Column by George Sibley
Gardening – June 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE HOT NEW ITEM on the home front is a shredder. Not a shredder like the Enron folk or various government agencies have used to cover their tracks, but one that you shovel leaves, grass, moldy MacDonald wrappers, soggy Shoppers and other rakings into, and then everything gets chewed up into little bits that either get sprinkled directly onto the claypan that passes for dirt around here or put into one of two backyard compost bins where we also dump a lot of garbage from the kitchen. And within a few months, that mess miraculously turns into dirt of the sort that has potential for growing things.
The shredder is my partner’s investment; she is a serious gardener – but more than just a gardener really. Or maybe all gardeners are more than “just gardeners.” What she really is, is a plant and soil facilitator. She isn’t necessarily on a mission to make the whole desert bloom, but (as a native Wisconsonian) she is out to create oases of abundant life in the West’s abundant places of scarce life. Therefore, a shredder that chops organic stuff into smaller bits that will more quickly decay and enrich our difficult desert soils is her idea of progress.
My role in the garden project is to serve as brute labor, leaving the thinking and planning to her and doing what digging, wheelbarrowing, and other heavy lifting I’m asked to do. My brain, I think, is still stuck, a little arrogantly, back in the Paleolithic proto-capitalist hunter-gather level of evolution. By that brainset, if the gods want us to survive, they’ll stick enough living stuff around us, harvestable or killable, and it’s our job to find and use it.
Expending a lot of labor to concentrate the living stuff in gardens or on farms is a little beyond my level of development, although in the interests of domestic tranquility I am willing to do what heavy work is requested. Especially since my Paleolithic ancestors seem to have pretty well high-graded the planet of easy hunting and gathering.
But a few weeks ago I read an article in Rolling Stone (I buy it for the articles, not the pictures) called “The End of Oil,” and it has caused a kind of lurch in my thinking — about the garden, among other things. James Howard Kunstler condensed the article from a book due out this month called The Long Emergency, a contemplation of what happens when the world slips over “the oil peak” sometime in the fairly near future.
“The oil peak” is the point at which global oil production peaks out and moves into a long (we should hope it’s long) and irreversible decline. This doesn’t mean the globe’s oil “reserves” are running out; it just means that our economic capability and cultural will to afford the massive industrial structure necessary to produce ever more oil will peak out and start to decline. The post-Paleolithic high-grading, in other words, will be done. This already happened in the United States 35 years ago; despite the fact that we still have some 80 billion barrels of domestic oil and an estimated gazillion barrels of oil-like stuff in oil shale and tar sands. But our capacity for collecting, refining, and distributing that oil peaked and began to decline in 1970 — exactly on the schedule predicted by resource analyst M. K. Hubbert, who went on to calculate that the global peak would happen sometime between maybe this afternoon and 2025.
THIS PREDICTION probably includes all those “aces in the hole” like oil shale and oil from tar sands. True to the myth that technology will find a way, Shell Oil recently announced a new process (untried) that will sort of magically melt the kerogen out of shale, but it requires 50 or 60 long electric heaters per acre that will in turn require some huge megawattage of power that doesn’t now exist. And the general cultural will for that kind of gearing-up was probably accurately reflected in a recent Denver Post article about some Colorado movers and shakers who visited a subsidized tar sands production facility in Canada, and then expressed no enthusiasm whatever for starting something similar here.
The implications of a “global oil peak” are so staggering that, as Kunstler notes, we really don’t want to think about them. And our politicians are of course happy to indulge us in not thinking about them.
But we probably should try to start thinking about these things, here in Central Colorado, because once the price of petroleum products starts to really rise in petroleum’s terminal fever, the cost of everything we need to support civilization as we know it in these valleys is going to get really expensive. We basically import our entire lifestyle (except for the scenery) in pipes and big trucks; and virtually everything that goes into our lifestyle – food, fuel, building materials, electricity, toys, whatever – has some fossil-fuel dependency in its production as well as its distribution and delivery.
NPR interviewed a farmer recently who said that, just this year, the cost of running his farm equipment is up 50 percent, and the cost of fertilizer (also oil-based) is up 35 percent. Add in the cost of fuel for getting our food to the industrial middlemen, and the costs of all those Safeway and City Market trucks bringing it from there to here, and we are going to be looking at significantly higher food prices before long.
SO AFTER ABSORBING these facts and predictions, you know what? I’m watching my partner in the garden a little more closely, learning some of this newfangled Neolithic farming stuff. It’s starting to make sense. Kunstler suggests that, once the oil peak is past and all the oil is increasingly reserved for the rich ruling class, which we’re allowing to form over us, “the American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture…. Farming.”
And it will not be a Jeffersonian idyll. “The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational,” Kunstler suggests, worked out in a cultural environment of random armies of angry people unloading from the urbs and suburbs in search of their American entitlement, or someone to blame, or just food.
Most of us persist in the 20th-century “can do” belief (thoroughly oil-soaked) that, in the nick of time, some technological miracle will come along that will enable us to snatch the old illusion of plenitude from the jaws of finitude. But Kunstler – and even more recently, that old hippie Stewart Brand in an article in MIT’s Technology Review — points out the extent to which the higher technology for all of our alternatives (the “hydrogen economy,” solar, wind and other renewable energies) are also products of fossil fuel energy.
So learning to build soil and assist plants begins to make sense. Learning to love potatoes, other root crops and the grains that can be grown above 7,000 feet. Putting that greenhouse on the south wall we’ve been talking about. Getting those solar panels on the roof I keep talking about while there’s still the wherewithal to make them. And rethinking how much of this stuff I really need anyway. It may be time to commit the currently un-American act of beginning to think about how to live intelligently on earth.
George Sibley lives on a portion of the earth known as The City of Gunnison, and works at a portion called Western State College of Colorado.
