Dismantle Civilisation

More advice, this time from Donna Williams in the American Chronicle.

Even in California, where people rarely use public transport let alone grow their own food, the governor announced CA officially drought effected. And that means water restrictions like we have here in Australia. In time anything outdoors you won´t be able to water. So get the bins and tubs now, catch the water now, as and when you can use it for plants.

Get or make stepping shelves and place them along your back fence. Cover them in flower pots and fill with organic soil enriched by the organic waste you now have (mulch it in the back garden). Seriously, food has gone up 20% here the last month, rice has doubled.

Petrol is around $6.95 a gallon here in Australia (June 2008) and in the UK already $10.45 a gallon… yes all you Americans who are lobbying your government to reduce your small $4.00 a gallon fuel cost you imagine will cripple your economy… thanks to wars like Iraq we are all in fact paying a far higher price than any of you. The US has among the world´s cheapest fuel and if the American government foolishly subsidised it´s fuel even further you´d never prepare for the end of oil (the independent experts relay that we´ve already reached peak oil), you´ll never build the public transport infrastructures which could save you, and in the end a government bankrupted by subsidising fuel will only have to throw its hands up sooner or later and your leap in price would be an even bigger catastrophe when you are paying what the rest of us do.

Good point. Americans are upset at their oil prices, but they are still cheaper than elsewhere – and Americans are still the most wasteful society.

High fuel means food will rocket in price. You CAN grow food in your garden, safely, with good nutrition, even later feed the scraps to a couple of chickens. Those who have no garden, consider growing on your window sills, balconies, flat roofs. Even if you only grow herbs, you would have something to barter with others growing other things.

But a good growing food garden takes 2 years to really get established. Your own urine is one of the greatest nitrogen rich fertilisers but water it down 10-1 so you don´t burn the plants and use it within 24 hours or you´ll overdo it on the ammonia. Unless you´re a vegetarian, don´t put faeces on your plants unless you want to get seriously ill.

We are endeavouring to publish plenty of helpful information about growing etc here. If you compost it, humanure is perfectly safe – but it must be composted.

Now is the time but water storage is key. Do you have hard rubbish curbside collections? People putting out plastic buckets, containers, pots etc for rubbish? Grab them, grab all you can. Plastic pots are now $1.50 each but people remember them as useless. When we have to grow our own food to subsidise shopping costs and the fuel to get there, those who threw all these pots and tubs out will kick themselves. If you see them out in the rubbish, collect them, seriously. They will pay you back.

Collect bottles and jars too and calico and cloth bags and good quality lidded tins. Plastic containers will become very expensive (they´re made from petrol) and those jars and bottles will help you store your own food when out of season, the cloth bags will help you carry shopping and wrap food and the tins will help you store larger foods.

All the things that people take for granted, and throw away, will become more expensive and scarce. Hoarding other people’s rubbish is good sense.

Are you prepared? Without income what are your housing plans? How will you make most use of the accommodation and skills you have? What do you have to barter? Food will be the new gold.

Already word is leaking that the overuse of soil, fast growth commercial fertilisers (and who knows re GM crops) our food has 75% less of the minerals and nutrients of the same foods grown in the 60s and 70s. Without these essential minerals, we can´t metabolise many of the vitamins in our food… they are just wasted. That means even if the starch, fat and protein levels are high, a mass of starving brains. Could this add to the burden of those who inherited tendencies toward gut, immune and metabolic disorders?

Today we have 1 in 150 children on the autism spectrum (2008), a percentage of which have these health issues (note, there are also those with autism who don´t have significant health issues). And then our societies have never been so polluted, fueled largely by our own consumer greed driving manufacturers to pour formaldehyde, lead, mercury and fluoride into our waterways, the same one´s which feed the foods we eat. Fluoride is sold commercially as a rat poison. It strips the lining of the gut. Yet we´ve bought propaganda that it´s ok to stick it in our mouths daily on the basis that it can harden tooth enamel. Sure, minimally, but at what cost if we swallow it? An epidemic of gut disorders? Vulnerable groups with metabolic disorders whose already vulnerable detox functions are overwhelmed and end up brain starved and over run by stored toxins? Twas greed which did it guv…ours.

