We also built the root cellar that we can drive a lawn tractor and trailer into to unload produce.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Summer of 2010
This summer we accomplished quite a lot. We planted 190 blueberry plants and have another 130 coming next Spring. Besides the rototilling, mowing and planting we also did some building. Below are pictures of how we reconditioned the old house. The part you are seeing was built in the 1940s. The passive solar is working very well. The picture below is an update of the house with our new hand pump so we need no electricity to get water. Look closely you can see a tomato plant in the window. It still unfrozen on 23 November with no additional heat into the house except the passive solar.
We also built the root cellar that we can drive a lawn tractor and trailer into to unload produce.
We also built the root cellar that we can drive a lawn tractor and trailer into to unload produce.
Monday, September 20, 2010
A Regional Magazine Article
An article in the "Lake Country Journal" September 2010.
Neighbor: Simple Living
By Tenlee Lund
“Sustainable” and “renewable” are more than just words to John Weber. A man who lives his beliefs, Weber has actually “walked the walk.”
For thirty years he lived “off the grid,” meaning his home was not connected to an electric utility. Since he was then living near Long Prairie, that meant facing not only daily tasks, but cold winters and hot summers without the convenience of power-on-demand. He pumped his own water and split his own wood for cooking and heating. Most of the electricity he consumed was generated on his own property via the sun and wind.
This was the culmination of a “back to the land” odyssey that began in the late 1960s, triggered by a return to his hometown of Hialeah, Florida.
“When I was growing up there was literally acreage between Hialeah and Miami,” says Weber. “I used to camp in a place that, when I came back on leave from the service, was a shopping center that was bigger than the city of Long Prairie. I thought, ‘Where did everything go? What happened?’
“In 1968, after I had finished a degree in anthropology, I remember looking at the Miami skyline and thinking, ‘This is not the way humans were meant to live and it will not succeed.’ It was an instinct kind of thing.”
Now, after more than forty years of dedicated study, Weber, an anthropologist and licensed psychologist, believes the key factor affecting the human condition is energy—its cost, production, and consumption.
Humans evolved from hunters and gatherers through the agricultural and industrial revolutions. “The major source of energy before the industrial revolution was animal power—horses, oxen, llamas—and humans.” Although he doesn’t advocate turning the clock back centuries, he does believe we can live at a much more sustainable level.
In fact, he’s convinced we are going to have to.
He cites historical data that shows the growth of the human population paralleling the use of fossil fuels—and the fact that current statistics indicate we’ve passed the planet’s peak oil production. As oil production declines and alternative energy sources struggle to fill the gap, Weber foresees global calamity.
“We are facing the biggest dilemma, the broadest dilemma, that humanity has ever faced because, without oil, we can’t keep six billion people going on this planet.”
And, although he supports wind and solar as transitional energy sources, he said they are not renewable because they require non-renewable elements for energy generation and storage.
“An oak tree is renewable. A horse is renewable. But the wind generator and the solar panels are not renewable. It’s incredibly important to understand this because there is this hope being created of continuing ‘business as usual’ and the status quo, and that absolutely cannot be.”
Weber’s main concern is for food, followed by heat in a climate like Lake Country’s. “Food is very serious because we probably only have a thirty-day supply of food and people aren’t prepared. We don’t live like we used to live. If you go back 150 years, people had a larder, they canned food.”
Weber and his partner, Kathy Wagner, have a root cellar. They are building another one that will serve as an old-fashioned icehouse. Their goal is to store enough food to sustain them for a year.
They now live in a modern home near Longville that includes digital clocks and two computers—along with some noticeable differences. Their electrical power is supplemented by grid-tied solar panels, keeping their daily usage at less than three kilowatt hours, instead of the twenty consumed by a typical household. They can also go completely off-grid if necessary.
“If I had to, we could be sustainable within a week. It wouldn’t be fun, but we could do it,” says Weber. They can cook and heat with wood and pump their own water. They also own a forty-acre farm, designed to operate off-grid, where they’ve planted an orchard, blueberry patch, and truck garden. Water can be pumped using a unique bicycle rig instead of “by hand,” and the house incorporates passive-solar heating.
In the 1970s, Weber taught a class on simple living, challenging his students with this assignment: For one week, “as you walk through your world, everything you touch, ask yourself, ‘How much energy is used to create it? Where does it come from? Do I need it? Can I make it myself?’”
Today he teaches an equally challenging seminar, “Let’s Talk Energy,” through Northland Community Schools in Remer.
“I want people to start thinking,” he says. “I’m saying that the world you know will not exist and the change could be overnight, given what goes on in the economy. If we’re going to survive we’ve got to think it out. In order to do that you’ve got to get the mindset that ‘business as usual’ cannot go on.
“We live so ‘high on the hog’ in this country, we’re actually in worse shape than some of the undeveloped countries, because they know how to live without energy. We don’t.”
However, we may soon need to learn. And a talk with John Weber is a good place to start.
Neighbor: Simple Living
By Tenlee Lund
“Sustainable” and “renewable” are more than just words to John Weber. A man who lives his beliefs, Weber has actually “walked the walk.”
For thirty years he lived “off the grid,” meaning his home was not connected to an electric utility. Since he was then living near Long Prairie, that meant facing not only daily tasks, but cold winters and hot summers without the convenience of power-on-demand. He pumped his own water and split his own wood for cooking and heating. Most of the electricity he consumed was generated on his own property via the sun and wind.
This was the culmination of a “back to the land” odyssey that began in the late 1960s, triggered by a return to his hometown of Hialeah, Florida.
“When I was growing up there was literally acreage between Hialeah and Miami,” says Weber. “I used to camp in a place that, when I came back on leave from the service, was a shopping center that was bigger than the city of Long Prairie. I thought, ‘Where did everything go? What happened?’
“In 1968, after I had finished a degree in anthropology, I remember looking at the Miami skyline and thinking, ‘This is not the way humans were meant to live and it will not succeed.’ It was an instinct kind of thing.”
Now, after more than forty years of dedicated study, Weber, an anthropologist and licensed psychologist, believes the key factor affecting the human condition is energy—its cost, production, and consumption.
Humans evolved from hunters and gatherers through the agricultural and industrial revolutions. “The major source of energy before the industrial revolution was animal power—horses, oxen, llamas—and humans.” Although he doesn’t advocate turning the clock back centuries, he does believe we can live at a much more sustainable level.
In fact, he’s convinced we are going to have to.
He cites historical data that shows the growth of the human population paralleling the use of fossil fuels—and the fact that current statistics indicate we’ve passed the planet’s peak oil production. As oil production declines and alternative energy sources struggle to fill the gap, Weber foresees global calamity.
“We are facing the biggest dilemma, the broadest dilemma, that humanity has ever faced because, without oil, we can’t keep six billion people going on this planet.”
And, although he supports wind and solar as transitional energy sources, he said they are not renewable because they require non-renewable elements for energy generation and storage.
“An oak tree is renewable. A horse is renewable. But the wind generator and the solar panels are not renewable. It’s incredibly important to understand this because there is this hope being created of continuing ‘business as usual’ and the status quo, and that absolutely cannot be.”
Weber’s main concern is for food, followed by heat in a climate like Lake Country’s. “Food is very serious because we probably only have a thirty-day supply of food and people aren’t prepared. We don’t live like we used to live. If you go back 150 years, people had a larder, they canned food.”
Weber and his partner, Kathy Wagner, have a root cellar. They are building another one that will serve as an old-fashioned icehouse. Their goal is to store enough food to sustain them for a year.
They now live in a modern home near Longville that includes digital clocks and two computers—along with some noticeable differences. Their electrical power is supplemented by grid-tied solar panels, keeping their daily usage at less than three kilowatt hours, instead of the twenty consumed by a typical household. They can also go completely off-grid if necessary.
“If I had to, we could be sustainable within a week. It wouldn’t be fun, but we could do it,” says Weber. They can cook and heat with wood and pump their own water. They also own a forty-acre farm, designed to operate off-grid, where they’ve planted an orchard, blueberry patch, and truck garden. Water can be pumped using a unique bicycle rig instead of “by hand,” and the house incorporates passive-solar heating.
In the 1970s, Weber taught a class on simple living, challenging his students with this assignment: For one week, “as you walk through your world, everything you touch, ask yourself, ‘How much energy is used to create it? Where does it come from? Do I need it? Can I make it myself?’”
Today he teaches an equally challenging seminar, “Let’s Talk Energy,” through Northland Community Schools in Remer.
“I want people to start thinking,” he says. “I’m saying that the world you know will not exist and the change could be overnight, given what goes on in the economy. If we’re going to survive we’ve got to think it out. In order to do that you’ve got to get the mindset that ‘business as usual’ cannot go on.
“We live so ‘high on the hog’ in this country, we’re actually in worse shape than some of the undeveloped countries, because they know how to live without energy. We don’t.”
However, we may soon need to learn. And a talk with John Weber is a good place to start.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Fall of Tomorrow
This is a piece I wrote for a novel entitled The Fall of Tomorrow that takes place in 2022.
THE OAK
September 29, 2022
Dear Shirley,
Hope this letter finds you. Okay poor joke. We have to laugh at the way things are these days. Or we . . . .
To start over, hope all is well with you. Things here seem okay. Yet when you look back six months things are changed, always downhill. The idiots at Channel 5 are still hyping like they did ten years ago. Remember how we use to make fun of it. Now, it is so sad. Like their smiles and words could bring it all back.
Hear tell, the side roads into the city can hardly be driven by the trucks. There were a few days when it was hard to get flour. My garden is just about done but feel lucky to get what I did out of it. The rain was so poor late in the season. It is crazy the way things have changed. Wet, wet, wet in the Spring and that hard drying the rest of the season. Got enough with some luck to make through the winter.
Closed off the upstairs. Moved the bed down into the living room with the help of Mr. Solsom next door. He’s younger than I am by a few years but working at that factory, smelling those fumes has made it hard on him. I am surprise we were able to get in down with it and us in one piece.
With the upstairs closed off and the little wood heater, I should be real cozy this year. I hope there’s no interruption in the gas this winter like last winter. I can cook on the wood heater but can’t bake anything when that happens.
How’s the water down your way. They had us boiling ours in July. Some old manure tank up river collapsed for want of repairs. There was an unpleasant smell to it but boiling made it safe. What a bother. I wonder how many of those holding tanks there are that will give way.
Can you remember when they use to have all those turkeys in big sheds, one on top of the other? Always reminded me of those big cities in Asia. Well, the plagues took care of those big cities. I count my blessings that it was so light up here.
What confusion. People didn’t know which way to go. If you have no oil do you go south to avoid the winter and freezing. Of course, the temperatures down there were unbearable in the summer. By the time they figure that out they didn’t have the energy to move. Yes, literally and figuratively.
The oak is dead.
Bill loved that oak. I remember the day we planted it 50 years ago like it was yesterday.
“This oak will grow and be beautiful just like us,” he had said. You know how he was. He use to love rake the leaves this time of year. Said it was a sign of more to come.
Have you had any more of those terrible sand storms. For a few weeks this summer I thought the wind would never stop blowing. Had to cover the garden at night with whatever I could find to keep the moisture. Hard enough to water each plant by hand. I really miss the sprinkler. Just turn it on and leave it. These changes are so sad.
I hate that the oak is dead. I wish it could have waited until after me. Losing Bill was so tough. Forty seven years together. He just couldn’t weather that damn flu. I’m afraid one of those winds will take the tree down. Lost one of the branches during that blow this summer. Will have to use it for heat this winter. I know I should be thankful that the oak is still giving to me. But it just hurts.
How are your grandchildren? I know it is tough to lose Sammy and Tommy to the flu. I was so sorry for you. Are the other three doing okay? What a world we have given them. Could you have imagined all those years ago that this is how it would be? What dreams we had. That little child down the block, well, I guess she isn’t so little anymore, is doing fine. It is strange about children. They just adapt don’t they. Not as easy for us old birds.
In many ways I am glad that Bill and I never could have children. For so many years that was so sad for us. But now, well, it certainly isn’t getting any easier out there.
Did I tell you about the snakes? I know you are use to them but we never had anything like that up here. Only garter snakes and they are harmless. Well, the heat changed all that. They just slithered right up here following the temperature. Now I have to watch were I walk and be real careful in the garden.
I wish the oak could have moved like the snakes. Did I tell you it was dead.
Yours,
Sylvia
THE OAK
September 29, 2022
Dear Shirley,
Hope this letter finds you. Okay poor joke. We have to laugh at the way things are these days. Or we . . . .
To start over, hope all is well with you. Things here seem okay. Yet when you look back six months things are changed, always downhill. The idiots at Channel 5 are still hyping like they did ten years ago. Remember how we use to make fun of it. Now, it is so sad. Like their smiles and words could bring it all back.
