Tuesday, July 28, 2009

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.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

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.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

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).

Friday, July 3, 2009

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?