Note: The article "Fueling Change," published in the October 2009 issue, is currently available only in print.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute, is the author of The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and most recently, Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis. Mr. Heinberg is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on peak oil. He has been quoted in Time magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Elle; see more at his site, richardheinberg.com.
Oil is a non-renewable resource. In principle, we started running out when we started taking it out of the ground. And we’re just drawing down on finite stocks. It’s not a matter of being able to increase production until one day it all just runs out. 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. We’ve gone through the easy stuff, and all that’s left is the hard stuff. The only oil that’s still available, new oil, is in ultra-deep water, and arctic areas and countries that have such bad operating conditions that persons and equipment are in peril of they operate there, and so on. So we’re seeing country after oil-producing country pass its national oil production peak, and go into decline, starting with the US in 1970. At this point, most oil producing countries are past peak, so it just stands to reason that the world as ah whole will reach peak at some point. And the optimistic view on this was stated by the International Energy Agency chief economist just yesterday (August 2, 2009), who said that we have 10 years. He says peak oil will happen in 2020. The pessimistic view is that it has already happened. It’s arguable. There were individual months of production in 2008 that were higher than in 2005. So if you say between 2005 and 2008, you’re pretty safe. A new oil production project, the amount of expense that has to go into drilling in ultra-deep water, the oil from those new projects is going to cost $60 a barrel just in production costs. So we’re not going to have oil below that price for very long. The only way that oil prices go below production costs is if demand is falling dramatically, which is what happened over the past year with the collapse of the economy. But as soon as the economy starts to pick up, that means oil demand picks up, which means the price of oil has to go back up, which then puts a cap on economic activity again, and we get into this kind of destructive feedback loop, which is what we’re in right now (Laughs).
What’s in the Illinois basin is not the lowest quality [coal] as far as heat content, but it has a lot of contaminants, especially sculpture. So, we stopped using a lot of that coal as the result of acid rain and other serious pollution problems. Maybe we could find a way to scrub the sulfur out of the smokestacks before it goes into the air; we could build coal gasification plants that would be cleaner and so on. But the reality is that coal is a finite resource too, and we’ll probably see peak coal in the U.S. by 2030, or 2035.
We have to look at radical energy conservation as our first, second, third and tenth priorities. Then, when it comes to alternative energy sources, I don’t see any magic bullets on the horizon. Solar, wind…we have to look to renewable sources of energy. Things like nuclear, where we’re depending once again on a non-renewable resource like uranium, where we are running through our high-grade ores very quickly, it’s just not a good idea, because we will probably only get once chance at the energy transition. It’s going to be expensive; we’re going to have to do it while we still have some cheap energy to fund it with. So going after some kind of transitional strategy where we assume that sometime later in the game that we’ll make that transition to renewable energy … I think just doesn’t make sense. We have several different kinds of solar, wind, several different kinds of geothermal that are being experimented with. I’ve identified about 25 different potential alternatives.
In agriculture as with everything else—fuel-fed machines are a lot cheaper to employ than human muscle power. So we took most of the agricultural work force, and took them off the farm and put them to work selling real estate and whatever else (Laughs) and did all that work with machinery. But of course all that machinery has to run on fuel. So it made total economic sense at the time, but people were just not thinking ahead.
This has been shown again and again [that small-scale organic farming is more efficient than large-scale industrial “monocrop” farming], 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 (Laughs). The alternative is starvation, so … (Laughs). There’s not a big conversation. 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. And Obama made some good comments about it, but it translated to a garden on the White House lawn, which is nice, and the new agriculture secretary could be worse, Vilsack, but then you look at some of the other people who are being appointed and it’s just kind of the same old, same old. So it’s not nearly the leadership on the scale that’s needed, unfortunately.
We have this bizarre situation in this country where half the population doesn’t even believe in climate change. I don’t think there is any other industrialized country in the world where that’s the situation. You can certainly find authoritative voices that are sounding the alarm; there was an article just this morning in the Independent UK, the British paper, quoting the chief economist of the international energy agency. And of course he says peak oil is away, in 2020, but he’s sounding about as dire as you can in that position. I think the people in leadership positions don’t want to hear about it, because if you follow out the implications - the main implication is no more economic growth. Nobody wants to hear that, nobody wants to break that news to the public. No one wants to be identified with that as a politician. So it’s really hard to talk about peak oil or even climate change in its fullest implications without getting around to that somehow, so the easiest thing is just to avoid the topic altogether. And it’s not just true of politicians; it’s true of mainstream media.
[The documentary End of Suburbia] uses humor, and irony and satire, which is helpful. St. Louis is 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. I can think of a lot worse places to be during the period that’s coming upon us. I would say that the city needs to examine not only its vulnerabilities - and it should do that in a realistic way, I mean clearly the city relies on transport enormously just as all American cities do, and that’s going to be a huge problem - more public transportation that’s available, the better off people will be. But also look at the strengths, what the opportunities are. A city that size has to think in terms of neighborhoods. Portland, Ore. is a good example of this. They way they’ve developed over the past 20 years is really around neighborhood centers with good public transportation linking neighborhoods, so you encourage people to live and work and shop within their neighborhood, and then when you need to travel beyond hat, you provide public transportation. And that way, if you just need to go to the store to get a loaf of bread, you shouldn’t have to get in your car. You should be able to walk or bicycle.
It takes a while to create enormous numbers of jobs in new industries overnight. So unfortunately a lot of what’s happened with the stimulus money, in order to get it spent as quickly as possible and inject it into the economic system as fast a possible, they spent it on highway projects. Because every state, every county has highway projects that they’d had on their back burner waiting to be financed. So this is a way to inject money quickly into the economy, but it’s also a great way to waste a lot of money (Laughs). The suburbs really have to be reinvented if they’re going to survive. I don’t believe what’s coming is going to mean the death of the suburbs, but they’re going to have to become self-sustaining to a much larger extent. People are going to have to have working and shopping close by, and they’re going to have to have public transit nearby, and they’re going to have to start growing more of their own food in their backyards and front yards. The gardening is way up this year.
There are so many things we could talk about; one thing I’ve been focusing on a lot lately is the connection between the economic crisis and peak oil and the response to peak oil. The economic crisis has resulted in declining energy consumption. It’s resulted in fewer car purchases. More bicycles were sold in the last 12 or 18 months than all the cars and trucks put together. Which is not so good for the car companies. But that’s the thing - as long as we have our indicators for success on things like the health of the finance industry and the automobile industry, and so on, then as things actually start to go in the right direction, it will look like a crisis. And vice versa. So we need to start changing our goals and our indicators so that we see what’s going on right now, yes, there’s a lot of pain, people are out of work, people are losing their homes, but at the same time, the economy is starting to contract, which actually it needs to do (Laughs). And people are actually starting to do some sensible things in response.
