Energy security is an increasingly important—and sometimes overlooked—aspect of food security. Producing food requires considerable fuel, electricity, heat or cooling, and inputs that have embedded energy costs. Every step from seed to stomach requires energy, and has a carbon cost. And in thinking about a secure, decentralized food system we have to think about how to meet those energy needs in secure, affordable and local ways.

This idea is nothing new to farmers and ranchers, for whom the bottom line considerations of energy use are an essential part of their business calculations. More and more producers are looking for ways to become more energy efficient, conserve water (in part because it takes energy to pump it), and in some cases “grow their own” green energy. On-farm renewable energy production can cut energy costs and in some cases provide a new source of income if there’s extra to be sold onto the grid. California producers are ahead of the game in this area—according to a USDA survey, the state leads the country in the production of on-farm wind, solar and solar thermal.

Last weekend, Governor Brown signed a bill that will make it easier and cheaper for farmers to get their “waste to energy” projects connected to the utility grid and get credited for that clean energy. SB 489, the Renewable Energy Equity Act, was authored by Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) and sponsored by the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN). It opens up California’s Net Energy Metering (NEM) Program to all eligible forms of renewable energy, including biomass and biogas.

Potential feedstocks for biomass production include agricultural waste from food processing, prunings from orchards and vineyards, and grape skins and seeds left over from wine processing. All new biomass projects have to meet existing air pollution standards. And importantly, the NEM program applies only to relatively small projects—one megawatt or less—so most of the renewable energy is consumed close to where it is generated, becoming part of the solution for a distributed, locally appropriate, scaled-to-fit energy generation system.

Russ Lester of Dixon Ridge Farms is an innovator of on-farm biomass production. Dixon Ridge grows organic walnuts and also processes all of California’s organic walnuts. Russ used to sell his walnut shell waste to a large biomass facility and have it trucked away to be burned and turned into electricity. Several years ago, he installed a state-of-the-art gasification system to produce combined heat and power. The system uses high pressure and heat to turn his walnut shells into heat to dry the walnuts and electricity to power his massive freezers (used instead of chemical fumigants for killing insects, and to keep the walnuts fresh). He uses the biochar that’s left over as fertilizer in his orchards and to increase soil carbon sequestration, an added climate benefit.

Because the biomass facility at Dixon Ridge hasn’t been eligible for the NEM program, and because their local utility refused to connect them to the grid at a reasonable cost, they have been able to generate energy only when they consume it immediately. Now that SB 489 is law, Russ will be able to maximize his potential for being a part of California’s clean energy future, increase his contribution to climate change mitigation, and get paid in electricity cost savings (spinning his meter backwards when he generates electricity), getting paid real money if he makes more than he uses.

At CalCAN, we are thrilled that SB 489 has been signed by the Governor, an indication of his commitment to California’s clean technology future. Now we will get to work to make sure that Russ’ story is replicated on scale.

I’ve heard stories of making granola bars under the heat of the sun, and I’ve seen advertisements attempting to sell $250 solar ovens. But developed and developing countries alike are proving that a scaleable solution for widespread use and availability of the sun’s heat has the potential to greatly affect our daily cooking practices and the concepts behind food production. In America, restaurants are experimenting with solar panels for operational use, even though the cost is still high for harnessing the power of the sun. And in some developing countries, solar cooking has come to mean survival–its value as an energy resource is vital to human sustenance.

In San Francisco, The Plant Organic Café has installed solar panels on its roof for sustainable energy usage. “We use the power of the sun to cook your food,” The Plant advertises as its slogan, and the restaurant draws a diverse crowd for its specialties like the “signature” Plant burger (bright magenta vegan patty, house made with packed beets, bulgur wheat, and lentils). The 6-kilowatt system, covering between 400 and 500 square feet, costs approximately $75,000. It supplies the restaurant with 25-30 percent of its electricity needs—a steady start for a promising alternative energy source. The restaurant also received an $8,000 rebate under the GoSolarSF Program. Financial incentives, it seems, may prove to be the jump start establishments need in order to start thinking about going solar.

But despite solid efforts to create a sustainable restaurant space, The Plant met with unforeseen design complications in its application process to becoming LEED certified. The U.S. Green Building Council that offers the certification program takes into account a variety of initiatives when reviewing applications: site construction, materials and resources, water efficiency, energy, and atmosphere. There are currently very few small buildings that have met all benchmarks to be certified LEED. The price of certification has been another obstacle. The Plant’s development plans for becoming certified proved expensive, but co-owner Matthew Guelke says that he would certainly try it again. “It takes a couple of years to pay off, but it’s an ethical, environmentally-positive stance we like to take.”