Hear tell, the side roads into the city can hardly be driven by the trucks. There were a few days when it was hard to get flour. My garden is just about done but feel lucky to get what I did out of it. The rain was so poor late in the season. It is crazy the way things have changed. Wet, wet, wet in the Spring and that hard drying the rest of the season. Got enough with some luck to make through the winter.
Closed off the upstairs. Moved the bed down into the living room with the help of Mr. Solsom next door. He’s younger than I am by a few years but working at that factory, smelling those fumes has made it hard on him. I am surprise we were able to get in down with it and us in one piece.
With the upstairs closed off and the little wood heater, I should be real cozy this year. I hope there’s no interruption in the gas this winter like last winter. I can cook on the wood heater but can’t bake anything when that happens.
How’s the water down your way. They had us boiling ours in July. Some old manure tank up river collapsed for want of repairs. There was an unpleasant smell to it but boiling made it safe. What a bother. I wonder how many of those holding tanks there are that will give way.
Can you remember when they use to have all those turkeys in big sheds, one on top of the other? Always reminded me of those big cities in Asia. Well, the plagues took care of those big cities. I count my blessings that it was so light up here.
What confusion. People didn’t know which way to go. If you have no oil do you go south to avoid the winter and freezing. Of course, the temperatures down there were unbearable in the summer. By the time they figure that out they didn’t have the energy to move. Yes, literally and figuratively.
The oak is dead.
Bill loved that oak. I remember the day we planted it 50 years ago like it was yesterday.
“This oak will grow and be beautiful just like us,” he had said. You know how he was. He use to love rake the leaves this time of year. Said it was a sign of more to come.
Have you had any more of those terrible sand storms. For a few weeks this summer I thought the wind would never stop blowing. Had to cover the garden at night with whatever I could find to keep the moisture. Hard enough to water each plant by hand. I really miss the sprinkler. Just turn it on and leave it. These changes are so sad.
I hate that the oak is dead. I wish it could have waited until after me. Losing Bill was so tough. Forty seven years together. He just couldn’t weather that damn flu. I’m afraid one of those winds will take the tree down. Lost one of the branches during that blow this summer. Will have to use it for heat this winter. I know I should be thankful that the oak is still giving to me. But it just hurts.
How are your grandchildren? I know it is tough to lose Sammy and Tommy to the flu. I was so sorry for you. Are the other three doing okay? What a world we have given them. Could you have imagined all those years ago that this is how it would be? What dreams we had. That little child down the block, well, I guess she isn’t so little anymore, is doing fine. It is strange about children. They just adapt don’t they. Not as easy for us old birds.
In many ways I am glad that Bill and I never could have children. For so many years that was so sad for us. But now, well, it certainly isn’t getting any easier out there.
Did I tell you about the snakes? I know you are use to them but we never had anything like that up here. Only garter snakes and they are harmless. Well, the heat changed all that. They just slithered right up here following the temperature. Now I have to watch were I walk and be real careful in the garden.
I wish the oak could have moved like the snakes. Did I tell you it was dead.
Yours,
Sylvia
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Superman Plays With Kryptonite Dice
SUPERMAN PLAYS WITH KRYPTONITE DICE
Understanding this essay will not make you happy. It will challenge our beliefs and lifestyles. Energy, so intricate to our survival, does not simply appear at the gas pump or the flip of a switch. The gas pump, the power lines, the grocery store are deceptive teats that we blissfully suck with infantile expectations. If we choose to remain ignorant of energy’s pervasiveness in human affairs our future is threatened. I will briefly examine the role of energy in population growth and pollution; energy’s physical laws; and some of the psychological, moral and spiritual factors blocking the changes facing us.
Energy is food; is home heating; is driving your car; is your car; is making widgets in the factory; is the widget; is toilet paper; is the soil at your feet; is the carrot in the soil; is the sun driven hydrologic cycle; is safe drinking water; is the stage where fashion models strut; is the lives of the many organisms and of the millions of years that creates petroleum; is the top of every jar in your house; is the heat, pressure and time of the earth concentrating the minerals for the aluminum in your pop can; is the wind turning the generator that makes my electricity; is the generator; is the ink on this page; is the sun and material formed in the trees that heat my house; is the shirts on our backs.
Human history subtly and not so subtly is the story of energy. Each major energy transformation has been driven by resources and population. Each ecological crisis brings a new technology. Each new social and physical technological development modifies no matter how slightly the original human condition.
For the first 100 thousand years of human existence we were gatherers and hunters. We would locate and gather energy from diverse and wide spread sources of fruits, nuts, and roots. A wild carrot used the sun, water and soil nutrients to grow. Some of that growth resulted in energy being stored in the root. As gatherer and hunters we came along and ate that stored energy. Sometimes we would take energy from an animal who had gathered its energy from other sources. Our other sources of stored energy were trees and water.
Resilient and resourceful our numbers grew. Ten thousand years ago population pressures, climatic shifts and resource stresses brought on a tremendous revolution in energy use (Cohen, 1977; McCorriston, J. & Hole, F. 1991). We cleared land by hand and fire. Using the stored energy in the soil and water we grew our food in a defined area. When the soil’s energy became depleted or irrigation salted the land, new land was brought into service. The Agriculture Revolution was born and human populations continued to grow.
The human species evolved in the physical environment of gathering and hunting. For over 90% of the time we have been on the face of the earth this was how we lived. This was also the social environment on which human adaptation is based. It is this social and physical environment that has been changing for the last ten thousand years.
The new agricultural technology by adding human labor to the energy of the sun, soil and water changed human communities. Women did not nurse as long, children were born closer together, permanent housing arose putting walls between people, toilet training within walls was more demanding, and very importantly, children at a young age became an important source of energy. Agriculture not only allowed population growth; it became a necessity.
The Agricultural Revolution worked to feed people nearly up to the present. There were major inventions both social and physical during this time. Writing, the horse collar, cities, plumbing, three world religions; these and many more are used as the criteria for progress and civilization. Our wonderful creativeness is surely a product of the energy of human nature. Without the energy from mining the soil and controlling water these and many other developments would have been far fewer if not unnecessary.
Population, fueled by agriculture, rose in an upward moving curve. In a repeating ecological pattern, our growing numbers exhausted the land, strained and polluted the water, depleted the forests, and crowded people into unhealthy conditions. Under these pressures, some people relocated using their feet, the wheel and domesticated energy in the form of animals. Or they died of starvation or pestilence or killed each other off.
One of the early Church Fathers, Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 - 240), commented on the effects of human enterprise on the earth: “Farms have replaced wastelands, cultivated land has subdued the forests, cattle have put to flight the wild beast, barren lands have become fertile, rocks have become soil, swamps have been drained, and the number of cities exceeds the number of poor huts found in former times . . . Everywhere there are people, communities - everywhere there is human life!” To such a point that “the world is full. The elements scarcely suffice us. Our needs press . . . Pestilence, famine, wars, [earthquakes] are intended, indeed, as remedies, as prunings, against the growth of the human race.” (Gies and Gies.1994, p. 6.)
Various technologies evolved during the Middle Ages (500 A. D. to 1500 A.D.) to support these growing populations. These developments were simply extensions to the primary energy base of sun, land and water. Among the inventions were the heavy plow, the horse collar, the horse shoe, better forges making iron tools more available, better wind machines, better water wheels, and different forms of human organization. One-third of the land under cultivation went to feeding horses. Heat for homes and the various industries was fueled by trees. We did not find another source of energy; we simply used bigger hammers.
The end of the Middle Ages heralded another energy and social transformation as illuminated in The Silent Countdown (Brimblecombe and Pfister, C. editors, 1995) and A Distant Mirror (Tuchman, 1978). The technological inventiveness and social transformations that culminated in the Industrial Revolution was prompted again by population growth, ecological pressures and a climatic shift (the “little ice age”). There was a desperate search for a fuel other than wood because of forest depletion. The steam engine was developed to pump water from coal mines. Coal began the Industrial Revolution. This initiated an unprecedented surge in population growth and a demand for new social adaptations.
The evolution of better sailing technologies allowed the dispersal of ecologically stressed populations beginning in the 1500’s. Large numbers migrated from Europe to Asia, Africa, South America, and North America.
Adapted from McEvedy, Colin and Jones, Richard. 1978. Atlas of World Population History.
Although narrow in its geographic scope, Tertullian’s observation is still relevant today. There have been only 50 generations since his statement. This is a short time in biology. Without the Americas and fossil fuels our population numbers and even consumption patterns would have been highly constrained.
At the beginning of the agricultural revolution, 10,000 years ago, the world’s population is estimated to have been 4 million people - a number that took perhaps 100,000 years to reach. In year one of the present era, the energy impetus of the Agricultural Revolution had brought the world population to 170 million. A mere five hundred years later - in 1500, the world population was approximately 425 million. This was after a loss of some 10,000,000 people during the Black Plague. Underwritten by fossil fuels for 500 years, we are now nearly 6 billion; 6,000,000,000.
“It is estimated . . . that every hour, more than eleven thousand newborns cry out. . . . At current birth and death rates, the world is adding a Los Angeles every three weeks” (Tobias, 1994, p.395). This continued growth is supported by stored energy in the soil, in fossil fuels, in ores, in the hydrologic cycle, and in the information passed from generation to generation.
Fossil fuels powered industry for several centuries before becoming a prime factor in agriculture. Many inventions brought greater production to agriculture yet the horse and the human fueled by the land, water and sun remained the basic sources of energy.
Only within the last hundred years have tractors and electric motors replace the horse and human to begin the present era of industrial agriculture. Many people in the world are, albeit indirectly, eating oil in the form of fuel for machines, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and electric generation (Green,1978). Industrial agriculture uses 10 units of energy (mostly fossil fuels) to generate one unit of energy for the table. Traditional rice paddy agriculture (which because of its magnitude has its own environmental drawbacks) uses one calorie to produce ten (Pimental, 1984).
Industrial Agriculture may not be around as long as traditional agriculture. The first productive oil well was drilled in 1860. In less then 200 years we will have exhausted most of the world’s easily accessible petroleum reserves. Each year the International Energy Agency puts out estimates of global petroleum reserves and a compilation of world petroleum consumption. Using consumption data from 1996 and the most optimistic estimate of remaining reserves and hoped for additional finds, simple division gives us 50 years remaining of easily accessible petroleum.
This number, however, does not recognized increased use from economic or population growth. Factoring in a 2.3% yearly growth in consumption which is the historic figure for the last decade there are approximately forty years remaining starting from 1996. The figures for worldwide natural gas are of the same magnitude. For those of us past this number in age, we know that 40 years is not very long.
Land available for food production must be considered. Using the world record food harvest of 1985, if we were all vegetarian we could provide adequate diets for 6 million people or 4 million, if we ate 15% animals or 2.5 million, if we ate a U. S. diet of 30% animal (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1991). These estimates are based on fossil fuel supported agriculture. Land needs before fossil fuels are estimated in Europe at 4 acres per person (Braudel, 1979. p. 61). The total estimated available arable land is10448 million acres (Revelle,1976). With the probable diminishing availability of fossil fuels for fuel, fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides and given this area and prefossil fuel acreage needs, 2.5 billion people appears to be the maximum sustainable level. And this leaves scant flexibility for any changes brought on by climate or war.
We need air, water and food. Heat would also be nice for some of the places we live. These are the very basics. For 100,000 years our sources of energy were gathered by an individual from the immediate environment. The development of agriculture, reduced the space necessary to support one person and allowed one person to support many others. Our sources of energy remained renewable within a human life time.
Fossils fuels brought a new dimension to stored energy. They are highly concentrated and portable. They are also nonrenewable. Fossil fuels are a non-increasing bank account. And we are withdrawing at ever increasing rates to keep up with population and to stimulate the commercial economy. This is the energy foundation of our present population numbers and continued growth.
Our population is certainly a product of improved hygiene, medicine, nutrition and various factors of quality of life - a plethora of things and thoughts from our prehistoric beginnings to the present. These very bright lights are fascinating, fabulous and entrancing. It can not be forgotten that the continual and indisputable underpinnings of our present population numbers is the sun, water, limited land and at present fossil fuels.
With each technological shift, the new sources and kinds of energy have brought relief from the pressures of population. They also brought with them the seeds of their own destructiveness and ultimate insufficiency (Ponting, 1992). The geometric spiral of population growth and ecological demands amplifies the environmental affect of each evolving energy technology. Being geometric, this process shows an increasing tendency towards social disruptions of greater magnitude and greater frequency. And we have no where else to sail.
Population growth has been supported by two primary energy developments: Agriculture and Fossil Fuels. There have been many other inventions and knowledges that have developed from these bases that have further supported increasing human numbers. Understanding energy’s sources, availability and influence on our history are one dimension of the knowledge necessary for the future.