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Christie Jonas moved to DeSoto from Affton with her husband Jason and new daughter, Sydney, in 2005. The family wanted to relocate to a rural area in order to pursue a lifestyle less dependent on oil; she quit her job as a graphic designer with Purina, and is now a stay-at-home mom and small-scale dairy goat farmer, though her husband still commutes to his full-time job in downtown St. Louis. Jonas spent most of 2009 working to get the DeSoto Farmer’s Market (buyfreshlocal.blogspot.com) off the ground for its first year.
My husband was the one who came across it [peak oil] first. He is vegetarian, and it was coming up on some of the sites where he was reading about vegetarianism. He started reading up on it [peak oil]. He also reads a lot of financial stuff. Then he got the End of Suburbia DVD and started watching that. And then one day, he came to me and he was just like, totally emotionally distressed about it, and so we talked about it and we talked about making a life change. We lived in Affton at the time and both worked downtown. We looked at moving to Springfield, and that wasn’t working out, and I was pregnant at the time (Laughs). So he was like, do we move before? Do we move after? And this was like during the housing bubble, and I was like, ‘I don’t want people coming to look [at the house] when I’m having a baby, I feel like if we wait until she’s born, it’s going to be too late.’ So we literally moved from the hospital to DeSoto. (Laughs.)
We were in the outer suburbs, between St. Louis city and the county. He still works downtown; he commutes in a Geo Metro from the 1990s (Laughs). I’m at home with our three-year-old. So yeah, my husband introduced me to peak oil and I started reading about and following [James Howard] Kunstler’s blog. Then I was on relocalization.net, and I’m a country girl, so this is like going back to my roots. It wasn’t hard to make the shift, but it’s like you live in two different worlds, the peak oil aware and then what’s going on around you, it’s like you’re in limbo, just kind of waiting. It’s like, are you waiting for a big event? Like with Pearl Harbor, there was a big event, and we entered World War II. It’s like okay, what’s the big event? But this a bunch of little bitty stuff, where you’re trying to connect the dots, and everyone looks at it a different way…
I grew up in St. James, so I grew up with a grandpa who gardened, and my husband, if he goes back and looks, his great-great-grandpa was a truck farmer, so it’s like the roots are there. We just came to this conclusion: we’re not living the right way. And there are things we need to do to prepare ourselves. So he’s been doing as much as he can, while still working a full-time job. He was much more into it than I was. I was coming from it from more of a food aspect. But once we got out here and things slowed down, I could open my eyes more. Before, he’d put on The End of Suburbia because he’d want to show it someone and I’d be ah, I’m not watching that.
We actually were close to three-quarters of an acre in Affton. We kind of got lucky there; I was always looking for land because I foster dogs. I worked for Purina, for Checkmark, which is the agency that does the design work for their packaging. For me, I guess it wasn’t that hard because I was a country person, so I just felt like I was going back to my roots. My husband is still working, and I think it is harder on him, because he has to work so many hours right now he feels really out of touch when he comes home. I think he hardest thing for me with the move is you talk to people you had worked with, or with friends that you had developed in suburban-city lifestyle. They think it’s cute, they think it’s interesting, but they don’t understand your motivation for it. That was the hardest thing for me. They’re like, oh, yeah, it’s cute and nice and interesting, but then some of those friendships kind of go away. But I think I have developed other relationships, you don’t want to be in that box where everyone thinks like you, but you start finding people who have similar interests, who want to learn about re-skilling and stuff like that. I think the farmer’s market has really introduced me to a lot of those people, so that’s been refreshing, because I really did feel alone for the first year that I was out here.
Melissa [Campbell] and I went down to Springfield and listened to Galen and the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance, and we really wanted to get a group of people together in St. Louis. We met at Bottleworks, and we talked about it and we introduced them to the concept. They’re all very interested in it. But I’m down in Southern Jefferson County, and they’re up there. You almost have to start at your own front door and work out. And St. Louis is such a huge area, and there are so many different groups within it, and so many different groups doing their own thing, it’s almost overwhelming to take on that large of an area. And it’s hard to find those people who are Peak Oilers to help you get going. Usually people who are into are really overt! But St. Louis is hard. I’ve tackled it from a different perspective; I started talking to people in my school. I brought in EarthWays to do presentations. I brought in the Extension Office to do presentations, at every grade level. We talked about recycling; I had a guy come do a demonstration for hydroponics, and growing herbs. So I have just been finding people and trying to bring them into the school.
In February, I was contacted through Local Harvest about the farmer’s market, that Healthy DeSoto was looking at starting one. I was like, I’m all for this, because this is an opportunity to like grow-the-grower type situation, and so that’s how, and through Healthy DeSoto, they’re into healthy living and active living, stuff like that. But taking on a farmer’s market and really trying to make it successful that first year is a lot of work, especially when that growing base is not already there. I think it’s been a little easier for us, being in southern Jefferson County, but when we started that we grew only horses and hay (Laughs). We have had good attendance, and the community seems to be supportive. But it’s still work—we feel like we have to keep having events so that we can one, pull vendors in, and showing that we’re trying to find a way to bring consumers in, because if we don’t it will fall apart, that’s my biggest fear. People don’t know how to eat healthy. They don’t know how to cook. I’m having a hard time finding time to cook because I’m trying to make the farmer’s market go, and I’m trying to find time to harvest, and my husband’s working downtown, and it’s just like, sometimes you’re just overwhelmed. It’s so much; if you can keep the goal in sight, and say this is how much I can do right now, and just keep working towards it. That’s what we’re doing, so that’s why St. Louis has kind of fallen off the map for me, it’s got to start here in my own town.
We have dairy goats, so I milk and sell to a few people. And then we have chickens, so we have fresh eggs and I also sell those to a few people. And then we do have the garden, and we expanded that this year to include extra to sell, and we sold plants at the beginning of the year as well, and we tried to give away plants to people. Another thing Healthy DeSoto had done was start a community garden—you want the people to do that garden versus finding the volunteers to do the garden. I would like to see something like what the Well-Fed Neighbor has done to happen in St. Louis, a gardening initiative. Because people don’t realize that if something were to happen to our transportation system, or if there is a flu outbreak —pick one almost out of the hat! (Laughs) that automatically affects your food system.
We had a lady show up in May at the farmer’s market, she was mad at us because we didn’t have bell peppers. (Laughs.) And we were like, we’re sorry, bell peppers aren’t available in May. We’re not going to produce row, and buying food and bringing up here, because then you miss that seasonal aspect of it. It’s amazing that people are like, I want fresh produce and I’m going to eat healthy, but that stuff should not be available all year round. Because of cheap oil, we have farm subsidies and we have farmers that are plowing up hundreds of acres and still not making it. The small farmer’s gone, and the ones who are successful have to have a job off of the farm in order to pay for the farm. They’re like, “Oh, I sold $3,000 worth of produce this year,” and it’s like … I don’t know. It’s very frustrating. Yesterday I was at one of my low points and I felt like I was beating my head up against the wall. But someone’s got to keep trying. People are more able to listen to it from a food perspective than an oil perspective. But even the people who are buying organic, I don’t now if they understand if they realize what the organic farmer has to go through to get that produce.
