This is a guest post by Richard Heinberg. Richard is the author of eight books including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003, 2005). His latest book is Peak Everything (New Society, 2007). He is a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. For more information visit his website RichardHeinberg.com. The following essay was first published in his MuseLetter # 146 / May 2004.
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Growing Security
by Richard Heinberg
Once one has grasped the implications of the imminent global oil production peak, it makes sense to try to prepare as much as possible for the event and its trail of consequences. Given the importance of petroleum for modern industrial agriculture, as well as for our truck-based food distribution system, producing more of one’s own food would appear to be one of the first priorities.
In this essay I aim to describe very cursorily my wife’s and my attempts to do this, in hopes that our experience will help shorten the learning curve for others. Along the way, I will also discuss some broader issues related to food production—from the social and political to the philosophical.
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There are lots of good reasons for gardening or becoming more self-sufficient as regards food—probably enough reasons to fill a small book. I’ll mention just one that appeals to my peculiar mentality. Anthropologists have found through long experience that knowing the way a society gets its food enables one to predict fairly accurately how the people in that society will be found to raise their children, and conceptualize and approach the sacred, how large their social units will be and how stratified, and so on. Hunter-gatherers never have kings and queens; people in irrigation-based pre-industrial agricultural societies almost always do. Most people in modern industrial societies get their food (which has been grown with fossil fuels) from supermarkets and restaurants, and this subtly and unconsciously shapes their entire worldview, sowing in their souls an imperious aloofness from the natural world around them. And this, in turn, enables them to turn a blind eye to the utter devastation of the biosphere on which their own continued existence depends. If we are to survive, we need to create a new culture to supplant ecocidal mass-consumerism (the “American Way of Life”). But ultimately that project cannot succeed on the basis of slogans and legislation; it must involve a fundamental change in the way most people get their food.
Fine. Local, smaller-scale, less fuel- and chemical-intensive food production is essential from the perspectives both of personal survivalism and of societal transformation toward sustainability. So how does one go about it?
It’s simple: just grow your own food. Buy some seeds and some garden tools, plant the former in ground loosened with the latter, apply water, wait a few weeks, and eat.
But of course in reality it’s not simple at all. Let’s back up a step: what about buying seeds at the store? That assumes that the seeds have arrived at the store on fuel-fed trucks, having been produced and marketed by some giant seed company hundreds of miles distant. This could be a perilous assumption. Zoom in on any aspect of the home gardening project (tools? water? land ownership? money with which to pay the rent or mortgage?) and you’ll find similar hidden dependencies. In fact, circumventing the industrial food system is damned hard. Purists are in for disappointment and frustration: all is compromise. Whatever disengagement can be achieved must be won in stages.
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Briefly, our personal experience: Four years ago my wife Janet and I bought a suburban house on a quarter-acre lot. Before then, we had been renting a tiny house further out of town, where we had even less garden space. Neither of us was a novice gardener even then: Janet had worked as a landscape manager and was schooled in herbalism, while I had done my own share of gardening starting in childhood.
When Janet and I finally achieved the American dream of home ownership (the suburban house with two cars, two parakeets, and a big mortgage), we went to work. The house itself was small (1200 square feet) and pathetically run down. We worked for eight weeks painting and remodeling until it was habitable; then we installed photovoltaic solar panels.
The garden was the next immediate priority. Over the course of the first year we planted two dozen fruit and nut trees and established a dozen garden beds.
When we moved in, nearly the entire property was covered with weeds and Bermuda grass. Rather than spraying herbicide or trying to dig all of the weeds out, we sheet mulched—covering the grass with layers of cardboard and inches of nitrogen-rich composted bedding from turkey pens. The actual garden beds did require hand weeding, and so over the course of the first year we removed many cubic yards of Bermuda grass and wild onions.
The next year, with the help of a friend, we built a garden room/greenhouse on the south-facing back of the main house. My idea at the time was that the greenhouse would generate heat during the winter to warm our home, thus cutting down on natural gas usage—as well as helping with food production. The construction of the greenhouse ended up being a year-long project, but it is better built than the house itself. However, it combines too many functions to do all of them well. In order to keep it from heating up too much in the summer, we gave it eaves and insulative (“high-e”) glass. The result: its interior stays within a comfortable range during both winter and summer—which is great for starting seeds and over-wintering plants during the chilly season, or providing shade for potted plants in July and August—but we just don’t get enough solar gain in the winters to make much of temperature difference for the rest of the house. (My advice: an attached greenhouse is an excellent idea; however, if deriving heat for your house during winter is a priority, design accordingly with lots of glass and heat sinks.)