We can change these things, if we understand them, if we know we are not pawns in this, we are active participants and we can choose what we support, what we buy, how we adapt. We are not powerless.

Get to know your neighbours. If you can work with them, and share resources, great. If not, consider moving while you still can.

Stop listening to the lies of corporate industrial civilisation. If you have food and shelter today appreciate it. Forget greed and selfishness. Sustainable local living is really not easy on your own, the days of people not knowing their neighbours are numbered.

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The floods in Iowa have spurred James Howard Kunstler to talk about ‘Katrina in slow motion’.

Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a pretty dire situation. So far, the US Public has experienced the world grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices. Cheap corn is behind the magic of the American processed food industry — all those pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).
Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of these “inputs” have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-and-gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline. Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertilizer prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more complicated than just buying x-amount of “inputs” (on credit) to be dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant diesel-powered machines.

The discovery of cheap abundant fuel in the form of oil was a dire mistake, that has enabled humans to crank up the rate of destruction – destruction that is inherent in the system that we call civilisation, but is more like a culture of empire. The natural worl has been assaulted at an unimaginable rate, along with our communities, skills, food diversity. We have been conned by huge agribusiness to do things their way – bigger, faster, more uniform, better (perhaps not!).

Like a lot of other activities in American life these days, agribusiness is unreformable along its current lines. It will take a convulsion to change it, and in that convulsion it will be dragged kicking-and-screaming into a new reality. As that occurs, the US public will have to contend with more than just higher taco chip prices. We’re heading into the Vale of Malthus — Thomas Robert Malthus, the British economist-philosopher who introduced the notion that eventually world population would overtake world food production capacity. Malthus has been scorned and ridiculed in recent decades, as fossil fuel-cranked farming allowed the global population to go vertical. Techno-triumphalist observers who should have known better attributed this to the “green revolution” of bio-engineering. Malthus is back now, along with his outriders: famine, pestilence, and war.

For many of the world’s peoples, the expansion of empire and the impact of global economics, has brought famine, pestilence and war. More than a few people will be glad to see ‘the rich’ suffer, as the oil based economy crashes, and reduces the ability of the rich to impoverish and steal from the poor (thinly diguised as trade and economic development).

Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it’s also possible that, at some point, they’ll mount a Night-of-the-Living-Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on “the system” that has brought them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any of its supermarkets.
The yet-more-ominous thing here is that shortages of food and oil are two fiascos that are pretty clearly predictable for the second half of the year. That’s bad enough without figuring in the “unknowns” that could kick up American hardship a few more notches.The hurricane season just got underway — obscured for the moment by the bigger weather story in Iowa. The fate of the banks is a train wreck still waiting to happen. As it occurs — also heading into the high political and hurricane seasons — we could find ourselves not only a nation wet, hungry, and out-of-gas, but also completely broke.

And because we have used oil to devastate the natural environment, things are likely to get worse than most can imagine. In pre-oil times ‘poor’ people had forests, rivers, oceans from which to glean a basic living. If you had no money you could forage for wild foods or go fishing. People also knew what they could eat, where to find it. land was held in common, for the benefit of the community. All these things have gone. Lost to the endless march of ‘progress’, that wasn’t progress at all, but simply ‘the rich’ stripmining the world, and hobbling us, tying us into the system that was created for us with their vision of one world economy.

The longer we subscribe to this corporate and heirarchical worldview, the worse things will be for us and other creatures as it crashes. The sooner we say ‘enough’ and walk away, and start seeking food and energy independence in local communities that value and cherish their local land bases, the softer will be the inevitable end of all things ‘civilised’.