One of the coolest things about our farmer’s market is that people barter. There have been people whose spouse lost a job, and they come to the market & make enough to buy groceries for their family. People help each other, they help put up and take down tents, if we know people are having hard times, here’s a dozen eggs, we’ve only known each other since may but on Saturdays we are a community and we’re supportive of each other. There’s a lady who does basket weaving. One day she had angora rabbits, and she was there spinning right off the rabbit. The kids were like oh my gosh, what is this animal? They’d never seen one. And kids will say mom, what’s this? They’ve never seen okra before.
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Galen Chadwick and Ruell Chappell are both part of the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance in Springfield, Mo., a grassroots organization that is working to establish “a road map for bringing back a main street economy, re-localizing our food supply, and establishing energy independence.” This year, they launched the 1,000 Gardens Project, which aids urban communities in establishing food gardens, as well as a rural project, the Well-Fed Neighbor Farmer’s Co-op. Find them online at wellfedneighbor.com.
RC: We in the United States can no longer feed ourselves. That’s it in a nutshell. The group that Galen and I co-founded—and actually we have a member, Melissa Campbell, who is in the St. Louis area—we’re going to be out there hopefully to speak to people, she’s trying to get an opportunity together and we’re going to hopefully go up there and help her get a St. Louis branch opened up. We work with Diana Endicott of Nature Farms in Kansas City. And our goal is food sovereignty and energy sovereignty for Missouri. It’s not only ambitious, it’s the only way we will be sustainable. The Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance in Springfield is dedicated to three things: local food security, that’s our first one. Second is relocation of the economy and third an adherence to a viable fossil fuel reduction plan. We started the 1000 Gardens campaign at the first of the year, and it’s been very successful. It’s designed to educate the people inside the cities to our plight, because most of them have grown up getting their food from a grocery store, and they just don’t know that there’s a problem. Secondly, we have just now finished forming the Well-Fed Neighbor Farmer’s Co-op. That’s our rural project. The whole idea is to put farmers back in business in an approximately 100- or 150-mile radius, all the way around Springfield. Here’s the magic thing that happens that no one ever talks about. When you do that, all of sudden, you’re growing food on the outskirts of town, that food does not come from anywhere other than your locale, so basically you’re supplying local food to the local people who in turn buy it because you need it in your schools, hospitals, prison systems, to purchase the same food, which is fresh, natural, it’s healthier, there’s just no downside. At the same time, you’re pumping hundreds of millions of dollars back into the community, building an economy. Because that’s the point—we have no economy. We don’t produce anything. We don’t grow anything. It’s all based on lies. We’re in the position we are now because of greed and lies ... in a nutshell, that’s what we’re doing.
We’re trying to do this as quickly as possible, because if the supply line that brings us our food to us, which, most food travels a minimum of 1500 miles, if anything happens to that food line, we’d be dead in the water. The City of Springfield has on hand approx three days worth of food. Everything is JIT [“Just-in-time”] now. That’s great if you’re in control of your resources, but we’re not.
GC: I’ve grown and experimented with agriculture since the 1960s. I’m part of the original back-to-the-land movement ... I’m also a master gardener. Like most gardeners, I’m self-taught; I’ve just experimented with it. You never stop learning. There’s no one who knows it all. You can never even begin to know it all. I’m a woodsman, I’m a man of the land, I’ve had a nontraditional lifestyle, and I’ve lived in Australia, Europe, Mexico ... but I think that’s enough. I have experimented with heirloom varieties for many years, and seed-saving, as well as vertical gardening techniques, rather than horizontals. If you take a very stiff wire mesh, cattle panels of welded steel rods, they’re 16 feet long, and if you bend them into an arc, you’ve got a tunnel of about 7 ½ to 8 feet tall. It’s a hoop and you can connect these end to end. For instance, people don’t know that pumpkins are self-supporting, meaning if you have a strong enough trellis you can have pumpkins growing in the air. It’s much easier to get to the insects, to keep them clean and give them a nice shape. Before I left here, I was actually squishing 50 to 60 pounds of tomatoes, different kinds of heirloom tomatoes, squishing them into a bucket, letting them rot and ferment for three days, and then I put a garden hose in, and then I let the pulp rises up out of it. The seeds are a little heavier, and they all settle to the bottom. You pour the water off, and then through a strainer, and I have a whole handful of clean tomato seeds. One tomato might have 100 seeds in it. Each one of those will turn into a plant, and one tomato plant can produce one ton of tomatoes the next year. There are fewer people now in the United States growing our food than there are in federal prison. We no longer have any wheat reserves, we think we are feeding the world, but the last mountains were sold in 1997, that’s 12 years ago, the strategic reserves for the American people have been sold. Our public launch [for 1,000 Gardens] was January 3. One hundred people gathered at the top of the Hammonds Tower, here in Springfield. We had a wonderful meal, entertainment and three guest speakers, and that was the launch of it.
RC: Local food to us means security. In a time of trouble, we would have food here. Right now we’re surrounded by what Galen describes as a fescue desert. One hundred miles in any direction, you want to drive out of Springfield, that’s all we have. Hay to feed cattle—that’s what we grow here. We’re trying to set something up in St. Louis. The basic thing that we are interested in, is locally grown food, we have food security. If an ice storm comes, or this could just be because of the flu. And then we’re out of food. We have no food. After seeing the way the government handled Katrina, I don’t want to lay my bets there when we’re hungry. If we have locally grown food, we also cut our health costs. There is no cheap food. You either pay for it on the front end, or pay the health care costs on the back end. We definitely believe this can impact the health of our community. And with locally grown food, we can build an economy again; the government, or anyone else, should have no problem with us rebuilding a food-based, vibrant local economy. There’s just no downside.
GC: It’s an urban strategy and a rural strategy. So you meet at a local pizza shop, and there’s master gardeners, and this is mostly led by the women, who show the kids square foot gardening, how to mix their soil, tell them about worms, and they each have cups that they fill with the soil that they’ve mixed, and the seeds they plant are for tomatoes, peppers, and various things that you can put on the pizza. Then they take these home, and they start growing these at home, and this is how we are reintroducing gardening skills into the urban environment, and legitimizing it. The party typically lasts three hours, including the pizza that comes, and all that, and the kids are in rapt attention. The moms are just thrilled to death, the kids are actually learning something instead of just filling up on sugar, and they’re going home and they have their little baby plants that they are going to take care of. This is where we have to start. The goal is to get it into the schools. The rural strategy goes far beyond farmers making 10 cents a pound for their tomatoes. What if we get a dollar a pound, or a hundred dollars a pound? We’re talking about farm restoration, one farm at a time. So our teams for the co-op, if they want to joint he co-op, we’ll meet them at the market, we’ll also talk to them about how to restore their farm. When the average age of Missouri farmers is in their sixties, we’re just saying—the strategic overview of our situation in our vulnerability is utterly alarming.
