Peak oil crossover

[goodcompanion]

I’ve had an interesting time over the last week posting on a forum devoted to discussion of life after the oil crash. There seems to be a lot of interest on the past of that “online community” in getting committed to food production. There is also interest in draft power, but most don’t seem to have a good way to approach it. It is not a teamster/farmer-dominated discussion.

Interesting to note that that forum has a quarter of a million posts to our 1700 or so. Granted it’s been around for a couple more years than dap.com. You can check it out at http://www.peakoilstore.com/forum/index.php. Some of the threads are devoted to topics that seem to me to be a little on the panicky side, e.g., stockpiling food and supplies, building an arsenal, but others are about members’ (sometimes beginning) efforts at gardening and husbandry.

At any rate I take this as yet another sign that change is afoot, and that those who have learned to accomplish useful work with animal power will be called to share their understanding with many who seem increasingly eager to learn it.

[Carl Russell]

I find it interesting how different people are preparing for the uncertain future. I think like many of the posters on DAP, for the most part I live in a little tiny world of soil, animals, and other people who live in that world. (I live in my own little world, I know everyone there!?!:confused:)

But what interests me the most is that now people in the other world are talking about limited and disappearing natural resource. Much of the conversation seems to be about tweaking the current system, or protecting critical infrastructure, or investing in stockpiles and reserves.

I really believe that our solutions will come from skills, skills of personal engagement with food production, and resource use. On our small farm, our most sought after products are skills. However, when we try to start that conversation with urbanites concerned about peak oil, it often ends with raised eyebrows.

We are really entrenched in a culture where people have a hard time envisioning how they can personally provide for themselves without purchasing products. This is one of the biggest drawbacks to draft animal power, it is much more about skills than about fuel.

I also look optimistically to the future because there is a rapidly growing huge group of people who are looking to share initiatives and solutions. For hundreds of thousand of years, we have found incredible return through interaction and shared purpose with a group of people who are invested in a shared initiative.

They call that social capital now. This little forum is serving a great purpose in that regard.

Carl

[goodcompanion]

Carl, right on, I am with you one hundred percent.

Things look pretty positive seen through our lens. The sun will continue to shine, grass to grow, work to get done, regardless. But I am sure you must consider that beyond our sphere things don’t look so promising, and people are reaching for answers. If an oil collapse occurs as some authorities on the subject predict, i.e., in an ugly way, then answers might not be all they are reaching for.

The questions that I ask myself are, can we thrive using skills as our antecedents did? At what level will we thrive? Farm, village, county, state, region, nation? How do we plan to interact with people from the next farm, village, county, state, nation over who are, possibly putting it mildly, not thriving? Your optimistic skills-centered world-view, and mine, may be overrun. How do we best use our skills and our optimism and exhibit leadership, if I may use so big a word, at this moment in time to make for a better transition?

Not to put it too bleakly, but I want to take as many of my family members and neighbors as possible into the new solar era. That’s hard when many still deny that such an era is coming.

[Carl Russell]

My perspective on leadership is a bit archaic. I have long held that taking care of myself and setting the best possible example of how I see that I can meet my needs, and those of my family in the future will be the best that I can do. If I do a good enough job, then some people will also see what I have been trying to do, and they will share in the effort. Leading ones who don’t see, is as you say, difficult. Although I know what you’re getting at, that the toe dragging is apt to weigh heavy on us. The future is not simply going to be a matter of getting enough food and energy, but also a significant period of growth (regrowth) in human social interaction. I am not looking forward to having fights over stores, land ,or other resources, but that has long been a strong component of the human psyche, and if current affairs are any indication, we have not learned yet.

“Forgive them for they know not what they’ve done,
But as sure as the sun will shine,
I’m gonna get my share of what’s mine,
Then the harder they come, the harder they fall,
One and all.”

One way I try to lead is like this weekend I made a quiche for a local food recipe contest. It was turkey egg-ricotta-onion-bacon-sausage-yogurt with a potato pancake crust. Everything grown on the farm. I had to buy the salt and pepper. We eat like that a lot. To most people, even though the local-vore movement is big, local is not that local. I make sure that my discussion about food is about more than ingredients, and some people get it, but it is as you say, they can’t really believe in what I see as fundamental facts about food in the future.

