I’m seeing a lot of assumptions out in the Peak Oil blog traffic lately that really demand some critical response. To take a recent example, Dave Cohen yesterday wrote in Everybody’s Jumping on the Solar Bandwagon

Do we live in a world of ever flowing abundance, or do we live in a world of limits to growth?

If your answer is “abundance”, your approach to the future requires a shift in direction in a context of business as usual. If your answer is “limits”, your approach requires a shift in behavior in a context of living within your means. What follows examines possible constraints on the expansion of solar energy in the 21st century.

The assumed correct answer here is “limits.” However this doesn’t square with physics. In fact, the answer is that both are true. This is based on understanding what a system is, and what the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics actually says, and on our common thinking about natural resources and time.

What the 2nd Law says is that in a closed system not yet in equilibrium, entropy - the measure of disorder in a system - is always increasing. Clearly the Earth is not a closed system, thanks to the continuous inputs of solar energy, the vast quantities of which Cohen thoughtfully describes in detail. So from the perspective of systems thinking, the world is abundant from an energy and material perspective (since one can be converted into the other).

Systems theory has been around for a long time, and has been well-articulated in the last 70 years. One of it’s more popular incarnations has been Donella Meadows’, (et. al.) studies and books Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits based on the systems work of Jay Forrester (Urban Dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, etc.). Big Gav recently had some interesting things to say about Limits to Growth.

Limits tried to predict, using a computer model, dynamic measures of world population, food, pollution and prosperity. Some aspects of systems theory were made clear by this work, including that systems behave in complex, non-linear and often counter-intuitive ways.

Where we come down on the side of limits is in the domain of natural resources: fossil fuels, minerals, forest and arable land for agriculture, air and water. Let me point out that the concept of “natural resource” needs further elaboration and critical analysis, being defined, as it is, from the viewpoint of economics. This analysis and the wildly undervalued way in which natural resources are priced will be the subject of a (near) future post.

Nobody (that I’ve read, heard or talked to) doubts that oil is a limited natural resource. The Peak Oil community has pointed out clearly that this limit is compounded by the shape of Hubbert’s production curve. Thus, “limit” is itself a complex concept, that has been assumed to be simple and straightforward in environmental discussions on both sides. A limit is a function of a system, not a hard and fast quantity in and of itself.

The POs also make clear that oil is basically millions of years of compressed sun-time. We have been living off our natural capital rather than natural income at least since the beginning of the fossil fuel age. They also rightly argue that the history of economics, that is of capitalism, is contiguous with the age of fossil fuels, and is dependent on many assumptions about the supply, demand and price of fossil fuel resources.

All of this discussion has profound implications for economic theory. This theory is still being worked out, by the way, no matter what Reagan-praisers and neo-Hayekian Thatcherites might say. Georgescu-Roegen is the key figure here, though his work is rarely mentioned in discussions on general economics. Not surprisingly, Georgescu-Roegen’s economic lineage inherits from Schumpeter and passes down to Herman Daly. A version of Daly’s famous “The Economy is a Wholly-owned Subsidiary of the Ecosystem” diagram can be seen here.

Underlying all this are my deep misgivings about concepts at the heart of economic theory and policy, including what we mean by cost, work, labor, value, trade, rationality, power and so on. These are the topics - energy, ecology, economics, sustainability, systems- I want to take up in the next several months. I’ve chosen to blog about them for two reasons: 1) I want your input, and 2) my method is what I would call “patch-and-mosaic”, to borrow a phrase from landscape ecology. What I mean is that I want the freedom to write topically, stochastically, in more of an essay form. My hope is that these threads and discussions turn into something more tangible, but for now my aim is to clarify our thinking on these muddy topics.

On Sunday, Sharon Astyk wrote at Casaubon’s Book about Victory Gardens. We must all be tapping into something here. There are a couple of links to sites that are promoting a new brand of Victory Garden, probably as part of the Relocalization movement. I’m going now to read the whole thing and maybe post a comment.

Hat tip to Energy Bulletin.

I’m reading about guild-building in Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Gardens. There are two basic ways to proceed: extended observation of plant community patterns, and book research. The latter appears to be faster and I need to jump start my knowledge.