There are still a few small restaurants that are LEED certified. These include the Founding Fathers Restaurant in Washington D.C. which claims to have “high-efficiency water and energy usage,” and the Red Stag Supper Club in Minneapolis which couples LEED certification with local and organic cuisine. Red Stag owner, Kim Bartmann, tells The Daily Green: “The Stag opened using 70 percent less water than a typical restaurant, and 50 percent less energy—greatly reducing our operating costs.” Surprisingly, many other LEED certified restaurants are franchises of fast-food chains. According to The Daily Green, only 38 restaurants have received LEED certification, and 40 percent of those (about 15 in all) are chain restaurants, including nine Starbucks, two McDonald’s, a Subway, and an Arby’s.

Across the world in eastern Chad, solar use tends toward necessity rather than trendiness: The Iridimi refugee camp, run by the Jewish World Watch and KoZon, has been helping refugee women find alternative methods for cooking to avoid the risky task of finding wood and water outside the camp. 14,000 cardboard and aluminum foil cookers are used daily to feed 17,000 refugees.

In other regions of the world, solar cooking has developed as a means to reduce firewood consumption where wood is expensive and scarce. The Villasceca Solar Restaurant in Chile functions solely on solar energy. With a $10,000 research grant from the United Nations Development Programme, the Association of Solar Artisans of Villaseca started the Solar Restaurant which has been serving dinners of fresh bread, meat, and flan to about 70 people a day since 1989. The restaurant uses metallic sheets to reflect solar heat into the oven interior.

While there are limitations to solar cooking (longer cooking times, a cap on mouths fed a day, limited menu items, and shorter serving hours), perhaps this cooking method can be viewed for its positive reach. Under the beating hot sun in Cuba, Joe Froese served up solar-cooked pizzas to tourists on a beach as early as 1995, and in India, The Ladakh Project is spreading solar cookers in a region that gets “roughly 320 days of sunlight a year.” As solar cooking becomes more mainstream, we may learn that a calculated approach to food preparation allows us to waste less food while cooking more sustainably, abiding by the rules of the sun.

Photo: Matthew Guelke

The new documentary screening around the country The Economics of Happiness says everything it should say. Ambitiously, it attempts to explain the many downsides of economic globalization, while offering actual alternatives that the viewer can get behind, and (for a movie just a little over an hour long) it does this concisely and without too much dreadful hyperbole or schmaltz. For this I am thankful. All too often, environmental themed movies rely on over-exaggerations, simplifications, and a preaching-to-the-choir sentimentalities–which result in a product unlikely to perform the educational (that’s entertainingly educational) role it was made for.

Director Helena Norberg-Hodge and her team use the case study of the Ladakhi people from the high-altitude regions of India, Pakistan, and China (whose traditional, sustainable, joyful, tightly-knit community lifestyle has been disintegrating since their introduction to the products and values of modern global capitalist culture) to illustrate their criticism of globalization, without overly romanticizing the Ladakhis or failing to address pro-globalization arguments.

The film’s analysis of the negative effects of globalization is spot on, citing eight main outcomes: mounting unhappiness in the industrialized world; feelings of insecurity for those who are not leading industrial-world lives; unsustainable use of resources; climate change; loss of meaningful livelihoods, especially farming for those in the “developing world”; increasing inter-group conflict; handouts to big businesses; and a false accounting of progress. The film contains effective explanations for how corporately-controlled global trade causes these results, including Hodge’s brilliant metaphor of how our “arms are so long we don’t know what our hands are doing.”

I have reservations regarding the use of climate change as an discursive tactic for getting people to make societal change toward sustainability. That being said, these other effects are clearly perceptible to the average person. With even a little effort to look at the world as it is, whether through scientific studies or personal experience, a reasonable American could see that these effects are real, and by watching this film could be convinced that they are a direct outcome and corollary of global capitalism.

The solution the film offers–economic and political localization–is one that we’ve heard for some time and with substantial frequency in the sustainable food world. Refreshingly, the film even includes a critique of the “buying our way out of the mess” argument which too often circumscribes the limits of sustainable foodies’ activism. And so I can heartily recommend this film as an activist tool, for introducing emerging or tentative foodies to the larger economic context of local, sustainable foods (and how to actually create more sustainable systems in general).

I do have one issue with the film, which isn’t really so much about what it says as what it doesn’t cover (and–as a filmmaker–I know this can be due to limitations of time, capacity, and/or the need to focus a film on one audience). That issue is that this film, like so many others coming from the environmentally-aware left, doesn’t ask the hard questions of how to actually leverage large-scale change. The film mentions the influence of corporate capital on our political system (which continues to be depressingly evidenced in all sections of government), but offers no ideas for how to counter this. It offers alternatives to the false accounting mentioned earlier, that of Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI) or Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of the grossly inaccurate Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But how to actually get governments to implement those measures, when those in charge are completely enthralled with and beholden to the ideologies of endless growth and “free” markets?

