My most recent trip to the Catskills revealed even more frenetic activity than was evident in June. This includes massive infrastructure, especially in the form of pipelines and right-of-way cuts over forested ridges for feeder branches. The new Millenium pipeline, which will run from Corning east then south and eventually to New Jersey is a mammoth 36″ natural gas replacement for a current 12″ line. That’s a 10-fold increase in capacity. Not one well has been drilled in New York State, yet the writing is on the wall.

© 2008 Russell Honicker

What does this sort of approaching resource extraction orgy have to do with the Third World? After all, as a spokesperson for the NYSDEC said, “this isn’t Wyoming; this is New York!” We are the new Third World. Having raped the rest of the world, time to start in earnest at home. Of course there’s a long history of this here: coal, railroads, oil, highways, farming etc.

The so-called economic growth we’ve been experiencing here in the North-and-West has been subsidized by resource extraction over the last 35 years in places like Ecuador, Zambia, Angola, Sudan, East Timor and the like. Murder, authoritarianism, theft, lies, and squalid urban poverty accompany each new “discovery.” Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls this the “Resource Curse.” John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man calls it unofficial U.S. Policy. There was a recent news story about Indian farmers unceremoniously removed from their lands to make way for a new 900 acre Tata plant. This is our real economic engine.

While op-eds to the NYT place the blame for poverty on proponents of biofuels and opponents to Genetically Modified (GM) foods, and praises the efforts of our good friends at the World Bank, the reality is that our wealth has been, and is being stolen from distant parts of the world. We have been exporting poverty to the Third World for decades. While death squads are palatable or at least ignorable in some of these places, somehow the idea of mercenaries in Delaware and Broome Counties seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, residents report that Haliburton and Blackwater have arrived, along with military helicopters performing alarming seismic testing. Exporting poverty is no longer limited to other countries; we’re bringing it to the Catskills and Southern Tier.

Others have made this point before, but our agriculture is now more of a mining operation than anything else. We frack for natural gas to generate nitrogen fertilizer, applied in massive doses to sterile soil as anhydrous ammonia, most of which washes off into the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico, spawning a “dead zone” (one of 150 worldwide) the size of Massachusetts. Phosphate fertilizer is mined in the Caribbean and in Canada.  Diesel and Gasoline comes from Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, by way of Port Arthur and Beaumont. The irrigation water is thousands of years old, mined from the once-huge Ogalalla reservoir, which is being rapidly depleted. All that produces starchy corn and soy beans that then act as inputs to other industrial food production processes like livestock, vegetable oils, soft drinks, and yeah, biofuels. It’s hard to find any actual food in our food systems- that is food that comes from rain, soil and sunshine. Rather, it’s all predominantly the end product of “drill, baby, drill.”

Finally, let’s tie this all back to the current global financial crisis, which is immediately a crisis of real estate and foreclosures, a crisis of land. Naturally, it is a crisis of much more. Ultimately, it’s a crisis of dissociation of money power from reality. All the working business models involve slavery, theft, monopoly or addiction.

Okay, that’s pretty negative. In order to end on a positive, a huge Greenerminds Congratulations and Thank You to Maura Harrington, who stared down Royal Dutch Shell last week.

[UPDATE 15:30 EDT] The Guardian Weekly has another success story- native Peruvians protect the Amazon basin.

Finally, a major news outlet (sort of) is covering the environmental damage from hydraulic fracturing (”fracking”) for natural gas in shale deposits. The Christian Science Monitor covers the story at a relatively high level (hat tip TOD). Interesting how the API always says “there’s a concrete casing so the water is fine.” NYC seems to finally be waking up and have put a 1 mile buffer around the reservoirs they own in the Catskills. The rivers in the area of the Marcellus shale drain into Hudson, Delaware, and Ohio river systems and Chesapeake Bay watersheds.
I previously posted about what this means for New York here.

When are they going to start talking about this instead of pigs, dogs, lipstick, etc?

