July
17, 2005
What follows is an excellent article on considerations for where to
live in an oil depletion world:
Urban vs. Rural Sustainability
by Toby Hemenway
http://www.energybulletin.net/3757.html
Published on 26 Dec 2004 by Permaculture Activist.
Over ten years
ago my wife and I moved to the country. One of our many reasons for
leaving the city was to finally pursue the dream of
self-reliance: to create a permaculture homestead that would trim our
resource use and let us tap in more fully to nature's abundance. And
in the back of my mind was the quietly nibbling worry that someday
the overconsumption party would end-the oil would run out, and things
might get ugly. I wanted to be settled where we could be less
dependent on the fossil fuel umbilicus when the cord finally snapped.
We went a good
way toward making that dream come true. The red clay of our former
clearcut turned, in places, to chocolate loam, though
I
noticed that even as our trees matured I still seemed to be needing
more wood chips from the electric company or manure from a stable two
miles away. From the garden flowed a steady procession of fruit and
vegetables, but I confess I tried to ignore how much well-water we
were pumping once our rain catchment ran dry partway through Southern
Oregon's four-month dry season.
We became involved
in the local community: Master Gardeners, an environmental group,
town meetings. Although we were busy in regional
life in the beginning, eventually I found I preferred to drive the
hour to see friends in progressive-minded Eugene than fight the pro-logging
consciousness that permeated our county. Over the years my
few local friends fell away as I became more drawn to the mind-set
of
those in Eugene, and as the local economics made it necessary for me
to be away for weeks to teach and do design work. We were on good
speaking terms with all our neighbors, but never found much common
ground with them. Local parties began with watery beer and often
ended in drunken fights, and neither was to our taste.
Slowly a mild paranoia
set in. I started to wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was
really in the right place. We had the best
garden for miles around, and everyone knew it. If law broke down,
wasn't there more than a chance that my next door neighbor, a gun-selling
meth dealer and felon, might just shoot me for all that food?
How about the right-wing fundamentalists past him, who shot Stellar's
jays for fun and clearcut their land when they suspected spotted owls
lived there? Or the two feuding families beyond them-one had fired
a
pistol during an argument, and neither would give way when their cars
met on the road. I began to sense the outlines of a pattern that
replicated one in society at large. We have the technical means to
feed, clothe, and house all humanity. But legions starve because we
have not learned to tolerate and support one another. People's real
problems are not technical, they are social and political. Down in
Douglas County, I'd solved most of the technical problems for our own
personal survival, but the social hurdles to true security were
staring me in the face.
Our isolation also
meant we were burning a lot of gas. A simple drive for groceries
was a 40-minute round trip. Fortunately we both worked
at home and had no children, so we could go for days without using
the car. But the odometer was whirling to higher numbers than it ever
had in the city. A couple of families had moved off our hill because
they were exhausted by two to four round trips each day down our
steep, potholed gravel road to work, school, soccer practice, music
lessons, and shopping.
We cherished our
decade-plus in the country, but eventually the realities began to
pile up. There wasn't a local market for the work
we did. Community events left us saddened by the gulf between our way
of life and theirs. And we were still tethered to the fossil-fuel
beast, just by a much longer lifeline of wire, pipe, and pavement.
That the beast looked smaller by being farther away no longer fooled
us.
There was a positive
side, too. We had achieved what we'd set out to
do: to make sense of our lives, find the work we loved, and grow into
ourselves. The portents now spoke clearly. It was time to return to
where the people were, and to be in the thick of things once more.
So we have moved
to Portland, and into the heart of town. We love it.
The first of many good omens was the bio-diesel Mercedes across the
street sporting a Kucinich sticker. And it's a pleasure to be within
walking distance of a bookstore, good coffee, and Ben and Jerry's.
During the first
few days in the city I would stand on the back porch, eyeing our
yard with permaculture dreams in my head. The sole
tree is a sprawling European prune plum. Other than that, the yard
is
a blank slate, dominated by a brick patio, a lawn, and an old dog
run. And it's small. I wondered how I would I fit all my favorite
fruit trees in that tiny space.