Before we got started, we drew diagrams of the land and tried out several possible garden designs. We used Permaculture principles to site pathways, orchards, berry patches, the culinary herb garden, and the veggie garden beds, taking into account existing off-property shade trees, drainage, and other non-movable existing features.
The property was dominated by two large shade trees when we moved in (there were also two plum trees and a loquat). We agonized over the decision, but eventually chose to have the shade trees removed and ground into wood chips (which now cover our garden pathways). As replacements we chose three apple varieties, two pears, a French plum, a pomegranate, a fig, a peach, a lemon, an almond, and a walnut (plus blueberry and currant bushes, strawberries, and other perennials).
While it was inevitable that our main garden would be in the large back yard, the property also had a small front lawn (of Bermuda grass, of course). We sheet-mulched over it, built a swale for water catchment, and installed two olive trees, another almond, and a persimmon—as well as a couple of small vegetable beds (with perennial artichokes and a few annuals), a medicinal herb garden, and some water-thrifty ornamental perennials.
We feel that we’ve crammed nearly all of the productivity into a suburban house lot that we can. There’s no swimming pool here. However, we did finally decide to include a lawn—30 square feet of it beneath a plum tree, whereupon we rest our lawn chairs in the summer, the better to survey our realm while sipping mint julips.
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Our home library is well stocked with books on gardening, ranging from philosophy to history to humor to practical advice. A few gems:
For the contemplative gardener, there is probably no better book than Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic, The One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (St. Martin’s, 1978). Let’s face it: agriculture is war. We encourage the growth of the plants we want (those are called “crops”) and discourage the growth of plants we don’t want (these we term “weeds”), thus simplifying the ecosystem and reducing biodiversity. Fukuoka calls a truce, asking whether there may be ways of working more with nature and less against it.
Gary Nabhan’s Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation (North Point, 1989) offers a clear glimpse into the food production practices of the people who inhabited North America before the Europeans invaded. This book is much more than a mere sentimental paean to the noble savage as intuitively environmentalist food producer, discussing (inter alia) Native societies that farmed themselves to extinction—such as the Hohokam, whose very name means “the exhausted people.” Few people today appreciate the fact that many of our staple foods (maize, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peppers) came from the work of countless generations of Native American plant domesticators. For American gardeners in particular, some understanding of indigenous practices seems essential.
John Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables (10 Speed Press, 1974, 1991), is the maven of biointensive gardening—a method that relies on double-digging garden beds and composting in order to achieve closer plant spacing and maximum productivity. Jeavons has done the best scientific work that I know of on the vital question of how to support the greatest number of people on the minimum amount of productive land while conserving or even building topsoil. Biointensive gardening is labor and knowledge intensive, but it is also probably our best hope for feeding a post-petroleum world. Jeavons has written other useful books and publishes (via his organization Ecology Action) a wonderful seed catalog, featuring heirloom varieties unavailable elsewhere. Janet and I are fortunate to live only an hour’s drive away from Jeavons’s home base.
Australian authors Bill Mollison and John Holmgren are the originators of Permaculture—a design system for “permanent agriculture” on a small scale (Mollison and Holmgren began their work in the mid-1970s but parted ways many years ago). Permaculture has become an international movement with its own magazine (Permaculture Activist), and with certified instructors offering consultations and classes worldwide. Janet and I have Holmgren’s new book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002, distributed by Chelsea Green), as well as a basic Permaculture how-to book, Rosemary Morrow’s Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture (Kangaroo Press, 1993); we have also taken a short course with Mollison himself. In addition, we have a copy of J. Russell Smith’s 1950 book, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture (republished by Harper in 1978), which served as an early inspiration to Mollison and Holmgren. Annual gardens are necessary for vegetables, but they’re a lot of work compared to food-producing trees—hence our mini-orchard.
British author John Seymour has written many books on rural life and self-sufficiency, and maintains a school for self-sufficiency in Wales. We had seen Seymour’s books while visiting friends in France; recently, while browsing a local used bookstore we were fortunate to find a copy of his The Guide to Self-Sufficiency (Popular Mechanics Books, 1976), a lavishly illustrated step-by-step walk-through of the processes of obtaining food from the wild, food from animals, and food from the garden. The author also shows the essence of various crafts and skills (making bricks and tiles, thatching, spinning flax), and discusses ways of harnessing natural energy sources. This sort of practical information about how pre-industrial people supported themselves is becoming ever harder to find, and could be invaluable in the future. Seymour’s books are more widely available in Britain than in North America, but they are well worth searching out.
Urban gardeners would be smart to seek out a used copy of The City People’s Book of Raising Food by Helga and William Olkowski (Rodale, 1975), which offers advice on vegetable varieties for small areas, succession planting, food storage in limited spaces, and intensive interplanting, as well as raising food from small animals (chickens and rabbits), beekeeping, and composting—all in a densely populated urban setting. There is also an important chapter on “neighbor relations.”