Last night, R. sent me a link to an Albany Times-Union article based on investigations by WNYC and ProPublica about the gas drilling nightmare. Today is the deadline for the Guv to sign (or not) Assembly bill A10526 which streamlines the permitting process and greatly increases the permissable well densities.

This morning the audio popped up on TOD: Local. I highly recommend listening to this, and if you are a New Yorker, call the Governor’s office and ask for a veto.

[UPDATE 7:27 PM EDT]

More links. Here’s Delaware Riverkeepers’ brief on gas drilling in NY and PA. And in case anyone thinks the DEC can or will protect air, water, habitat and people, some reports by EANY.

Unfortunately it looks like the Governor signed the rushed-through last minute bill. What’s quite disturbing to me is that, according to Judith Enck (interviewed on WNYC yesterday), the bill was actually written by the DEC staff. Patterson is also directing the DEC to do more assessment of the impacts to water, air, noise, soil and so on. Will the staff be beefed up? Probably not as NY is facing large budget deficits. But how will the DEC have time to do all the research and assessments necessary? They’re obviously busy drafting legislation at the behest of the gas companies to streamline their permitting and making it easier to put more wells in.

[UPDATE 7/24 12:17 PM EDT]

Found a blog on Barnett Shale in the Fort Worth Basin area in Texas, which is apparently the formation most similar to Marcellus. I have an opportunity to attend a conference in Ft. Worth in September, so I hope to check out some of this first hand. Some of the reports are showing leases worth $17,000 per acre signing bonus, with royalties of 25%.

I watched Escape from Suburbia the other night. Phil and Tom are featured in the film, and I wanted learn more about what they are doing in NYC. The movie covers a number of efforts across North America to deal with and find solutions to Peak Oil, and secondarily Climate Change and poverty, mainly through local food production. At least local food production was a theme.

What was most moving to me was the segment on LA’s South Central Community farm, a 14 acre community project at ground zero of urban gardening. This farm had private plots for 350 local families who grew food, medicinals and ornamentals. They started a market because people there were growing things not available anywhere else in LA. Horrifyingly, the city took back the land and sold it to a “logistics” company to build a warehouse there, because “people in South Central need jobs.” Despite community action and protest, the site was bulldozed on camera while the urban farmers could only look on in despair.

Carolyn Baker points out in her review what this means. Relocalization is not currently threatening to the powers that be, but will be soon, and we can expect a very nasty backlash. This example is just a taste of that. I’m relating this to the Archdruid’s post a couple of days ago about the misconception that collapse will somehow mystically be okay, and not too violent. I doubt that. The image I have of collapse is not a bunch of spontaneously emerging ecovillages, but something like New Orleans, post-Katrina, times every major metropolitan area in the world. I see pain in our future.

The conclusion I’m coming to, inescapably, is that food, relocalization and gardening are political. The good news is that gardening also seems to be a great way of organizing people in a way that doesn’t overtly seem political. In other words, like me, it’s only after gardening for some years that one comes to understand that gardening is political.

There seem to be two approaches to fighting the Beast. One is to go head to head, like Gandhi, Mandela or MLK. Another is to go underground like the mycelium network and stay off the radar until there is enough strength or pain to stand and fight. The danger is that being underground can become comfortable and the standing up never happens, or it gets co-opted before the groundswell.

When I took the PDC down in Hancock, a big and growing concern of my other classmates, who actually live there, was gas drilling in the area. Catskill Mountainkeepers have put together the best summary on the issue I’ve seen. I’m linking to that in response to the Pickens Plan link (Drumbeat July 8th) on The Oil Drum. Shifting natural gas to transport doesn’t solve anything, and I’m guessing that Mr. Pickens has some $ interest in Big Wind.

George Monbiot finallly makes the point today in the Guardian, that I have been wanting to make about the emerging global food crisis. While some stories on the subject in recent days have mentioned the epic drought in Australia, likely due to global warming, most blame the situation on biofuel use of corn. The fact is that most corn, and indeed most food grain is fed to livestock. Livestock can eat a lot of things beside grain, but grain feed allows for factory production, where massive numbers of animals can be housed on small areas rather than free ranging on pasture. Corn-fed beef and pork are also more “marketable” than pasture-fed.