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A heartfelt plea from 36 years ago:

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A Mother Jones article, by Josh Harkinson, gives a simple explanation of the different methods of oil production. As conventional oil gets harder to find and extract, the oil addicts have even worse methods that could be used to acquire oil products – but to do so would be madness in the face of climate change. How do we convince people that having a planet that can sustain human life is more important than being able to drive to work or buy plastic ‘stuff’ that we don’t really need!

conventional oil
How it’s produced: Drilling in the ground
Where it’s found: Middle East, Russia, United States, elsewhere
Average production cost per barrel: $9
Greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions from production: 5 grams of carbon equivalent per megajoule
Potential output: 2,162 billion barrels
Dirty secret: 77% is controlled by state-run companies, so Big Oil is turning to unconventional sources to survive.

enhanced oil recovery
How it’s produced: CO2 is injected into old oil wells to squeeze out the last 30 to 60%.
Where it’s found: United States, Middle East
Average production cost per barrel: $16
ghg emissions from production: 67% more than conventional oil
Potential output: 1,011 billion barrels
Dirty secret: Could have an environmental upside if oil companies figure out how to sequester CO2 in old wells—and guarantee it won’t leak out again.

tar sands and heavy oil
How it’s produced: Ore is extracted and processed into synthetic crude.
Where it’s found: Canada, Venezuela
Average production cost per barrel: $23
ghg emissions from production: 151% more than conventional oil
Potential output: 1,535 billion barrels
Dirty secret: Each barrel of oil produced leaves behind two of toxic waste. Refining tar sands oil produces as much as 80% more CO2 than conventional refining.

gas-to-liquid synfuel
How it’s produced: Natural gas is mixed with oxygen, purified, and processed into transportation fuels.
Where it’s found: Russia, Iran, Qatar
Average production cost per barrel: $26
ghg emissions from production: 66% more than conventional oil
Potential output: 3,597 billion barrels
Dirty secret: South Africa perfected the technology in response to apartheid-era trade embargoes.

liquefied coal
How it’s produced: Coal is heated and pressurized to create a gas, which is converted to fuel using the gas-to-liquid technique.
Where it’s found: The largest coal reserves are in the United States, Russia, China, India, and South Africa.
Average production cost per barrel: $35
ghg emissions from production: 393% more than conventional oil
Potential output: 8,892 billion barrels
Dirty secret: Mercury is a byproduct. Last year, Senator Barack Obama cosponsored a bill that would have provided the industry with federal loans for as much as $20 million. Enviros accused him of pandering to Illinois coal interests.

oil shale
How it’s produced: Oil-containing rock is mined, crushed, cooked, and injected with hydrogen.
Where it’s found: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming
Average production cost per barrel: $57
ghg emissions from production: 530% more than conventional oil
Potential output: 1,451 billion barrels
Dirty secret: In 2007, former secretary of the interior Gale Norton joined Shell’s oil shale team.

We cannot afford to keep burning oil, or releasing the carbon and pollution into the planets atmosphere. The climate has already been destabilised by human activities, and its already going to get a lot worse. We need to stop now, before the whole planet is turned into a lifeless desert.

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Culture Change Letter #186, Written by Jan Lundberg.

There are several major assumptions blinding most of those who try, within the confines of the dominant culture and “The System,” to grasp trends and glimpse the future:

1) Oil supplies will diminish gradually now that peak extraction has arrived.

2) Alternative fuels and renewable energy can replace our petroleum consumption.

3) The petroleum infrastructure can last or become renewable-energy based.

4) Technology is the equivalent of energy, and energy is energy (all the same).

5) Today’s population of consumers has something to fall back on if and when petroleum-grown/distributed food and petroleum-pumped water disappear.

6) Government and scientists can see us through this challenge and save us.

7) “The market” and “entrepreneurial innovation” offer salvation for our unraveling social fabric and our destruction of the ecosystem.

Climate change will be gradual and be reflected accurately by numerical averages.

9) The U.S. population can cope with anything and is at an advantage over other countries especially as scarcity and adversity mount.

10) The “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan are winnable or can be put behind us with elections, and that the waste of lives and wealth on these wars can be absorbed.

