Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sharon Astyk Ornamental edible gardening gets a lot of attention right now. Consider a new book _The Edible Front Yard_ by Ivette Soler that The Peak Oil Hausfrau has just reviewed. I did a post a while back on ornamental perennial edibles, and I wanted to do a companion piece on ornamental medicinal herbs.
Why we farm kids of the middle 20th century in Ohio also called them gumboots I do not know. We wore them regularly and so, human beings being what they are, gumboots became a symbol of our country culture and we were ridiculed for wearing them by town brats. Even as a young man who often went to town wearing gumboots, I was teased, usually in good humor, but the barb was always there. The city slickers didn’t realize that gumboots were very fashionable with the British aristocracy in the early nineteen hundreds.
Although it is peak oil and climate change that initially inspire Transition initiatives and form the underpinning for much of the initial awareness stage, might it be that an initiative reaches a point where continued focus on those issues could be counterproductive?
Not only do we “seem to be a verb”, but more precisely we are transitive verbs whose job it is to maintain bounded order in order to export chaos into the environment by the alchemical transmutation of energy “gold” into the “dross” of dissipated heat. This may seem to be an inadequate job description for such “highly evolved” creatures as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, one step below the angels (our hubris has always tripped us up). But there is a bit more to the job description than that. Unfortunately, we seem to have misread it.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
At a recent conference, I saw the potential for blending two of the most exciting emerging movements of our time—the living building and the living economies movements. A vision of the combination of these two movements energized me with renewed hope that we humans can end our isolation from one another and from nature—that we can move forward to achieve a prosperous, secure, and creative human future for all.
The System of Rice Intensification SRI) is an innovative method of increasing the productivity of irrigated rice with very simple adjustments to traditional techniques. It involves transplanting younger seedlings into the field with wider spacing in a square pattern, irrigating to keep the roots moist and aerated instead of flooding fields, and increasing organic matter in the soil with compost and manure.
The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but there is a significant difference between them – the majority of the wastage in the global south comes from lack of ability to preserve food – no refrigeration, no easy way to preserve it on a large scale, and limited market access or long times from harvest to market…In the Global North, the picture is different. We do lose food at harvest, but the majority of all food loss is household and market – supermarkets throwing out lightly dinged cans and crates of produce, households buying food and burying it in the back of their refrigerators – this is the picture of food waste in the Global North.
Despite the recent drop in oil prices, the outlook for the remainder of the year is not good. If the IEA numbers are correct the world is probably burning more oil each day than is coming out of the ground, with the difference being made up from the 2.6 billion barrel stockpiles held by the OECD countries. Every day brings new stories of coal, electric power and oil product shortages in some corner of the world. The climate too is not cooperating with significant crop failures imminent.
The Gulf Coast region, still reeling from the oil-laden assault on its ecosystem and livelihoods, is now bracing for what’s being called one of the worst cases of flooding since the 1920s and “the nation’s slowest moving natural disaster.” Economists are projecting billions of dollars in damages just as local Gulf-dependent industries such as fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism are struggling back to profitability after the devastating blows from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the BP oil spill.
Movements don’t live on bright ideas and hard work alone. Martin Luther King Jr. said that movements need to offer people a portrait of what the future could look like. So here is a vision of a commons-based society of the future, rising out of the ashes of greedy individualism in a gated community outside Houston.
Generals are particularly famous for planning for the last war rather than the next one, but it’s a common failing; most of today’s industrial civilization, for example, is busily planning its future on the basis of the energy supplies it had available in the recent past, rather than those much sparser supplies it will have to make do with in the recent future. Outside the myopic conviction that temporary conditions will last forever, there are plenty of options that can make the Long Descent ahead of us less grueling than it will otherwise be.