Something else kept haunting me as I watched the film: “the masses.” Globalization is no doubt the hegemonic ideology of our time, and the masses (at least its vocal, politically active members like Tea Partiers) have bought the line, practically without reservations. I believe that the biggest question for the anti-globalization (or better, the pro-localization) movement is: how do we change this? Can people be convinced to break from ideologies that don’t serve them? Can “everyday” Americans (those who this film claims to be at their unhappiest level of the past 60 years) be convinced that localization is a preferable alternative? More importantly, perhaps, can they be convinced that it is actually possible, and not just a hippie pipe dream?

The sad reality is that these questions are much easier to ask than to answer. I ask them not to try to seem like I have it figured out, but to honestly plea for continued conversation from those who would like to see humanity and the planet “saved.” We know the problems, and we think we know the (physical) solutions. Now, how do we get from here to there? I have a feeling that, at minimum, it will involve a lot of education. And for that, this movie is a great start.

Ten years ago, our farm operation–Massa Organics–responded to increasing energy costs by building a new farmhouse out of rice straw bales. It made a lot of sense given the temperature extremes of California’s Sacramento Valley, not to mention the excess straw we had on our hands. The project continues to save us thousands of dollars in heating and cooling costs.

We made this move to be competitive and efficient. Like most California farmers and ranchers, we stay in business by innovating and adapting. Keeping a lot of options on our table helps guarantee that we can keep delivering food to your table.

In the past few years, California’s clean energy and air policies have fostered billions of dollars in investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. Agriculture is among the many sectors in California that has benefited from our state’s leadership on this. Many small farms like mine are already generating their own solar, wind and biogas energy for on-farm use, or sometimes even to sell back to the grid. Just within a few miles of us are six farm-scale windmills. These innovations not only help farmers like us reduce our emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, they also help us with meet our bottom line so we can continue doing what we do best–growing food.

Family farms, like many small businesses, are vulnerable to increasing and volatile energy prices. Our narrow profit margins don’t leave much room to absorb the impacts of price shocks that come with relying on foreign oil. The sooner we make the move to renewable energy, the more secure we, as food growers, are going to be.

To do this, though, we need all the financial incentives, investments, and expertise we can get a hold of to access these new technologies and best practices. AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, could help us do just that. But by blocking this law, Prop 23 would indefinitely stall these opportunities and prevent farmers and other businesses from innovating. Its backers have spent millions to protect their profit margins and have no stake in California’s economy, environment, or food security.

For four generations, our farm has been producing high quality organic brown rice, almonds and wheat and marketing them directly at farmers markets and online. We’re very proud of that, and intend to keep things going strong into the future. It’s the reason why we’re voting no on Prop 23 next Tuesday and why we hope the rest of California does the same.

“Please stop calling it a leak!” Bill KcKibben pleaded at the Slow Money conference in Shelburne, Vermont last month. A leak, after all, suggests a kind of dribble. A spill sounds like something you might mop up with a towel.

“We’ve punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean,” McKibben added. “Is a knife wound a ‘blood leak?’”

We’re hitting some fundamental limits, he added, citing the ‘thousand year’ storms that seem to come every four or five years now, and the fact that we’re facing the hottest year on record, so far (and that was before the heat wave that hit the whole Eastern seaboard this past week).

Yes, we need to plug that hole in the ocean floor before the entire Gulf becomes one gigantic dead zone. But there’s an onshore contaminant threatening our future, too, and it’s called fast money.

Fast money spews from the wells of Wall Street and spatters the globe from Beijing to Bangalore to Bentonville. It creates land-based dead zones filled with underwater mortgages and sinking businesses. Fast money “does violence to the web of relations on which the health of communities and bioregions depend,” according to Slow Money founder Woody Tasch.

Tasch shares Bill McKibben’s fervent belief that you can’t have a truly sound economy unless you practice sound ecology. The subtitle of Tasch’s book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, says it all: investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered.