One hundred years ago, Missouri had 700 varieties of apples. Let’s put this in perspective: 97 percent of all the fruit and vegetable varieties growing here in 1909, in the state of Missouri, are extinct due to industrialized agriculture, according to the World Food Atlas. The commonwealth, people gave each other these seeds. They cultivated them for centuries; they brought them from countries all over earth. Ninety-seven percent of the commonwealth, the true wealth that we the people have, has been destroyed and is gone forever. The abundance, we were a farm state that as so prosperous, we put on a World’s Fair in 1904, it’s still one of the top ten ever given, our farmers were so prosperous they could build houses and buy land without the use of banks. The farmer was wealthy and everything else flowed from that, all of the artisans, all of the dye makers and cart wrights, everyone had a period of prosperity from 1888 to 1948. That is called the golden age of Missouri agriculture, and it was the golden age of Missouri. We had peace, we had abundance, and we had prosperity. We fed all of our people and millions more besides, with mules and with steam. Now, with computers and with tractors and these huge claims of efficiency, one out of every six Missourian is on federal food stamps—the number one state in the union. And 100 years ago, we set all time records for the diversity and the abundance and the wealth of our agricultural base. In all of history. We have been in decline for 95 years, and the people who are now in charge have the same mentality and outlook of every politician and decision maker who has made it this way, through political power and greed and selling out until we live in this vast food desert. Not just us, can you imagine what it’s like in St. Louis? Why would anyone knowing this want to stay there one more day? Any urban population that’s thousands of miles from your food, three days after the food runs out, there will be one million 77 thousand Missourians rioting in the streets, saying feed me! What are you going to do? Well, if you’ve thought it down the road, you’ve got plans to deal with that, don’t you? Our rural strategy is farm survival and township level self sufficiency, so maybe not every farm is self-sufficient like it was for all of American history, but at least we have a grain mill, we have a kerosene squeezing plant so we can run our kerosene refrigerator off the grid, we’ve got a steam engine, we’ve got everything that the people within that township needs to survive, and then all the townships within that county would be coordinated at the county level, by our coop, so we have everything we need to ensure each others’ survival. Which is the whole point of the well-fed neighbor alliance. Do you know our motto? Your best defense against hard time is a well-fed neighbor.
RC: Our biggest push is to involve women. They make 95 percent of the purchase decisions across the board. Women carry the culture, women speak approximately 4,000 more words per day than a man. They refer their friends, they refer generationally, in other words a woman will refer her daughter ran her mother, and you guys spend the money. You the women vote every time you go to the grocery store. And if you go to Wal-Mart, you’re voting for the demise of our local situation. So basically what we are trying to do is make women aware of how important they are. The largest economy on the face of the earth is American women. Bar none. American women are the largest single economy on the face of the earth. As of this year, surpassed men in ownership of small businesses. They stand to make more money in the next decade than men, as far as accruing wealth. They are in control of this situation. They need to write their congressmen. They need to talk amongst themselves. They need to change to their buying habits. They need to go to schools and say I want locally grown food fed to my child, not this crap. They need to go to the hospitals and say I want locally grown food fed to my patient, not this crap. The men won’t ever, ever get it done. It has to come through women. They have been taking over the world quietly for some time now. But to look back in history and say we as a gender changed the course of the United States and saved our country, I can’t think of anything better to go to your grave knowing you did this movement will be as important as our declaration of independence. We are literally declaring our independence from corporate America. We work from the center out. In our first 100 days, we spearheaded the creation of 300,000 new gardens … just giving you an idea. This is more than just a peak oil or climate change strategy. After you’ve convinced two percent of the population, now what?
GC: By the end of the year, we can safely say that our urban project, 1000 Gardens, will just keep going. And we want to grow that and grow that. During World War II, approximately 40 percent of food eaten by people came from their yards. There’s real value in getting people to put more gardens in. It’s easy to say I’m going to create 1000 gardens in the next 100 days … Ruell and I bring an exception. It’s not about informing people; it’s about awakening them. We’re a household name down here now, in 6 months.
RC: The Well-Fed Neighbors Alliance is very loosely constructed. We have no president, no bank account; it’s all organic. We hope that one day we can just melt into the well-fed background.
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Mike Black is a graphic designer who lives in rural Missouri with his wife; after selling their home on the west coast, they were able to buy a little homestead outright, where they garden and raise chickens and goats. He posts as “Pops” on peakoil.net, and maintains a website, mygrandkidsfarm.com.
I didn’t really know that much about the whole Transition Town deal, and I just spoke to Galen just a couple of days ago, for the first time. I’ve been in and around the whole peak oil things for quite a while. I was one of the first posters on peakoil.com, and got the “Planning for the Future” sub-forum started there. We’ve been talking about these sorts of things since 2004, when we started it up. It was one of the first sites that had a message board. There were other sites out there, doomery sites like dieoff.com and Wolf at the Door and some of the real doomer sites. Peak oil has gotten … I guess message boards get carried away after a while, it’s kind of a low point as far as I’m concerned. It’s gotten real political and real confrontational. Maybe people are just bored! (Laughs.)
It’s one of those things; I’m 53, so I was going to school in the ’70s and it was, you know, zero population growth and the whole start of the green thing, and I had read some stuff along those lines like The Club of Rome and Limits to Growth and a lot of those sorts of things, so I sort of knew about it in the back of my head, but like most baby boomers I went off to make money (Laughs). I think it was ’98 or ’99, there was an article in Scientific American on peak oil. That’s a super mainstream publication; it’s not some fringe publication. I started looking around and it was around the time when message bards were kind starting up, and really plugging along, it simmered on me for a while. After 9/11 I decided, it would have been my time, I started to look around—what caused this to happen? It’s not because they hate us for our freedom (Laughs.) So around that time, there were quote-unquote survivalists sites out there, and I’m not really a Bible-thumping gun-toter sort of guy, so I didn’t get along there. I just kept looking around. There were a couple other message boards. I read Wolf at the Door, Dieoff, Life After the Oil Crash, Matt Savinar’s site, and I read the doomery ones. Reading about how many ways you’re going to die, on one hand it doesn’t do a lot for you (Laughs). I couldn’t find a place out there that did. There’d been a couple of other sites that tried to start up a message board format, and they didn’t really catch on. The Oil Drum is another great site, but it’s a lot more academic.
Along about last part of ’03, early part of ’04, peakoil.com came online. It was just exactly what I was looking for. Always been—not a survivalist, but I’ve always been someone—in my younger life I was in construction. Well, when you’re in construction you’re either working a lot or you’re not. We always had canned goods stuck away in the pantry, and you know, we always had a garden, my folks were obviously great depression folks, dust bowl Okie people, so I was raised to be more self-sufficient, not going to McDonalds every night (Laughs.) So when peakoil.com came along, I jumped right in there. I’m the oldest active poster on there, longwinded guy that I am. I’m Pops. I assume, my first one or two posts on that site, I wasn’t there to debate peak oil. I’m there to talk about what we’re going to do about it. And so that’s kind of been my place there all along. There’s all these arguments about when we peaked, when we’re going to peak, is nuclear power, algae, going to be the next thing. But I was more interested in planning for the future after peak oil.