I did a little research and found this great online book on Plant Communities of the Central Finger Lakes. I haven’t yet explored this e-Cornell online library but this first strike is definitely a gem.

I have a couple of norway maples, some large evergreen trees, a copper maple and several honey locusts. I’ve added a lilac hedge, gingko and several fruit trees. These form the bones of the garden so far. There’s also a black walnut on a neighbor’s lot that hangs about 30% over my property, so we get a lot of black walnuts. Hemenway’s book includes a well-defined walnut guild, but I want to do more with the maples and locusts and evergreens.

As part of my Permaculture Certification training, I’ve started doing a little research into WWII Victory Gardens. How this came up is that one of the other students was asking about apple varieties, and I was relaying the story in Masters of the Victory Garden about the man in Virginia who’d collected 1800 varieties of fruits in his half-acre suburban plot. Andrew caught the words “Victory Garden” and asked me to explain what a Victory Garden was. All I knew was that Victory Gardens were planted in the US and England during WWII. Andrew “suggested” this would be a good research project- find out more about Victory Gardens.

So this week I’ve done a little web research and found a number of sites (K-12 resources, Victory Seeds, Pennsylvania VGs, Canadian story), documents and photos. Victory Gardens, or war gardens, started in WWI, so there was a history of the activity when the US went to war in 1941. Many gardens appear to have sprung up spontaneously but a conference of the Civilian Defense and USDA held in 1941 added organizational and communications power to the movement. Commercial enterprises like Beechnut and International Harvester also joined. By 1942 there were 6 million Victory Gardens planted. In 1943, this number shot up to 20 million, and the home gardener was supplying around 40% of the nation’s total vegetable production. This number is huge when you consider that we were also supplying troops and Allies’ food needs. In 1946, after the end of the war, few gardens were planted and the US suffered significant food shortages.

Victory Gardens graced Boston Common and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Schools, government buildings, vacant lots and many back yards were used. At least one Victory Garden, located in Boston’s Fenway, still exists.

Victory Gardening was driven by real needs- rationing, food shortages, tin shortages, and limits to transportation. A large part of the program was aimed at preserving food as well as growing it. Preserving techniques were centered around canning, but also included drying, cold storage and the brand-new idea of refrigeration. Pressure cooker sales went from 50,000 in 1942 up to over 300,000 in 1943.

The government and industry assisted by promoting the program and publishing guides and pamphlets that gave very basic training in vegetable gardening. The explicit assumption was that the average suburban gardener would have little, if any, gardening experience. Alongside the quaint references to insect pests as “Japanazis,” these guides include very practical tips such as using straw mulch between rows and preparing soil with animal manure. They also include garden plans and planting schedules.

Victory Garden Committees were set up to support gardeners, give advice and coordinate work and distribution of produce. In Pennsylvania, 1500 committees supported over 1.5 million gardens, a ratio of about 1 committee to 1000 gardens.

I found that the Canadian Government was much less proactive about home gardening. Two urban gardeners from Victoria, B.C. pestered the government so much though, by way of their MP, that eventually in 1943 the Canadians joined the movement. The story seems to show that a concerted and organized effort coupled with real need and grass roots organizing led to near food self-sufficiency within a couple of years. This gives me great hope that when the chips are down we can do it again if needed.

I just completed the first of five, weekend long modules at Hancock Permaculture with Andrew Leslie Phillips. If you are also attending the course, I mentioned the Placement Randomizer Tool, which takes a little digging to find here. Here’s a link to Peak Moment TV- lots of great interviews with Peak Oil as well as Permaculture and other cultural creatives. Also I’ve got a link here to Greeening the Desert.

I’d like to offer this as a place for us to work together virtually, in between and after the training sessions. If anyone is interested in contributing, send me an e-mail and I’ll create an account for you, and give you a little run through on how to write a post.

Finally I want to say a big Thank You to all of you for coming and inspiring me and eachother to move forward with Permaculture. I was looking at an old list of things I would do if I had unlimited time and resources and this training is on the list. Special thanks for the great food, coffee, pie, smoked fish, cheese, and Little Debbie cakes! See you next month.