No matter how inventive we are, there are laws of energy that underwrite the realities of the possible. Because of their basic importance I may err on the side of too much information concerning them. Intelligent, life giving decisions can not be made without awareness of these laws.
"There are several natural laws of energy that apparently have no exception on earth. These laws give us an understanding of the limits to human life and nature on our planet. We must learn these laws of energy in order to develop common sense about our future, about plans and propositions we are offered and about how energy affects our money." (Odum and Odum. 1976 p. 37)
These are the laws of thermodynamics - thermo meaning heat like in thermometer and dynamics meaning action. These laws tell us the ways that energy acts. First law - ENERGY CAN NOT BE CREATED NOR DESTROYED. If you use a gallon of gas to drive to the store, some of the energy goes into moving you, some goes into heat in the engine, some into friction on the road and in the air, some goes out the exhaust pipe. All of the energy used to get to the store if measured would be the same amount of energy in the gas you started with.
Second law - ALTHOUGH ENERGY IS NEITHER CREATED NOR DESTROYED, EVERY TIME ENERGY IS USED TO DO WORK SOME OF THAT ENERGY IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE TO DO WORK AGAIN.
"The first law is the conservation law. It says that while energy can never be created or destroyed it can be transformed from one form to another." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 34). When we burn that gallon of gas in our car, the gallon of gas is gone. It is dispersed as heat of friction in the engine, where the tires meet the road, and in the air blowing against the car and in doing work by moving the car. The energy has not been destroyed only changed to the forms of heat and motion. A bowl of cereal will help us to play a game of tennis or weed the garden or hammer a nail. The cereal and milk energy will be dispersed as heat, sweat, waste and work pulling that weed. It has changed form.
The first law is like paying for the loan on your car. Some of the money goes to pay off the actual loan; some goes to pay off the interest on the loan. Unfortunately in nature and technology, interest rates are very high - from 40 to 97 percent. A corn plant is about 3% efficient; a wind generator has an upper limit efficiency of about 60%. That means when you send in a payment of 100 dollars you might be only paying 30 dollars to pay off the original loan (getting work done). If your car uses 30 percent of the energy to accomplish the goal of moving you around; then 70 percent is not being used. It is going into the environment as heat and residue (pollution). What goes in, comes out in one form or another.
“Oh boy,” you say, “improve the amount of the energy actually used to do work and then we have much more energy available.” Yes and NO. NO! There are natural limits to the actual energy any tool or organism (us or a corn plant) can use. No system (our body is an energy using system) is 100 percent efficient. "You got to pay the piper." There is always interest.
Here comes the second law of energy. There is an even greater constraint than just paying the interest. Remember back where we were paying for the loan on our car, 30 dollars went to pay for the loan and 70 dollars went to interest. Well these bankers are crazy. They tear up and burn 40 of the 70 dollars. That 40 dollars is no longer available to pay for anything. ". . . every time energy is transformed from one state to another a certain penalty is exacted.' That penalty is a loss in the amount of available energy to perform work of some kind in the future. There is a term for this; it's called entropy." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 34).
The second law (of thermodynamics) is the Entropy Law. The entropy law could just as well be called the "Humpty Dumpty" law or the "there ain't no free lunch" law. It is critical for understanding energy and the constraints put upon us by the universe.
"Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy no longer capable of conversion into work. Work occurs when energy moves from a higher level of concentration to a lower level . . . More important still, every time energy goes from one level to another, it means that less energy is available to perform work the next time around. For example, water going over a dam falls into a lake. As it falls, it can be used to generate electricity or turn a water wheel or perform some other useful function. Once it reaches the bottom, however, the water is no longer in a state to perform work. Water on a flat plane can't be used to turn even the smallest water wheel." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 35)
"Every time something occurs in the natural world, some amount of energy ends up being unavailable for future work. That unavailable energy is what pollution is all about. Many people think that pollution is a by-product of production. In fact pollution is the sum total of all of the available energy in the world that has been transformed into unavailable energy." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 35)
". . . The second law is the law of degradation of energy : In all processes some of the energy loses its ability to do work and is degraded in quality. . . . Energy that has the ability to do work is called potential energy and is useful; energy that has done work is degraded and is no longer useful. When most people refer to the energy supply - gasoline - for the work of an automobile, they really are referring to potential energy. When people say energy has been 'used up,' they mean that potential energy capable of doing work has been converted into a degraded form of energy, usually dispersed heat. . . . Thus the second law of energy is a familiar idea to most people. We are used to the idea that foods and fuels cannot be used more than once." (Odum and Odum. 1976, p. 38)
I have purposely given you several approaches to the second law - the entropy law. Only some of the energy in that bowl of cereal will go into pulling that weed. The rest, the majority of the energy, is lost to us.
A second aspect of the entropy law has to do with systems. Entropy is a measure of disorder within a system. Consider a teenager who has a very messy room - his room (the system) has high entropy; a lot of disorder. Another teen has a very neat room - this is low entropy; a lot of order. The teenager with the neat room had to eat his cereal for energy to make that room neat. If we want him to keep that room neat, we need to keep feeding him that cereal. (We don't know what the teenager with the messy room is doing with his cereal energy. Let's hope having fun.)
The amount of disorder in these rooms will either stay the same or increase. Order in a system will never increase without an input of energy from outside the system. A broken cup will not simply go back together. Said the other way around, the amount of order in a system either stays the same or decreases. It NEVER increases unless energy is brought in from the outside - gotta eat that cereal.
". . . it is destined that 'we can't break even.' It's impossible to turn around and redo something that has been undone with the same energy that was used to do it in the first place. Once an act is accomplished, the energy required to accomplish it has degraded to a lower level. The entropy law describes the existence of a great natural law - a sort of 'energy gravity' of the universe: Energy is constantly moving from a higher level to a lower level. In the same way that gravity influences water flow, energy can't be made to run uphill (Clark.1975. p. 13).
So the entropy law tells us that when a gallon of gas is used that some of the energy becomes unavailable for further use. It also tells us that the more complicated or complex a system is the more energy you need to keep order - keeping clean a one room cabin compared to a mansion; or a village compared to a megalopolis. And that every act of using energy creates disorder outside the system - where do you throw the trash either from the cabin or the mansion or the city of 20 million people?
The entropy law tells us that an important aspect of our energy use is pollution. The more we use the more we create. It is an illusion to think we are outside the bounds of nature. With our adding the stored energy of fossil fuels and concentrated minerals, more importantly with us adding new, human-made substances to the environment, it all has to fit in somewhere.
Much of what we now add to the environment is toxic either by virtue of the quantity (too much carbon dioxide) or the quality of its newness to the environment (human-made exotic chemicals) or by its destruction of natural barriers (ozone). No matter how toxic our additions are they become a part of the flow. Yeast in a petri dish will grow until their own alcoholic wastes poison them. Then given the voracious nature of life something else will grow, feeding on the dead yeast and its particular pollution. The odds are we will not destroy life through pollution, only ourselves by failing to use our accumulated knowledge for adaptation.
A third aspect of the entropy law is that there is a quality or concentration to a source of energy. The heat from a piece of coal or a piece of oak firewood has the same origin, the sun's energy concentrated in plant tissue. The coal also has layered generations of plant growth and decay coupled with tens of thousands of years of geologic energy in the form of pressure and heat. With this energy gift from the earth, one pound of coal has two times the energy as one pound of oak wood. A pound of petroleum has two and one half times the energy in a pound of wood.
The increase in concentration of the energy sources that support humans connects directly to the pollution side of the equation - the richer the source the higher the impact and more enduring the result of its exhaust. When the soil was depleted in primitive agriculture it could be left to regenerate naturally for a few years. Ozone depletion and greenhouse gases will take decades if not centuries to return to earlier levels. Nuclear waste, the most concentrated of our energy sources, takes many thousands of years to become safe.
We are familiar with the concept of energy quality from the idea of the food chain. The grass uses the sun's energy directly to make food for the cow. We eat the cow. Each movement in the food chain is a concentration of energy. Each step up the chain requires multiple inputs of energy from the preceding step. And some will be loss from use because of entropy. There is the need for many deer to support one wolf. One deer needs many acres of land for support. And in a natural setting humans need square miles for survival.
An ecological system will be as rich in variety as available energy allows. Life generates many forms to tap this available energy. Often the variations are mirrors to each other. The cow grazes the field, the aphid the leaf, the whale the ocean, the dragonfly the air. The sun, water, and air are the force and the fluids.
At each level of the food chain there must be a thermodynamic balance. There can not be more wolves than deer. Their can be no more sheep on an acre then that acre can carry. Only by adding the condensed energy of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and large machinery can humans live as we now do.
Our "culturing" competes with and replaces the energy eaters of nature with our own energy eaters - cars, hair dryers, toothpaste. With too many of us and too many of us too high up on the energy ladder, there is a grave and real danger our system will collapse just like any other ecological system. And so it goes. Energy defining how life will continue.
Every product of our lifestyle that surrounds us has energy as a gift from the earth. We take the concentrated energy in bauxite, use energy from fossil fuels to convert it into aluminum, more energy to make a can, more energy to fill the can, more energy to bring the can to the store, more energy to bring that can home, more energy to take the heat out of it so that it is cold, more energy to drink it and finally more energy to dispose of the can. The kicker is that in many of these cans there is very little nutrition (meaning energy). At each step there is an accumulation of entropy.
Energy has laws that can not be changed or beaten. These laws work in the Arctic, the Sahara Desert, the wheat fields of Kansas, and downtown Chicago. These laws and the amount of energy available determine the diversity, level of sophistication, and continuity of life in each of these places. And finally the use of energy slowly or not so slowly creates entropy - pollution that must be remove or that habitat will no longer be usable.
Odum (1976) has noted that in a system money moves in one direction and energy in the other. Money buys power - the energy to do something. We can not expect to maintain the unnatural accumulations of millions of people in our megacities without an input of large amounts of money. This is a fact missed by many politicians and tax-weary citizens alike.
The influences of energy in our history and the underlying laws governing energy use can seem abstract and distant. They are not. They are immediate and continually present.
The key to our future lies only partially in understanding energy’s physical laws and influence in our history. In simplistic and quite unrealistic terms one child per couple would in one generation reduce our numbers by half. Our inventiveness and present technological knowledge could generate tools that would make our lives far from brutish and yet gentler on the earth. Over population and over consumption are the results of particularly human issues. Our views of ourselves and our relationships with the rest of nature are the primary stumbling blocks. Here it is the psychological, moral and spiritual that come into the script.
We have no natural enemies to keep us in ecological balance except for ourselves and perhaps microbes. This is a powerfully important concept. One major form of the evolution of human consciousness both ontogenetically and hopefully historically requires the setting of personal and human species limits. This means limits in our numbers and in our per capita energy use. This will not be an easy task.
Limits go against the natural proclivity of life. Consider the making of beer. Beer is made from barley, hops, water, yeast and sugar. The yeast will eat the sugar until it runs out of room or sugar. As it eats, the yeast is reproducing itself as well as making alcohol. Adding more water to the container gives the yeast more room and is analogous to the improved sailing ships of the 15th and 16th centuries. Adding a more concentrated, hyper sugar, is similar to the shift from wood to coal, then petroleum and finally nuclear. The yeast will reproduce itself willy nilly as long as there is sugar or no predator enemy (microbe) or no fatal concentration of alcohol. The waste product of alcohol, although our goal in the fermentation process, poisons the environment for the yeast. Here is the crux of the uneasy task. Yeast can not make self reflective choices; we, no matter how reluctantly, can.
No one individual or species in a naturally occurring ecological system uses more energy than is within the budget of its particular ecosystem; at least not for long. We have imposed "our culturing" on nature. We as an animal with a certain biological mass are using far more energy then would naturally be our allotment. This is possible only because of the bank accounts of fossil fuels and concentrated minerals.
There is a measure of energy consumption called a Human Energy Equivalent (HEE) (Odum and Odum, 1976). This is the yearly energy necessary for basic survival. Gatherers and hunters with fire used about two HEE’s. We in the United States use 100 plus HEE’s. Two thirds of the people in the world use considerably less. If there was an animal outside your door consuming the biologically disproportionate amount of energy used by the average U.S. citizen, that animal would end up on your dining room table. It would be war. In fact for thousands of years it has been war on plants and animals.
Using appropriate technology, we need to achieve an individual HEE level of consumption at somewhere between 10 and 30 units. We need not live brutishly given all our accumulated knowledge. We run our economics as if the energy of natural resources was limitless and unaccountable. Information on the true energy content of the continual flow of materials we use is sorely missing. As U.S. food products have calorie labels, we need the same information for each products and services we use each day. We must be accountable.
