Ardi makes Lucy look like a Newborn

Lucy is 3.2 million years old. Ardi is 4.4 million years old. She walked upright, was taller and weighed more than Lucy. Her brain was about the size of a modern chimp's.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/science/02fossil.html?hp

This extension of the human lineage an additional 1.2 million years into the past is a large statement in our presence on this planet. Our actions, motivated by our biology, have inextricable links to our environment and the longer those links stay intact, the more powerful they become.

What is the Point of Ascent?

According to Bill McKibben in Deep Economy, there was a period of time in which economic growth made everybody wealthier.  That was a big part of the purpose of the growth.  The standard of living went up for everyone as businesses expanded.  McKibben argues that we hit a point where we should have stopped focusing on growing our economies because of limits in resources.  Our economic gauges are recognize health only when they see increased economic activity.  To have the same amount of activity as last quarter is unhealthy. 

 A less important gauge is the average wealth of the people of an economy. McKibben thinks that the Business As Usual model of growth is now geared to centralize the wealth rather than make everybody wealthier. In fact, “though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it.  The median wage in the U.S. is the same as it was thirty years ago.  The real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily: they earned $27,060 in real dollars in 1979, $25,646 in 2005.”  Where did that growth go??  Well, the top one percent in the U.S. in this 30 year period perennially “captured more of the real national gain in income than the bottom 50 percent.” 

 What is the point of all of it?  We are not wealthier and we certainly are not happier. The richest Americans are as happy as the Pennsylvania Amish.  The G8 + 5 is not some bliss club.  Costa Ricans are happier than the Japanese, says McKibben.  The French are about as happy as Venezuelans.  Homeless people in Calcutta get some of the lowest happiness scores in the world, but their score doubled when they moved into a slum.  That new score was equal to a sampling of college students from 47 countries!

What is a society that does not seek economic growth as a central focus of progress?  Is it happier than this current paradigm of human existence?   

Peak Oil?

The NY Times proves to provide a corporate, business as usual perspective in an op-ed today about peak oil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Read the comments on the op-ed for more educated perspectives on the issue.

Let the Light Shine Down

I built this lamp last week as a gift to my girlfriend who wanted to redecorate.  In a small apartment with only a drill and a wrench, I had to get creative with the materials.  The base is a old classroom chair I found on the street.  The small shelf is a cutting board that supports a baby lemon tree planted from a seed inside a lemon I bought.

 

Midwestern Wind

The NY Times blog Green Inc. posted a blurb about wind farms in Missouri. 

And an online discussion took place.

I live in central Missouri and my electricity comes from a rural co-op. I’m in my third year of purchasing eight units a month of wind energy at $3/unit. It’s not much, and it’s (i think) coming from of state (Kansas) but for $24 a month I am weaning myself from coal. It will be really nice when that same wind energy is being generated in Missouri.

— Vanessa

#2 Vanessa’s post is hopeful. The renewable energy industry can change the power dynamics of one of our most important resources. Large corporations control citizen access to all major resources, but this has always been an exploitive, extractive, and destructive system.

Creating rural co-ops, where the energy is produced and controlled by the citizens, for the citizens, we develop a resource stream that empowers the people who both produce and depend on it. Do not let large corporations come into our towns and try to steal what is rightfully ours and then sell it back to us!

As we power-down our societies, let us empower our communities. Join the discussion at…

http://descentculture.blogspot.com/

Samuel

Samuel Kraft (#5),

The romance of the co-op concept is deceptive, at least from a clean energy perspective - rural co-ops are far more regressive when it comes to green energy than either regulated private utilities or independent generators. Granted regulated utilities have in most cases been driven by legislation and regulation to do what they’ve done, but in some ways that’s the point, and it’s been for-profit, competitive independent producers who have led in development of new clean energy sources. In most cases the last bastions of new coal-fired plant construction are rural co-ops, and those same co-ops have used their taxpayer-subsidized cost of capital to freeze out the independent generators who are innovating new clean sources of generation. In most states with renewable portfolio standards, co-ops have successfully fought to be excluded from them, and they’ve in most cases they’ve used that exclusion to continue with business-as-usual. You need to revisit your romantic notion of the inherent virtues of rural co-ops.

— Michael HoganIt seems as though I do not really know what I am talking about when I spoke about rural co-ops.  This guy Michael dropped some authoritative sounding jargon on me.  But he did not sound all preachy like I did, which is the more important part of my post anyways.  I can't believe he did not start his post with a compliment...that is rude.

The Military will save us, right?

The NY Times published an article today titled, "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security."

Through statements from people in the military, the article tells us that more extreme weather patterns will create unlivable conditions in the already poor parts of the world, causing conflict. Because of the one dimensional quotes, the reader is left to wonder if the U.S. should provide aid with our military, or protect our right to resources and borders.   Forget that our current levels of resource consumption are causing the problems in the first place, we need to hang to our lifestyles with every bullet we've got! 

They published this on a Saturday.  Nobody reads the paper on Saturday!  As Richard Heinberg says in Powerdown, articles about the impending crises ahead caused by systematic fossil fuel consumption and resource depletion appear periodically in major news sources but do not remain part of a news cycle and do not appear often enough to become regularly discussed issues.  It is too frightening, too complex, too destructive to the way we have come to understand our world and our lifestyles.  It is also too long term.  We do not base our actions on their consequences decades from now...but we can if we try.

Eat it, Monsanto!

In early May, I planted some seeds in containers on our balcony from produce I bought at the supermarket .  I was fearful that these industrial hybrid seeds probably owned by DuPont or Monsanto would either grow surveillance cameras and eventually explode, or just not fruit.

But my illegal tomatoes have responded well to my love and attention. 

