Illustration by Mark Shaver
This spring, as an unprecedented number of Americans busied themselves planting six-packs of tomato starts, the Post Carbon Institute released a study titled The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post-Carbon Food System. Co-authored by Post Carbon senior fellow in residence Richard Heinberg and Dr. Michael Bomford of Kentucky State University, it's bracing reading for anyone who considers eating a nonnegotiable activity. Our current methods of food production, the paper explains, are completely petroleum-based, in ways that go far beyond just fueling tractors and combines. Farmers no longer spread animal manure on their fields, but instead use natural gas–based nitrogen fertilizers; most pesticides and herbicides derive from gas and oil. From irrigation to delivery, our agricultural system assumes a never-ending supply of cheap, abundant petroleum. Which is an unsettling prospect for anyone wellversed on the topic of peak oil.
"It's not a matter of being able to increase production until one day it all just runs out," Heinberg explains. "There's a natural kind of low-hanging fruit phenomenon here; we go after the best-quality, easiest-to-access resources first, and leave the hard stuff for later. The only oil that's still available, new oil, is in ultradeep water, and arctic areas and countries that have such bad operating conditions that persons and equipment are in peril if they operate there." Heinberg cites a study released August 2 of this year by the International Energy Agency's chief economist, Dr. Fatih Birol, predicting a peak in oil production 10 years from now. Heinberg says that's the optimistic view, and "the pessimistic view" is that the peak occurred between 2005 and 2008. Either way, he says, this will mean expensive petroleum. Which by extension, as we saw last fall, means expensive food—and hungry people in poorer countries rioting in the streets.
The Post Carbon Institute's food and farming paper recommends a shift to hyperlocal, organic food production on small-scale farms, citing a University of Michigan study that found this method not only resulted in greater land-use efficiency, but increased crop yields. "This has been shown again and again, but economists aren't terribly impressed by it, because that assumes we have to have more people on the farm, and that's not economic efficiency. But the alternative," Heinberg states bluntly, "is starvation. People hint around these things. President Obama read a piece by Michael Pollan before he was inaugurated that made a lot of the same points as the Food and Farming Transition paper." But, he notes with some worry, there is still no serious political discourse on these issues on a national level.
On the grass-roots level—on peak-oil websites and message boards—there is plenty of discourse going on, most of it related to how to survive in a world where oil is $200 a barrel. The Transition Town movement, founded in the U.K. in 2005, is now global and focuses on helping communities foster self-sufficiency skills, from permaculture to canning jellies to mending your own socks. Last fall, Missouri staked its own claim in the transition movement with the launch of the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance, a loose collective whose motto is "The best defense against hard times is a well-fed neighbor." Founded by master gardener Galen Chadwick, the group's goals include helping Missouri establish local food security; relocalizing the state economy with small, organic farms; and creating a viable fossil-fuel reduction program for Springfield and other Missouri communities. This January, WFNA launched the 1,000 Gardens Project (their goal was to help start 1,000 urban gardens before Earth Day; they exceeded that goal and are still planting), as well as the Well-Fed Neighbor Farmers Co-op, On the grass-roots level—on peak-oil websites and message boards—there is plenty of discourse going on, most of it related to how to survive in a world where oil is $200 a barrel. The Transition Town movement, founded in the U.K. in 2005, is now global and focuses on helping communities foster self-sufficiency skills, from permaculture to canning jellies to mending your own socks. Last fall, Missouri staked its own claim in the transition movement with the launch of the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance, a loose collective whose motto is "The best defense against hard times is a well-fed neighbor." Founded by master gardener Galen Chadwick, the group's goals include helping Missouri establish local food security; relocalizing the state economy with small, organic farms; and creating a viable fossil-fuel reduction program for Springfield and other Missouri communities. This January, WFNA launched the 1,000 Gardens Project (their goal was to help start 1,000 urban gardens before Earth Day; they exceeded that goal and are still planting), as well as the Well-Fed Neighbor Farmers Co-op,which aims to build networks of small farms around Springfield that can become the basis of the city's food supply.
"Local food to us means security," says Ruell Chappell, who, along with Chadwick, feels such a sense of urgency that he volunteers for Well-Fed Neighbor full time. "Right now, we're surrounded by what Galen describes as a 'fescue desert,'" he says. "One hundred miles in any direction, you want to drive out of Springfield, that's all we have." Chappell takes this scenario to the next level: "So if an ice storm comes, or a flu outbreak, then we're out of food. We have no food. And after seeing the way the government handled Katrina, I don't want to lay my bets there when we're hungry."
When 1,000 Gardens launched January 3, 100 people gathered at the top of the Hammons Tower in Springfield. Among them were Christie Jonas, a former Affton resident, and Melissa Campbell, a resident of Florissant. The pair is working together to establish a similar, food-based transition effort in St. Louis. So far, they have set up a Transition Missouri Web page, have facilitated meetups at Schlafly Bottleworks, and are working to get the WFNA to St. Louis for "one big thing to raise awareness, to find out who out there has the skills, who out there is interested in learning these skills, and just get a better picture, in a huge, big sweep," Campbell says.