A nice summary of the reactions that we hear from people who can’t see beyond the global corporate industrial worldview that helped us get into this mess. And here’s Jan’s responses:

1. The oil industry and the oil market are, like the global corporate economy, not set up for contraction. Enough of a shortage will sink the whole ship.

2. Petroleum has no substitute, neither for all its uses nor for the cheapness of the bygone days of rising supply. “Unlimited” petroleum created the growth and abundance we’ve known. The main alternatives are just for electricity and have far lower energy yield than the easily extracted, cheap petroleum of yore.

3. The petroleum infrastructure is hard-wired and decaying rapidly. A replacement-alternative needed to be created decades ago to avoid industrial and economic collapse.

4. Energy comes at a physical cost (entropy) and has been exploited according to convenience at hand. Continuing to wish for a free lunch to power our endless consumption may yield gee-wizz technologies, but there are too many weak links in the supply chain (metals, petroleum, uranium). “Externalities” such as environmental degradation come home to roost with, for example, the cancer epidemic.

5. People are basically eating petroleum as part of modern agriculture’s industrialization and scale dedicated only to profit. Ten units of fossil energy are needed today to create one unit of food-calorie energy, and that does not include transportation or food preparation. The average piece of food in the U.S. has to travel 1,500 miles from its point of origin.

6. Government is not really in control of the gigantic, complex systems it has unleashed for its Big Business constituency. Corruption, incompetence and ignorance prevail, and reflect the dominant culture of materialism and private wealth – at odds with any spirit of citizen-cooperation for the public good. Katrina and Rita were only ameliorated by individual and grassroots volunteerism.

7. Making more money and relying on ever-advancing technology is the basis of not only green consumerism but the promise of a “new economy” that is really just more of the same: a disconnect with ecology.

8. Global warming is already out of control, as positive feedback loops have kicked in. The tipping points, accompanied by mass extinction already underway, are inescapable and are characterized over geological time by sudden, total flips to new states not seen on Earth perhaps for the last 55 million years. It has always been true that Mother Nature knows no restraint.

9. The average U.S. citizen has become far softer than our tough forebears who worked the land and could create and repair anything their lives depended upon. Crucial skills have been lost along with community. Most other countries have been called impoverished, but even after being ravaged by corporate and government manipulation, they remain –- compared to Northern Americans — close to the land, and their peoples retain family cohesion.

10. The cost of the Iraq War alone has approached half a trillion dollars and is projected to cost over three trillion in the long run. Far more significant is the death and destruction that, although tragic and incalculable already, will persist for generations. The use of depleted uranium amounts to a nuclear war that the average U.S. citizen knows nothing about, as if one is not affected on this side of the world.

As Jan then says, he or we could go way beyond ten responses. Regular readers will by now have attained a grasp of the situation and the options for the future.

We do not have an energy crisis or a financial crisis, but rather a culture crisis. The above regrettable assumptions cover most of the attitudinal confusion and error that prevent modern consumers from understanding their own lives. Automatic acceptance of technology, and chauvinism for the Red-White-and-Blue, with some religious faith thrown in, are leading all of us — humanity and innocent species that we drive extinct — to what may be oblivion. If this sounds too dire to be possible, look at the direction we are going in, and do the math.

Civilisation’s endgame – 10,000 years of culture of empire has lead us to this.

We are caught in a culture of denial and ruination: of our rights as humans and animals, and of the absolute interdependence of humans and the rest of nature. Too many of us want to believe the propaganda that brainwashed us as “THE Americans,” regarding our being the most special and justly proud of nations — never mind the inextricable bases of slavery and the genocide of the native peoples. This is not to say there are not amazingly wonderful Americans today. Nor do we forget we have unique wonders of natural beauty such as the Grand Canyon.