   

And my pepper plants are flowering too.  Seems like they take a little bit longer than tomatoes.

In other balcony news, I have to give my compost away today!  Despite the anaerobic environment of the buckets, I managed to maintain a little bit of integrity with the material. The left bin has been resting for about 2 months, while the right bin our active one.

I am moving to Seattle in a week, so I am giving my compost to the Lower East Side Ecology Center.  They set up a compost collection booth at the Union Square Farmer's Market 4 times a week.  My urban experiment is over, but I found an organization in Seattle that offers workshops in urban composting, container gardening, urban chicken husbandry, and other great topics.  Most of the workshops are free!  

From Magnificent Maize to Clever Corn

Corn has been food science since its invention in southern Mexico more than 6,000 years ago.  All the other major cereals--wheat, rice, millet, and barley--had wild ancestors or even have wild analogues today, and all of them can propagate themselves if left untended.  Corn, called maize in most countries because of its species name Zea mays, cannot reproduce without human intervention.  This shows that in order to create the corn species, it required some hybridization from existing wild species.  Thus, it is an invention, not a domestication.

Today, corn is the world's most important crop in terms of annual harvest weight.  It has been put on a pedestal by the Green Revolution following WWII, not to be confused with the amorphous, nameless, grassroots movement happening worldwide today.  The Green Revolution transformed agriculture worldwide to depend on monocultures of hybrid seeds created in research laboratories and inputs of increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.  These transformations mechanized agriculture, which increased yields and provided cheap food all over the world.  But the system was powered by cheap fossil fuels and took the knowledge and resources of farming out of the hands of farmers and centralized them in the hands of corporations or universities largely funded by corporations. 

The Green Revolution made traditional agricultural practices evolved over hundreds or thousands of years obsolete because the hybrids and fertilizers could boost yields to create unheard of amounts of food per acre.  In Mexico, the Green Revolution almost entirely eliminated the ancient farming practice called the milpa, which is a field interplanted with corn, beans, squash, avocados, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna.  Milpas are regarded by scholars in many academic fields as the most intelligent farming in human history.  Here is a passage from 1491 by Charles Mann that describes the milpa. 

"In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, [an extinct, ancient relative of corn possibly used in combination with other species to create corn] the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans' nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by the teosinte.  The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes.

Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary.  Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin; diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency and pellagra, a disease caused by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionin, which are provided by the maize...Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats." (p. 198)  

The milpa, which has been adopted by Permaculture, also naturally replenishes the soil with the nutrients to continually replant in the same soil.  When interplanted as a guild, each species has certain qualities that take advantage of existing natural systems to provide nutrients to humans permanently, thus Permaculture.  When Europeans arrived to the Americas, there were milpas that grew uninterrupted for thousands of acres year after year.  Government and business powers proved that this holistic approach to farming, nutrition, and land use management was obsolete in a post WWII planet with increasing urbanization, population pressures, and access to cheap fossil fuels.  

Today, just a few massive corporations own all of the hybrid seeds used by farmers today.  The crop that benefited the most from this transformation was corn, especially in America.  American agriculture and food corporations rely on government subsidies and cheap oil to turn corn into thousands of "clever variations" as Michael Pollan puts it in Omnivore's Dilemma.  Most corn is processed into odd forms of feed for cattle, chickens, and pigs.  A large portion is also turned into high fructose corn syrup, glucose, partially hydrogenated oil, and so many other hard to pronounce and frightening variations.  In an average grocery store, more than 95 percent of the products on the shelves contain some form of corn.  

Why corn?  Corn growing and harvesting works well with mechanization, it is easy to store, and it grows well in lots of different soils and a wide range of warm and cool climates.  Thus, it was a source of wealth for America.  We could export and store surpluses.  We could trade it globally for oil at a ratio of 1 to 1 until the early 1970s.  Then America hit peak oil in 1970, OPEC staged an embargo in 1973, and the ratio has shot up ever since, and not in our favor. Current prices are at a ratio of about 14:1.  

So what the hell do we do with an agricultural infrastructure set up for corn?  Turn everything we depend on into some manipulation of the crop.  Now we hear elected officials and spokespeople for Chevron talking about using corn to make ethanol for our cars!  America's corn based foods are responsible for our obesity epidemic.  We are overfed, but undernourished.  According to Food Inc., 1 in 3 children born in the U.S. today will have childhood diabetes, for children of color the epidemic jumps to 1 in 2.  Like Majora Carter says, our current sustainability problems are fundamentally linked to poverty, and thus linked to race.  Although all of us cannot avoid eating products of industrial agriculture, our mobility to opt into a sustainable food system is linked to our wealth, our education, and our skin color.       

There were more than 100 million people living in the Americas before Columbus, far more than lived in Europe, who had consumed corn as the centerpiece of their diet.  However, they did not have United States health, soil, and water issues because they developed the milpa.  In addition, indians cooked corn with lime (the mineral, not the fruit), which unlocked the niacin in the corn to allow the human body to absorb it.  Recognizing the intelligence of traditional practices is a key component of Descent Culture.  Wisdom is held in evolution, in gradual developments implemented in response to natural conditions.  Descent does not promote some false sense of nostalgia to get back to an ancient, "natural" way of life the way the Business-As-Usual ascent culture promotes growth and technology blindly.  Plant a regionally adapted version of a milpa in your garden to work toward sustainable sources of food that can exist after cheap fossil fuels.    

The new D.A.R.E program: Just Say No to Chemical Fertilizers

A mindset transformed the way we grow food.  It started in the UK in the nineteenth century when a handful of clever chemists thought they figured out that soil health and thus plant growth could be determined and manipulated with three elements: N, P, K, or nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.  Europe started importing vast, I am talking vaaaast, amounts of guano (bat shit) from these magical bat shit mountains on the coast of Peru and Chile.  Most bat shit around the world falls on the ground and its nutrients (its super high in nitrogen) get integrated back into the current ecosystem.  Lame.  On this 200 mile strip of coast the conditions were such that the bat shit just accumulated over millennia.  This allowed greedy colonizers to take it back to their farmers to put as many fat fingered blond children on this planet as possible.