Setting and maintaining boundaries for a two year old or an adolescent is a challenge known to all parents. Setting personal and species limits is an equivalent challenge and a primary process in our maturing development. These are limits to our numbers and consumption. There are many exciting dimensions to our humanity that are not constrained by these mature guidelines. Accepting and living each person’s life and the history of the species as an unfolding development of self awareness and an exploring of our many dimensions will create a spiritual revolution in the human community.
Historically in much of the western world as well as in many more advanced agricultural societies, there has been attitude of dominance and regency over the earth and its denizens. From this perspective: we will control and dictate the processes of the environment. It is by divine decree that nature will subordinately accommodate and adjust to humanity. I am chosen; I am at the top of the evolutionary tree; the earth is mine to use in any manner and in any intensity I may choose; it is my birthright to do with the earth as I please.
This attitude is blind to ecological energetics and discloses the hubris found in humanities’ greatest tragedies. We have only bought time with the use of petroleum and other fossil fuels. It has artificially and with great illusion extended the earth’s carrying capacity for the human species (Catton,1980).
In order to move toward a world of peace, issues of social justice will highlight energy questions no matter how we fulfill our future needs. Energy for whom? We in the United States use a total of 25 barrels of petroleum a day personally, commercially, and industrially. Over three billion people in the world use 4 or less barrels of petroleum each day; this is over 60% of world’s population. Over three billion people in the world use 4 Kilowatts or less a day. In the United States we use some 30 Kilowatts of electricity a day. In 1970 just 25 years ago, the population of the whole world was approximately 3,500,000,000 people.
We know that much energy use directly causes pollution. We know that fossil fuels were the reason for a war and that most wars are resource issues. We know that many countries and people in those countries are being exploited for their natural resources. We know that rising greenhouse oceans will flood the homes of millions of “third world” peoples. We know that the ill effects of ozone depletion will impact millions of people who received no benefit from the technologies, do not know there is a problem and if they did know, could not afford sun glasses or #25 sunscreen. We know that ecologically there are too many humans. We know that too many of us using too much means too few of other life forms and too little for them. We who have know that there is a huge disparity between the haves and the have nots worldwide. We know that each of our life styles is making the world minute by minute less livable. We know that petroleum reserves are measured in decades. We know that our great, great grandchildren will inherit our nuclear waste. We know this information and much, much more.
If we saw any other animal that was dying from worldwide epidemics, starvation, violence within families and communities as well as between communities; if this highly social animal was abusing and neglecting its young, raping its females, poisoning its nests, and sickening its members from stresses of modern adaptation demands; we would know we were seeing an animal in an ecological crisis. This is us and this is where we stand.
Ecology is not a spectator sport. We may think that we can sit, watch and shake our head at the way they are depleting fossil fuels or degrading our environment or warring for fuel and non-fuel minerals or raping our sisters and our children. We are they and we can be no less than involved. And we must bear witness.
If you are reading this then you are at least somewhat conversant with the many considerations presented in the last three paragraphs. How do the many people actively involved in spiritual endeavors and espousing a need for gentleness with the earth fly to multiple conferences with its high energy uses and pollution consequences? I believe there are biological and psychological considerations that inhibit us from making these choices for change. These blocks can be adapted and modified if we choose.
A need for stimulation is a core attribute of the mammalian brain. If we consider pleasure/pain experiments performed by Olds or the pay of entertainers compared to teachers or the material purchases of the world’s poor, this motivation can be seen in all its power.
This demand has an addictive quality that is encouraged and magnified by the ease of immediate satisfaction available through technology. Technology seductively satisfies our drive for stimulation and takes the place of spiritual and interrelational excitations that require more personal effort and involvement. We must find new ways to satisfy the incessant and driving need for stimulation. Stepping away from high energy consumption to satisfy this most wonderful need will be one of the most difficult stumbling blocks on the path to realizing and accepting a more gentle place in the family of earth.
Making mature and humane changes that alter our perspectives of dominance, that promote more equitable distribution of energy forms and that balance our ecological situation are deterred in the immediate by two other factors. One is the powerful and necessary faculty of psychological defense mechanisms and the other is the present global economic system.
Defense mechanism protect us from the inconsistencies and contradictions that endanger the mental order necessary for a being a functional human and that challenge our learned perspective of the world. Among the many defense mechanisms several are especially important in our present discussion.
“Denial: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors by refusing to acknowledge some aspect of external reality that would be apparent to others.
Displacement: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by generalizing or redirecting a feeling about or a response to an object onto another, usually less threatening, object.
Intellectualization: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by the excessive use of abstract thinking to avoid experiencing disturbing feelings.
Rationalization: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by devising reassuring or self-serving but incorrect explanations for his or her own or others’ behavior.
Suppression: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by intentional avoiding thinking about disturbing problems, wishes, feelings, or experiences” (Vaillant, 1986, p. 104-105).
Each of these defense mechanisms stands in the way of realizing our need to honor and control our biological power. They inhibit our acknowledging the suffering our inequitable uses of resources causes among other humans. They deter us from accepting our position in the ecological scheme of the earth and the vital importance of other life forms. They block us from recognizing the contradictions between our words and our deeds.
During the coming transition an appreciation of the grieving process and human defense mechanisms is critically important. For many the changes ahead will be a great mourning for the lost dreams fostered by our culture, the perspectives defined by our religions, the myths spawned by our economics. . This will be a dangerous time. The mechanism of displacement scares me. Many of us will search for a place to put our anger instead of accepting our own involvement, responsibility and need for mature constraints. Where will our anger be directed? Who will catch this anger: Arabs, blacks, women, Jews, our children? Or how about the earth in mistaken rage that she does not provide? Or the messengers with the bad news?
Another factor impeding the shift to a more balanced ecological situation in our numbers and consumption is the present economic engine whether called capitalism, market economy or more rightfully consumerism. It is based on the continual growth of goods and services to more and more people. This perspective is the ‘yeast growing willy nilly’ approach to resources and population.
Having an addictive and frantic feel to it, the ways of the global economy are coupled especially through advertising with our self images, our defense mechanisms, and our need for stimulation. There is a rapacious and bulimic quality to this view of the world which is inherently short sighted and on a treadmill of ever increasing speed.
A great illusion and deep wound to ecology was initiated the week of October 14, 1995 on the Chicago Board of Trade. TRASH became a commodity to be sold and traded but most importantly to make big money. There will be no incentive to reduce energy and material at the head waters of the consuming stream. Recycling at our level of consumption is a cruel hoax. The lament of the trash traders was that there was not enough. The advertisements and jingles are sure to come.
I have great concern for the men and women who sincerely and diligently work long and hard to make the unneeded so they can consume the unnecessary. The energy for their activities is based on diminishing and polluting fossil fuels and dangerous and truly costly nuclear power. And this does not even consider the necessary base of land and water for the fundamental energy of food.
There is yet one more impediment to an ecologically sane future and it is the sum total of the specifically human aspects of this discussion. Our chief survival tool is our wonderful adaptability. I propose that the test of our species is learning to handle this powerful outcome of biological evolution. I further suggest that we have pushed our adaptability both to its ecological limits and to its psychological boundaries.
We have adapted to the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, to human communities growing in a short hundred years to megasizes, to access to sources of energy that emulate the sun itself. Each time we have modified our interaction with the environment and that change has modified us. The children of the change inherit the confusions and pains of their pioneering parents.
Consider it this way. If humanity is seen as a person who is 100 years old, the first 99 years of her life would have been spent as gatherer and hunter. She would have only one year to adapt to the changes in family structure, living arrangements, child rearing and all the other pressures and stresses that the shift to agriculture brought. This same 100 year old person would have five or six days to adapt to the enormous changes brought about by the industrial revolution. And less than a day to adapt to the mass of information made available by electronics.
Each adaptation moves us further away from the original social and physical environment of our emergence. Is it bad or wrong? This is not the criteria. There is no fault. Each accommodation comes from necessity and is the best we know at the time. At the leading edge of human history is an accumulation that expands and deepens the knowledge of our travels.
Our adaptation is a formidable and powerful tool for survival. There is, however, a caution to be heeded:
"That adaptability, unfortunately, is also a source of dangers. We are extremely sensitive to the legendary 'boiled frog' syndrome. Frogs placed in a pan of water that is slowly heated will be unable to detect the gradual but deadly trend; they will sit still until they die. Like the frogs, many people seem unable to detect the gradual but lethal trend in which population and economic growth threaten to boil civilization. They keep working to turn up the heat, because they can't detect its rise. . . . When was the last time you went out in the rain and tasted its acidity? In a few places, including some Chinese cities, it is possible to find rain so acid that you can taste it." (Ornstein and Ehrlich. 1989. 74-75)
I am not suggesting that we should return to the days of yesteryear. Obviously, returning to hunting and gathering is not an option even if it was desirable. What is important is to consider the social and physical setting in which we developed as a species, the influence of unrestrained population growth and ecological pressures. Perhaps an understanding of this milieu can guide us through the ecological and social stresses that we now face. Perhaps it can help us understand the health care crisis and massive ingestion of medicinal drugs.
Energy and our place in ecology will be major issues in our future. It will determine if we eat and stay warm. It will determine how we move about, how quickly and how far. It will determine how many of us there are. It has always and will continue to be a major factor in how we treat each other. I believe a knowledge of systems and processes are imperative. I believe the serious challenges for the future are psychological, sociological and spiritual.
We know All things are bound together.
that the White Man All things connect.
does not understand What happens to the Earth
our way of life. happens to children of the Earth.
To him, one piece of land Man has not woven the web of life.
is much like the other. He is but one thread.
He is a stranger coming in the night Whatever he does to the web,
taking from the land he does to himself.
what he needs.
The earth is not his brother
but his enemy
and when he has conquered it,
he moves on.
He cares nothing for the land,
he forgets his father's grave
and his children's heritage.
He treats his mother the Earth
and his Brother the Sky
like merchandise.
His hunger will eat
the earth bare
and leave only a desert.
I do not understand -
our ways are different from yours.
If we should sell our land
then you must know
that the air is valuable to us,
that the air passes its breath
over all life that it maintains.
The wind that gave
my grandfather his first breath How can one sell the air? The
also received his last sigh. Manifesto of an Indian Chief.
And the wind also Book Publishing Co.
breathes life into our children. Sunnertown, TN. 1980
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED READINGS
******************
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Braudel, F. 1979. The Structures of Everyday Life: the Limits of the Possible. Harper &Row. N.Y.
Bicchieri, M. B.(editor). 1972. Hunters and Gatherers Today. Edited by M. B.. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. New York.
Biddulph, John. 1985. "Commentary: A Pediatrician's Perspective." Infant Care and Feeding in the South Pacific. Edited by Leslie B. Marshall. Gordon and Breach Science Pub. New York.
Bilsky, Lester. 1980. Historical Ecology. Kennikat Press. London.
Boyden, S. 1992. Biohistory: The Interplay Between Human Society and the Biosphere. Parthenon. Paris.
Brimblecombe, P. and Pfister, C. (editors). The Silent Countdown. Springer-Verlag. N.Y.
Campbell, J. 1982. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life. Simon and Schuster. N.Y.
Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot.. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.
Clark, Wilson. 1975. Energy for Survival. Anchor Books. N.Y.
Cipolla, Carlo. 1967. The Economic History of World Population. Penguin Books. Baltimore, MD.
Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Dahlberg, F. (editor). 1981. Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Ehrlich, Paul & Ehrlich, Anne. 1991. Healing the Planet. Addison Wesley. N.Y.
Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph. 1994. Cathederal, Forge, and Waterwheel. Harper Collins. N.Y.
Grant, M. 1976. The Fall of the Roman Empire. Annenburg Press. London.
Green, M. 1978. Eating Oil. Westview Press. Boulder, CO.
Hardin, G. 1993. Living within Limits. Oxford University Press. N. Y.
Lee, R. B. and DeVore, I. (eds.). 1968. Man the Hunter. Chicago. Aldine.
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McEvedy, Colin and Jones, Richard. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Penquin Books. N.Y.
Morgan, E. 1995. The Descent of the Child. Oxford University Press. N.Y.
Odum, Howard T. and Odum, Elisabeth C. 1976. Energy Basis for Man and Nature. McGraw-Hill Book Co. N. Y.
Ophuls, William. 1977. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. W.. Freeman and Co. San Francisco.
Ornstein, R. and Ehrlich, P. 1989. New World New Mind. Doubleday. N.Y.
Panksepp, J; Siviy, S.; and Normansell,L. 1985. "Brain Opioids and Social Emotions." The Psychobiology of Attachment and Separation. Edited by Reite, M. and Field, T. Academic Press. New York.
