1) Peak oil
Most petroleum experts agree that we
shot past peak oil in the U.S. around 1971.
Lest you've missed
the raging, that's the point at
which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in
reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to
retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We've shot or are
about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging
from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at
least the latter.
There are no new cheap-easy oil
fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new
methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling,
dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce
more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more
down the line.
That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be
history.
What difference does that make?
For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all
that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it.
I offer an exercise in
Life Rules, "The ABC's of Peak
Oil" which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives
everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil.
It doesn't leave much. (See Beth Terry's
Web site, for example, for what
subtracting plastics may entail.)
The global economy that presently supplies us with our food,
runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less
predictably on expensive oil that's hard to get because it's
located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones.
Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box
stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies depends
on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and
herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from
fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and
consumers, around the world.
Past peak, that system's going to
have the half-life of the strontium 90 that's escaping the
Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or thereabouts.
One good global crisis, and not that
long.
2) Peak soil & space
A couple of links between peak oil
and peak soil:
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First, it matters that one of the proposed
alternatives to oil is biofuels.
Acreage around the world is being
converted from production of corn, wheat and soy for human and
animal consumption - i.e. food - to production of ethanol and
biofuels to put in trucks and cars and... which makes remaining
corn, et al., more expensive.
Some energy economy geniuses are
proposing that Afghans, for example, convert the fields of opium
poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to
growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to
biofuel, which would, not
coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military
equipment much cheaper and provide Afghans with a profitable
market item rather than food.
According to a 2009 National Geographic staff
report,
"The corn used to make a
25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year."
Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland,
Al Gore's deep-pockets
friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.
-
Second, the
huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming
possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of
them.
Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been
at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic
location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new.
Revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are occurring
not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to
obtain more food and more affordable food. Revolutionaries are
barking up a tree that's seen better days.
In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read
"First" world, arable land has reached peak production.
All those petroleum-based products
that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also
produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic
chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a
live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland - if
its farmers didn't go organic a while back - is comprised of
dead soils.
Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th
century
Green Revolution impossible,
which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for
food prices and supplies.
After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to
injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable
land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than
they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition.
Half the Earth's original trove of
topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to
feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of
years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by
industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries.
China's soils ride easterly winds
across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in
California while the American Bread Basket's soils are building
deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil,
that soil isn't coming back.
We can only build it, help it to
build itself and wait.
3) Monoculture
We can cut to the chase on this one.
The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength,
fossil-fuel-driven super farms.
Those farms practice monoculture:
the planting one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop,
at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of
plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with
the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather,
disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out
the whole crop.
At present the
Ug99 fungus, called stem rust,
which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than
80 percent of the world's wheat crops as it spreads, according
to a
2009 article in the L. A. Times.
Recent studies follow its appearance
in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it
originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are
already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the
possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and
Eastern Asia.
The race is on to breed resistant
plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a
decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic
line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can
travel much faster than that.
The current spike in the price of
wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed
"Ugh."
4) Climate instability
Bad - uncongenial - weather has
lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico,
Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere.
Many climate scientists believe
we've passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar
weather, too. And while increasing heat will
bedevil harvests, intense cold,
downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems
will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit
is what's being farmed for.
The
transitional climate will be unpredictable from season to
season and will produce more extremes of weather and
weather-related disasters, which means farmers will not be able
to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns and
getting crops through to harvest.
If the past is precedent, the
transition from the climate we've been used to for 10,000 years
to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next,
could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if
we keep messing with it.
When a whole nation's or region's
staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again,
everything down the line from the crops themselves become more
expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of
processed food.
I.e., the food we shop for as if
supermarkets were actually where food comes from.
5) The roller-coaster economy
This isn't the place for me to offer
my explanation for the probability of
global economic collapse.
No pundits, talking-heads or
economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic
times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge
that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment
and many of the lost jobs won't be coming back.
The less cautious, like me, predict
the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money,
inequitable, overly complicated global economic system in the
lifetimes of anyone under 50.
Well, at the rate we're going in
all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard
the guess, anyone under 80.
Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most
or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the
extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if
our lives depended on it. Bringing food production processes and
systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival.
We need to take producing our own
and each other's food as seriously as we've taken producing a
money income because growing numbers of us won't have enough
money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be
less of it to buy.
So what's our recourse?
