around the world. Lingering wars in Iraq (the nation with the world’s second-largest crude oil reserves) and Afghanistan (the site of disputed oil and gas pipeline projects) continued to bleed the coffers of the world’s foremost oil-importing nation.

Meanwhile, the debate about what to do to rein in global climate change exemplified the political inertia that had kept the world on track for calamity since the early ’70s. It had by now become obvious to nearly every person of modest education and intellect that the world has two urgent, incontrovertible reasons to rapidly end its reliance on fossil fuels: the twin threats of climate catastrophe and impending constraints to fuel supplies (with most of the remaining oil reserves located in just a few countries). Yet at the Copenhagen climate conference in December, 2009, the priorities of the most fuel-dependent nations were clear: carbon emissions should be cut, and fossil fuel dependency reduced, but only if doing so does not threaten economic growth.

The cruel irony, obvious to my Peak Oil-aware colleagues but apparently not to the delegates at Copenhagen, was that the decades-long era of rapid economic growth based on increased fossil-fueled production and consumption is over anyway. The world’s last chance to collectively, cooperatively negotiate a turn away from the precipice was being squandered for the sake of a goal that was no longer achievable.

I could take no satisfaction from these confirmations of the Limits to Growth and Peak Oil scenarios; being able to say “I told you so” hardly made up for the shock of knowing that our last opportunities to change direction had been missed and that the train of industrial civilization was now not merely still chugging toward a broken bridge, but was actually starting to plummet into the gorge below. We had succeeded somewhat in helping increase public awareness of an issue: due to the efforts of thousands of scientists, writers, and activists, “peak oil” had become a recognizable term in public discourse. But we had failed to budge government policy in more than very minor ways (I had, for example, assisted the City Council-appointed Peak Oil Task Force of Oakland, California, which produced a sensible report on which, so far, little action has been taken).

The world has entered a new era. The project of awakening and warning policy makers and the general public was worthy of the investment of all the effort we could muster. In fact, it would have been negligent of the Limits to Growth authors, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, and thousands of climate and environmental scientists and activists (myself included) not to give it our best shot. But it is now too late to avert a collapse of the existing system. The collapse has begun.

It is time for a different strategy.

By saying this, I am not suggesting that we should all simply give up and accept an inevitable, awful fate. Even though the collapse of the world’s financial and industrial systems has started, effort now at minimizing further dire consequences is essential. Collapse does not mean extinction. A new way of life will almost certainly emerge from the wreckage of the fossil-fueled growth era. It is up to those of us who have some understanding of what is happening, and why, to help design that new way of life so that it will be sustainable, equitable, and fulfilling for all concerned. We all need practical strategies and tools to weather the collapse and to build the foundation of whatever is to come after.

Journey to a New Economy

The propositions described above, and my personal journey, are the starting points for a search that can be summarized in a single question: What are the guideposts toward a livable, inviting post-growth society?

This search has in many instances entailed a literal, geographic journey. During the past few years, as I traveled the lecture circuit, I met thousands of people who had already concluded on their own that the global stage was being set for an economic crash of epic proportions. They had passed through the psychological stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They were thinking creatively, building new lives, and experimenting with a wide range of strategies for meeting basic human needs while using much less of just about everything.

Some of these folks, like me, had been thinking along these lines for a long time—since the 1970s. Many were much younger, though, had learned about Peak Oil or climate change just within the past few years, and had recently decided to devote their lives to building a post-hydrocarbon world. Some were clearly members of what was known in the 1970s as the “counterculture.” Others were mainstream citizens—investment bankers, real estate sellers, high school teachers, small business owners, corporate middle managers—who had chanced upon information that awakened them forcibly from their routines. Many of these folks lived in large cities, but others in small towns or on farms; some were rich, some poor (a few by choice); some were devout, others agnostic or atheist; some were working alone on survivalist projects, while others were building community organizations; some saw the transition as a business opportunity while others were working through non-profit organizations. Here are just three examples that stand out.