But our phase of history whereby our “exuberance,” as William Catton called our “Overshoot,” is coming to an end more swiftly than some us thought even a few years ago. The world is turning upside down for better AND for worse. The days of pumping gas and flicking a switch are going to be all but forgotten when we lurch desperately toward more human, “convivial” interaction (as Ivan Illich described our next possible phase). That is, if we do not go extinct from our releasing the chemical and radioactive genies into the world. Gone will be the days of further such atrocities done without the permission of all affected.

If we pull through, we will live in such a way to reject false values, idiocies and greedy tendencies that have dragged us all down. This hegemony has at least accelerated its own demise and helped to close the chapter on a bloody period that began many centuries ago. Now it is time for us to open up the doors and go outside to our freedom. Don’t wait for the talking heads or bosses or politicians to give you permission. Just tell them “Have a global warming day.”

You’ll find us in the garden!

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CommonDreams article by Ronnie Cummins.

Fortunately, there are hopeful signs that we can move beyond crisis to positive solutions. Connecting the dots in our food-climate-energy crisis, millions of green consumers are voting with their dollars for foods and products that are healthy, locally produced, energy efficient, and eco-friendly. A growing number of politicians, mainly at local and state levels, are also waking up.

Organic food and farmers markets are booming. Chemical-free lawns and gardens, green buildings, solar panels, wind generators, “buy local” networks, and bike paths are sprouting. A critical mass of organic-minded Americans are waking up to the fact that we must green the economy, drastically reduce petroleum use and greenhouse gas pollution, re-stabilize the climate, and heal ourselves, before it’s too late.

For 10,000 years locally based family farmers and ranchers managed to grow and distribute healthy food, and ample feed and fiber, largely without the use of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, toxic pesticides, animal drugs, or energy-intensive irrigation, processing, and long-distance transportation.

In 1945 most of the U.S.’s six million family farmers were still rotating their crops and cultivating a wide variety of fruits, grains, beans, and vegetables organically, fertilizing with natural compost, and generally practicing sustainable farming methods they had learned from their parents and grandparents.

By 1945, as part of the war effort, Americans were growing a full 42 percent of our vegetables and fruits in our backyards, schoolyards, and community Liberty Gardens.

The nutritious, primarily non-processed foods that people cooked for their family meals were purchased from locally owned grocers who stocked their shelves with a wide variety of items — typically grown or raised within a 100 mile radius of our communities.

In the 1950s the average American household spent 22 percent of our household income for fresh, locally produced food. Currently we are spending 13-15%, though low-income households are spending 30-35%.

By today’s standards the post-war generation was relatively healthy in terms of low rates of diet-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, food allergies, birth defects, and learning disabilities.

Its just common sense. Industrial agriculture relies on cheap abundant energy supplies. The oil is running out, so we have to rebuild a local organic food infrastructure. Its better for us, our local economies, and the planet.

Organic and local farms dramatically reduce energy use in the agricultural sector by 30-50 percent while safely sequestering in the soil enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Decades of research have shown that small farms produce far more food per acre than chemical farms, especially in the developing world, and that organic farms outperform chemical farms (by 40-70%) under the kind of adverse weather conditions that are quickly becoming the norm. Buying local and regionally grown organic products means food doesn’t have to travel 1500-3500 miles before it reaches your kitchen.

Crisis demands change. We must continue to buy local and organic foods and green products. Patronize farmers markets. Start or expand your garden. Move your diet away from restaurant fare and over-consuming meat and animal products. Buy in bulk and cook your meals at home with healthy whole foods ingredients — vegetables, fruits, beans and grains. If you’re going to eat meat or animal products, make sure they’re both organic and grass-fed or free range. Most important of all, get political. Demand an end to the war. Demand healthy and sustainable food and farming, energy, and climate policies from your local, state, and federal elected public officials‹or else vote them out of office. Don’t panic — go organic.

How bad does it need to get before you start doing something constructive?

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Tom Whipple points out in this article that very little has been talked about electricity, and how our supplies rely on oil.