Pimental, M. 1984. "Food for People." Pimental, D. and Hall, C. editors. Food and Energy Resource. Academic Press. N.Y.
Ponting, C. 1992. A Green History of the World. St. Martin’s Press. N.Y.
Quale, G. Robina. 1988. A History of Marriage Systems. Greenwood Press. N. Y.
Revelle, Roger. 1976. “The Resources Available for Agriculture.” Science. V. 235 P. 165-180.
Ridley, M. 1994. The Red Queen. MacMillan. N.Y.
Rifkin, J. 1989. Entropy: into the greenhouse world. Bantam. N.Y.
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Understanding this essay will not make you happy. It will challenge our beliefs and lifestyles. Energy, so intricate to our survival, does not simply appear at the gas pump or the flip of a switch. The gas pump, the power lines, the grocery store are deceptive teats that we blissfully suck with infantile expectations. If we choose to remain ignorant of energy’s pervasiveness in human affairs our future is threatened. I will briefly examine the role of energy in population growth and pollution; energy’s physical laws; and some of the psychological, moral and spiritual factors blocking the changes facing us.
Energy is food; is home heating; is driving your car; is your car; is making widgets in the factory; is the widget; is toilet paper; is the soil at your feet; is the carrot in the soil; is the sun driven hydrologic cycle; is safe drinking water; is the stage where fashion models strut; is the lives of the many organisms and of the millions of years that creates petroleum; is the top of every jar in your house; is the heat, pressure and time of the earth concentrating the minerals for the aluminum in your pop can; is the wind turning the generator that makes my electricity; is the generator; is the ink on this page; is the sun and material formed in the trees that heat my house; is the shirts on our backs.
Human history subtly and not so subtly is the story of energy. Each major energy transformation has been driven by resources and population. Each ecological crisis brings a new technology. Each new social and physical technological development modifies no matter how slightly the original human condition.
For the first 100 thousand years of human existence we were gatherers and hunters. We would locate and gather energy from diverse and wide spread sources of fruits, nuts, and roots. A wild carrot used the sun, water and soil nutrients to grow. Some of that growth resulted in energy being stored in the root. As gatherer and hunters we came along and ate that stored energy. Sometimes we would take energy from an animal who had gathered its energy from other sources. Our other sources of stored energy were trees and water.
Resilient and resourceful our numbers grew. Ten thousand years ago population pressures, climatic shifts and resource stresses brought on a tremendous revolution in energy use (Cohen, 1977; McCorriston, J. & Hole, F. 1991). We cleared land by hand and fire. Using the stored energy in the soil and water we grew our food in a defined area. When the soil’s energy became depleted or irrigation salted the land, new land was brought into service. The Agriculture Revolution was born and human populations continued to grow.
The human species evolved in the physical environment of gathering and hunting. For over 90% of the time we have been on the face of the earth this was how we lived. This was also the social environment on which human adaptation is based. It is this social and physical environment that has been changing for the last ten thousand years.
With the movement from gathering and hunting to agriculture, changes in the time and space as well as the spiritual and social orientation and organization of human societies occurred (Torrance, 1994). If the !Kung of the Kalahari desert are any example life originally for us was quite different. They spend about 15 hours a week getting what they need for sustenance. The rest of the time is spent in play. Their children are nursed on demand as the composition of mother’s milk would seem to indicate. Release of pleasure producing hormones in both mother and child during nursing promote bonding. This natural nursing deters conception until the child is weaned at 4 years of age.
"It is now well established that human milk supplies the infant with its full complement of nutritional requirements. . . . Fat content, an important component of breast milk, is indirectly related to mammalian feeding schedules (frequency of nursing bouts) and directly related to mammalian sucking frequency (frequency of sucking within a nursing bout). For example, lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) have very high fat content in their milk and feed every 12-24 hours. In contrast, most primates that carry their infants have low fat content in their milk and feed on demand. Humans, following this primate pattern, have low fat content in their milk. . . . These data support the constant contact model by arguing that the human infant is a rather continuous feeder requiring rather continuous caretaking. (Tronick, E.; Winn, S.; and Morelli, G. 1985. p, 299)
Children are cared for by a wide age range of people freeing the parents from the stress of constant care and providing multiple role models for the developing child. Children learn toilet training in a natural way and have no chores until into their teen years. People live intimately with their organic environment as a part of the web. Individuals, families, clans are all embedded in the greater natural family of their particular piece of the earth.
All energy comes from the immediate environment with the only stored energy coming from trees and water pools. It takes about 4 square miles to support one person. For the prairie indians of the United States it took some 10 square miles and for the Eskimo approximately 54 square miles.
This is likely very much how our ancestors lived until some 10,000 years ago when population pressures, climatic shifts and resource stresses brought on a tremendous revolution in energy use. Using the energy stored in the soil that took years to build, agriculture allowed the continued growth of human populations. When the soil’s energy became depleted new land was brought into service.
The agricultural revolution occurring in a short span of time worldwide allowed the compression of time and space. Square miles for living were reduced to a few acres across a growing season. This is what technology does; it compresses time and space.
The new agricultural technology by adding human labor to the energy of the sun, soil and water changed human communities. Women did not nurse as long, children were born closer together, permanent housing arose putting walls between people, toilet training within walls was more demanding, and very importantly, children at a young age became an important source of energy. Agriculture not only allowed population growth; it became a necessity.
The Agricultural Revolution worked to feed people nearly up to the present. There were major inventions both social and physical during this time. Writing, the horse collar, cities, plumbing, three world religions; these and many more are used as the criteria for progress and civilization. Our wonderful creativeness is surely a product of the energy of human nature. Without the energy from mining the soil and controlling water these and many other developments would have been far fewer if not unnecessary.
Population, fueled by agriculture, rose in an upward moving curve. In a repeating ecological pattern, our growing numbers exhausted the land, strained and polluted the water, depleted the forests, and crowded people into unhealthy conditions. Under these pressures, some people relocated using their feet, the wheel and domesticated energy in the form of animals. Or they died of starvation or pestilence or killed each other off.
One of the early Church Fathers, Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 - 240), commented on the effects of human enterprise on the earth: “Farms have replaced wastelands, cultivated land has subdued the forests, cattle have put to flight the wild beast, barren lands have become fertile, rocks have become soil, swamps have been drained, and the number of cities exceeds the number of poor huts found in former times . . . Everywhere there are people, communities - everywhere there is human life!” To such a point that “the world is full. The elements scarcely suffice us. Our needs press . . . Pestilence, famine, wars, [earthquakes] are intended, indeed, as remedies, as prunings, against the growth of the human race.” (Gies and Gies.1994, p. 6.)
Various technologies evolved during the Middle Ages (500 A. D. to 1500 A.D.) to support these growing populations. These developments were simply extensions to the primary energy base of sun, land and water. Among the inventions were the heavy plow, the horse collar, the horse shoe, better forges making iron tools more available, better wind machines, better water wheels, and different forms of human organization. One-third of the land under cultivation went to feeding horses. Heat for homes and the various industries was fueled by trees. We did not find another source of energy; we simply used bigger hammers.
The end of the Middle Ages heralded another energy and social transformation as illuminated in The Silent Countdown (Brimblecombe and Pfister, C. editors, 1995) and A Distant Mirror (Tuchman, 1978). The technological inventiveness and social transformations that culminated in the Industrial Revolution was prompted again by population growth, ecological pressures and a climatic shift (the “little ice age”). There was a desperate search for a fuel other than wood because of forest depletion. The steam engine was developed to pump water from coal mines. Coal began the Industrial Revolution. This initiated an unprecedented surge in population growth and a demand for new social adaptations.
The evolution of better sailing technologies allowed the dispersal of ecologically stressed populations beginning in the 1500’s. Large numbers migrated from Europe to Asia, Africa, South America, and North America.
Adapted from McEvedy, Colin and Jones, Richard. 1978. Atlas of World Population History.
Although narrow in its geographic scope, Tertullian’s observation is still relevant today. There have been only 50 generations since his statement. This is a short time in biology. Without the Americas and fossil fuels our population numbers and even consumption patterns would have been highly constrained.
At the beginning of the agricultural revolution, 10,000 years ago, the world’s population is estimated to have been 4 million people - a number that took perhaps 100,000 years to reach. In year one of the present era, the energy impetus of the Agricultural Revolution had brought the world population to 170 million. A mere five hundred years later - in 1500, the world population was approximately 425 million. This was after a loss of some 10,000,000 people during the Black Plague. Underwritten by fossil fuels for 500 years, we are now nearly 6 billion; 6,000,000,000.
“It is estimated . . . that every hour, more than eleven thousand newborns cry out. . . . At current birth and death rates, the world is adding a Los Angeles every three weeks” (Tobias, 1994, p.395). This continued growth is supported by stored energy in the soil, in fossil fuels, in ores, in the hydrologic cycle, and in the information passed from generation to generation.
Fossil fuels powered industry for several centuries before becoming a prime factor in agriculture. Many inventions brought greater production to agriculture yet the horse and the human fueled by the land, water and sun remained the basic sources of energy.
Only within the last hundred years have tractors and electric motors replace the horse and human to begin the present era of industrial agriculture. Many people in the world are, albeit indirectly, eating oil in the form of fuel for machines, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and electric generation (Green,1978). Industrial agriculture uses 10 units of energy (mostly fossil fuels) to generate one unit of energy for the table. Traditional rice paddy agriculture (which because of its magnitude has its own environmental drawbacks) uses one calorie to produce ten (Pimental, 1984).
Industrial Agriculture may not be around as long as traditional agriculture. The first productive oil well was drilled in 1860. In less then 200 years we will have exhausted most of the world’s easily accessible petroleum reserves. Each year the International Energy Agency puts out estimates of global petroleum reserves and a compilation of world petroleum consumption. Using consumption data from 1996 and the most optimistic estimate of remaining reserves and hoped for additional finds, simple division gives us 50 years remaining of easily accessible petroleum.
This number, however, does not recognized increased use from economic or population growth. Factoring in a 2.3% yearly growth in consumption which is the historic figure for the last decade there are approximately forty years remaining starting from 1996. The figures for worldwide natural gas are of the same magnitude. For those of us past this number in age, we know that 40 years is not very long.
Land available for food production must be considered. Using the world record food harvest of 1985, if we were all vegetarian we could provide adequate diets for 6 million people or 4 million, if we ate 15% animals or 2.5 million, if we ate a U. S. diet of 30% animal (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1991). These estimates are based on fossil fuel supported agriculture. Land needs before fossil fuels are estimated in Europe at 4 acres per person (Braudel, 1979. p. 61). The total estimated available arable land is10448 million acres (Revelle,1976). With the probable diminishing availability of fossil fuels for fuel, fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides and given this area and prefossil fuel acreage needs, 2.5 billion people appears to be the maximum sustainable level. And this leaves scant flexibility for any changes brought on by climate or war.
We need air, water and food. Heat would also be nice for some of the places we live. These are the very basics. For 100,000 years our sources of energy were gathered by an individual from the immediate environment. The development of agriculture, reduced the space necessary to support one person and allowed one person to support many others. Our sources of energy remained renewable within a human life time.
Fossils fuels brought a new dimension to stored energy. They are highly concentrated and portable. They are also nonrenewable. Fossil fuels are a non-increasing bank account. And we are withdrawing at ever increasing rates to keep up with population and to stimulate the commercial economy. This is the energy foundation of our present population numbers and continued growth.
Our population is certainly a product of improved hygiene, medicine, nutrition and various factors of quality of life - a plethora of things and thoughts from our prehistoric beginnings to the present. These very bright lights are fascinating, fabulous and entrancing. It can not be forgotten that the continual and indisputable underpinnings of our present population numbers is the sun, water, limited land and at present fossil fuels.
With each technological shift, the new sources and kinds of energy have brought relief from the pressures of population. They also brought with them the seeds of their own destructiveness and ultimate insufficiency (Ponting, 1992). The geometric spiral of population growth and ecological demands amplifies the environmental affect of each evolving energy technology. Being geometric, this process shows an increasing tendency towards social disruptions of greater magnitude and greater frequency. And we have no where else to sail.
Population growth has been supported by two primary energy developments: Agriculture and Fossil Fuels. There have been many other inventions and knowledges that have developed from these bases that have further supported increasing human numbers. Understanding energy’s sources, availability and influence on our history are one dimension of the knowledge necessary for the future.
No matter how inventive we are, there are laws of energy that underwrite the realities of the possible. Because of their basic importance I may err on the side of too much information concerning them. Intelligent, life giving decisions can not be made without awareness of these laws.