 

Low and behold Europe got hooked on that shit and kept increasing their imports.  They extracted it with exploited local laborers who occasionally died in the process.  Soon there were no more shit mountains to feed the growing and industrializing Europe.  Instead of going to guano rehab meetings, Europe turned to a harder drug: oil.  Enter stage left Fritz Haber. In 1909 Haber invented a process to “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants crave.  See, the plants that industrial nations care about do not have a way of taking nitrogen from the atmosphere, where it is in abundance, so they take it from the soil, where it will quickly be depleted.  If you combine atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen using electricity and intense heat, you get the source of today’s chemical fertilizers.  Haber basically simulated a lightning strike, which naturally fixes nitrogen and hydrogen together, creating a shower of fertility during a thunderstorm.  Today’s process fixes nitrogen from the air, composed of 80 percent nitrogen, with hydrogen from the hydrocarbon chains found in petroleum.

 

Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth, thinks this guy Haber created the single most important contribution to twentieth century societies.  Haber is unknown today probably because he started rolling with the wrong crowd.  He got into using nitrogen fixing to make lethal chemical compounds that the Germans used in WWI, and then the Nazis used in concentration camps.  He was responsible for chemical warfare!  His wife shot herself, he had to flee Germany because he was Jewish, and he died a miserable man in a hotel in Switzerland.  It is so disturbing that the same process that allows us to eat cheap food was a tool for genocide.  Take a moment…Ugh.  At the same time, Smil estimates that two in five people (more than 2.5 billion people!) are alive today because of the food energy produced with the help of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.  We can live without the automobile, the computer, and the internet, but we literally would not be alive without this invention, called the Haber-Bosch process because it was commercialized by Bosch.  Post WWII global population growth has not been a natural acceleration.  It has been powered by the fossil fuels that create synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. 

 

The mindset here is that we have the power to isolate the essential ingredients that create a “desirable” process and synthesize them with whatever we have a lot of.  “I saw a ton of bat shit on the beach, maybe we could use that!”  Forty years later it was, “Hey those big black pools ancient dead plants that are heating our homes might work!”  Using these ingredients was truly clever, and there was a lot of bat shit and underground oil, but using every last bat turd should have been a lesson!  Growth has limits.  And then farmers needed to increase their fertilizer inputs to achieve the same yields and the captains of industry did not stop and think.  The world’s natural processes operate as connected systems.  If humans change one part of the system, the system reacts.  In a local system, pumping petrochemicals into the soil to boost yields changes the food and the ecosystem.  In the global system, putting 9 billion people on the planet will have enormous consequences.

 

The major crisis here is that as the oil runs out, so does the fertilizer, and thus the food.  The resources needed to feed, shelter, clothe, and power the current human population is already destroying the earth’s life support systems.  Current projections launch today’s more than 6 billion people to between 8 and 9 billion by 2050.  A more nuanced look at human consumption patterns reveals that wealthy nations are consuming far more per capita than peripheral nations.  The majority of the world’s poorest two-thirds are consuming resources at locally and globally sustainable levels.  The wealthiest third is consuming two thirds of the resources.  Herein lies the imperative of Descent Culture.  As members of the superlative nation in all sorts of consumption categories we must first conserve, what many call the low-hanging-fruit of our future ecologically responsible economy, and develop creative solutions for localizing and cycling our resources.

Food Politics

I have just finished Omnivore's Dilemma and I hope to keep my many thoughts neatly contained into concise episodic posts.

On most issues food and economics I agree with Joel Salatin, and further agree with Michael Pollan's thoughtful commentary. Free market globalization is irresponsible, neglecting human and environmental health for the almighty dollar. As soon as something can be produced cheaper somewhere else it will stop being produced here. Governments and consumers reward this hunt by continuing to fund it regardless of why it is cheaper to produce something somewhere else. It is not universally bad that something be produced somewhere else more cheaply, but the consumer should know why and be able to assess whether paying a lower sticker price is representative of the actual price of that product. The cheaper price might be caused from more lax environmental or labor regulations, less taxes, or easier access to necessary resources. We do not know, and as consumers not knowing and not caring are too closely linked in the age of consuming on a global scale.

Polyface farm products are priced honestly rather than irresponsibly. Their price factors in the cost of labor, environment, resources, producing, transporting and the like. Salatin encourages his customers to come to the farm and observe the entire process of creating the products they consume. He has nothing to hide. Wal-Mart has some things to hide because Wal-Mart's prices do not factor in the actual costs of doing business to create the low sticker price.... Fortunately for them, they hide behind the largest and most elaborately constructed walls that have ever been built for the purpose of protecting industry. The walls were paid for with tax dollars from working and consuming citizens, the very same people the walls are trying to keep out.

DIY: Make your own oil!

The creation of underground oil reservoirs is a complex biological and geological process, but with a little know how, the right ingredients, and some patience you can do it just like Earth!

It starts with phytoplankton and other microorganisms (that make up 80 percent of the organic mass in oceans) that die and sink to sea floors. Throughout most of the world, these tiny organisms get eaten and their calories cycle near the surface of the water, but in certain shallow seas the shower of organic matter settles undisturbed on the floor. Over 10 million years this process can create a layer of detritus one kilometer thick. As tectonic plates shift, seas get buried and the floor is pushed toward the earth's core. As it gets pushed, the pressure turns the sediment layers into hydrocarbon rich rock known as shale ( these hydrocarbons are molecule chains that repel water and come from the cells of the phytoplankton). The shales heat up as tectonic shifting pushes them toward the center of the earth. The heat cooks the hydrocarbon chains over millions of years, breaking them down into smaller units. They become lighter, turning from rock into a viscous substance, but they are still trapped in the shale, or "source rock". At this point, the substance is what we know to be petroleum.