But for Jonas, who moved to De Soto in 2006 with her husband, Jason, and brandnew baby, Sydney, the realization came early that she needed to focus on her immediate community. For one thing, she's one of the organizers of the De Soto Farmer's Market, which is only in its first year; that takes a lot of work. So does the pursuit of a less oildependent lifestyle, something the couple is doing deliberately in order to prepare for an energy-scarce world. When SLM spoke to Jonas, she had just spent a week canning tomatoes: "I did 24 pints between Saturday and Sunday of tomato soup, and I've got pizza sauce and pasta sauce and green beans and pickles and all that jazz." The couple also raises dairy goats, which Jonas tends—she grew up as a 4-H kid in St. James, Mo.—and maintains a garden. They moved to De Soto, Jonas says, because it's near a waterway and the railroad line, which will both be great assets should interstate trucking no longer be feasible. Even so, her husband still commutes to a day job downtown in what Jonas laughingly calls "a Geo Metro from the '90s." Ironically, it was he who first saw the peak oil documentary The End of Suburbia and had to win her over to the idea; Jonas, who was pregnant at the time, says she knew if she gave birth in Affton, they'd be stuck for a while, so they decided to just make the jump. "We literally moved from the hospital to De Soto," she says with some amusement. (Heinberg says St. Louis, so long as it addresses public transportation challenges, won't be a bad post-peak city: "It's an area that has good soil, relatively good weather. There's no reason that the city shouldn't be self-sufficient in food and energy," Heinberg says. "I can think of a lot worse places to be during the period that's coming upon us.")
Campbell and her husband, on the other hand, have purchased acreage in Leasburg, where they intend to build a homestead, but remain in the suburbs. Though they're closer to St. Louis, Campbell says she wishes she had "started in my own backyard and grown things out from there." Indeed, the whole focus of the transition movement is hyperlocalization: How close would Florissant be to St. Louis if one had to travel there by 19th-century means? Campbell learned about peak oil last fall when she went home to Springfield for Thanksgiving and read about Well-Fed Neighbor. For her, she says, peak oil isn't about food or fuel; it's about sustainability. "It doesn't really matter," she says. "We all know what a stranglehold gas can have on our lifestyles. So why would we want to continue to support that, whether it runs out tomorrow or 100 years from now? Or even if it never runs out?"
Still, one of Campbell's projects has been working with another St. Louis resident, Chris Clark, to research CSAs, with the ultimate goal of setting up a big urban garden in south St. Louis where residents could buy shares as well as learn about growing their own food. Jonas says unequivocally that peak oil is a food issue for her; after reading the Post Carbon study this spring, she says she became so concerned that she sent it to the University of Missouri Extension program. "No one ever got back to me about that, other than 'Thanks for sending that to us,'" she says. "But where does sustainable agriculture and the state of Missouri fit into using less energy? No one understands that this needs to be a driving cause—not just that it is a good thing to do for the environment."
That sort of denial, Jonas says, makes many peak-aware people like herself feel as if they're living in two worlds. "The hardest thing for me," she says, "is you talk to people you had worked with, or with friends that you had developed in that county-suburban city lifestyle. They think it's cute, they think it's interesting, but they don't understand your motivation for it. So some of those friendships kind of go away. But I have developed other relationships. You start finding people who have similar interests—the farmer's market has really introduced me to a lot of those people."
But when asked why it's been so difficult to assemble a focused group in St. Louis similar to the one in Springfield, neither woman cites a lack of people interested in peak oil—rather, it's the city's size and fragmented structure. But Jonas in particular has been encouraged by the success she's seen in De Soto with the farmer's market, even though that's the reason "St. Louis has kind of fallen off the map for me." By discussing the end of cheap oil as it relates to food, Jonas says she's managed to turn what could be a very grim conversation— including speculation about what would happen if an oil shock suddenly wiped out our "just-in-time" deliveries to grocery stores— into one that's empowering. "There was a lady at the market spinning wool right off an angora rabbit at the market, and the kids were like, 'Oh my gosh!' They'd never seen one," she says, laughing. "And they were asking, 'Mom, what's this?' Because they'd never seen okra before."
And more important, Jonas says the market has fostered a deep sense of community, where people began to spontaneously barter and trade. "There have been people whose spouse lost a job, and they come to the market and make enough to buy groceries for their family," she says. "Even though we've only known each other since May, people help each other. If we know someone's having a hard time, we'll be like, 'Here's a dozen eggs ... '"
As they say in Springfield: Your best bet in times of trouble is a well-fed neighbor.
Stefene Russell is St. Louis Magazine's culture editor and the executive editor of AT HOME. For more information on Transition Missouri, go to transitionmissouri.ning.com.