"There are several natural laws of energy that apparently have no exception on earth. These laws give us an understanding of the limits to human life and nature on our planet. We must learn these laws of energy in order to develop common sense about our future, about plans and propositions we are offered and about how energy affects our money." (Odum and Odum. 1976 p. 37)
These are the laws of thermodynamics - thermo meaning heat like in thermometer and dynamics meaning action. These laws tell us the ways that energy acts. First law - ENERGY CAN NOT BE CREATED NOR DESTROYED. If you use a gallon of gas to drive to the store, some of the energy goes into moving you, some goes into heat in the engine, some into friction on the road and in the air, some goes out the exhaust pipe. All of the energy used to get to the store if measured would be the same amount of energy in the gas you started with.
Second law - ALTHOUGH ENERGY IS NEITHER CREATED NOR DESTROYED, EVERY TIME ENERGY IS USED TO DO WORK SOME OF THAT ENERGY IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE TO DO WORK AGAIN.
"The first law is the conservation law. It says that while energy can never be created or destroyed it can be transformed from one form to another." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 34). When we burn that gallon of gas in our car, the gallon of gas is gone. It is dispersed as heat of friction in the engine, where the tires meet the road, and in the air blowing against the car and in doing work by moving the car. The energy has not been destroyed only changed to the forms of heat and motion. A bowl of cereal will help us to play a game of tennis or weed the garden or hammer a nail. The cereal and milk energy will be dispersed as heat, sweat, waste and work pulling that weed. It has changed form.
The first law is like paying for the loan on your car. Some of the money goes to pay off the actual loan; some goes to pay off the interest on the loan. Unfortunately in nature and technology, interest rates are very high - from 40 to 97 percent. A corn plant is about 3% efficient; a wind generator has an upper limit efficiency of about 60%. That means when you send in a payment of 100 dollars you might be only paying 30 dollars to pay off the original loan (getting work done). If your car uses 30 percent of the energy to accomplish the goal of moving you around; then 70 percent is not being used. It is going into the environment as heat and residue (pollution). What goes in, comes out in one form or another.
“Oh boy,” you say, “improve the amount of the energy actually used to do work and then we have much more energy available.” Yes and NO. NO! There are natural limits to the actual energy any tool or organism (us or a corn plant) can use. No system (our body is an energy using system) is 100 percent efficient. "You got to pay the piper." There is always interest.
Here comes the second law of energy. There is an even greater constraint than just paying the interest. Remember back where we were paying for the loan on our car, 30 dollars went to pay for the loan and 70 dollars went to interest. Well these bankers are crazy. They tear up and burn 40 of the 70 dollars. That 40 dollars is no longer available to pay for anything. ". . . every time energy is transformed from one state to another a certain penalty is exacted.' That penalty is a loss in the amount of available energy to perform work of some kind in the future. There is a term for this; it's called entropy." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 34).
The second law (of thermodynamics) is the Entropy Law. The entropy law could just as well be called the "Humpty Dumpty" law or the "there ain't no free lunch" law. It is critical for understanding energy and the constraints put upon us by the universe.
"Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy no longer capable of conversion into work. Work occurs when energy moves from a higher level of concentration to a lower level . . . More important still, every time energy goes from one level to another, it means that less energy is available to perform work the next time around. For example, water going over a dam falls into a lake. As it falls, it can be used to generate electricity or turn a water wheel or perform some other useful function. Once it reaches the bottom, however, the water is no longer in a state to perform work. Water on a flat plane can't be used to turn even the smallest water wheel." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 35)
"Every time something occurs in the natural world, some amount of energy ends up being unavailable for future work. That unavailable energy is what pollution is all about. Many people think that pollution is a by-product of production. In fact pollution is the sum total of all of the available energy in the world that has been transformed into unavailable energy." (Rifkin. 1989. p. 35)
". . . The second law is the law of degradation of energy : In all processes some of the energy loses its ability to do work and is degraded in quality. . . . Energy that has the ability to do work is called potential energy and is useful; energy that has done work is degraded and is no longer useful. When most people refer to the energy supply - gasoline - for the work of an automobile, they really are referring to potential energy. When people say energy has been 'used up,' they mean that potential energy capable of doing work has been converted into a degraded form of energy, usually dispersed heat. . . . Thus the second law of energy is a familiar idea to most people. We are used to the idea that foods and fuels cannot be used more than once." (Odum and Odum. 1976, p. 38)
I have purposely given you several approaches to the second law - the entropy law. Only some of the energy in that bowl of cereal will go into pulling that weed. The rest, the majority of the energy, is lost to us.
A second aspect of the entropy law has to do with systems. Entropy is a measure of disorder within a system. Consider a teenager who has a very messy room - his room (the system) has high entropy; a lot of disorder. Another teen has a very neat room - this is low entropy; a lot of order. The teenager with the neat room had to eat his cereal for energy to make that room neat. If we want him to keep that room neat, we need to keep feeding him that cereal. (We don't know what the teenager with the messy room is doing with his cereal energy. Let's hope having fun.)
The amount of disorder in these rooms will either stay the same or increase. Order in a system will never increase without an input of energy from outside the system. A broken cup will not simply go back together. Said the other way around, the amount of order in a system either stays the same or decreases. It NEVER increases unless energy is brought in from the outside - gotta eat that cereal.
". . . it is destined that 'we can't break even.' It's impossible to turn around and redo something that has been undone with the same energy that was used to do it in the first place. Once an act is accomplished, the energy required to accomplish it has degraded to a lower level. The entropy law describes the existence of a great natural law - a sort of 'energy gravity' of the universe: Energy is constantly moving from a higher level to a lower level. In the same way that gravity influences water flow, energy can't be made to run uphill (Clark.1975. p. 13).
So the entropy law tells us that when a gallon of gas is used that some of the energy becomes unavailable for further use. It also tells us that the more complicated or complex a system is the more energy you need to keep order - keeping clean a one room cabin compared to a mansion; or a village compared to a megalopolis. And that every act of using energy creates disorder outside the system - where do you throw the trash either from the cabin or the mansion or the city of 20 million people?
The entropy law tells us that an important aspect of our energy use is pollution. The more we use the more we create. It is an illusion to think we are outside the bounds of nature. With our adding the stored energy of fossil fuels and concentrated minerals, more importantly with us adding new, human-made substances to the environment, it all has to fit in somewhere.
Much of what we now add to the environment is toxic either by virtue of the quantity (too much carbon dioxide) or the quality of its newness to the environment (human-made exotic chemicals) or by its destruction of natural barriers (ozone). No matter how toxic our additions are they become a part of the flow. Yeast in a petri dish will grow until their own alcoholic wastes poison them. Then given the voracious nature of life something else will grow, feeding on the dead yeast and its particular pollution. The odds are we will not destroy life through pollution, only ourselves by failing to use our accumulated knowledge for adaptation.
A third aspect of the entropy law is that there is a quality or concentration to a source of energy. The heat from a piece of coal or a piece of oak firewood has the same origin, the sun's energy concentrated in plant tissue. The coal also has layered generations of plant growth and decay coupled with tens of thousands of years of geologic energy in the form of pressure and heat. With this energy gift from the earth, one pound of coal has two times the energy as one pound of oak wood. A pound of petroleum has two and one half times the energy in a pound of wood.
The increase in concentration of the energy sources that support humans connects directly to the pollution side of the equation - the richer the source the higher the impact and more enduring the result of its exhaust. When the soil was depleted in primitive agriculture it could be left to regenerate naturally for a few years. Ozone depletion and greenhouse gases will take decades if not centuries to return to earlier levels. Nuclear waste, the most concentrated of our energy sources, takes many thousands of years to become safe.
We are familiar with the concept of energy quality from the idea of the food chain. The grass uses the sun's energy directly to make food for the cow. We eat the cow. Each movement in the food chain is a concentration of energy. Each step up the chain requires multiple inputs of energy from the preceding step. And some will be loss from use because of entropy. There is the need for many deer to support one wolf. One deer needs many acres of land for support. And in a natural setting humans need square miles for survival.
An ecological system will be as rich in variety as available energy allows. Life generates many forms to tap this available energy. Often the variations are mirrors to each other. The cow grazes the field, the aphid the leaf, the whale the ocean, the dragonfly the air. The sun, water, and air are the force and the fluids.
At each level of the food chain there must be a thermodynamic balance. There can not be more wolves than deer. Their can be no more sheep on an acre then that acre can carry. Only by adding the condensed energy of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and large machinery can humans live as we now do.
Our "culturing" competes with and replaces the energy eaters of nature with our own energy eaters - cars, hair dryers, toothpaste. With too many of us and too many of us too high up on the energy ladder, there is a grave and real danger our system will collapse just like any other ecological system. And so it goes. Energy defining how life will continue.
Every product of our lifestyle that surrounds us has energy as a gift from the earth. We take the concentrated energy in bauxite, use energy from fossil fuels to convert it into aluminum, more energy to make a can, more energy to fill the can, more energy to bring the can to the store, more energy to bring that can home, more energy to take the heat out of it so that it is cold, more energy to drink it and finally more energy to dispose of the can. The kicker is that in many of these cans there is very little nutrition (meaning energy). At each step there is an accumulation of entropy.
Energy has laws that can not be changed or beaten. These laws work in the Arctic, the Sahara Desert, the wheat fields of Kansas, and downtown Chicago. These laws and the amount of energy available determine the diversity, level of sophistication, and continuity of life in each of these places. And finally the use of energy slowly or not so slowly creates entropy - pollution that must be remove or that habitat will no longer be usable.
Odum (1976) has noted that in a system money moves in one direction and energy in the other. Money buys power - the energy to do something. We can not expect to maintain the unnatural accumulations of millions of people in our megacities without an input of large amounts of money. This is a fact missed by many politicians and tax-weary citizens alike.
The influences of energy in our history and the underlying laws governing energy use can seem abstract and distant. They are not. They are immediate and continually present.
The key to our future lies only partially in understanding energy’s physical laws and influence in our history. In simplistic and quite unrealistic terms one child per couple would in one generation reduce our numbers by half. Our inventiveness and present technological knowledge could generate tools that would make our lives far from brutish and yet gentler on the earth. Over population and over consumption are the results of particularly human issues. Our views of ourselves and our relationships with the rest of nature are the primary stumbling blocks. Here it is the psychological, moral and spiritual that come into the script.
We have no natural enemies to keep us in ecological balance except for ourselves and perhaps microbes. This is a powerfully important concept. One major form of the evolution of human consciousness both ontogenetically and hopefully historically requires the setting of personal and human species limits. This means limits in our numbers and in our per capita energy use. This will not be an easy task.
Limits go against the natural proclivity of life. Consider the making of beer. Beer is made from barley, hops, water, yeast and sugar. The yeast will eat the sugar until it runs out of room or sugar. As it eats, the yeast is reproducing itself as well as making alcohol. Adding more water to the container gives the yeast more room and is analogous to the improved sailing ships of the 15th and 16th centuries. Adding a more concentrated, hyper sugar, is similar to the shift from wood to coal, then petroleum and finally nuclear. The yeast will reproduce itself willy nilly as long as there is sugar or no predator enemy (microbe) or no fatal concentration of alcohol. The waste product of alcohol, although our goal in the fermentation process, poisons the environment for the yeast. Here is the crux of the uneasy task. Yeast can not make self reflective choices; we, no matter how reluctantly, can.
No one individual or species in a naturally occurring ecological system uses more energy than is within the budget of its particular ecosystem; at least not for long. We have imposed "our culturing" on nature. We as an animal with a certain biological mass are using far more energy then would naturally be our allotment. This is possible only because of the bank accounts of fossil fuels and concentrated minerals.
There is a measure of energy consumption called a Human Energy Equivalent (HEE) (Odum and Odum, 1976). This is the yearly energy necessary for basic survival. Gatherers and hunters with fire used about two HEE’s. We in the United States use 100 plus HEE’s. Two thirds of the people in the world use considerably less. If there was an animal outside your door consuming the biologically disproportionate amount of energy used by the average U.S. citizen, that animal would end up on your dining room table. It would be war. In fact for thousands of years it has been war on plants and animals.
Using appropriate technology, we need to achieve an individual HEE level of consumption at somewhere between 10 and 30 units. We need not live brutishly given all our accumulated knowledge. We run our economics as if the energy of natural resources was limitless and unaccountable. Information on the true energy content of the continual flow of materials we use is sorely missing. As U.S. food products have calorie labels, we need the same information for each products and services we use each day. We must be accountable.
Setting and maintaining boundaries for a two year old or an adolescent is a challenge known to all parents. Setting personal and species limits is an equivalent challenge and a primary process in our maturing development. These are limits to our numbers and consumption. There are many exciting dimensions to our humanity that are not constrained by these mature guidelines. Accepting and living each person’s life and the history of the species as an unfolding development of self awareness and an exploring of our many dimensions will create a spiritual revolution in the human community.