But don’t expect Tasch to declare war on Wall Street. In a statement to the six hundred or so farmers, philanthropists, investors, eco-preneurs and real food rabble rousers (like me) who came to historic Shelburne Farms for Slow Money’s second annual conference, Tasch explained why he’s not going to pick that fight–or any fight, for that matter:

All of us here, today, recognize that we live in an economy and culture that is addicted to oil. We know that our system of industrial agriculture is, in Joan Gussow’s words, “floating on a sea of oil.” We recognize the irony that the Gulf oil spill is occurring in what is already a dead zone due to agricultural run-off carried down the Mississippi River.We recognize, too, the temptation to become Tea-Party-like in our anger and frustration. It is tempting to wage war against BP or Goldman Sachs or McDonalds or Monsanto. But waging such wars makes about as much sense as trying to inject Slow Money into the gusher of fast money, hoping it will somehow “top kill” it…

…let’s remember that you can launch a war, but you cannot launch peace. You can launch money into an investment portfolio, but you cannot launch peace of mind. You can launch chemicals into the soil, but you cannot launch fertility. Peace, health and fertility can only be found through what Wendell Berry calls “millions of small acts of care and restraint.”

Peace. Health. Fertility. Too bad our current notions of how to keep America secure and prosperous have brought us just the opposite: war, disease, barren seas and soil.

And how do you sell the virtues of “small acts of care and restraint” to a nation that prides itself on living large and thinking big?

Except that we really don’t think big, anymore, when we think at all. We have a shockingly defeatist, “can’t do” attitude when it comes to tackling our current crises. Hence the mindset that we can’t afford a moratorium on deepwater drilling because it will cost even more jobs than BP’s disastrous deepwater drilling has already destroyed. We need the oil and the jobs, come hell or high, oily water. As Tasch wrote in his book:

It is not surprising that we find ourselves, today, captive to markets that are themselves captive to the enormous momentum of the economic growth that they have made possible.What is surprising, however, is the degree of our reticence, our impotence, our unwillingness–in the face of the collision course between unlimited economic growth and the limits of culture and the biosphere to absorb our accelerating levels of extraction, consumption, and pollution–to dare to imagine another way.

The Slow Money conference showcased the socially responsible investors, sustainable agriculture proponents, and ecologically savvy entrepreneurs who have not only dared to imagine another way, but are actively pursuing it.

No, I’m not going to claim that all our problems will be solved by backing the manufacture of such locavore luxuries as organic kale chips and granola bars, or artisanal grass-fed sausage sticks, or (my personal favorite) a chia-based beverage that was delicious in a viscous way.

But I was impressed and inspired by the presentations from a variety of innovators: Midwestern Bio Ag, Terra Green Biologics, and Marrone Bio Innovations, who’ve found environmentally safe ways to boost soil fertility and control pests; City Fresh Foods, Peoples’ Community Market, and Home Town Farms, who are improving their communities’ access to fresh, healthy food; and Farmland LP and the Carrot Project, dedicated to fostering the growth of sustainably farmed land. And as a dedicated DIYer, I was delighted to learn about a totally non-toxic but super durable varnish from Vermont Natural Coatings that is made from whey, a by-product of the local cheese industry.

Together, these trail blazers, among others, made a compelling case that nurturing the kinds of small, regionally based businesses that they exemplify could not only create jobs and revitalize our economy, but also address what Bill McKibben called our “social deficit…the ecological and psychic wounds that we’ve inflicted on ourselves.”

As McKibben noted, anything that’s “too big to fail” is, by definition, too big, period. That goes not only for our financial system, but every other system we rely on, including our food and energy systems.

How many more fast money blowouts can we afford? Slow Money, on the other hand, is about growing things, not blowing things up, whether it’s in pursuit of the coal beneath a mountaintop or the oil at the bottom of the sea.

McKibben ended his keynote by saying that we need to “take very drastic action, now.” Is it time to put a cap on capitalism? You can help bring our economy back down to earth literally, now, by signing on to the Slow Money Soil Trust.

Originally published on Eating Liberally

With the documentary movie Gasland making its national debut on HBO just last week, the nation is now more aware of the environmental issues natural gas fracking poses. What you might not have heard is that many farmers in upstate New York fear the impact that natural gas drilling will have on our grasslands and water, and ultimately our livelihoods. It is an issue that could threaten New York City’s food shed but many do not realize what is at stake.

Ken Jaffe, an upstate New York grass-fed beef farmer, is concerned about the devastating impact gas fracking could have on his farm. He penned an impassioned letter to the residents of New York City on the blog “Green State Fair”  and advised:

You should understand that the industrialization and pollution of rural upstate New York will kill the production of organic and sustainable food in this region.  The area of food production is almost all outside the NYC Watershed, and vulnerable. Massive amounts of toxins will be released into our aquifers and air. Many millions of gallons of these hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds, including known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, are pumped into the ground during the drilling process, and released into the air from evaporation tanks.

The most frustrating part of all this is that upstate New York has been economically depressed for decades. It is in trouble, and the sectors that once supported us, like manufacturing and agriculture, have left or are so consolidated that they employ too few people. Who can begrudge communities for hoping that natural gas will give a must-needed economic boost? Promises of jobs and investment are a powerful lure in a place where young people flee, and the population continues to plummet because there are no jobs.