In 2005, while on a lecture tour in Ireland, I met a young college teacher named Rob Hopkins who believed that life could be better without fossil fuels. He had led his students in developing an “Energy Descent Action Plan” for their town, and believed he had the seed for something larger and more significant. He soon moved back to his native England to earn his Ph.D., and designed his thesis project around helping the village of Totnes begin a cooperative, phased process of transitioning away from its dependence on fossil fuels. This project in turn led to the start of a series of Transition Initiatives in villages, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the U.K. In 2007, a version of Rob’s written Ph.D. thesis was published as a book (The Transition Handbook) that quickly began inspiring others to take up this strategy. Today there are hundreds of Transition Initiatives at various stages of development in a dozen countries (including over 50 in the U.S.).

While in Montana for a speaking engagement at the University of Montana in Helena in spring 2009, some local Peak Oil activists drove me to the town of Ronan and introduced me to Billie Lee, who had helped start Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center. The Center is housed in a fairly small, non-descript building and features medium-scale food processing equipment that local small food producers can rent at reasonable rates. This enables small farmers to produce value-added products (everything from canned soups to herbal tea bags) that are profitable and are price-competitive with those made by industrial food companies located hundreds or thousands of miles from Ronan. Local food has become an obsession for the sustainability-minded during the past few years, and local food systems will be a necessary pillar of post-growth economies. Yet aspiring small-scale farmers often have a hard time getting started because they cannot afford the equipment to enable them to produce profitable value-added products. Here in the tiny hamlet of Ronan was an ingenious solution to the problem, and one that deserves to be replicated in every agricultural county in the nation.

On a trip to New England in 2007, I met Lynn Benander, a community energy activist and entrepreneur who had started a project called Co-op Power to bring renewable energy to low-income and multi-ethnic communities throughout the Northeast. Typically, renewable energy projects cost more to get going than conventional coal or gas power projects, and so they tend to be found in wealthier communities and regions. Conversely, the most polluting energy projects tend to be sited in or near poor neighborhoods or regions. Co-op Power aims to change that imbalance of power—in a way that any community can copy. A typical project: You help four people put up a solar hot water system and everyone comes to help you put up yours; you save 40 to 50 percent off your total system price, get to know your neighbors, and learn how your system works. Co-op Power had also pioneered a cooperative financing method that cuts through the usual roadblocks to renewable energy projects in poorer neighborhoods by leveraging member equity.

Individually, these initiatives and projects may seem to be on too small a scale to make much of a difference. But multiplied by thousands, with examples in nearly every community, they represent a quiet yet powerful movement.

Few of these efforts have gained national media attention. Most media commentators who address economic issues are focused on the prospects—positive or negative—of the existing growth-based economy. These projects don’t seem all that important within that framework of thinking. But in the new context of the no-growth economy, they may mean the difference between ruinous poverty and happy sufficiency.

The trends are already in evidence: as the financial crisis worsens, more people are planting gardens, and seed companies are working hard to keep up with the demand. More young people are taking up farming now than in any recent decade. In 2008, more bicycles were sold in the U.S. than automobiles (not good news for the struggling car companies, but great news for the climate). And since the crisis started, Americans have been spending much less on non-essentials—repairing and re-using rather than replacing and adding.

Many economists assume these trends are short-term and that Americans will return to consumerism as economic crisis shifts into recovery. But if there is no “recovery” in the usual sense, then these trends will only grow.

This is what the early adopters are assuming. They believe that the nation and the world have turned a corner. They understand something the media either ignore or deny. They’re betting on a future of local food systems, not global agribusiness; of community credit co-ops rather than too-big-to-fail Wall Street megabanks; of small-scale renewable energy projects, not a world-spanning system of fossil-fuel extraction, trade, and consumption. A future in which we do for ourselves, share, and cooperate.

They’re embarking on a life after growth.