Monbiot says this:

But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

He proposes eating farmed tilapia which is very protein-productive and efficient. I’m looking into raising a few in my new mini-pond, when it gets dug later this year. This is the first I’ve heard anyone mention tilapia outside Permaculture circles, although a commenter mentions problems with Chinese and Taiwanese farmed tilapia.

In energy descent, rather than centralized grocery shopping, fed by centralized distribution centers and trucking, fed by monoculture stockyards, fed by monoculture grain production, we need a system where most of the food is much closer to the point of consumption.

In other words, grow a garden. Farm some tilapia. Raise some chickens for eggs and perhaps meat, and maybe a goat for milk. Grain production may still be more efficient on medium to large scales, from an energy standpoint, but most industrial vegetables and fruits are clearly energy losers, even before they get shipped from Chile or California.

One point raised in the comments to Monbiot’s article indicates that the financial crisis does in fact play into the food crisis. Speculative excess capital has flowed into commodities of all kinds over the last two years and this is having a huge cumulative effect on grain prices, including energy and fertilizer input costs and a new midwestern land price bubble. Without being able to systematically untangle the skein of interrelated forcings, we can’t say for certain how much any of these factors —ethanol, oil, climate change, meat habits and speculation —directly contribute to hunger; we only know that they do.

With this post I want to complexify some of the terms that are commonly used in discussions around Peak Oil, climate change, economic viability and sustainability.

Energy

H. T. Odum shows that not all BTUs, kilocalories and quads are created equal. Since these measure heat, into which all forms of energy can be converted, they are convenience measures. However, dilute energy forms, such as solar radiation, are less able to do work than highly concentrated forms such as gasoline, TNT and high voltage electricity. Collected wood has about 0.5 Fossil Fuel Equivalents (FFE) in terms of quality. Collected sunlight calories need to be concentrated at a rate of 2000:1 FFEs through plant photosynthesis. The ability to do work determines economic as well as ecological growth.

Furthermore, he shows that there is a typical pattern in successful ecological energy systems, where a portion of high quality energy is fed back to improve the quality of a low quality energy source of greater volume. This pattern can be chained to move energy up the chain. When calculating net energy, we should consider the quality of the energy, not just raw heat equivalents.

Resources

Mollison shows that resources are not all created equal. They can be categorized based on the effects of their use on themselves and other resources. Some resources when used degrade or destroy themselves. Some, like a skill or knowledge, improve with use. Others degrade if they are not used. Some resources improve other resources with their use. An example is the one cited above, where a high quality energy source improves a lower quality source. Some resources are neutral with respect to themselves and / or others.

The worst resources degrade themselves and others with use. The extent and reversibility of this degradation, destruction or improvement indicates another dimension in grading resources. So when we talk about resource yields from use we can be more specific by identifying the downstream as well as upstream costs of resource usage. This is a largely ignored aspect of energy accounting, and is almost nowhere captured in micro-economics (though sometimes captured in macro-economic analyses).

Waste

From the foregoing we can see that waste, too, is a matter of perspective. One man’s trash, and so on. Waste is in fact simply a resource that degrades itself or other resources when used or not used.

Concentrated livestock manure is a “waste problem” under the current industrial divisions and geographical separations of livestock operation inputs and outputs.Manure is rich in nitrogen, fosters soil organisms, generates heat, and acts as water conserving mulch when spread on fields at lower concentrations.

For this reason, Permaculture says “the problem is the solution.” Also we can see that any gross accumulation of a resource, not used by the system, is a form of pollution to the next larger scale system. By this definition, even money, when highly concentrated and not reinvested in the system becomes a form of pollution.