There are only … it’d be really hard to separate out the whole psychology of this whole deal. There are a lot people who play at it, it’s a computer game to them, overnight Armageddon. It’s an excuse to tell their wife that they’re going to go out & buy another weapon. Seriously, I’ve been around this stuff for so long on the Internet. There are so many personalities involved. Even myself. Right around the same time that peakoil.com started up, we decided to move. After we set down and made our little list of our requirements, this was the perfect place for what we could afford. Well, you know, I could say that, I moved out here and I’m a self-sufficient farmer and blah blah, I’m going to raise some chickens and put in a garden because I know that peak oil is coming, well, it’s not necessarily the entire truth, but it sure had an influence on what we did. So we moved out here, and both 40 acres and a 100 year old house and now we raise some dairy calves, and a little garden and chickens and pigs and stuff.
I think the Well-Fed Neighbor is a great idea; it’s a way to talk to a wide range of people. It’s not just organic and tofu and crunchy granola. They’ve mixed in that little bit of self-reliance, you know, we Missourians have to import foreign food, and a little almost jingoistic kind of thing in there. It’s better than Transition Town if you ask me. I’ve been talking about what to do about peak oil for five years on the Internet, and peak oil is the no 1 site for peak oil news out there. I don’t have a bunch of little groupies all around the world (Laughs). It attracts a certain personality, the Transition Town, that kind of hippy dippy grey ponytail crowd, which really I am a part of, it’s granola, but it leaves out my neighbors here that who thinks that global warming is something al gore came up with to make money. The Well-Fed Neighbor deal, it recognized that and broadened it out, which I thought was really neat.
I don’t know how many posts I’ve made on this site, and I’ve seen people post over and over, how do I get my spouse on board? How do I talk to my co-workers? There was a guy who worked for a planning department, I think he was in California, all the way out there in the land of fruits and nuts, who was going to quit his job because he couldn’t get—this was a small ag town—Merced county or something, and he couldn’t get the people on the planning department to even listen to him at all about peak oil. This has been several years ago, before the Hirsh report and before Bartlett in the congress, and now Matt Simmons is all over TV and magazines and newspapers. But heck, my kids are the same way (Laughs.) My kids are the same way, let’s be real. Technology will get us out of it. (Laughs.) They respect me, but they think I am a bit overboard, I say that one hand, but on the other, they may go out to eat three times a week, but they all have a few cans of pork and beans in the cupboard too. Sometimes I feel like a cheerleader, sometimes I feel like a counselor on the website, people, when they first start reading about it—they get something from the mainstream media, or someone will tell them something about it, they’ll Google it, and they start reading about it and they get freaked out. And then other people say, shoot, I’ve got to run off to the hills and build me a bunker, but not everyone can run off to the hills, they can’t be a small-time food producer—you can grow a garden, but not everyone is going to be a small time farmer. You have to prepare for everything, including that nothing will happen. You know what I’m saying? Something’s going to happen, but it’s not going to be nearly as dire as a lot of people say.
I talked to a gal from CNN last year who wanted to come out and film me and al this jazz, and I said, no, I don’t want you to. I’ve got a little farm, I took early retirement and I try to do things here that will help me out, I get on the peak oil website and talk about this, that and the other thing, but I don’t want you to come and portray everybody that believes that energy is not always going to be as cheap and available as it is now as some Unabomber run off to the hills, chicken-choking’ mud-grubbing’ homestead back-to-the-land-Little-House-on-the-Prairie-geek. That’s not what everyone’s like, that’s not the solution for … any percent of the country, really, having a small little place, being able to grow some food, is a great thing. It’s like racing go-karts; it’s what you want to do, its what you like to do.
The number of websites out there, is staggering, it’s amazing how much has been started up in just the last couple of years. It’s really hard, people talk about conservation, the people who are the biggest doomers will say, that the more you conserve the cheaper the price will be, the more everyone else will use, so it’s kind of like what happened to oil in the US in the ’80s after the embargo in the ’70s early ’80s, we got real energetic (Laughs) about reducing our use; they didn’t even put insulation in house walls prior to the embargo in the ’70s. Which is crazy! So the price of oil went down because we were using less. And so we ended up using more. That’s when, the last part of the ’80s when the Cherokee and the big SUVs all started becoming popular, when oil was down again to 15 bucks a barrel. So conservation doesn’t necessarily help the world, but conservation can help the individual live a less susceptible to big bumps in oil prices. I don’t drive into town; I work from home. So I don’t have a commute. I shop once a month at Sam’s Club or something, so I don’t go to the grocery store every day. I don’t run my A/C, I use firewood to heat with, I have a couple of box fans to cool the house with, I try to use less energy because last year the average person used I don’t know 1800 bucks more for energy than they did in ’07. And the next time oil spikes again, they are going to be right in that very same place.
You can conserve and know it will help you and not necessarily the entire world, which is not great, but you can see that I am a bit of a doomer, the Well-Fed Neighbor is probably the best mitigation strategy that a grassroots group can implement, I think, is increasing local food production in your own backyard, and like they talk about on their site, a bunch of little coops all around Springfield in this case, that would supply Springfield with food, instead of shipping apples in from California.
The permaculture deal is really interesting to me, and I go on a couple of different websites, one website, this is a doomer website from way back, but doomer in a nice way, (Laughs), if you know what I’m saying, like it would be great if all 7 billion of us were hunters and gatherers (Laughs), and all farming is the root of all evil. I try to be an accepting person, but a lot of that stuff verges on religion to me, and it’s silly. If you can get a tomato to grow, fine! It doesn’t matter which way the wind is blowing, or what your Feng Shui is. (Laughs). My dad was always out in the garden, so I learned from him. But when he got older, he’d go down, he’d buy a two-dollar sack of steer manure and a six-pack of tomato plants, he’d cut that thing open, stick some tomatoes in there and that’s how he grew his tomatoes. It kept the gophers, out in California, it’s a bad problem, it keeps them out of the bottom of your tomatoes, and he grew great tomatoes, whatever it takes! It just got to the point where he just couldn’t hoe and weed the old fashioned way.
It’s going to be easy to tell if your job will be affected by higher priced energy. But it’s even harder to tell if it won’t be. I think the more that anyone can do to be more resilient, is the Well-Fed Neighbor’s term and the Transition movement’s term. Don’t be commuting 100 miles a day. Don’t be, I guess there’s a lot of don’ts… mostly, don’t be so dependent on cheap energy.
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Laura Santora and her husband run Mountain Creek River Resort, out near Lebanon, Mo. For the Santoras, the issue isn’t so much peak oil, as it is climate change and sustainability. Find them online at mountaincreekcanoes.com.
We’re between Lebanon & Camdenton. We run a resort, we’re on the Nangua River, and we have cabins and stuff like that. We’re not in any city, so we’re near Lebanon, but outside it.