Although it has received scant coverage in the U.S. media, in many parts of the world, the electric grids are shutting down for long periods each day. In a few places the electricity is now off most of the time. Some of this is due to droughts which have reduced the hydroelectric generating capacity in many parts of the world. Some is due to the price of oil which has simply become too expensive to use in thermoelectric generating stations and in a few places the electricity is out or has been greatly reduced because of civil strife. Iraq, Nigeria, Gaza and Pakistan are the most prominent instances of the latter. Even the climate has contributed to the problem as a wave of unusually cold weather has enveloped the Middle East, Central Asia and Siberia, forcing many to use electric heat as their only means of survival.

Currently, there is some form of power shortage starting in southern China and ranging south to Vietnam and then westward across the subcontinent to Africa. Parts of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and many places in central and southern Africa have reported shortages. These range from minor inconveniences to cities where the economy is close to shutting down. Problems have been reported in Central and South America and nearly everywhere where oil-fired power plants are used to generate electricity.

Thus far the developed countries have largely avoided problems due to better electrical infrastructures, domestic fuel supplies, or the ability to pay whatever it costs to obtain the necessary fuel. In effect, the rich have outbid the poor who are now suffering the consequences.

The mainstream media seems to be ignoring the blackouts around the world, or warning people that it could soon be happening in the richer countries.

Sad as it may seem, we may have a situation shaping up where the world will shortly be divided into countries that have general access to electricity and those who don’t. If you have a good source of domestic fuel for generation, then you are probably in good shape. If you don’t, you probably won’t be able to afford to import it for the competition will be fierce.

What this means for the billions around the world that will be without it is difficult to contemplate. They can certainly forget electric cars for awhile and it is a good bet their governments will restrict or maybe even eliminate household use. Whatever electricity is still available will be used to pump water, maintain communications, public services, and some amount of industry.

For most of human history people went to sleep when it got dark. Full moon was a time of outside activities, gatherings, parties. Electricity has only been around since oil, and much of what we take for granted has only been here for a tiny blip of our history. Eventually most of the world will undoubtedly be without electricity, at least most of the time, and for those of us in the West (and elsewhere) the oil culture has seen traditional alternatives and skills disappear. Alternatives such as solar panels may help make the transition easier for some, but with a guaranteed working life of 15 years, there wont be the oil or energy to repair or replace them after that time. In the longterm it looks like we will have to learn to live without electricity.
So much to think about, so much to learn, and so much to do.

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Sharon Astyk has inspired many people to think about and work towards food and energy independence. Most of us have so much to learn, having been raised from supermarkets and the global economy. Sharon’s weekly updates is a very useful idea, breaking up the mammoth task of learning how to support ourselves into a series of questions. Obviously not all of us can learn everything. Perhaps by following Sharons lead, and meeting with our neighbours to discuss ‘Independence Days’ together, a level of co-operation, mutual aid and local specialisation can be found at the street or village level. Money is losing its value fast, but useful skills once learned will increase in value to ourselves and our communities as the economy continues to crash. So much to do, so little time – if only people had listened to the peak oil ‘prophets’ back in the 70s!

Planted something.
Harvested something.
Preserved something.
Cooked something new.
Managed reserves.
Prepped something.
Minimized waste.
Learned A New Skill.

What have you done today towards food and energy independence?

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“Even the United States is not immune from the potential for food shortages, food riots and food insecurity. We’re just blind to the possibility”, says Monica Davis on Indybay.org.

A few analysts believe that the United States is on the verge of a major economic revolution, a process, which will change where we live, what we eat, and how we view agriculture. Looking at the rumbles from around the world we are already seeing wars over oil and energy resources, not to mention the violent eviction of traditional farmers in South America and other parts of the world by the industrialized bio-fuels industry.

The fight over finite land resources is slowly taking shape out of sight of most of the United States as agribusinesses lay claim to land around the world. Agro-conglomerates chase natives off tribal lands in South America, Indonesia and parts of the Far East at gunpoint. Murder over land continues in the Third World, as conglomerates move onto jungle and rain forest land, clearing acreage with slash and burn campaigns.