For those with a larger rural property, an essential book is Malcolm Margolin’s, The Earth Manual: How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming It (Heyday, 1975)—a wonderful, practical guide to caring for soil, trees, and wildlife.
Surveying the stack of books I’ve selected from our shelves, I’m impressed by how many of the best were published in the 1970s. The sustainability pioneers of that recent era (a period of energy, financial, and political crises, let us not forget) have left us a rich legacy.
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I don’t want to give the impression that Janet and I get all, or even most, of our food from our garden. In a couple of more years, when our trees are mature and all of our beds are productive, and when we have a couple of chickens, as we plan to, we might realistically hope to eat mostly from the garden for half the year. But we are still primarily dependent, especially for grain-based foods, on the local store (we’re lucky to have easy access to Community Market—a worker-owned natural foods outlet that buys from local farmers whenever possible).
Growing all of one’s own food is certainly possible: I recall my father, who was raised on a farm in northeast Missouri, telling me that his family was self-sufficient in nearly everything but salt and sugar. But that kind of lifestyle takes time and hard work, and assumes the need for only a small cash flow (and therefore also assumes the availability of cheap land with low property taxes). The modern suburban American gardener needs a career to support the habit, and it is unrealistic to expect to have a career (or, in our case, six jobs or careers split between two people) while becoming entirely food self-sufficient in one’s spare time.
In addition to lack of time, we face other challenges. Northern California has an agreeable climate: it is virtually impossible to freeze to death here; however, there is typically almost no rain from May till November. Luther Burbank declared Santa Rosa the most favored place in all the Earth for gardening, but here irrigation is the basis for survival. So where does the water come from? The Russian River, the primary local waterway and a source of fresh water for much of the region, is already being supplemented by a diversion of the Eel River, further north. And yet even this is not enough to supply the needs for anticipated future development (the population of northern California is growing rapidly, mostly due to immigration). Janet and I are fortunate to have a well on our property (we haven’t yet gotten around to supplying it with a pump), but the water table in our valley is falling. We have installed water-conserving drip irrigation systems for most of our garden beds, but even so we find ourselves using 5,000 to 12,000 gallons during a typical month in the dry growing season (versus 2,000 during the rainy winter). Currently water costs us $2.65 per 1,000 gallons—but how long can this precious resource remain so cheap?
Another challenge to the gardener in a temperate climate is planning for a year’s production. It is surprisingly easy to grow too much of one crop and not enough of another—to be overwhelmed with tomatoes and zucchinis in August but to have almost nothing coming from the garden in January. Of course, it is difficult to know ahead of time whether this year will turn out to be a good or bad one for a particular crop, but it is still essential to try as best one can to avoid surfeit while ensuring sufficiency. This requires experience and research.
Temporary abundances are not to be entirely avoided: many foods can be stored relatively easily, and food storage is essential if one is to even attempt self-sufficiency. In our arid Mediterranean climate, we have found sun drying to be the simplest and least energy-intensive method (we dry tomatoes and fruit.) Canning is better for putting aside large quantities, but requires more equipment and the dedication of an afternoon now and then to an intensive operation. Dry beans need no processing for storage other than shelling, and some apple varieties will keep throughout much of the winter if they’re in a cool place.
We make some attempts to save seed from year to year, but still find ourselves buying most of our seeds from several excellent organic suppliers. Seed saving is an art in itself, and requires knowledge, among other things, of how various plant varieties are pollinated.
Maintaining soil fertility is one of the most important aspects of gardening. Without attention to this, one sees a very noticeable drop-off in garden productivity within only two or three years. We have compost piles and a worm bin (building and maintaining these is an art in itself, about which books have been written). But our food system is not a closed cycle: plants take up nutrients from the soil, we eat parts of the plants, and we compost the rest—but then our human wastes get flushed into the city sewer system. Eventually we would like to have a composting toilet, but currently these are illegal in Sonoma County. Consequently we have to buy manures, composts, and other amendments to supplement the soil-building process.
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Even if Janet and I were to become spectacularly successful at growing all of our own food sustainably, we would still face a serious problem. As energy resources become scarce and the life-support infrastructure of modern suburbia breaks down, people who haven’t had the same forethought that we have will endeavor to survive in any way possible—and some of these people will be violence-prone folks with nothing to lose. Under such circumstances, individualist survivalism will be pointless; the best insurance against crop theft and general chaos will be community solidarity. Entire neighborhoods will need to be organized for collective security and for cooperative food-growing efforts. To be effective, efforts along these lines will need to start before the breakdown.