I got involved when they first introduced it [Well-Fed Neighbor] to Springfield last December. I don’t get to a lot of events down there but I keep track of what they’re doing and I work closely with the people who started it down there, Aubrey and Galen and some of them. And actually before they even started that, we were planning on turning this into an eco-lodge, and we’ve been working on that for a year and a half now. We’re really excited to have a network of people like that, that we can turn to for advice and help, and it turn help out in what they’re doing.
I spoke to a guy who does the eco-radio show in Kansas City last winter and he had heard of the Transition movement going on in Springfield, so I gave him their contact information, and then talked a little bit, they’ve got something’s going on in Kansas City now.
We grew up in Kansas City, my husband and I did, but we’ve been down here for nine years, and running it ourselves for four years. We took it over because we thought it would be a good way to teach children about the value of our planet and how to protect our natural resources. The Missouri Conservation Department has done studies that show that kids who have memorable experiences out in nature end up growing up to be more earth-conscious. It’s mostly families that come down here now, though it’s also some scout troops and some youth groups that come down, and we also have the 20somethings that come down. We use biodiesel now, there was no recycling when we took over. On our website, there is a page that summarizes all the changes the resort has made.
I’m only 27; the reason the green movement has taken off is I’ve been hearing about this since I was in elementary school, they told us about global warming, the schools were teaching it to us, we had someone come to us in school and show us how you could make fuel out of soy, that really made an impression on me. That’s just been my passion for my whole life, the green stuff. And fuels are definitely an interesting part of that. It goes not only how we fuel our vehicles and our homes, but all of our trash, what we package things with, and I love the relocalization part of the Transition movement. That’s one of the things we’re really focused on in our community garden here in Lebanon, where people get almost everything from Wal-Mart. The stuff people have is coming from around the world. And so by starting this garden, the people who are involved have been able to get their produce locally. We are the organizers for the community garden, we’re 30 minutes outside of town, the one we did this year was mostly people in these rural areas. Most of them have some land, so they’ve started their own gardens, but a lot of them didn’t know how to garden organically, so it’s been kind of a learning tool. Then we’ve been trying to get one going in Lebanon for the people in town, there’s some issues with land there, we tried all last winter to try to find land there and couldn’t manage to find any close enough. It’s bigger than a city garden. It’s probably only a quarter acre, it’s a learning tool. We plan on making it bigger, but we had to retill the land. We all share the work, and we share the harvest, too. But it’s not to feed everyone, which is why everyone’s starting their gardens too. We’ve lost a lot of the old knowledge, but a lot of the people out here are still connected to it because they’re still connected to the land. But I think a lot of the people in the cities think about where their food comes from.
We’re also doing an interesting event, the Green Mountain Eco-Festival. [Note: that festival took place September 25 through 27; go to greenmountainecofest.com for information on next year’s event.] We’re raising money for all of these projects that we’re doing. We want to turn it into a completely sustainable business and residence, with buildings made out of reclaimed materials, and alternative energy and all of that stuff. We’re going to have over 30 bands out here, and a whole bunch of activities & workshops. We have gardening workshops, we’re building a kids’ play castle out of straw bales and paper crate, we’re doing a rain barrel workshop, we’re doing yoga, belly dancing, hoop dancing, that sort of thing. The kids’ area, they’ll learn how to do recycling and healthy snacks and how to listen to Native American storytellers, we’re going to read The Lorax. We have experts coming out to talk about solar energy and energy efficiency and we are going to do a bioregional congress, with David Haencke, who is setting up bioregional congresses, since the ’70s and ’80s. A lot of experts and individuals get together and talk about all of the environmental factors in their bioregional, they do it based on watersheds. We need to be doing this know before all the knowledge is lost. We’ve talked to some people who were around during the Depression. Even though it was a really bad time, it seems like they all have a lot of hope for the times we’re going through now and the future, they know they lived without much and they made it through.
I have two kids, a one-and-a-half year old and a five year old. I guess I became more dedicated [after they were born], but I’m concerned about all of the animals, all of the species, all of creation. And I guess the earth will go on, even if we’re not it. (Laughs.) We’ve been doing an earth day celebration every year, but we want to make this one a bigger one that more people from the region can come to. I think people want to believe that everything’s OK, and they don’t want to change what they’re doing, at least in this country. There’s a lot of publications and TV shows out educating people, I guess I’ve been talking to people about these topics for so many years, I’ve found that just over the past couple of years, people have been much much more receptive. When you mention the small steps, they’re more willing to do the hard things after they’ve accomplished those.
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Melissa Campbell lives in North St. Louis County, and is deeply involved, along with Christy Jonas, in establishing a St. Louis peak oil group similar to the one in Springfield. She is one of the moderators of the St. Louis Transition page, transitionmissouri.ning.com.
For a while, I’ve wanted to be self-sufficient in my lifestyle, and I came across an article that Galen had written in Springfield when I was down for Thanksgiving of last year. It really encompassed a lot of the things I was feeling, which led me to a book by Rob Hopkins, Transition Towns: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, I think is the title. He has some really neat concepts about how to get other people involved, so I threw it onto some of these groups that I’m on to see if anyone in the area was already working on something like this. I got a response from Christy Jonas. She’s really neat. I wish she lived closer! She’s got a lot going on in her life, but she’s really good at organizing things and speaking with people, and very approachable and she’s getting a lot done in her area. She contacted me and said, wow, there’s someone else out there that’s thinking like this, and she got me really excited, and we went down to Springfield and attended one of their meetings, to see how they were doing things. She was like, well, what do we do next? And I’m like; lets throw it out there, have a meeting, and see who comes. Because St. Louis is such a big area, I didn’t really know how to approach it, except to just throw it out there and see who was working on it already, and who was interested in this kind of stuff. For our first meeting we had a pretty good turnout, we had it at the Bottleworks. And we were exactly prepared to be doing it all, but we were like, let’s just go with it and see what happens instead of sitting around mulling it all. My big thing is trying to find a centralized meeting place where we could maybe bring in some food, and show movies if we want to.
When I first came across all this was in November, Thanksgiving, so I have this as my little market. Christy and I started doing stuff in December; I want to say that meeting at Bottleworks was around February. We had our first meeting. We’ve only had three since then, and there were a lot of really neat people from different backgrounds, some of them are interested in the energy aspect, others are interested in the food aspect. So I just I’m not quite the person to pull it all together, that’s not my talent. I’m more about getting people networking with each other, keep the website going and put up information for people to read.
For me, I look at this from the sustainability side, the whole aspect of it. My husband and I just purchased some property out in Leasburg. We got a little over 13-and-a-half acres, and that’s my step towards being sustainable for my own personal self. And I’ve tried to couple that with helping other people try to become more aware and networking with each other, the end goal is not going back to the stone ages, but trying to be kinder to each other and to the planet so we can sustain what we have.
People don’t want to go back to the stone ages, grinding my own wheat, and making my own clothes, which I can completely understand—we can find a happy balance. We just have to get more people on board with different skill sets to complete the picture.