* * *

The realization that growth is at an end raises many questions. Will the financial impact be inflationary or deflationary? Will some nations fare better than others, leading to protectionist trade wars? Will the “down-sizing” of social and economic complexity lead also to a substantial die-off of the human species? How quickly will all of this happen?

There simply are no hard and fast answers to such questions. The financial, energy, food, transport, and political systems on which we rely are complex, so it is almost impossible to reliably model their response to a shock such as a resource limits-imposed end to economic growth. The only reasonable response, it seems to me, is to act as if survival is possible, and to build resilience throughout society as quickly as can be, acting locally wherever there are individuals or groups with the understanding and wherewithal. We must assume that a satisfactory, sustainable way of life is achievable in the absence of fossil fuels and conventional economic growth, and go about building it. This will be the focus of my work from now on—and it is likely to be the work of the next few generations as well. Call it Transition, call it cultural survival and renewal, call it what you will, it is the only game in town for the foreseeable future.

* A recent study by Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) concluded, “[Our] analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of [the Limits to Growth] business-as-usual scenario….”

“I feel so overwhelmed,” he finally said, wondering aloud if political organizing could really make a difference. The young man said he often felt depressed, not about the circumstances of his own life but about the possibilities for change. Finally, he looked at me and asked, “Once you see what’s happening—I mean really see it—how are you supposed to act like everything is going to be OK?”

I hear such concerns often, from young and older people alike. Perhaps the questions are rationalizations for political inaction for some people, attempts to persuade themselves that there’s no reason to join left/progressive movements. But most of the people I meet who struggle with this question are activists, engaged in all kinds of worthy projects. They aren’t looking for a reason to drop out but are trying to face honestly the state of the world. They want to stay engaged but recognize the depth of multiple crises—economic, political, cultural, and ecological.

Some organizers respond to such concerns with upbeat assurances that if we just get more people on board and work a little bit harder, the problems will be solved—if not tomorrow, certainly within some reasonable period of time. I used to say things like that, but now I think it’s more honest, and potentially effective, to acknowledge how massive the obstacles that need to be overcome really are. We must not only recognize that the world’s resources distributed in a profoundly unjust way and the systems in which we live are fundamentally unsustainable ecologically, but also understand there’s no guarantee that this state of affairs can be reversed or even substantially slowed down. There are, in fact, lots of reasons to suspect that many of our fundamental problems have no solutions, at least no solutions in any framework we currently understand.

Some have challenged me: Why give in to such despair? My response: If honest emotional responses based on rational assessments lead committed activists to feel despair, why try to bury that? It’s better to grapple with those emotions and assessments than to respond with empty platitudes.

The damage to the ecosystem may mean that a large-scale human presence on the planet cannot continue much longer. The obsession with self-interest cultivated by capitalism may be so deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary identity that real solidarity in affluent societies is no longer possible. The deskilling and dependency that comes with a high-energy/high-technology society has eroded crucial traditional skills. Mass-media corporations have eroticized violence and commodified intimacy at an unprecedented level, globally.

None of this is crazy apocalypticism, but rather a sober assessment of the reality around us. Rather than deny the despair that flows from that assessment, we need to find a way to deal with it.

When I got home from that speaking engagement, I re-read an interview I conducted with lifelong radical activist Abe Osheroff, who was the subject of a documentary film I produced. His reflections on these subjects, excerpted below, have helped me struggle with my own despair. In my conversations with Osheroff, he never looked away from these difficult subjects, and he also never abandoned his commitment to politics, right up to this death at the age of 92.

Robert Jensen: I’ve heard you use the term “long-distance runner” before. Is that the key—the notion that we have to be in it for the long haul and not expect things to change dramatically all at once?

Abe Osheroff: Not the long haul—the endless haul.

RJ: What’s the difference between long and endless?

AO: Oh yeah, there’s a difference. We will never win the fight. We will influence the players. We may be able to make life better in many ways. We will blunt the shit that the government and the corporations throw at us. But we’ll always be coping with things. My view is that there’s no destination for the train I’m on. No destination, just a direction. No final station on that train. There’s no final destination, no socialist society where we will all be able to sit back and have a wonderful life. Bullshit!