It is ancient solar energy that has been collected, converted into carbon, and stored by Earth's marine plant life. These photosynthesizing microorganisms have been so prolific over the past 2.5 billion years that they have changed the composition of the atmosphere multiple times from high carbon or methane concentrations to more oxygen based atmospheres that allow other species to evolve. Large meteoric or geologic activity has spewed billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean's algae and plankton have used this atmospheric carbon and sunlight to multiply. They regulate the heat of Gaia by sequestering carbon, and further geologic activity buries it for millions of years. This carbon is not eliminated from the atmosphere permanently, it is released on a geologic time scale as shales get pushed to the surface. When humans pump it out of the ground and burn it really quickly (1 trillion barrels in 150 years), what do you think happens to the atmosphere?

At the point that the hydrocarbons become viscous petroleum, they are several miles below the surface. Humans would have never found out about this substance that has allowed us to temporarily stop deriving our energy from the sun if it stayed this far below our feet. Over 10's of millions of years, the "source rocks" of our reservoirs experienced intense geologic force pushing, shifting, and squeezing the rock. Under this pressure, the viscous hydrocarbons seeped upwards through tiny fractures or pore spaces. In many places there are more porous sandstones, the "reservoir rock" above the "source rock" shales where the oil can collect. Sometimes there is a layer of impermeable rock, the "cap rock", above the sandstones, capping the top of the oil seepage. And in even rarer sometimes, the cap rock is put under pressure and pushed upwards, creating a dome to trap the oil. This is the process and ingredients necessary to create a "worthwhile reservoir" ready for extraction.

One place that this precise mixture has occurred is in the Middle East, where the Arabian and Asian continents moved toward each other and eventually collided. Between them, as they were inching toward each other, was the Tethys Sea, a warm shallow sea teeming with marine life. For 100 million years the floor collected rich layers of organic sediments. The continental shifting made the sea recede and forced the sediments deep underground to experience a hot and pressurized geologic process. Layers of salt that remained from the disappeared sea folded into huge domes near the surface at the same time that the oil migrated upward from its source rock. This created the world's largest reservoirs. The new human species walked from Africa across the land bridge created by the continental collision and witnessed the transformed remains of the ancient sea slowly oozing on the ground.

It took awhile for humans to systematically exploit the energy in this ancient sunlight, but it has completely transformed our civilizations. For the majority of the time that our species has been around, we have only used current solar energy to power our lives. Civilization, generally thought of as arising with the advent of agriculture 10-12,000 years ago, has no doubt altered the biosphere and the atmosphere before oil, but the current magnitude and speed of change has no equal in the natural history of this planet. We have launched ourselves to the precarious peak of oil reserves and climate change and we do not know how to get down. Understanding the natural history of oil puts into perspective the scales of time at play in the creation and usage of this resource. Understanding also helps us build a connection between our species and the rest of Gaia. Oil has fueled our attitude that we are somehow disconnected and superior to the rest, but as you will see, oil actually links us to the ancestors of our current ecosystems. We are piped into the productivity of ancient marine plant life, the foundational species on which all complex life forms were built , and which derived their energy from the only known source: the sun.

For further reading, check out this educational website or read Crude or The Long Emergency or for an illustrated biological history of the earth read The Book of Life edited by Stephen Jay Gould (a fun reference book to own).

Will Allen

...Is a badass.  Elizabeth Royte, who went to Bard College and wrote Garbage Land and Bottlemania, wrote an article in the NY Times about him.  My friends who have been studying and practicing in environmentalism fields for awhile say Allen has gotten extremely popular recently and that he did not ask for it; I owe my knowledge of him to this craze.  He is just a guy on a mission that is now getting press.

The article talks about his recent grants from well known foundations.  "So no, Growing Power isn’t self-sufficient. But neither is industrial agriculture, which relies on price supports and government subsidies."  This is an odd comparison to me.  Royte is saying that industrial ag. and Will Allen are on the same playing field because neither source of food can support itself financially.  Earlier in the article she reported that the Kellogg Foundation gave him $400,000 this year.  Kelloggs!  A company that makes billions off of the fossil fuel driven, subsidy driven industry of cheap corn production is giving a minute fraction of their profits to this man.  However, the story that interests me is scarcely reported.  To what extent did Allen start his company without grants?  When did the grants come in?  Why does he need to rely on the profits of extractive industry to fund his mission?  It sounds like he just reached out to the community for volunteers and grew lots of good food by harnessing the energy of ecological systems.

  

To what extent has he created community wealth, health, and education with his personal confidence and wisdom?     

The Costs of Our Throw Away Economy

The New York Times reported that 3 workers died today at a waste transfer plant in Jamaica, Queens. They went into an 18 foot deep hole filled with 4 feet of sewage decomposing anaerobically and giving off so much hydrogen sulfide that it killed the workers. "According to state records, the commercial plant is run by M. & P. Reali Enterprises, doing business as the Regal Recycling Company. A man who answered the phone at the plant said the company had no immediate comment." The NYT did some pretty lazy investigating to report these rather unglamorous deaths that are a cost of our throw-away economy. Shouldn't we care that the way that we have chosen to deal with human waste (modern plumbing and chemical water treatment) leads to us having 18 foot holes full of toxic sewage in our city's peripherial, low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods?