Yet, there is one bright spot in all this gloom: we are seeing a huge increase in our sustainable agriculture sector. We can thank local demand but also our superior pastureland and clean water. New farmers, both young and retired, are reclaiming fallow dairy pastures and raising grass-fed meats and organic produce. This has all been made possible by a passionate and renewed interest in local food and a belief that it is safer. All this progress and hope could be threatened by trusting our future to natural gas when the real future rests on our best asset: our water and superior grasslands, three million acres of which are currently unused. In fact, have so much pasture land we could locally raise grass-fed beef for all of New York City.

The BP spill, in all its horror, should serve as a lesson.  Because the federal government has dismantled safeguards that would protect us from pollution, the risk seems to be at the expense of our land. Alarmingly, gas drilling, or fracking, is now exempt from federal pollution laws. As Jaffe explains:

Pollution of water, air and food from the gas drilling industry is exempt from federal pollution laws, thanks to Dick Cheney’s 2005 Energy Policy Act and its ‘Halliburton Exemption.’ Incredibly, gas drillers can pollute without regard to the basic protections in Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, or the Clear Air Act.  For instance, it is legal for gas drilling to cause drinking water to contain high levels of carcinogens like benzene that violate the Safe Drinking Water Act because that law simply does not apply if gas drilling is the cause. The public and the environment have been essentially defenseless against gas drillers (who are  often the same companies as the oil drillers).  They have used the cover of this exemption to ruin the air, water, and landscape of large swaths of several western states, and are now moving east.

The gas companies have made sure to steer clear of New York City’s watershed because they know how powerful New York City is politically. But what New York City has failed to see is that they are threatening its foodshed. It is time for us to realize that local sustainable farming is under attack and under great threat just when it has become a positive economic force in our state. Jaffe says it best:

The gas and oil industry is relying on your silence so that they will be unopposed. Their current plans are for 8-10 wells per square mile, pumping billions of gallons of toxic water into the ground. They will pollute the air and water of a large region that represents most of New York State’s food shed, directly threatening the agricultural base that you rely upon for your food. This includes the western Catskills, and across the Finger Lakes to western New York. Most of Pennsylvania is also under the gun.

Watch the trailer for Gasland below, and then go here for a list of things you can do to make your voice heard.

Big Fisherman Seafood restaurant owner Henry Pynot in New Orleans believes shrimp prices will go up 50 to 75 percent [VIDEO]. The Crescent City Farmer’s Market in uptown New Orleans exhausted its supply earlier this month and markets as far as Florida were selling four times more seafood than usual as customers seemed to grab what may be their last. Gulf Coast fishermen—300,000 of them—catch at least 30 percent of the U.S. seafood supply, which begets around $2.4 billion annually to the region. Although most fishing occurs west of the oil spill, well-known New Orleans chef John Besh is very concerned about the long-term effect on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Florida panhandle.

The bayou is French for slow-moving waterway. In Louisiana, it’s an offshoot of the Mississippi River that forms a delta at the river’s mouth.

It took a thousand years of annual spring flooding for the silt and sediments to develop in this region. But it’s taken only the past 60 years to endanger it. The oil and gas industry is at the center of this destruction.

But the threat to the bayous didn’t happen last month with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Oil rigs began to appear in the brackish coastal areas of the Gulf in the early 1930s when a Texan Company (Texaco) developed the first mobile steel barges for drilling. After World War II, other companies began to build fixed off-shore platforms near southern Louisiana. Today the Gulf hosts about 4,000 platforms.

Since 1950, an 8,000-mile system of canals has been constructed in the bayous, with channels 15 to 25-feet wide and six to seven-feet deep, to accommodate the transport of oil-related equipment.

Over the past few years, many people in Louisiana have been concerned about the disappearing bayous. The waterway loss each day is equivalent to the size of a football field. Among the concerned voices is musician, Dr. John, who wrote “Black Gold” (included in his Grammy Award-winning 2007 album, The City That Care Forgot). The song points out how canals make the area more vulnerable to hurricanes and other storms without recognizing that the wetlands provide protection to the mainland–one reason why Hurricane Katrina was so destructive.

“Thirty years ago we had a plan to build new wetlands,” said Dr. John, “but corruption in the state made the money go elsewhere.” He spoke recently at the American Planning Association (APA) conference in New Orleans.

Today, the world consumes 85 million barrels of oil per day.  The United States is the top guzzler at almost 23 percent. The European Union comes in second at 14 percent, China at 9 percent and India at 3 percent.

Nearly half of each barrel of oil is made into gasoline. The rest, according to the Ranken Energy Corporation, is used in practically everything else: agriculture, cosmetics, soaps and cleaning supplies, textiles, plastics, recreational equipment, auto parts, kitchen appliances.