RJ: No utopias.

AO: Nowhere near utopia. In fact, we’ll never get completely out of hell. But we can make some progress. In my lifetime, with all of its limitations, the movement has achieved some incredible things. Forty-some years ago it was still possible to hang a black person in Holmes County, Mississippi, and not get arrested. Right where I worked, the year previous, they hung a black person in public, with half of the fucking county eating box lunches and watching it. We’ve come a long way, in many ways. Women? Whatever the limitations they face, women have made a lot of progress in this country. Gay people? They have had their defeats, their ups and downs, but with successes, too. On all these things, at times the train breaks down, somebody fucks up the tracks, but it’ll get back on the track and go on. There’s no way in the world you can stop it.

In this country, one of the biggest problems we have as leftists is that there are so many strong reasons for not being an activist, in the sense that it’s possible for people—even if they’re mediocre, but if they’re aggressive enough—to make a good life in this country. It’s the easiest country in the world to become a millionaire. On the plus side, it’s also the easiest country to be a radical. The potential penalties are very small. I have put in less than six months jail time in a whole lifetime of radical activism in this country. I would have been dead 30 times over in 20 countries I can think of.

RJ: So, we have this affluent country in which it’s easy to avoid political engagement and obligation and most people are afraid of any risk. It’s also a country in which people—whatever their politics—are used to instant gratification. Then you come along and talk about a direction, not a destination, and the endless haul. Do you find it hard to ask people to be hopeful?

AO: I talk to people about getting rid of hope and faith. And the strange effect of it is that it makes them more hopeful. I don’t deprive them of that if that’s what they need at that stage of their development. But personally, I’m not hopeful because I think hope is a kind of religion, and religions don’t work. If you’re hopeful you’re going to suffer disappointments, whether it’s politics or your personal life. You can care about things, you can want things to happen, you can work to make things happen without being hopeful. The way I guarantee not being too disappointed is to not put too much hope onto things.

Take this conversation between you and me, for example. Sure, I hope that we’ll get something out of it. I want something to come out of it because I don’t have a lot of energy these days and I’m careful about how I spend it. But if this interaction were a total waste, I wouldn’t be upset very much. All that said, sometimes I wish I could be more hopeful. Sometimes I miss that.

RJ: Why is that?

AO: Because hope is comfortable. Because sometimes the way I think makes me very lonely, a kind of intellectual loneliness.

RJ: I use these terms differently. I make a distinction, as have others over the years, between optimism and hope. I’m not optimistic. If you ask me whether I think that U.S. economy is going to be fundamentally fairer in a year, I would say no. I’m not optimistic about that, because it’s a question of rational assessment, and things seem to be going the other way in the short term. But I think there’s a way to use the term “hope” that taps into our belief that—in that endless haul you talk about—humans have the capacity to be decent. I suppose it’s about having reasonable expectations, which is what you are talking about. I’m just using different words, perhaps.

AO: Yea, it may be a difference in how we use the same terms. Sometimes people I deal with describe me as cynical. I tell them, “Where do you come up with that shit? Cynicism normally leads to inactivity. I’m 14 times more active than you are. You don’t do shit, and you’re labeling me cynical? If anybody’s fucking cynical, it’s you.” Those people have yielded to society’s bullshit, and I think I’ve refused to yield. I’m not optimistic, and I’m not pessimistic. I’m none of those things. I’m me—learning, exploring, and, fortunately, along the way I discovered a way of living that is very gratifying. Let’s start with that. I live a gratifying life. I ask people if they want to live one. If they do, I’ll tell them some ideas on how it can be done.

The documentary “Abe Osheroff: One foot in the grave, the other still dancing,” has just been released by the Media Education Foundation at a special price of $19.95. To order, go to http://www.abeosheroffmovie.com/. The transcript of the complete interview with Osheroff is online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html. For more information on Osheroff, visit abeosheroff.org.