These fumes were the result of a waste management infrastructure that is trying to cover up the ecological realities of decomposition because the scale of NYC's waste is way too massive for any ecosystem nearby to digest. NYC's sewer system is so poorly built that even a minor rain event will overflow the drainage culvert into the sewage culvert, part of a system called "combined overflow". The two mix together and pour out into the city's waterways as water infused with petrochemical residues from the streets and untreated sewage. On a dry day, the sewage would make its way to a treatment facility. Probability would have it end up at the NYAFCO plant in Hunt's Point, which chemically treats 70 percent of New York City's effluent waste. Finding info online about NYAFCO is pretty hard, similar to the elusive waste transfer station in Queens. It would be hard for them to put up a snazy website like Monsanto, where they cover up the systemic messes they make with photos of smiling kids with dark skin who benefitted from some Monsanto funded community development project.

To mention the systemic messes breifly, I taught fourth graders in a classroom a quarter mile from the NYAFCO plant for two years. It smelled like feces in my classroom as my students took their high-stakes state tests that determine whether the school gets federal funding or gets shut down. This is an example of society literally shitting on low-income students of color, denying them access to the excellent education that their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers have. I do not think it is a coincidence that the neighborhood with the largest waste treatment plant in the city has some of the city's lowest test scores. As Majora Carter (who founded Sustainable South Bronx) puts it, if industrial polluters were operating in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, which is 88 percent white and has a per capita income of $85K, the green movement would have cleaned up industry long ago. In fact it did. Something New Under the Sun by John Robert McNeil talks about American cities in the early 20th Century pushing their industrial factories, especially coal, out of the city limits. Back then, the effects of pollution were immediately visible to people. Soot from coal hovered over the city, coating everything, and causing people to get sick and die. Today, environmental justice is about race and class because the people most affected by industrial pollution are the people of color living in the areas with low property values.

As far as trash, we need mechanical, chemical, and dangerous, exploitive labor solutions to bottle it up, pipe and truck it away from the eyes of the people who created it. NYC trucks 600 tractor trailers full of trash every day out of the city to landfills as far away as Michigan. That is a line of trucks 9 miles long every day! If NYC had a comprehensive composting program, that costly, environmentally destructive, and deadly pipeline of trash would be cut in half.

New York has some work to do to descend from this zenith of consumption and waste. We can start by not collecting our putrescent wastes in toxic cesspools that actually kill the people that have to go into the pools and drain them.

Urban Composting--It Went Anaerobic!

Oh boy.  So, I was keeping our composting kitchen waste on our balcony in a cardboard box with several layers of cardboard underneath it to absorb the draining moisture.  Then I saw a food grade 5 gallon barrel on the street discarded by a restaurant.  I thought keeping the material in plastic with a lid (but poking holes throughout the barrel to ventilate) would contain the insects inside the barrels instead of swarming around our tiny balcony.  I had too much material to fit in one barrel, so I still kept the cardboard box and searched the streets for more discarded barrels with no luck.  After a week of daily rain, things have dried out and the insects are taking over out there.  I had to give up and go buy another barrel.  They decrease the insect swarms, but its a balancing act here.     

Cardboard breaths and drains, plastic does not.  I turned the original barrel to find a pool of liquid at the bottom.  I smelled the retched stench of anaerobic decomposition.  Deprived of oxygen, the microorganisms that decompose the material break it down with a chemical process that off-gasses methane.  The methane in my barrel was sealed in by the weight of the material.  When I turned it, the methane was released...It is a powerful, powerful smell. 

I sat out there for 45 minutes, turning the material to expose it to oxygen and start to dry it out.  I have to let it air out probably for a few days, so the biggest reason why I switched to plastic barrels, to contain the flies, cannot be employed yet.  The barrels will ultimately require more maintenance than the cardboard box to keep them aerobic and not too wet.

What I am learning is that ultra-urban composting (on a 20 square foot 7th floor balcony) is about balancing your priorities.  Consider the labor you want to input, ventilation, moisture level, carbon level, insects, and odors.  

Tight parameters lead to creativity.    

Current Article on Descent

There is a great article out now about the Transition town movement in Orion Magazine, "The Transition Initiative".  They are talking about my jam:  community empowerment through knowledgea and skill building.  "The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called." 

Here is another excerpt:

“The people who see the value of changing the system are ordinary people, doing it for their children,” says Naresh Giangrande, who was involved in setting up the first Transition Town. “The political process is corrupted by money, power, and vested interests. I’m not writing off large corporations and government, but because they have such an investment in this system, they haven’t got an incentive to change. I can only see us getting sustainable societies from the grassroots, bottom-up, and only that way can we get governments to change.”   Yeah!

Read it and let's discuss.

Starting to Explain Descent Culture

A Descent Culture recognizes that we need to transition to more localized and cycled resources in order to meet the needs of our lifestyles.  Clearly, there are huge challenges in the transition because we exist in a civilization addicted to fossil fuels, growing our economies for the sake of growth, and consuming and throwing away as if the resources that allow for our consumption are limitless.  We can promote descent with our personal choices, by advocacy, or by profession, but however we find a Descent Culture we should use guiding ethics to help us and our communities look out for each other.  I like the ethics of Permaculture:  People Care, Earth Care, Redistribute Surplus.

Permaculture is anthropocentric.  We do not want to save the 6,000 species that go extinct every year because we are altruistic.  We want to pay attention to that global pattern because it speaks to the health of ecosystems worldwide, and we depend on ecosystems to support our own species.  We are connected to and in fact entirely dependent on the life-support systems on this planet.  