Unfortunately, our desire for oil makes us willing to do whatever it takes to get it. This self-destructive drive and over-reliance on oil is bad for four reasons.

First, oil is a non-renewable resource and its supply is limited. We have already extracted about half of the cheap and easy-to-obtain oil in the world. What’s left is more difficult to get. Here is where deepwater off-shore rigging enters the scene.

Second, carbon-based fuels are choking our planet’s atmosphere and causing climate change. Before the Industrial Revolution began around 1750, earth had 270 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.  Today, it is at 390 ppm. Climate change is linked to the increasing intensity of storms and is also directly responsible for rising seas due to melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Third, accidents like the oil spill demonstrate how dangerous oil drilling can be to the environment and to the livelihoods of people living in coastal areas.

Fourth, our reliance on imported oil has led to an aggressive U.S. foreign and military policy against the world’s oil-producing regions upon whom we depend for our imported oil.

We first exposed our desperation for oil on January 23, 1980, when President Jimmy Carter initiated the Carter Doctrine, which declared that the United States would use military force–if necessary–to defend our national interests in the Persian Gulf.

In 2001, the overt fight for oil began with the invasion of Afghanistan where several oil companies wanted to build a Trans-Afghanistan Gas Pipeline in the late 1990s from Azerbaijan and Central Asia to Pakistan or India. In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq, which just happens to be the second largest proven oil reserve.

We are still at war in both these countries with no end in sight and so far have lost 4,402 Americans in Iraq, 1,060 in Afghanistan, a combined wounded of 37,641 and nearly $1 trillion. About one million Iraqis have also lost their lives and no one is counting dead Afghanis.

Oil has been a problem for the United States over the past 40 years, said David Cohen, author of Decline of Empire, who notes that the nation peaked in its domestic oil production in 1970. That led us to import more oil, which then left us less self-sufficient and extremely vulnerable to several other countries, including those who hate us.

“And now we’re paying the tragic consequences,” said Cohen. “Our civilization has been and continues to be built on fossil energy.  As a consequence of that mindless development, humans have trashed their environment.”

America has a 36,000-mile cross-country pipeline network that fuels 250 million vehicles. So while the media focuses blame on BP and government regulators–and rightfully so–we must also recognize that our demand for oil makes all of us responsible for the oil spill.

If there is a lesson in this horrible tragedy, it is that we must change our way of life to one that is less centered around fossil fuels.

As a start, we can walk and bike more; use public transportation; support train travel and transport; eat local food or grow our own; turn down the heat; cut the air conditioning; resist using plastic products; retire gas-powered lawn equipment and other vehicles.

It is imperative that we reduce our demand for oil or we will sacrifice not only our precious bayous, wildlife, coastal cities and businesses, but eventually our planet too.

Yesterday, activists with Rainforest Action Network (RAN) occupied the executive offices of Cargill, the nation’s largest privately held agribusiness company. Cargill is also the nation’s largest importer of palm oil, a tropical fruit extract commonly found in thousands of consumer products, from soaps and detergents to breakfast cereals and biofuels. The protest comes on the heels of RAN’s newly released and highly damning report which documents systematic failures by Cargill to comply with international palm oil standards led by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The report also documents rainforest destruction on two plantations that Cargill owns, but has allegedly hidden from the Indonesian government and its customers. In a statement, Cargill denied the claims, saying it produces palm oil responsibly on its own plantations and is working toward sustainable production from its suppliers. RAN issued its own statement today, in response to Cargill’s denial, standing by their position that Cargill is destroying rainforests.

Grown on massive plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, palm oil has been associated with rainforest destruction, threatened and extinct species (including orangutans), huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions, and violations of human rights and labor laws. Its use is widespread and increasing around the world, but particularly in the U.S., where its consumption has tripled in the last five years. Cargill supplies palm oil to some of the nation’s largest food companies, including Nabisco, Kellogg’s, Nestle, Mars, Kraft, and General Mills, the last of which uses palm oil in over 100 of its products, including Cheerios and Lucky Charms. According to RAN, through their purchase of Cargill palm oil, General Mills is violating their own stated corporate social responsibility policy to “be one of the most environmentally sustainable food companies in the world.”

So, how can our food choices here make a difference thousands of miles away? When we realize how our cookies and crackers (and hundreds of other products) can be contributing to global greenhouse gases. According to RAN, worldwide, the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests are responsible for 15 percent of all annual greenhouse gas emissions. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesia’s rapid deforestation account for around eight percent of global emissions: more than the combined emissions from all the cars, planes, trucks, buses, and trains in the U.S. This huge carbon footprint from forest destruction has made non-industrialized Indonesia the third-largest global greenhouse gas emitter, behind only the U.S. and China.