[With a St. Louis event], I’d like to do 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. And then you let people know you’ve got to take it back to, like I live in Florissant. So I feel like what I probably should have done, I should have started by reaching out to the people that I know, all the way from St. Peters to Christy in DeSoto to people in South City, just a huge spectrum of people, I probably should have started in Florissant. You know, talk to a couple of people, and show some movies, like the Future of Food, some of the food aspects of things, The World According to Monsanto, to bring awareness. I’m hoping we can get together to have this big event so that people can take that information back to their community and let it spring from there. It’s going to be an awareness-raising event, to introduce the Transition Town concept, how you can go into your local community and talk to people, and find people who are interested and get things done, like Christie has done with the farmer’s market, that was a huge thing for her.
Food security is huge. A lot of people—for me, I don’t want genetically modified food, I don’t want weird stuff in my milk, I don’t want pesticides in my food. I think a lot of people are cashing in on it, but it’s also raising awareness, which is why the food trends are going that way, for that reason. Yeah, I want healthy food, but I don’t want to spend ten dollars for a potato! But if I grow tomatoes, and Bob grows cucumbers, it’s easy to be spurring it from that direction. On the energy side of things, in Springfield they’ve run across peak oil, I’ve even come across it here, but I never looked at it as a diving factor for people, but it is. Some people get peak oil and believe in peak oil, and other people think it’s just a scare tactic to control. And it could be both at the same time, it doesn’t really matter because 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?
We are still in the initial stages as far as what to do. We’ve looked at building an Earthship, using materials that are found locally and naturally, like tires for the walls, or positioning the windows to bring in sunlight in the winter and keep it out in the summer. The solar panels with the batteries, I get the food side more than the energy side because my mind doesn’t quite work that way. But the Earthship collects rainwater, where we don’t have to be on the grid, where we’re just generating our own electricity. There’s even, there’s this special, there’s a guy using algae, which grows really quick and you can convert it to gasoline. That was very interesting, so there are solutions out there that people have come up with, that people are too afraid or sold out, this technology is just being suppressed. So for me it’s just trying to find people who are like-minded so we don’t have to be so scared anymore.
One of the things that one of the people I’ve met along this journey, Chris Clark, he’s on the Transition Site too. He and I were, and another lady mentioned that she had a sister that had some property, or was a property manager, down by the Botanical Garden, she’s got 17 lots that are empty because of the bubble bursting, and we approached them with the idea of using that land to start a CSA, community-supported agriculture. And we’re trying to become a 501(c)3 too. But we wanted to make a garden in the city where people can come shop, or buy a share, pick their own food, or come help grow the food … just get something going in the city. The food aspect connects with more people. And then once you’ve got them at that point, you can help them understand, you can take this a step further, and you don’t have to be dependent on working that 9 to 5 job crazy hustle bustle. You can actually sit back and enjoy life a little bit, instead of paying that $200 electric bill every month or scraping your pennies together to buy food at McDonald’s. You can live a better life. That’s ultimately what I would like to see, people coming together, maybe first through the food aspect, getting to know their neighbors, and communicating with each other and then taking it a step further into the energy world. So Chris is running with it, he’s doing some research, up in Chicago they’ve got a really successful one, so he’s trying to put a little more thought and research into it, I’ve been trying to help him, but he’s down in the city. So it’s hard for me to be too much of a help, because I’m home-schooling my daughter, and I’ve got this property out there that I’m trying to turn into a CSA/Sustainable school, and I work part-time.
I feel like I’m being torn between helping the people I’ve already contacted versus thinking I just should’ve started something in Florissant and let that be the example. There’s not any this is what we ran into, and this is how we approached it. There’s no advice on how to deal with a big city.
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Denny Henke grew up in St. Louis, lived in an intentional community in Memphis for 12 years, and has now returned to his family’s land in rural Missouri, where he’s started up a little permaculture homestead for himself, his siblings and his nieces and nephews. You can read about his ongoing adventures with food forests (and guinea hens) at ourtomorrow.blogspot.com.
I lived in Memphis for 12 years. It was an attempt at urban permaculture. For me, it was really the environmental stuff, and it started back in the early ’90s, when I was in college. I sort of was coming at it from the angle recognizing that oil and coal were limited resources; we knew that back in the ’60s and ’70s, if not before then. But there was that rebirth of Earth Day back in 1990, when it sort of came back for a while, and it’s sort of been going since then, but there was a surge back then, and of course that was during the first Gulf War, so oil was being talked about to some limited degree as a resource that we didn’t have here, the way we had had back in the ’70s. So that was when I first started really thinking about it, and pondering both climate change, though I think the ozone layer debate was much more prominent then, though climate change was also being talked about. I was coming at it from that angle. I hadn’t heard the term “peak oil” until around 2005. I started coming across that specific term to describe that whole phenomenon … I came across James Howard Kunstler and his writings. He had a—ha, ha—not a negative, but a cynical approach, a crankiness. Really honestly, I think a lot of people who go through this process, they get cranky because you’re trying to tell people about this, you’re trying to tell your family, your friends, your loved ones, this is probably something we should be paying attention to, and they don’t really want to pay attention to it. So you do get cranky.
A couple of years ago I had got Kunstler’s book, and that was one that I thought people could take in more, because it’s fiction, and I had loaned that to my sister. I’ve got a sister to a brother, I’m fairly close to both of them, but my sister and her brother they are a little more open to ideas about peak oil and a little more rustic in the way that they live. They got chickens a bit after we talked about it, they lived in a log cabin, not anything they built, but nevertheless they’re outdoorsy type folk and he had his own small business, or he did, and they’ve always lived on the edge as far as their finances, like a lot of people, and always struggled. I think they were a big more open to things because of his precarious position in the larger economy. As things unfolded over the course of ’07 and into ’08, he started seeing it with his situation, he was right there at the pulse of it, so they decided, they decided to take this on, I was definitely was doing it because I am a firm believer in what’s coming. They were doing it on a certain way like well, it will be a nice place to have for the summer, and if things to get bad, then we have a backup retreat, where we have fruit planted and potential for gardens and that sort of a thing. Even to this day, they’re not nearly as pessimistic as I am but they also live in a bubble. My sister doesn’t watch the news. She really purposely shields herself, and makes it a point not to get involved. She’s involved in her school and her PTO, but she doesn’t really make any effort to make any effort to understand what’s going on, though she typically takes my word for it to some degree, and I never really know how much of it is her nodding her head to shut me up, as opposed to truly understanding. But she really enjoyed that book, World Made By Hand, and that opened up the possibility in her mind, well, if things do get as bad as Denny says, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. We enjoy it when our electric goes out, you know, it’s a different kind of living but we could adapt if we needed to it. So they’re on board with it to a certain degree, we’re going to build their cabin next. It’s waiting in the wings for the fall or the spring. We got the processes rolling as far as the garden and the fruit trees and all that that you saw on the website.
I was born in Spanish Lake, and then at some point my folks moved further south to the Arnold area, and then after college I ended up going to Memphis, and my grandfather had set this land up back in the ’70s. It was like a hunting club, guys from St. Louis would come down and get drunk and fish and hunt. And so we got lucky, basically, he had this land and he left it to us. So we have this opportunity to do something with it if we choose to, and it seemed silly not to.