Historically in much of the western world as well as in many more advanced agricultural societies, there has been attitude of dominance and regency over the earth and its denizens. From this perspective: we will control and dictate the processes of the environment. It is by divine decree that nature will subordinately accommodate and adjust to humanity. I am chosen; I am at the top of the evolutionary tree; the earth is mine to use in any manner and in any intensity I may choose; it is my birthright to do with the earth as I please.
This attitude is blind to ecological energetics and discloses the hubris found in humanities’ greatest tragedies. We have only bought time with the use of petroleum and other fossil fuels. It has artificially and with great illusion extended the earth’s carrying capacity for the human species (Catton,1980).
In order to move toward a world of peace, issues of social justice will highlight energy questions no matter how we fulfill our future needs. Energy for whom? We in the United States use a total of 25 barrels of petroleum a day personally, commercially, and industrially. Over three billion people in the world use 4 or less barrels of petroleum each day; this is over 60% of world’s population. Over three billion people in the world use 4 Kilowatts or less a day. In the United States we use some 30 Kilowatts of electricity a day. In 1970 just 25 years ago, the population of the whole world was approximately 3,500,000,000 people.
We know that much energy use directly causes pollution. We know that fossil fuels were the reason for a war and that most wars are resource issues. We know that many countries and people in those countries are being exploited for their natural resources. We know that rising greenhouse oceans will flood the homes of millions of “third world” peoples. We know that the ill effects of ozone depletion will impact millions of people who received no benefit from the technologies, do not know there is a problem and if they did know, could not afford sun glasses or #25 sunscreen. We know that ecologically there are too many humans. We know that too many of us using too much means too few of other life forms and too little for them. We who have know that there is a huge disparity between the haves and the have nots worldwide. We know that each of our life styles is making the world minute by minute less livable. We know that petroleum reserves are measured in decades. We know that our great, great grandchildren will inherit our nuclear waste. We know this information and much, much more.
If we saw any other animal that was dying from worldwide epidemics, starvation, violence within families and communities as well as between communities; if this highly social animal was abusing and neglecting its young, raping its females, poisoning its nests, and sickening its members from stresses of modern adaptation demands; we would know we were seeing an animal in an ecological crisis. This is us and this is where we stand.
Ecology is not a spectator sport. We may think that we can sit, watch and shake our head at the way they are depleting fossil fuels or degrading our environment or warring for fuel and non-fuel minerals or raping our sisters and our children. We are they and we can be no less than involved. And we must bear witness.
If you are reading this then you are at least somewhat conversant with the many considerations presented in the last three paragraphs. How do the many people actively involved in spiritual endeavors and espousing a need for gentleness with the earth fly to multiple conferences with its high energy uses and pollution consequences? I believe there are biological and psychological considerations that inhibit us from making these choices for change. These blocks can be adapted and modified if we choose.
A need for stimulation is a core attribute of the mammalian brain. If we consider pleasure/pain experiments performed by Olds or the pay of entertainers compared to teachers or the material purchases of the world’s poor, this motivation can be seen in all its power.
This demand has an addictive quality that is encouraged and magnified by the ease of immediate satisfaction available through technology. Technology seductively satisfies our drive for stimulation and takes the place of spiritual and interrelational excitations that require more personal effort and involvement. We must find new ways to satisfy the incessant and driving need for stimulation. Stepping away from high energy consumption to satisfy this most wonderful need will be one of the most difficult stumbling blocks on the path to realizing and accepting a more gentle place in the family of earth.
Making mature and humane changes that alter our perspectives of dominance, that promote more equitable distribution of energy forms and that balance our ecological situation are deterred in the immediate by two other factors. One is the powerful and necessary faculty of psychological defense mechanisms and the other is the present global economic system.
Defense mechanism protect us from the inconsistencies and contradictions that endanger the mental order necessary for a being a functional human and that challenge our learned perspective of the world. Among the many defense mechanisms several are especially important in our present discussion.
“Denial: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors by refusing to acknowledge some aspect of external reality that would be apparent to others.
Displacement: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by generalizing or redirecting a feeling about or a response to an object onto another, usually less threatening, object.
Intellectualization: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by the excessive use of abstract thinking to avoid experiencing disturbing feelings.
Rationalization: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by devising reassuring or self-serving but incorrect explanations for his or her own or others’ behavior.
Suppression: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by intentional avoiding thinking about disturbing problems, wishes, feelings, or experiences” (Vaillant, 1986, p. 104-105).
Each of these defense mechanisms stands in the way of realizing our need to honor and control our biological power. They inhibit our acknowledging the suffering our inequitable uses of resources causes among other humans. They deter us from accepting our position in the ecological scheme of the earth and the vital importance of other life forms. They block us from recognizing the contradictions between our words and our deeds.
During the coming transition an appreciation of the grieving process and human defense mechanisms is critically important. For many the changes ahead will be a great mourning for the lost dreams fostered by our culture, the perspectives defined by our religions, the myths spawned by our economics. . This will be a dangerous time. The mechanism of displacement scares me. Many of us will search for a place to put our anger instead of accepting our own involvement, responsibility and need for mature constraints. Where will our anger be directed? Who will catch this anger: Arabs, blacks, women, Jews, our children? Or how about the earth in mistaken rage that she does not provide? Or the messengers with the bad news?
Another factor impeding the shift to a more balanced ecological situation in our numbers and consumption is the present economic engine whether called capitalism, market economy or more rightfully consumerism. It is based on the continual growth of goods and services to more and more people. This perspective is the ‘yeast growing willy nilly’ approach to resources and population.
Having an addictive and frantic feel to it, the ways of the global economy are coupled especially through advertising with our self images, our defense mechanisms, and our need for stimulation. There is a rapacious and bulimic quality to this view of the world which is inherently short sighted and on a treadmill of ever increasing speed.
A great illusion and deep wound to ecology was initiated the week of October 14, 1995 on the Chicago Board of Trade. TRASH became a commodity to be sold and traded but most importantly to make big money. There will be no incentive to reduce energy and material at the head waters of the consuming stream. Recycling at our level of consumption is a cruel hoax. The lament of the trash traders was that there was not enough. The advertisements and jingles are sure to come.
I have great concern for the men and women who sincerely and diligently work long and hard to make the unneeded so they can consume the unnecessary. The energy for their activities is based on diminishing and polluting fossil fuels and dangerous and truly costly nuclear power. And this does not even consider the necessary base of land and water for the fundamental energy of food.
There is yet one more impediment to an ecologically sane future and it is the sum total of the specifically human aspects of this discussion. Our chief survival tool is our wonderful adaptability. I propose that the test of our species is learning to handle this powerful outcome of biological evolution. I further suggest that we have pushed our adaptability both to its ecological limits and to its psychological boundaries.
We have adapted to the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, to human communities growing in a short hundred years to megasizes, to access to sources of energy that emulate the sun itself. Each time we have modified our interaction with the environment and that change has modified us. The children of the change inherit the confusions and pains of their pioneering parents.
Consider it this way. If humanity is seen as a person who is 100 years old, the first 99 years of her life would have been spent as gatherer and hunter. She would have only one year to adapt to the changes in family structure, living arrangements, child rearing and all the other pressures and stresses that the shift to agriculture brought. This same 100 year old person would have five or six days to adapt to the enormous changes brought about by the industrial revolution. And less than a day to adapt to the mass of information made available by electronics.
Each adaptation moves us further away from the original social and physical environment of our emergence. Is it bad or wrong? This is not the criteria. There is no fault. Each accommodation comes from necessity and is the best we know at the time. At the leading edge of human history is an accumulation that expands and deepens the knowledge of our travels.
Our adaptation is a formidable and powerful tool for survival. There is, however, a caution to be heeded:
"That adaptability, unfortunately, is also a source of dangers. We are extremely sensitive to the legendary 'boiled frog' syndrome. Frogs placed in a pan of water that is slowly heated will be unable to detect the gradual but deadly trend; they will sit still until they die. Like the frogs, many people seem unable to detect the gradual but lethal trend in which population and economic growth threaten to boil civilization. They keep working to turn up the heat, because they can't detect its rise. . . . When was the last time you went out in the rain and tasted its acidity? In a few places, including some Chinese cities, it is possible to find rain so acid that you can taste it." (Ornstein and Ehrlich. 1989. 74-75)
I am not suggesting that we should return to the days of yesteryear. Obviously, returning to hunting and gathering is not an option even if it was desirable. What is important is to consider the social and physical setting in which we developed as a species, the influence of unrestrained population growth and ecological pressures. Perhaps an understanding of this milieu can guide us through the ecological and social stresses that we now face. Perhaps it can help us understand the health care crisis and massive ingestion of medicinal drugs.
Energy and our place in ecology will be major issues in our future. It will determine if we eat and stay warm. It will determine how we move about, how quickly and how far. It will determine how many of us there are. It has always and will continue to be a major factor in how we treat each other. I believe a knowledge of systems and processes are imperative. I believe the serious challenges for the future are psychological, sociological and spiritual.
We know All things are bound together.
that the White Man All things connect.
does not understand What happens to the Earth
our way of life. happens to children of the Earth.
To him, one piece of land Man has not woven the web of life.
is much like the other. He is but one thread.
He is a stranger coming in the night Whatever he does to the web,
taking from the land he does to himself.
what he needs.
The earth is not his brother
but his enemy
and when he has conquered it,
he moves on.
He cares nothing for the land,
he forgets his father's grave
and his children's heritage.
He treats his mother the Earth
and his Brother the Sky
like merchandise.
His hunger will eat
the earth bare
and leave only a desert.
I do not understand -
our ways are different from yours.
If we should sell our land
then you must know
that the air is valuable to us,
that the air passes its breath
over all life that it maintains.
The wind that gave
my grandfather his first breath How can one sell the air? The
also received his last sigh. Manifesto of an Indian Chief.
And the wind also Book Publishing Co.
breathes life into our children. Sunnertown, TN. 1980
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED READINGS
******************
Aries, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood. Alfred A. Knopf. N.Y.
Braudel, F. 1979. The Structures of Everyday Life: the Limits of the Possible. Harper &Row. N.Y.
Bicchieri, M. B.(editor). 1972. Hunters and Gatherers Today. Edited by M. B.. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. New York.
Biddulph, John. 1985. "Commentary: A Pediatrician's Perspective." Infant Care and Feeding in the South Pacific. Edited by Leslie B. Marshall. Gordon and Breach Science Pub. New York.
Bilsky, Lester. 1980. Historical Ecology. Kennikat Press. London.
Boyden, S. 1992. Biohistory: The Interplay Between Human Society and the Biosphere. Parthenon. Paris.
Brimblecombe, P. and Pfister, C. (editors). The Silent Countdown. Springer-Verlag. N.Y.
Campbell, J. 1982. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life. Simon and Schuster. N.Y.
Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot.. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.
Clark, Wilson. 1975. Energy for Survival. Anchor Books. N.Y.
Cipolla, Carlo. 1967. The Economic History of World Population. Penguin Books. Baltimore, MD.
Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Dahlberg, F. (editor). 1981. Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Ehrlich, Paul & Ehrlich, Anne. 1991. Healing the Planet. Addison Wesley. N.Y.
Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph. 1994. Cathederal, Forge, and Waterwheel. Harper Collins. N.Y.
Grant, M. 1976. The Fall of the Roman Empire. Annenburg Press. London.
Green, M. 1978. Eating Oil. Westview Press. Boulder, CO.
Hardin, G. 1993. Living within Limits. Oxford University Press. N. Y.
Lee, R. B. and DeVore, I. (eds.). 1968. Man the Hunter. Chicago. Aldine.
McCorriston, J. & Hole, F. 1991. “The Ecology of Seasonal Stress and Origins of Agriculture in the Near East.” American Anthropologist. V. 93. p. 46-49.
McEvedy, Colin and Jones, Richard. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Penquin Books. N.Y.
Morgan, E. 1995. The Descent of the Child. Oxford University Press. N.Y.
Odum, Howard T. and Odum, Elisabeth C. 1976. Energy Basis for Man and Nature. McGraw-Hill Book Co. N. Y.
Ophuls, William. 1977. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. W.. Freeman and Co. San Francisco.
Ornstein, R. and Ehrlich, P. 1989. New World New Mind. Doubleday. N.Y.
Panksepp, J; Siviy, S.; and Normansell,L. 1985. "Brain Opioids and Social Emotions." The Psychobiology of Attachment and Separation. Edited by Reite, M. and Field, T. Academic Press. New York.
Pimental, M. 1984. "Food for People." Pimental, D. and Hall, C. editors. Food and Energy Resource. Academic Press. N.Y.
Ponting, C. 1992. A Green History of the World. St. Martin’s Press. N.Y.