Fortunately, there are precedents for the widespread adoption of backyard and community gardening. As David M. Tucker has documented in his fascinating book Kitchen Gardening in America: A History (Iowa State University Press, 1993), during previous periods of economic and political turmoil city and suburban dwellers have responded by turning lawns and golf courses into potato beds. I had previously heard of the Victory Gardens of World War II; I didn’t realize that the phenomenon was even more widespread during World War I, and that in both instances it began not with a government program, but, according to Tucker, with spontaneous citizen action:
The war gardening of 1917 emerged from consumer fear of rising prices and actual food shortages. Threatened railroad labor strikes and the anticipated American entry into the European War created speculative food hoarding in the inter of 1916–17, leading to an inflationary price spiral that quickly doubled the cost of most food staples in New York City while onions soared 700 percent in cost and cabbages 2,000 percent.
Volunteer community gardens appeared throughout the country, including school gardens and gardens for the poor. Only later did the government decide that this was a good idea and begin a propaganda campaign to encourage the effort.
After the War, the garden craze subsided for a decade; however, “the hard times of the Great Depression turned both the middle class and the unemployed back to the land.” As World War II approached, Agriculture Department Secretary Claude Wickard “called a special National Defense Gardening Conference in Washington . . . to both seize control of the victory gardens leadership and kill any war garden enthusiasm.” Wickard went so far as to label garden enthusiasm “unpatriotic.” But despite initial official discouragement, victory gardens sprang up everywhere—“parking lots, playgrounds, college campuses, vacant lots, and backyards.” Twenty million victory gardens were planted in 1943, including one on the White House lawn (by now Secretary Wickard was at the head of a pro-garden propaganda campaign).
During the oil shocks, war, and economic recessions of the 1970s still another wave of gardening mania swept the country—and in some ways we are still in the trailing end of that most recent wave (biointensive gardening and Permaculture are perhaps its greatest ongoing contributions).
With rising fuel prices, we will no doubt see yet another spontaneous explosion of interest in backyard food production. However, this time the added productive capacity will be required long-term, and the need itself will be greater. Urban and suburban families who know nothing about composting or saving seed, and who lack even basic garden tools, will need information and supplies. Local coordination will be essential.
A few communities have already made helpful steps in this general direction. Berkeley, Calif., has instituted a Food Policy Council, whose mission is “To build a local food system based on sustainable regional agriculture that fosters the local economy and assures all people of Berkeley have access to healthy, affordable and culturally appropriate food from non-emergency sources.” The Council works to “improve linkages between local organic farms and means of distribution throughout urban areas, and expand opportunities and support for urban gardening and farming.”
Such local councils are especially needed given the intractable reality of national policies: the US Department of Agriculture lends nearly all of its considerable institutional support to giant agribusiness cartels, monopolistic seed companies, and the agricultural biotechnology industry. Many state agriculture departments do the same.
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At New College of California in Santa Rosa, we have started an Ecological Agriculture program, which teaches students exactly the skills that will be needed. We hold many of our classes at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center , which maintains decades-old gardens of thousands of rare heirloom vegetable varieties and offers public classes on seed saving, composting, and food activism. I am proud of the intelligence and quality of what we at New College, and the folks at OAEC, are offering. Still, these efforts barely scratch the surface in terms of what is needed in order to make our county self-sufficient and sustainable in terms of food. I can only hope that, as economic conditions deteriorate as a result of the inevitable rise in energy prices, many more people in this area will become interested in food security issues.
Meanwhile, as I walk down our suburban street and peer at my neighbors’ lawns and ornamental plantings, I can’t help but be worried by the magnitude of the challenge ahead.
It is mid-June as I’m writing this—the end of spring and the very beginning of summer. Our garden is burgeoning, but we have to water some beds almost daily. The snails are eating our greens. Birds gobble our bean seedlings before they can establish themselves. The artichokes, fava beans, and loquats are done for the year. The apples, pears, peaches, and tomatoes have yet to start coming in. Most of Janet’s and my meals are still based on food from the market, with our garden supplying peripheral supplements like onions, chard, parsnips, a few early potatoes, beets, peas, scallions, lettuce, Napa cabbage, a few berries, and herbs.
If we could assume that the world will go on as it is indefinitely, our garden would constitute a satisfying hobby. Given what we know about the coming energy famine, it is the basis of our future security. One of our neighbors (also an avid gardener) understands the oil-peak dilemma, and has asked me to give a lecture on it for other employees at the corporation for which he works. Cultivating relationships with all of our other neighbors to this degree would be a full-time job, yet we know we must start somewhere. The sooner more gardens are planted, the better off we all will be.