I often refer to the tree in a drought that grows with every ounce of its capability, until there is such a demand for water and nutrients that leaves, twigs and branches die off. Being natural organisms, I think humans are prone to the same strategy in difficult times. As we look forward, the shear misery of under-satisfied needs is going to be a big chore.

Cheers:), Carl

[ngcmcn]

Erik and carl,

You both have touched on a can of worms i think of often and most times just emerge a bit bewidered from with out any clear cut answers about what might happen after an serious oil crisis in this country. We all use some energy and thats okay to some degree we are all part of the system that exists at the moment i’m not sure how one could avoid it. I sometimes get into these rants about whats in food at the grocery store, or commercial milk, but “Who Cares?” What it comes down to me is personal choice of what i eat. Somewhere out there is a fictional book by an Englishman(Burroughs?) about a serious oil crisis, mideast blowout, factory farm collapse,local militias battling the gov., small farm livestock confiscated(nais) because of hardy breeds out side the commercial loop, resurgence of wind power, local cooperation………a good read. I’ll find the title.

$7 a gallon fuel would be a blessing to agriculture in the N.E. making small farms valuable and profitable, and once again a vital part of the community. Carl, like you say, leading by example is a good thing, and there again, I don’t have to buy the prostaglandin milk.

Skills,such as figuring out what to do when i live in N.J. and suddenly i can’t get fuel………….well, this creates a need to develope new skills. Personally i don’t think the majority of Am,ericans are going to bugde until…….it hurts. Before Y2k, i had people busting dwon my door because i have horses, and use them to get around some of the time. Mobility in this culture in regards to community, is a mixed blessing.

Lots of thoughts. Glad to be reading what you guys express after a long day.

Neal

[goodcompanion]

I think however the age of oil ends and the new solar era comes, the ethical implications will weigh heavily on those that saw the writing on the wall early on. Carl, you and I live in a state with the natural and social resources to do all right or even better than all right should people here merely re-adjust their priorities. We can advocate for animal power, eating more locally, and so on, with the knowledge that it can work—here.

I’ve lived in six countries, earlier in life, and I can’t help but think in broader terms even though these days I almost never leave the farm. We can look at people already contemplating hoarding and arming, and say, “Well, how small-minded, merely thinking on an individual level when positive action can easily be taken to see that things will never come down to a gunfight over a case of rice-a-roni.” At least I have that response to such people. But by extension, couldn’t then a town, a county, a state, be faulted for considering only itself, rather than what role it might play as a part of a whole?

What are the ethical implications of advocating a type of power and traction that may work for those that have animals, water, land, functional social structures, but which offers little in the way of hope or help to perhaps 90% of the u.s. population where and how they are currently living?

[Carl Russell]

I have long held that there is a difference between self interest and selfishness. Survival is dependent on self interest, selfishness is a recipe for disaster. As I am truly only a small part of a huge undertaking, I am prepared to help, educate, feed, heal, whatever, but I am worthless without my foundation, my assets, my skills, my lifestyle. By separating myself from the masses in terms of lifestyle choices, I don’t assign them any judgment that will prevent me from sharing the group undertaking, I simply see it as fundamental to my security in the here-and-now, and it’s my best shot at the future.
I am a very extroverted person. Because of that, I am easily drawn into relationships with other people. I know my neighbors by the sound of their cars, and I find myself drawn to other people’s experiences. That being said, in spite of those reflexes, I have focused most of my life on simple physical, earthy enterprises, which I have ended up doing mostly by myself. Although I am now basking in the warmth of peer validation, most of the time it has been a lonely undertaking, and I know, and have known, that in my heart of hearts that this is what I need to be doing.
Although I realize that what works for me, may not solve anything for others, I can offer nothing if I don’t have what I need. There are as many perspectives as there are eyeballs, and we each can bring important pieces to the solution.
What we are doing on small farms may be no match for the coming disaster, but I realized one day while daydreaming in the woods that I was looking at an old back-furrow, a remnant of an old field in the deep woods, and it dawned on me that there are important messages left all around me from the scratches the old-timers left on the land. This farm we’re building may only end up as a message in the bottle for some distant future tribe trying to find answers to wrestling a living off this rock.
Carl

[ngcmcn]

Ca
There’s a warmth in a 96 year old school teacher’s eyes, that rings of your furrow in the woods. A knowing from days past. A knowing of the present.