Quale, G. Robina. 1988. A History of Marriage Systems. Greenwood Press. N. Y.
Revelle, Roger. 1976. “The Resources Available for Agriculture.” Science. V. 235 P. 165-180.
Ridley, M. 1994. The Red Queen. MacMillan. N.Y.
Rifkin, J. 1989. Entropy: into the greenhouse world. Bantam. N.Y.
Rifkin, J. 1992. Beyond Beef. Dutton. N.Y.
Tobias, M. 1994. World War III. Bear. Santa Fe.
Torrance, R. 1994. The Spiritual Quest. University of California Press. Berkeley.
Tronick, E.; Winn, S.; and Morelli, G. 1985. "Multiple Caretaking in the Context of Human Evolution: Why Don't the Efe' Know the Western Prescription for Child Care?" The Psychobiology of Attachment and Separation. Edited by Reite, M. and Field, T. Academic Press. New York.
Tuchman, Barbara. 1978. A Distant Mirror. Knopf. N. Y.
Vaillant, G. 1986. Empirical Studies of Ego Mechanisms of Defense. American Psychiatric Press. Washington, D.C.
Van Esterik, P. 1985. "Commentary: An Anthropological Perspective on Infant Feeding In Oceania." Infant Care and Feeding in the South Pacific. Edited by Leslie B. Marshall. Gordon and Breach Science Pub. New York.
White, Lynn. 1978. Medieval Religion and Technology. Univ. of California Press. Berkeley.
Young, D. 1992. Origins of the Sacred. Harper. N.Y.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Real World Energy Decisions
Real World Energy Decisions
We must ask ourselves, what do we need materially to live a life of far less energy and earth minerals.
For the first ten years that I lived in the house I built in Central Minnesota, I had no electricity. I cooked with wood and heated with wood. I pumped my water by hand up into a retaining tank on the second floor for gravity feed to the rest of the house. I had a battery-operated radio. I had a solar heated outhouse that was actually only really heated between two and three in the afternoon. All in all, this time was an interesting and wonderful experience with many stories.
I got electricity from the sun and wind for the next 20 years. The first wind generator was massive, built in the 1930s. Putting the tower up was a major experience. The third generator, bought new, nearly burned the house down because of faulty design.
The solar panels worked like a charm.
My use of electricity was about 1kWh a day including the energy to wash clothes weekly in town. Except for the inverter that ran my computer and occasional appliances like a vacuum cleaner or a power saw, all the electrical use in the house was 12 volt, like your car. I had lights (some of which were tail lights for cars), a television, a radio, a 1/2 horsepower motor that ran my pumpjack for water. I had a refrigerator that I installed through the wall with extra insulation on the sides, top and bottom so that during the winter I could use the outside weather for cooling. Again there are many stories of interest and learning.
When I started this adventure I thought I would be the “simple living king of the West”. How naïve! My first wood cook stove was made in 1935, I used it daily for over twenty years. It was the product of a backdrop of many industries, workers, materials and energy. The stove is an example that all that we have is part of this earth and human web.
Most homes in United States use 20 kWh or more a day. Our overall use is even higher. This is the point of this story. In 2000, I did an Excel spreadsheet on energy use per capita by all the countries of the world. Ten percent of the people, including us, use 30kWh of electricity or more per capita per day. HALF of the people in the world use 2 kWh or less of electricity each day - over three billion people. And that number is misleading because in a country like Haiti, the poor do not have anywhere near the average per capita use, the bulk goes to the rich.
This spread sheet included petroleum and natural gas. These great differences held for these energy sources too.
Although morals and ethics could enter into these thoughts, as could class inequities, that is not the point. The point is how much do we need to live a decent non-brutish life? This question will and should arise immediately. Presently, most of the global “powers” are trying to maintain the status quo. With diminishing fossil fuels and other mineral resources, with peak oil and other peaking resources, this will only deplete the stock of these nonrenewable resources that much faster. Just as importantly, resource demands have the high potential of fostering war (perhaps of the nuclear kind) since most wars have been about resources in human history.
Petroleum has peaked and is on the down side of producing capacity globally. Much new natural gas supplies in North America are based on methods that endanger our underground water which is far more important for life than fossil fuels. The remaining coal is of lesser quality, requiring more for the energy use and is more polluting.
There is much talk about sustainability. Almost all is aimed at some fantasy of maintaining the status quo. We will all have cars that run on batteries, air, hydrogen, or wishes. We will have snow mobiles, four wheelers, vacations to Las Vegas, ski trips to Vail, basking in Cancun, 2000 square foot houses, horses, lots and lots of service jobs, Burger Kings and golf courses on every corner.
This fantasy will cause great distress, ultimately anger and possibly terrible violence. And it will do so in our lifetime - probably within the decade. We must ask what do we really need and how will we provide the energy and materials for it? We are not kids in a candy store with a credit card. It is a question of maturity.
[In 2000, I took all the countries of the world. I found their population, their petroleum, natural gas and electrical use. Calculating the per capita use for each country, I then rank ordered them form the least to the most. Then I did an accumulation of population from the least to the most divided by the current estimate of world population to find the percentages. Then I could read the spread sheet to tell me what percentage of people used how much of the various energy sources. Very illuminating]
To learn about the energy situation:
Books
Energy for Survival by Wilson Clark
Overshoot by William Catton
Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage by Kenneth S Deffeyes
Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Deep Economy by Bill McKibben
The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler
Twilight in the Desert by Matt Simmons
Party's Over: Oil,War and the Fate of Industrial Societies By Richard Heinberg
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg
Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil - by David L Goodstein
Energy Basis for Man and Nature by Howard T. Odum, Elisabeth C. Odum
The Fires of Culture by Carol E. Steinhart, John S. Steinhart
A Century of War by William Engdahl
Websites
Energy and Human Evolution by David Price
http://www.dieoff.org/page137.htm
Updated World Oil Forecasts, including Saudi Arabia
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2716
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer
http://www.peakoil.com/
http://www.energybulletin.net
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html
http://www.postcarbonbooks.com/
http://www.peakoilblues.com/blog/
We must ask ourselves, what do we need materially to live a life of far less energy and earth minerals.
For the first ten years that I lived in the house I built in Central Minnesota, I had no electricity. I cooked with wood and heated with wood. I pumped my water by hand up into a retaining tank on the second floor for gravity feed to the rest of the house. I had a battery-operated radio. I had a solar heated outhouse that was actually only really heated between two and three in the afternoon. All in all, this time was an interesting and wonderful experience with many stories.
I got electricity from the sun and wind for the next 20 years. The first wind generator was massive, built in the 1930s. Putting the tower up was a major experience. The third generator, bought new, nearly burned the house down because of faulty design.
The solar panels worked like a charm.
My use of electricity was about 1kWh a day including the energy to wash clothes weekly in town. Except for the inverter that ran my computer and occasional appliances like a vacuum cleaner or a power saw, all the electrical use in the house was 12 volt, like your car. I had lights (some of which were tail lights for cars), a television, a radio, a 1/2 horsepower motor that ran my pumpjack for water. I had a refrigerator that I installed through the wall with extra insulation on the sides, top and bottom so that during the winter I could use the outside weather for cooling. Again there are many stories of interest and learning.
When I started this adventure I thought I would be the “simple living king of the West”. How naïve! My first wood cook stove was made in 1935, I used it daily for over twenty years. It was the product of a backdrop of many industries, workers, materials and energy. The stove is an example that all that we have is part of this earth and human web.
Most homes in United States use 20 kWh or more a day. Our overall use is even higher. This is the point of this story. In 2000, I did an Excel spreadsheet on energy use per capita by all the countries of the world. Ten percent of the people, including us, use 30kWh of electricity or more per capita per day. HALF of the people in the world use 2 kWh or less of electricity each day - over three billion people. And that number is misleading because in a country like Haiti, the poor do not have anywhere near the average per capita use, the bulk goes to the rich.
This spread sheet included petroleum and natural gas. These great differences held for these energy sources too.
Although morals and ethics could enter into these thoughts, as could class inequities, that is not the point. The point is how much do we need to live a decent non-brutish life? This question will and should arise immediately. Presently, most of the global “powers” are trying to maintain the status quo. With diminishing fossil fuels and other mineral resources, with peak oil and other peaking resources, this will only deplete the stock of these nonrenewable resources that much faster. Just as importantly, resource demands have the high potential of fostering war (perhaps of the nuclear kind) since most wars have been about resources in human history.
Petroleum has peaked and is on the down side of producing capacity globally. Much new natural gas supplies in North America are based on methods that endanger our underground water which is far more important for life than fossil fuels. The remaining coal is of lesser quality, requiring more for the energy use and is more polluting.
There is much talk about sustainability. Almost all is aimed at some fantasy of maintaining the status quo. We will all have cars that run on batteries, air, hydrogen, or wishes. We will have snow mobiles, four wheelers, vacations to Las Vegas, ski trips to Vail, basking in Cancun, 2000 square foot houses, horses, lots and lots of service jobs, Burger Kings and golf courses on every corner.
This fantasy will cause great distress, ultimately anger and possibly terrible violence. And it will do so in our lifetime - probably within the decade. We must ask what do we really need and how will we provide the energy and materials for it? We are not kids in a candy store with a credit card. It is a question of maturity.
[In 2000, I took all the countries of the world. I found their population, their petroleum, natural gas and electrical use. Calculating the per capita use for each country, I then rank ordered them form the least to the most. Then I did an accumulation of population from the least to the most divided by the current estimate of world population to find the percentages. Then I could read the spread sheet to tell me what percentage of people used how much of the various energy sources. Very illuminating]
To learn about the energy situation:
Books
Energy for Survival by Wilson Clark
Overshoot by William Catton
Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage by Kenneth S Deffeyes
Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Deep Economy by Bill McKibben
The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler
Twilight in the Desert by Matt Simmons
Party's Over: Oil,War and the Fate of Industrial Societies By Richard Heinberg
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg
Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil - by David L Goodstein
Energy Basis for Man and Nature by Howard T. Odum, Elisabeth C. Odum
The Fires of Culture by Carol E. Steinhart, John S. Steinhart
A Century of War by William Engdahl
Websites
Energy and Human Evolution by David Price
http://www.dieoff.org/page137.htm
Updated World Oil Forecasts, including Saudi Arabia
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2716
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer
http://www.peakoil.com/
http://www.energybulletin.net
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html
http://www.postcarbonbooks.com/
http://www.peakoilblues.com/blog/
Friday, January 9, 2009
Sustainability some thoughts
Coming to Minnesota in 1973 as a back-to-the-land hippie, I had a lot to learn. Born and raised in Florida, we thought we would die when it got below 45 degrees F. My plan was to heat and cook with wood which I did as a sole source for over 30 years.
The small town (pop. 325) that I lived in while I built my house had a storefront where all the old men would gather. I spent time with the fellows asking them how they did all sorts of things, quite an education. One sample of sustainability concerned the heating with wood. The rule is – one cord of wood (4’x4’x8’) can be gotten from one to two acres of forest. So if you need 10 cords of wood a year for heating and perhaps cooking then you need 10 to 20 acres of forest.
Conceptually, you could start cutting at the front of these acres and by the time you cut to the other end, the process would be ready to start again. Now this is not how it would be done. It would be done with a knowledge of culling the trees and taking any dead fall throughout the ten acres. It would honor the processes of tree ecology. The type of forest would also determine the acreage needed as would the year to year growing seasons.
I asked them about keeping food cold and they told me about ice houses. They cut blocks of ice from the lakes and stored them in buildings putting saw dust around the blocks for insulation. They said the ice would last until the middle of summer.
It is clear to me sustainability is a living process and a process of living.
The one cord to one or two acres example illustrates some of the criteria for sustainability. I have added a few additional. The future may depend on what we mean by sustainable. There are important questions to be asked:
1. When we use something from the earth can it regenerate itself as a tree can or is it non-renewable?
2. When we use something from the earth how long does it take the earth to regenerate itself as in rotational farming or the example of acres of trees?
3. When we use something from the earth how long does it take the earth to assimilate the waste such as computer chemicals and copper processing?
4. When we call something “renewable” does that include all the fossil fuels used to create the devices to capture the sun or wind?
5. How large a geographical area does the sustainable definition include?
6. Is there a holding or carrying capacity to a geographic area and are we willing to discuss it?
7. How should we value non-renewable resources as petroleum from which tractor and ambulance power comes as well as many medicines?
8. All life depends on energy. We need an accounting method to determine the value of how we use energy? Instead of payback in money should we assess a payback in energy for any energy devices such as wind and solar collectors?
We are at a crossroads for the future. This requires hard questions and selfless honesty. We need to be clear about what we mean about sustainability. Faulty definitions create false hopes and dead end decisions.
Also found second post on this page:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47776
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