What was once climate producing tropical rain forest has become fields for sugar cane, corn and other biofuels. More profitable biofuel crops have now deprived the food chain of a large supply of corn and other crops, driving up the cost of corn-based food such as corn meal, tortillas, corn syrup and a hundred other crops and products which grace our tables at ever greater cost.

Using other people’s food to feed our cars is crazy and immoral. People in less developed parts of the world are already feeling the impact of our addiction to driving. But worldwide food prices are being driven up, and no one is immune from the consequences.

The United States produces 46% of the world’s biofuels, with Brazil coming in at a close second with 42%. (Biofuels: the Promise and the Risks). As a world leader in food exports, grain in particular, the United States has altered world grain markets by diverting grain into fuel production, thereby increasing demand for grains with a resultant rise in the price of the commodity because of demand. The ensuing market shortage has generated price increases in the world grain market, making food staples too expensive for much of the world’s poor to afford.

So far, Americans are mostly bystanders in the game, content to grumble at the gas pump and complain in the grocery aisles. As a “First World” nation, the United States so far has not been subject to the food riots, which we have seen in Haiti and other parts of the world. Americans have more per capita income than much of the world; hence the crisis of the Third World, so far, is inconvenience in the “First World” and in developed nations such as the United States.

That said, however, we must understand that this situation is not sustainable. While Americans do have more disposable income than the rest of the word, that income is not unlimited and our food supply is much more vulnerable than we think. When it comes to food security, both in terms of supply and accessibility, this country is much more vulnerable than we think.

As one retired grain salesman noted, most of the nation’s grain is moved around the country by just TWO railroads. Little is stored in the event of disaster and the whole system is extremely vulnerable. While we in the United States look at the food riots in other countries with a sense of disbelief, we are not immune. Under the right circumstances, we could be in the same boat. (Ibid)

In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn’t have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no short-term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can’t make up the difference because no other nation has a surplus of grain in good times let alone in times when they are having droughts and floods also. (Robert Felix, “US Food Riots Much Closer than You Think”)

Critics say the US is currently too preoccupied with foreign excursions and oil to pay attention to food security, particularly how concentration of suppliers and processors threaten the food chain. The highly concentrated meat processing industry has generated millions of pounds of recalls this year. Outbreaks in e.coli and other food borne pathogens continue to haunt the headlines, as food prices rise around the world.

The concentration of food processing, cultivation and distribution into the hands of a few companies is wrecking havoc around the world.

The endgame of civilisation – control and power over food concentrated in the hands of a few corporations whose principle concern is with profits for their shareholders. And of course, increased prices means increased profits for the few at the expense of the many.

Food security, that is the availability and affordability of food, has been pushed aside by the War on Terror, and continues to lag behind our awareness, despite their being linked together in a dangerous dance of death, which has been created by the bio-fuels industry. Ultimately, the price of oil, depends on supply, demand and risk (War), and the price of food has now become dangerously linked to the energy market by the requirements of the fuel crop industry. We now are dealing with a ‘double whammy’ that is dangerously impeding our food supply.

Living in the “Breadbasket of the World,” it is hard for most Americans to even conceive of the idea that food could become scarce in this country. Few of us are paying attention to the close relationship between biofuel, grain crops and price inflation.

Think tank analyst Pat Mooney noted the close connection between corn and oil prices.

“The market place does now tie the price of a bushel of corn to the price of a barrel of crude and when it does that it means that poor people are going to lose out,” said Mooney. (Ibid)

The world’s grain and food markets have been turned on their heads. Where once the price of fuel and oil-based fertilizers used to cultivate crops added to the cost of the crop, now the use of crops as fuel generates still another tier of demand on the world’s soils and crops.

With finite amounts of cropland, competition between fuel and food crops for land and economic resources, and unpredictable natural disasters, wars and pestilence waiting in the wings, our food supply is not as secure as we think it is.

Isn’t it time you started thinking about where your food comes from, and start working out how you can take part in local food production?