Neal

[Crabapple Farm]

@goodcompanion 1516 wrote:

What are the ethical implications of advocating a type of power and traction that may work for those that have animals, water, land, functional social structures, but which offers little in the way of hope or help to perhaps 90% of the u.s. population where and how they are currently living?

We can not hold ourselves responsible for the choices that have been made by millions of people over the past hundred and fifty years. The majority of that 90% not in a position to benefit from animal powered farming could have made different choices in their lives, and still can make choices. I may be hard hearted and cruel, but I will not weep when I hear about refuges fleeing the drought-stricken southwest when that time comes. What were they thinking when they moved there? Just as I have no sympathy for folks who bought a big house in the suburbs a few years back and now their house isn’t worth much and it costs a lot of money to fill the SUV they commute into the city to work (where they used to live).
The best thing that we can do is to help people realize that there are choices that they can make. Most people do what they do because that is the option that they see open to them – and most people are so used to blinders that they have lost their peripheral vision.

As a side note, I was somewhat dismayed by the response I got from the local Peak Oil/Sustainability group when I directly addressed their question about how many people our farm could feed entirely, if it came to that. They were reassured to hear that I thought our land base (though not current labor) could feed about 100 people, tops. I guess it made them think that the food situation locally wouldn’t be so bad. We’ve got over a hundred current customers, most of the folks in that group aren’t current customers, there are about a thousand folks in our town, and most of the folks in the group were from neighboring towns. I’m not sure what made them think that they’d be part of that 100. There’s a couple folks with cattle, one grain farmer, a blueberry farm, and many home gardeners in town in addition to us, but no one with the skill and knowledge set required to actually provide lots of people with a complete diet (I think we’re probably closest, and we have a lot of learning still to do about grains and other storage crops). People heard me say that the land base was ample (current population around here is about the same as it was in 1900), but didn’t hear the bit about the skills not being here.
-Tevis

[goodcompanion]

When living in England I walked a footpaths from Sussex to Wales, a little of it on old sections of Roman road. Fascinating that those roads went from point to point exactly as the crow flies without regard to landscape. Terrain, after all, could be re-engineered, but those few minutes it would cost a courier to gallop around a hill instead of over it were indispensable to the empire. Some little arched bridges are still intact and used by present-day farmers for their stock and haywagons.

A chain of couriers could carry a message from Segontium (northern welsh garrison city) to Rome itself in three days at full gallop. A chain of trumpet blasts would assure that a rider would be on the road with a fresh horse to take up the message from the previous leg without the message itself ever decreasing in speed. Today you can barely drive that distance in three days! Of course they rode all through the night, too.

These roads are still around not because they are still used but because they aren’t. The high speed internet of its day, this network collapsed with the empire because the local populace had no particular need of instant messaging, as it were, and cut their roads along the path of easiest travel, as they had done before.

All of which is an elaborate aside.

Totally agreed with Tevis and Carl that skills are the real critical resource. And I think that we take the stewardship of those skills, and their dissemination to the willing, seriously. Of course we have to balance that effort with taking care of our own endeavors. Right now the prospect of the hungry at our doorstep is theoretical to us (though not so theoretical in Haiti, Cameroon, Somalia where food prices have already broken down the social order). I think it’s very hard to say for sure what role any of us can or will play in events to come.

In social upheavals, everyone’s assumptions are often turned on their heads, even those that saw it all coming. This is hard for us because we do what we do and are where we are out of a desire to craft our own life and live by our own terms.

I try to remind myself of the wisdom in Frank Zappa’s two-word commencement address: “Stay loose.”

[Author]

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