Some good corporate actors are helping to make a difference. RAN has led a successful pledge campaign, signed by dozens of personal care product manufacturers, as well as Whole Foods Market, to call on all agribusiness companies, including Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge, to use their influence with the palm oil industry to require standards that protect rainforests. The pledge also asks companies to work with RAN to ensure that sustainable alternatives to palm oil (like coconut oil, olive oil, and rapeseed oil) are available in the marketplace. Working closely with current market leaders and palm oil producers, RAN has developed a detailed model palm oil policy that addresses weaknesses in the development and enforcement of the RSPO and incorporates the concerns of local communities, environmentalists, and development experts.

You can make a difference, too. RAN believes that bold action by Cargill to reduce the negative impacts of its palm oil operations could establish an important precedent for agribusiness throughout the world. You can start by checking labels (ingredients to look for include: “palm oil”, “palm kernel oil”, “palm fruit oil” or “palmitate”) and you can call Cargill’s CEO Gregory Page and tell him to act now to protect rainforests, communities, and the climate.

Oil is history, and food as it is currently produced and eaten is going the way of the dinosaurs, too. So what are our real options for producing food to feed our population? A great one hour film called A Farm for the Future from the BBC seeks to answer this very question by investigating some of the methods for making real sustainable changes to a livestock farm in Devon, England belonging to the narrator of the film, Rebecca Hosking. There are no easy answers, but she discovers one root of unsustainability on farms is the energy we put into working against nature. While speaking to permaculture expert Patrick Whitefield, she asks if what he is proposing is “to design the energy out, or design the labor out” of the system. To which he replies yes, on both counts.

Hosking visits a number of experts who have developed systems — like for example, the livestock farmer that has stopped tilling the land every year, and produces grass made up of twenty or so varieties with dense root systems, such that the cows can remain outdoors year round without destroying the pasture. Otherwise, the narrator says, tractors must produce the bails of hay that are then brought to the animals indoors. Tilling also brings up the valuable living soil, exposing earth worms and other creatures to the elements and to predators like birds. Eventually the land is drained of its life, and must be showered with fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, because there are no longer any natural defenses left to protect the crops.

Those natural defenses are the outcome of biodiversity, which some current legislation in the United States could require farms to do away with in a misguided measure for food safety. Living soil breaks down waste and produces fertility, having flowers that invite pollinators encourages better yields, bird life means natural sources of phosphate (instead of mining it for fertilizers that then get washed away). This is working with nature, and requires less energy to produce more.

The film features small-holder permaculture farms where diversity of plants, animals and insects in mixed wooded and open land, resulting in low energy and low maintenance abundance — up to five times more food than can be produced in open fields under current methods. One such grower estimated that you could feed ten people on an acre in such a permaculture system. The one catch, you cannot grow the amount of cereals that we consume this way. This could prove the hardest sell: a diet made up of a lot less grain.

Unfortunately in the U.S., permaculture is not often discussed. Systems like these are also never studied to compare with our current chemical and oil-intensive systems of growing food, so as to see a real comparison. This is because Big Ag is paying for most of the studies performed by researchers, and therefore they are skewed towards developing new technologies. Also, we would need a million new farmers in short order to begin to change the system, and to get there, we’d need to admit that the system we have no is not working and put legislation in place to help small farmers thrive.

Unfortunately, if we don’t begin to try out alternatives now, it could be too late when the oil runs out and we are forced to find out what works through trial and error.  I highly suggest taking a look at this program, A Farm for the Future, as it gives insight into improving the methodologies behind farming that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

H/T to Rob Smart
Photo: The BBC

I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler’s dim view of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.

Kunstler’s relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra. But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, “Far from the image of the stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically.”

So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler’s neck of the woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga Springs’ resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation, Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy.

We chatted about food, politics, urban planning, gardening and a dozen other topics, but I’m not much of a note-taker; I’d rather eat than tweet. So our dinner conversation was off the record, including, mercifully, his ribald remarks about Alice Waters and Martha Stewart, which decency should preclude me from even alluding to.

However, he graciously agreed to answer my questions via e-mail about his conversion from carnivore to (mostly) vegan and other foodish and fuelish topics.

Kerry Trueman: Let’s get right to the meat of the matter — or, rather, the lack thereof. You used to enjoy eating “lots of meat, duck fat, butter by the firkin.” What made you decide to go more or less vegan in recent months? Was it hard to make the transition to a plant-based diet?