Cultivating Communities website may be of interest to UK readers.

Local Harvest website may be of interest to readers in the USA.

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Ecologist article by Peter Bunyard, deconstructs the myth of nuclear power as an energy source that necessarily results in low greenhouse gas emissions. Haven’t we been here before?

And, if we are going to be serious about substituting nuclear power for fossil fuel powered electricity generation in the world, so as to make a difference, we would need an urgent, production line programme to build at least 5,000 gigawatt-sized reactors by 2020. Every two days we would have to start on the construction of a new reactor, with the programme costing at least, £20 million-million, or some thousand times the cost of the proposed nuclear construction programme over the next two decades in the UK. Moreover, after one generation of say 30 to 40 years, the whole cycle would have to start all over again.

Even if we could find enough suitable sites to put up all the reactors and enough water to cool them, the massive costs involved must surely put nuclear power well out of reach of all but a handful of nations. And where would nuclear power be without using fossil fuels for uranium mining, for processing the ore, for preparing reactor fuel, for constructing the reactor, the cooling ponds and the reprocessing plant, the electricity connection, let alone for the casks used in transporting spent fuel, whether by rail, sea or road? In effect, fossil fuels have subsidized nuclear power and will continue to do so. In that respect, the cost of nuclear power generation cannot be divorced from the costs of fossil fuel use, and as those costs rise, so too will the costs of nuclear power. Indeed, a carbon tax on fossil fuels would lead automatically to higher construction and maintenance costs for nuclear power.

Nuclear power requires fossil fuels. The lie that we can reduce carbon emmissions by switching to nuclear is simply that – a bare faced lie.

Nor is that the end of the story. The average household in an industrialised country such as the UK consumes two-thirds of the energy in the home for heating and just one-third for electrical appliances. Even in France with its subsidised nuclear power, consumers prefer to use natural gas-fired boilers and cookers for hot water, space-heating and cooking rather than resort to expensive electricity.

And were we to be persuaded to use electricity for everything in the house, including heating, we would push up demands on the electricity supply industry to the point where considerably more generating capacity would have to be built. To maintain the supply so that householders can get what they want at the flick of a switch, requires capacity to be built which may get used only at peak times. Meanwhile, to ensure an instantaneous response to demand, power stations need to be ticking over, as ‘spinning reserve’. France, for instance, has a total installed capacity of over 110,000 megawatts (electricity) of which 63,000 MW is from nuclear plants. A significant proportion of that capacity is now used inefficiently to meet peak loads. In fact, the daily peak load for electricity in winter reaches 70,000 MW, which is more than three times the load that may be encountered in summer.

Using electricity to generate heating is an insane idea however that electricity is made.

Today’s reactors, totalling some 350 GW(e) provide three per cent of the total energy used in the world, for which they consume some 60,000 tonnes of natural uranium each year. At that rate, economically recoverable reserves of uranium – some 10 million tonnes – would last less than 100 years. A worldwide nuclear programme of some 1000 nuclear reactors would consume the uranium within 50 years, and if all the world’s electricity, currently some 60 exajoules or 17,000 terawatt-hours (million million watt-hours), was generated by nuclear reactors such economic reserves of uranium would last just four years.

Peak uranium is not far behind peak oil and peak gas. We have to use less, and lower our consuption levels so that all can get a fair share. Not build hundreds of nuclear plants in an attempt to continue this crazy system of work, buy, consume, die. We have an opportunity here to reduce our levels of ‘business’, to reform how land is distributed and how food is grown. But no, the UK governments wants to try keeping this machine, that we are all enslaved by and addicted to, trundling on until every last drop of water and soil is poisoned, every last species is domesticated or extinct, every last human suffers from the stress and sickness and poisoning that is inherent in this sytem. Are they criminally insane or simply ignorant and stupid?

But, we are going nuclear and the UK government is taking us back into a world of old-fashioned concepts that by now should have had their day. A nuclear power programme will cost us dear, if not the Earth.

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