Stuart Staniford of the Oil Drum posted yet another rosy scenario about the future of food. What has struck me about this series is the fantastic gaps, assumptions and leaps of faith Staniford takes as givens and most of the commentators go along with. To give just a brief example, he says that there’s no problem with producing nitrogen in the future, despite the fact that natural gas is a critical component in the production of ammonia, which is the critical component of all nitrogen fertilizers. No problem, we’ll just substitute the boundless renewable energy he talked about in a previous post.

David Holmgren points out that if there’s boundless energy, then all of our work in Permaculture and sustainability is probably a waste of time. There’s still that pesky global warming issue, but we can ignore it for a while longer. Nevertheless, Staniford’s posts represent a possible scenario in the future, and we need to consider it, however unlikely it is to come to fruition. Holmgren considers this view as the “green tech” solution- one among a number of possible scenarios, each of which require differing strategies.

My point here is not to take Staniford’s arguments apart. At least not yet. What’s interesting to me today is that the process of uncovering the assumptions leads to more learning. To me this is like digging a trench (to use my friend Bill’s expression). Working at the trench level of detail, close to the ground, gives a strong and coherent foundation to one’s knowledge. So while I intuitively disagree with Staniford’s conclusions, he’s providing tremendous service by defining this swiss-cheese structure, whose negative space is a patch pattern of very fertile intellectual ground.

Permaculture points out that the interesting stuff, the productive areas are at the edges and transitions. This suggests that it is not the anti-assumption that is interesting but the points at which the assumption and anti-assumption approach eachother, where the anti-assumptions spread out to touch eachother, like pioneer patches in a successional field.

I want to weigh in on the relocalization debate that has been going on for the last several weeks on The Oil Drum. The debate continued with the ArchDruid’s mixed-metaphor weigh-in on Friday. I’ve finally got some coherent thoughts about this. My argument follows.

Mollison defines yield in terms of a system, which creates both product and energy yield. Since energy is not created, according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, energy yield is not truly a “net” but rather the surplus energy after the system’s needs are met. This is the key measure of sustainability in a general sense.

System yield is the sum total of surplus energy produced by, stored, conserved, reused, or converted by the design. Energy is in surplus once the system itself has available all its needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance.

Cheap oil has allowed us to create really big systems, so that current agricultural grain system yields need to be measured against a system that includes oil inputs from Canada, refining in Texas, potash from Canada, nitrogen from Venezuela, processing and shipping to markets all over the world. For all practical purposes this includes the entire global ecosystem. Whether this system is in surplus is a question for another post. The point is that the scale of the system has been driven by cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Therefore, the end of cheap energy will necessitate a reduction in scale of all operations, including agriculture, if it is to be sustainable.

To Staniford’s point that BigAg can continue under improved economic conditions due to Peak Corn, at some point this cannot be argued to be sustainable. There’s a price point that will be reached if it has not done so already. Mollison’s items about all the needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance seem to indicate, in a world where 1/6 of the population live in extreme poverty, that this point has already been reached.

Relocalization can be defined as an attempt to create sustainable systems at a much smaller, more human scale. This would apply to food, money, transportation, media and other “extensions of man.” It follows then that the scale and progress of relocalization is a function of energy supply. This is not to imply that this is a linear relation; the function is necessarily complex.

This realization leads to a further question about the mechanisms and strategies for achieving relocalization. “Planning” is clearly a term with a lot of baggage, so I prefer Mollison’s term “Design.” This will still make Market Fundamentalists twitch, but the fact is the current system has been historically designed in very specific ways. Again this is subject for a future post. The IMF is a case in point, if you need one.

Donald Norman, the usability expert says there is no such thing as “no design”: there is good design or bad design. So we should start designing for a future with a much smaller scale, and the relocalization movement is attempting to do this. To the extent that we employ conscious systems design, for example using Permaculture strategies, relocalization is not a “reversalist” approach.

An important follow-on question is the pace at which re-scaling and relocalizing must take place. I would argue that this depends on whether we are in a Code Red situation or whether there is yet time to design a controlled energy descent, especially in light of Global Warming.