James Howard Kunstler: It was as simple as a trip to the doctor’s office. My cholesterol and blood pressure were too high. I had to take some radical action. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of cooking with a very different range of ingredients. But I like cooking and am pretty good at it — I worked in many restaurant kitchens when I was a starving bohemian — and I figured a lot of things out.

For instance, that you can make stocks and sauces by braising onions and aromatics without oil or butter. The only thing I really miss is making really bravura dishes for company, like chicken pie with a butter-saturated crust, duck-and-sausage gumbo, brownies … you get the picture. … I’m still excited by the challenge of vegan (or nearly vegan — I use skim milk) cookery.

There are some excellent cookbooks out there, by the way, like Vegan With a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, The Accidental Vegan by Devra Gartenstein, and the Candle Cafe Cookbook by Joy Pierson and Bart Potenza.

KT: A study has just come out showing that although the French spend two hours eating each day — roughly twice as long as we do — they’re among the slimmest of the 18 nations in the study. Americans were the fattest, with more than 1 in 3 Americans qualifying as obese. How would you explain this phenomenon? What compels Americans to eat so many of our meals in our cars?

JHK: Americans eat so many meals in cars because: 1) The infrastructure of daily life is engineered for extreme car dependency, and 2) because the paucity of decent quality public space and so-called third places (gathering places) for the working classes (and lower) — and remember, it is the working classes and poor who are way disproportionately obese. The people portrayed in Vanity Fair magazine are not fat. I suspect that the amount of time Americans spend in their cars is roughly proportionate to the amount of time French people spend at the table.

Fast food is not a new phenomenon in the USA, however. Frances Trollope’s sensational travel book of the 1830s, The Domestic Manners of the Americans dwells on the horrifying spectacle of our hotel dining rooms, where people bolted their food with disgusting manners. Americans have been in a tearing rush for 200 years.

KT: In The Long Emergency, published in 2005, you predicted with astounding accuracy how the subprime mortgage meltdown would unfold. Your latest novel, World Made By Hand, takes place in the near future after a massive flu outbreak that originated in Mexico. Um, what should we start worrying about next?

JHK: Worry about the “recovery” that never comes and the insidious collapse of our institutions and arrangements that will proceed from this. Worry about lost incomes and vocations that will never come back (e.g. marketing exec for Target, Inc.) and the need to find new ways to be useful to your fellow human beings (and incidentally perhaps earn a living). Worry about finding a community to live in that is cohesive enough to stave off anarchy at the local level. Worry about building the best garden you can and making good compost. Worry about how difficult it is to learn how to play a musical instrument at age 47.

KT: You recently wrote “there’s no way we can continue the petro-agriculture system of farming and the Cheez Doodle and Pepsi Cola diet that it services. The public is absolutely zombified in the face of this problem — perhaps a result of the diet itself.” OK, so how will we stock our post-peak-oil pantries? Do we really need to start hoarding rice and beans?

JHK: Get some kind of a hand-cranked home grain mill. Personally, I think it is indeed a good idea to lay in a supply of beans, lentils, rice, oats, other grains and don’t forget salt, boullion (soups can sustain us with any number of ingredients), dried onion flakes, spices (chilies and curries especially). Our just-in-time, three-day’s-worth-of-inventory supermarket system is very susceptible to disruption. And we’re very far from establishing workable local food networks in this country.

The fragility of petro-ag is being aggravated by the collapse of bank lending now. Farmers need borrowed money desperately. Capital is as important an “input” as methane-based fertilizers. I think we could see problems with food production and distribution anytime from here on.

KT: You’re an avid gardener — do you grow much of your own food? Do you worry that you’ll have to guard your greens with a gun if our collapsing economy sends the mall rats outdoors to forage after the food courts run out of pretzel nuggets?

JHK: I don’t grow any grains. I have successfully grown potatoes, but won’t this year (I’m renting my current house and its accompanying property). This year, I’ll be planting mostly leafy greens — collards, kale, chard, lettuces, plus some peppers and tomatoes (pure frivolity). It is not hard to imagine that food theft will become a problem. The trouble, though, is that the sort of people liable to do the thieving are exactly those with the poorest skills in cooking. You have to know what to do with kale to make it worth stealing. It may be more like kitchen theft: “… what’s that you got on the stove, pal?”

KT: You evidently enjoy cooking and entertaining. Who would your dream dinner guests be (limiting your guest list to those folks who are currently among the living)?

JHK: I have a pretty good revolving cast of characters among my friends locally who make regular visits to my table. This week, a farming couple who are renting 20 acres off a wealthy land-truster (and doing a great job of market gardening) are coming over, along with the Rolling Stone environmental reporter and his wife, who is writing a gardening book. I don’t need no steenkin’ outatown celebrities.

Originally published on AlterNet

Photo: AP