I left Memphis in ’04, when my brother and his wife were about to have their second child, and my plan was, I needed a change from Memphis, my plan was to come back to Missouri and couch surf between my siblings and my parents, and stay for a couple of months maybe, and then to move on to Vermont or Maine. I had a few different ideas to where I would be going next. But, at the back of my mind I think I knew, when I left Memphis there were so many things going on with bush, and the war, and I just felt something might be ready to come on and I wanted to be closer to my family. And yet I had this pull to move on somewhere else, and so the longer I stayed, the more I got pulled into different projects, things like renovating my sister’s house. I helped them renovate their basement, I helped them with their business, and after a while it was like OK, I’m getting stuck here, so I either need to move on or figure something out. That was after Katrina, that’s when I really started paying attention to peak oil, and that’s when I really started moving away form going out of state to coming down here and actually developing something for us.
Yeah, I think that’s a constant debate in a lot of people’s heads. I mean, Vermont, Burlington is a cool place, there’s a lot of cool places in Vermont. And there are a lot of beautiful places in Maine. And just all sorts of places I could go, I’m not married, I don’t have any kids, I have a dog, so I’m free enough. It would’ve been pretty simple for me to go and start a life just like I had in Memphis, either fit into a community or develop a community…I like the idea of being part of a community. I don’t like the idea of isolating myself. Wherever I am I want to be a part of the larger situation. It got into my brain, and was something that was starting to kick in right around Katrina, the Oil Drum was a website I had discovered around that time, and that was also a turning point as far as the timing of things.
It’s a tough call. You don’t really know; no one knows how it’s going to play out. Will the countryside be calm and a little more peaceful and a little less violent? Possibly. But at the same time, maybe people will come together in cities in ways that we haven’t been used to. I think America has gone through this period where we’ve become more violent society. Our generation, starting with my generation on down, we’ve gotten used to not necessarily handouts, but a certain expectation of quality of life. The further you go back towards the Great Depression, you have people that didn’t have those expectations and they were harder working people. They weren’t afraid to get out and get sweaty in the woods or in gardens…we were a much more agricultural country. And today we’re office workers and people who tend to shy away from that kind of hard work. What happens when we have a crisis with our food system? Are people going to get nasty, or are they going to get together and cooperate? Living in a cooperative in Memphis, it was a great experience. We wanted to set an example as to what people could do as far as being cooperative and living together, growing food and try to paint a picture of what’s possible other than the typical single family dwelling with two housemates or three housemates, but an actual cooperative endeavor with food production in mind.
I’m not really paying rent here, I built the cabin with cash that I had. My expenses, not having any children, I’ve lived frugally for many years, I do a little bit of website and database work to make an income to buy my groceries, but my income, I live on $60 month. Which is crazy! Most people spend that in a few days. I need enough to feed my dog; I feed my chickens, but they feed me. It’s give-and-take, but back to the point of not being a lot of work. It isn’t a lot of work once you get it set up. There are many days when I spend nearly half the day doing next to nothing. That’s the beauty of permaculture, and you’re paying attention to energy flows, and it’s like the greenhouse and the chicken coop, I collect my rainwater and that saves me a trip over to the hose. So many that we can do to make things easier, once it’s set up, it really isn’t a lot of hard work in that sense. It’s more difficult, you look at what most people have in suburbia. At least my experience of suburbia, and there are very few gardens. There’s grass cutting. That’s a tradeoff, if you give up some of your lawn and replace it with a garden, that’s a bit less grass cutting that you have to do. But in a typical yard, what is there besides grass cutting? What do folks do outside? It’s really not a whole lot other than walk to their car to go to work. In our neighborhood, some people had pools, so there was a little bit of work there, so it is a little more work, but it is doable, which is why I like Sharon [Astyk]’s website as well because she really brings it down for people and presents it, like in Independence Days, if you take it in little bites, you don’t have to start with a whole system, you can do a couple of small garden beds.
I think there’s a balance that you have to find with being sensible and being open and involved, as a culture I’m not sure what the turning point was in American, but it seems like we went from a culture of community and extended families, you know, the Waltons, where people helped each other, there was a time when we helped one another and that was fundamental to our daily life. There was a time when we were citizens, when we had obligations to our democracy and to our neighborhoods. And we allowed ourselves to be turned into these consumer-bots that no longer voted, no longer cared about community, and just went about working and buying VCRs and DVD players and iPods and whatever. There needs to be a balance between taking care of your own stuff to the best of your ability and then at the same time, balancing that with helping other people take care of their own stuff, sharing the knowledge, whether it’s free workshops and classes, or like Sharon does, classes online or maybe it’s having people out to your place and saying we can do this, this and this, or maybe I’m trying to get stuff going where I can have people coming out here, I’d like to go into town, there are these things that are really popular in Australia, they’re called perma-blitzers were people go to other peoples houses, and instead of making things pretty, though that might be a part of it, the point is to really over the course of a couple of days, really help them get on their feet with a system.
People value website and database skills, and I’m one of those people, but those Depression Era lady who does the cooking classes on YouTube, I really love her. And that’s the interesting thing, there’s sort of this overlap where you have people using the technology in the best way—to me, YouTube, that’s what it’s good for, is learning things and sharing real stuff. It’s fun to watch people doing tricks with four-wheelers and boomerangs, but the YouTube and the web in general, it’s fullest potential is when it’s being used to help people enrich their lives and survive. So her show is, the more the better.
As an anarchist, I decided long ago that our political system was way to broken to fix, and that we needed a whole new rewrite of the operating system so to speak. Someone who is successful in this system has a certain sort of scumminess. On the other hand, of course I’m hopeful.
No one wants to deal with what we have in front of us. It’s much easier to pretend, which is why I love the title of Al Gore’s movie—there’s so many inconvenient truths. If we can turn away from them, hell yes, we will. And if there is any way we can kick the can a little further down the road, and put of the reckoning, we will. It’s unfortunate, I do agree with the folks who say that the more we kick it down the road the more difficult it will be when we actually deal with it.
I got involved in the Fredericktown Revitalization initiative; I’ve been running articles in the paper (The Town Crier) and things like that. I am definitely getting people who are receptive and open and seem to see what’s coming, a lot of them are not necessarily coming to me for advice, but I definitely get this sense of yeah, we’re there with you, it’s not looking good and what can we do to make things a little more solid for our community. I like that concept of resilience, which you hear a lot with the transition towns, let’s build resilience into our community. For me, of course, that starts with food, and I think that’s why a lot of people do focus on the food because it’s something that’s empowering. You don’t need a government hand, whether it’s a hand out or some sort of force; it’s something we can all do with almost no money, just a few packets of seeds an a little bit of effort. And we can start building that resilience, even if it’s just a little every year. Every little bit is going to count, I think. If we have a couple more years, in a way it might be good. If we are kicking the can down the road, if we use that time wisely, I think it’s a good thing. That’s yet to be seen.