A good friend of mine recently told me that humans are superior to the rest of nature and that technological advancement will carry us through the current resource depletions and global ecological collapse we are witnessing.  I tried to explain to him how risky and arrogant this notion is.  Why are we betting on inventions that do not exist to save us from our own destruction?  Isn't it more conservative and wiser (let us live up to our species name "homo sapiens sapiens" or "man, the wise, the wise") to work toward a sustainable, or better yet, regenerative species existence?  In other words, it seems smarter to promote the health of the systems that create the resources we depend on.

The introduction of Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan is an articulate response to my friend.  The authors flip the dominant attitude that humans are the supreme creation of nature by saying that actually, microorganisms are far more advanced and important to the health of this planet than humans.  The first forms of life on this planet--originating about 3.9 billion years ago, possibly in a nutrient-rich "soup" struck by lightning, thereby ordering the inanimate chemicals into a structure that was capable of self-animation--were microorganisms.  Very quickly, microorganisms have been developing for 3.9 billion years, while the human species showed up about 2.7 million years ago out of the mammalian class, which is about 70 million years old.  Microorganisms are far more active members in global nutrient and resource cycles and are also incredibly resistant and adaptable life forms.  It would be impossible for microorganisms to go extinct without destroying the self-regulating global life-support system.  Life would cease on Earth.  However, the extinction of the human species is a realistic prospect for the story of this planet, and one that would not necessarily harm other species. 

But lets try to avoid this.  We can be wise!  We can contribute to global ecological health! We can use our heavy brains to thoughtfully manipulate natural landscapes and even regenerate resources as we consume them (a potential vector for new technology).  Descent is an integrated approach to converging crises.  I see the guiding principle for social and economic change as promoting individual and community empowerment.  Extracting wealth and resources from one part of the world and shipping or piping it to another needs to minimized.  Localize wealth creation and cycling.  Let us improve the quality of our food, air, and water by relying on ecologically responsible systems.  At the core of our businesses and organizations should be a care for human health and life-support system health.  Not limitless profits (see Biomimicry as a Business Model).  

The problems are systemic.  Descent Culture solutions are systemically minded but locally or regionally geared.  This idea is not new, it is espoused by many organizations and part of mission statements all over the world.   Descent Culture is unique because it promotes human empowerment through low-tech, low-cost solutions to large problems.  Let us teach each other what we are wise about, to promote homo sapiens sapiens, and lets build our confidence do things we have not been trained to do.  Build a compost bin, tune your bike, retrofit your plumbing to redirect greywater, build a lean-to greenhouse and start a garden, ferment your own sauerkraut (like my sister just started doing) or honey wine, build a cob oven and bake your own bread.  Take action toward a Descent Culture!

      

Urban Composting Continued

I returned to our apartment after being away for almost three weeks to find a lot changes on the balcony.

I started composting I think in early May. After my trip, the compost had definitely "matured". It was teeming with fruit flies, so I had to move it to the back of our tiny balcony, as you can see in the photo below. It had not been touched since I left. The material had condensed considerably, all of the moisture collected at the bottom, and it smelled like parts of it were decomposing anaerobically, which means without oxygen. This means unpleasant odors. I turned everything over and added carbon to try to achieve the desired moisture level of "a wrung out sponge". My girlfiend, while supportive of this endeavor, does not want to share our small balcony with dozens of flies. I might have to donate it to a local large scale composting operation...

On the bright side, our herb garden is now a vibrant place of green growth. I was initially concerned because of its north facing orientation and tall buildings all around that allow very little direct sunlight. It turns out that this is a decent spot to grow our garnishes.



A month ago I took seeds from a store-bought tomato, pepper, and lemon and planted them in containers. They are all coming up. Lets see if the tomatoes and peppers will be able to fruit.

Children Starchitects in Harlem

My good friend Michael Klein, co-creator of the Critical Educator Network (an amazing new organization that is tackling the achievement gap in the crucial arena of teacher training and development), invited me into his classroom at Harlem Link Charter School to do a series of lessons on architecture.



I set up the premise that we as community members did not design the neighborhood we live in, so there are probably elements that we do not like. Here is our chance to design a neighborhood that we can be happy living in. The students are designing our own homes, learning basic model building skills using chipboard and elmers and training them to think that they have the power to influence the environments in which they live, work, and play.



My internship at Yestermorrow Design/Build School helped me recognize how important it is for non-professionals to have an understanding of architecture and building. It does not take much training to be able to troubleshoot a domestic plumbing system or design and build an addition onto a house. Many people just do not have the confidence. Confidence is derived largely from our ability and the messages we receive about our ability, both factors that good teachers can change.

Who wants that confidence, though? We exist in a consumerist society that values being able to buy our way out of these problems. Knowing about plumbing if I am professor or a waiter does not help me achieve the dream. The problem here is that this disenfranchises us because we depend on "experts" or machines to make, install, and fix the things we depend on. Teaching children to be critically aware of the environments they live in is part of Descent Culture because it empowers us to know and to act.

Peak Oil and Descent

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is a pretty decent intro book describing the urgent problems surrounding peak oil and what life will be like transitioning away or rather down from oil. He really is a descent author.

Peak oil is the critical issue that creates the descent imperative. While coal, nuclear, and renewables all need to be a part of our descent discussions, oil is the dominant resource in our industrialized civilizations. Human civilizations are depleting global oil reserves at a rapid rate, about 31 billion barrels every year are pumped up from the earth's crust and piped, shipped, and trucked mostly to centers of population and wealth. This number is increasing as wealthy nations increase consumption every year and China, India and the rest of the globe's peripheral countries develop competitive petroleum based economies.

What does 31 billion barrels mean? According to Kunstler, our planet had stored 2 trillion barrels of liquid oil before humans started burning it. As of the year 2005 humans had extracted roughly 1 trillion, or half. Half is the tipping point. Peak oil happens when half of the oil in a reservoir has been extracted.  Reductively speaking, the second half requires more energy and is more expensive to extract.  Furthermore, it is just impossible to pump out every barrel. Once half has been reached, production gets more expensive and slows down, wreaking havoc on our economies because they are completely addicted to oil.

So, if the current level of 31 billion barrels stays constant and there are no new reserves discovered, our civilizations will use the 1 trillion barrels of liquid oil remaining in about 32 years. That means that it took 150 years, from 1859 until 2009, to reach one half and now the second half will be gone in 1/5 of that time. The difference between 1859 and 2009 is that now the world is forced to support more people consuming more based on models of growth that ignore ecological realities. We will not be able to extract all of the remaining reserves because at some point in the extraction of the second half of reservoirs it will take more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. That's a serious problem. We also have a global economic climate that promotes growth as inherently beneficial. China alone poses annual threats to global oil production because its economy grows 9 percent every year and its oil consumption grows commensurately.

That was long winded but important. It takes a few years to assemble the global data on oil reserves, so a true understanding of what we have left is only acheived in hindsight. This hindsight played out with U.S. peak oil production when geologists and markets discovered in 1971 that U.S. oil had peaked the year before. It is likely that global peak oil has already occurred, sometime in the last 8 years. This is the hypothesis of current geologists who are in the Hubbert and Deffyes camp. It is not in the interest of oil companies--who hold the information about global reserves--to be factual or transparent about what our addictive societies depend on to sustain false growth. On January 9, 2004, Shell revealed that it had exaggerated its reserves by 20 percent, or 4.5 billion barrels. OPEC regularly makes statements that it can increase production to meet global demand, but does not follow through possibly because its fields are reaching peak.

But what if we discover lots of new oil? That just won't happen. Our current production relies on fields discovered before 1964, the year when the rate of global oil discoveries peaked. The largest OPEC reservoirs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that provide the world with most of its oil were discovered 70 and 57 years ago respectively. We just are not finding new reserves that can promise to yield significant amounts anymore, and do not think that it is because the oil industry, backed by the governments of wealthy nations, are not trying hard enough.

But what about the 3 billion barrels in the Alberta tar sands? To start, the ratio of energy produced to energy expended there is 2:1.  That compares to 28:1 in the Texas oil fields of 1916. The oil extracted from the tar sands is dirty dirty oil and requires a messy and corrupt operation to extract it. Locals' voices are silenced as the noisy machines pollute the air and water and raise respiratory and immune system problems in surrounding communities. The sands have to be dug up and piled high, denuding landscapes and killing ecosystems. Then the oil has to be extracted and intensively cleaned to produce a product that is only good for asphalt. Our addicitive economies relying on this miniscule amount of dirty oil is equivilant to the following anecdote: An alcoholic walks into an old pub and asks for a beer. "We're out," says the bartender. "But if you want, you can tear up the carpet that has been here since we opened and probably squeeze out enough spills to fill a mug."

There is much more to say on the topic of peak oil.  Last month, I read Crude by Sonia Shah and I just checked out Powerdown by Richard Heinberg from the library and I hope to write more soon.  However, to finish and bring back 31 billion:  the U.S. with less than 5 percent of the world's population consumes 25 percent of its oil, or about 7.5 billion barrels every year (that is 20.5 million barrels every day!)  The U.S. is at the tippy top of this spike in human energy consumption and will soon be descending the energy dependence of our infrastructure, industry, and lifestyles.  I want to prepare for this descent with realistic urgency, intelligent research, discussion, and creativity.

Suburban Permaculture Laboratory

I just got back from a whirlwind tour of the Midwest, stopping in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio to spend time with my parents and old friends. I built a compost tumbler at my parent's house to convert their kitchen waste stream into a resource. The tumbler does not require a pitchfork to turn the pile, will not attract foraging mammals, and can generate finished compost quickly. I used gas line pipe as the crank. My parents will add their kitchen waste regularly, but every couple of weeks RNK here will come out and turn the crank to mix up the material, providing oxygen to the areas that have been settling. Occasionally aerating the material re-activates the thermophilic bacteria that decompose what has been collected, thereby speeding up the composting process.



I also helped my dad plant 12 grape plants to start his vineyard. They are fruiting less than 3 weeks after planting.

O.I.L.

Two Tidbits.  Fit them into your synthesis of the world how you see fit.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq back in 2003, the USA Today published the mission as Operation Iraqi Liberation, known for short as OIL.  It was quickly changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Before serving in the Bush Administration, Condoleeza Rice worked for Chevron and sat on their Board of Directors.  Chevron appreciated her contributions to the company so much that they named a double-hulled tanker after her, the 129,000 ton Condoleeza Rice, registered in the Bahamas as part of a policy called Flags of Convenience (FOC), which I will discuss more in later posts inspired by Crude by Sonia Shah.  (Quickly, FOCs allow wealthy nation's oil companies to register their ships in other countries with lower taxes and less stringent safety requirements, saving oil companies billions of dollars.)  

Chevron changed the name of the  Condoleeza Rice in April of 2001 to Altair Voyager in order to "eliminate the unnecessary attention caused by the vessel's original name."    

 

Biomimicry as a Business Model

Michael Shuman's The Small Mart Revolution is largely a response the dominant economic paradigm of non-place based, big business as the only viable model for doing business in the era of globalization. Shuman calls this model TINA (There Is No Alternative) and pitches the case for a LOIS (Locally Owned Import Substitution) model. Here are some key thoughts that I took from this book:

Not only is it socially and ecologically destructive to support TINA businesses (reason enough for me to support LOIS, but much of the U.S. cares more about the bottom line of profits), it is just factually incorrect that TINAs enjoy competitive advantages because of their size, structure, and ability to search out ever cheaper labor and infrastructure. Every year U.S. taxpayers pay $50 billion in local and state taxes because officials offer subsidies to attract TINAs (Wal-Mart, BMW, Citibank, Whole Foods, Verizon, Home Depot, Boeing, etc.) to set up shop on their communities. This same advantage is not offered to local small businesses because we do not need to entice locally owned businesses to stay local. When TINAs move in, they promise a certain number of jobs, revenue, social contributions, and the beginning of a long lasting relationship with the community. They usually do not fulfill those promises and will move their operations in a matter of years if cheaper opportunities are available elsewhere. This means that the community's investment in tax dollars quickly disappears unless they cough up another impressive subsidy to encourage the TINA not to leave town. In addition, federal business tax code allows businesses to write off the costs of moving and can declare taxes they incur in foreign countries as U.S. tax credits, making the costs of moving completely FREE!

The dominant paradigm justifies TINA social and ecological destruction over the ethical benefits of LOIS by saying that TINAs can offer lower prices, that is the bottom line for Americans. However, as we can see, the price tag is false. The price tag is further falsified when we look comparatively at local wealth creation.

A group of economists from Civic Economists did studies that showed that locally owned businesses have higher economic multipliers than TINAs, meaning they contribute more dollars that cycle within the community and create more jobs that are more permanent. They did a study in Austin, Texas with a Borders and two local bookstores. They found that for every $100 spent at Borders, $13 circulated in the Austin economy, while they local bookstores circulated $45, three times the economic multiplier.

Then there are the societal costs of paying for workers because our leaders set up a system that further increases the price tag of the TINA model. Last post I referenced the stat that taxpayers spend $2.5 billion per year on welfare assistance to Wal-Mart workers alone. Does anyone have stats on the combined welfare bill for workers of McDonald's, ADM, Campbell's and the like? Here is my synthesis: Politcal and business leaders work together to set minimum wage levels. Then large businesses pay their workers low wages and do not provide benefits. The government uses social programs to pay for the basic needs of the wage earners. This means that because wages are set so low that workers do not have access to the basics, everyone has to front the bill for the difference. This seems to me like yet another example of corporations being allowed to shirk responsibilities and putting the actual costs of doing business on the citizens. This takes away my right to support businesses I like and boycott ones I do not like. Whether I like it or not, I have to financially support businesses that have unfair practices with my taxes.

The economic free passes enjoyed by TINAs are allowing these businesses to grow without natural limits. Limitless growth simply does not exist. All growth is within the context of the characteristics of the organism and its environment. Promoting limitless growth may only hurt small local businesses and small community wealth at first, but the TINAs will also start to hurt because only one species is being cared for, not the whole system.

Some trees do grow very tall. Some are short. Trees have different characteristics. These are bold statements. Some companies, because of the characteristics of the products or services they provide, might promote community health and wealth as large companies. I am not sure what might be: telecommunications and electronics, airplanes, power generation, table saws, book publishing? However, most companies do not need to be absolutely enormous, especially food growth and production and construction materials. Starting a descent culture for these two industries would contribute enormously to the health of our communities and the life support systems on this planet.

Wal Mart's Prices Depend on Socialism

Michael Shuman writes in The Small-Mart Revolution that there are so many Wal-Mart workers below the poverty line that they receive a combined $2.5 billion in federal welfare assistance, with similar sums coming from state assistance as well. So according to Shuman, taxpayers are footing the bill for Wal-Mart's low prices. In addition, all Wal-Mart store managers receive booklets on how to prevent their employees from organizing titled "Manager's Toolbox to Remaining Union Free."

I am new to understanding the nuances of how big box retail takes wealth from communities, so this is the beginning of a dialogue for me. According to a Business Week article, the average wage of a Wal-Mart sales person was $8.23 in 2001. According to Wal-Mart it rose to $9.68 in 2005 and is now at $10.83, for "full-time workers". However, according to Shuman, Wal-Mart hires more employees to fill part-time positions rather than fewer full-time employees to reduce the company costs of providing benefits. I did a tiny bit of research. At full time, $10.83 is just shy of the 2008 $21,200 poverty line for a family of four.

So, Wal-Mart exploits the labor of its employees, systematically discouraging employee organizations (when the meat-cutters department in a Texas store voted to unionize in 2000 the entire group was promptly fired) and denying benefits. However, Wal-Mart is working within a system that not only allows these business practices, they are supported by political leaders. While Wal-Mart is paying their employees $10/hour, the federal minimum wage is $6.55, rising to $7.25 in July of this year. With no deductions, that wage meets the poverty line of $14K for a two person household. Try supporting two people off of that wage in a city. Or try living in a suburban or rural community and paying for all the costs involved in owning a car. Need to get a check-up or flu vaccination? Sorry, Wal-Mart doesn't promote the health of its workers because they are just that expendable. The leaders of this country--who get elected on the premise that they are looking out for the well being of their constituents--think that it is an acceptable cost of business to set wages so low that workers cannot provide for themselves. They set policy that clears employers of the responsibility of providing basic services to their employees (often access to the very products the company sells). Then the costs of social programs to clean up the messes that the corporate and government collaborations have created is put onto everyone.

Digressing takes a lot of effort. What I want to investigate is that corporations that that claim to provide low prices to the consumer and thus need to rely on a low wage labor model are relying on the public perception that this is the only viable model and that it actually makes sense. There are two issues here. Low wage labor leads to increased costs for society, thus the prices to consumers are higher than the listed price tag. There are alternative business models that keep wealth circulating in communities and provide a higher quality of life for employees, producers, and consumers. Small, for-profit businesses guided by an ethic of promoting local and global human health relies less on social welfare programs and less on global exploitive and extractive businesses. Local is also generally going to be more ecologically responsible because they are relying on resources and ecosystems from their region.