The answer soon
came. The plum tree straddles the fence we share with our neighbor
Johnny, who has lived next door for 55 years. One day,
on opposite sides of the fence, Johnny and I were gathering a small
fraction of the branch-bending loads of plums when he called out, "Do
you like figs?" I said I did, and soon a tub of black mission
figs
wobbled over the fence toward me.
We kept returning
the basin to Johnny, but it found its way back almost immediately,
full of figs. "You weren't here in time for
the
apricots I've got," Johnny told us, "But next year you'll
get your
fill of them."
As the buckets
of plums began to fill up the yard, I tried to unload some on Theressa
across the street. "Oh, no," she said, "I've
got my
own tree. But when the Granny Smith's come on, you'd better help me
with them. And next year's peaches will knock you out."
When I met our
neighbor Will, he begged me to take some of the pears that were plopping
onto his yard. The American chestnuts up the
street are bearing heavily, although the Asian community is all over
them each morning before I wake up. I've cracked a few of the local
walnuts, and they're pretty good. And yesterday I discovered a nearby
strawberry tree dotted with creamy mild fruit.
This informal assessment
of local resources has revised my mental landscape design. I don't
need to grow all my favorite trees, only
the ones that my neighbors lack (I'm thinking Asian pears, persimmons,
and some early and storage apples). My neighbor's yards
are my Zones Two and Three. [Ed's note: a common feature of
permaculture design is the zoning of a property up into areas,
numbered one through to five or so, relating to proximity to the
house and levels of required maintainence. -AF ] Plus, Stacey and
Troy on the next block have persuaded the owner of a vacant lot to
let eight families create a community garden on the site. A local
tree service will soon be dumping chips there for sheet mulch, and
next year we'll be awash in food.
The Big Rural Footprint
I had always assumed
that cities would be the worst place to be in bad times. I'm revising
my opinion. Granted, Portland is an
exceptional city. (Shhhh! Don't tell anyone!) But I can't help
comparing this neighborhood to our old one. There, we were twelve
families on two miles of road, driveways hundreds of feet long, all
served by long runs of phone and electric wire, individual septic
systems and wells, each commuting long distances. And with political
and social views so divergent that feuds, gossip, and awkward
conversations about safe topics were the norm.
In the city, an
equal group of twelve families use 10% of the road, wire, and pipe
needed in my old neighborhood. Many neighbors bus or
bike to work, or at worst, drive single-digit mileages. And our
social and political views are close enough that I am fairly
confident we can work in mutual support if times get tough.
This is not the
place to go deeply into the question of whether cities are more sustainable
than contemporary American country life,
but at each point where I delve into the issues, I find suggestions
that urbanites have a smaller ecological footprint per capita.
Over the last two
decades, millions of people have moved out of cities. Many of them
are people of modest means, driven out by the
high costs of urban life. Unfortunately, they have brought their city
ways with them. Our neighbors in the country all clearcut their land
and planted acres of grass. Many built enormous houses, since low
interest rates made more square footage affordable. Some put up
glaring streetlights in their front yards. They bought boats, ATVs,
RVs, and other gas-guzzling toys. Unlike earlier self-reliant country
folk, these are simply city people with really big yards. And there
are millions of them.
Sociologists Jane
Jacobs and Lewis Mumford have each noted that during the Depression
and other hard times, urban residents have
generally fared better than ruralites. The causes mainly boil down
to
market forces and simple physics. Since most of the population lives
in or near cities, when goods are scarce the greater demand, density,
and economic power in the cities directs resources to them. Shipping
hubs are mostly in cities, so trucks are emptied before they get out
of town.
In the Depression,
farmers initially had the advantage of being able to feed themselves.
But they soon ran out of other supplies: coal to
run forges to fix machinery, fertilizer, medicine, clothing, and
almost every other non-food item. Without those, they couldn't grow
food. Farmers who could still do business with cities survived. Those
too remote or obstinate blew away with the Kansas dust.
Survival Skills
Today the situation
for farmers has worsened. Few farmers grow their own food. Agribusiness
has made them utterly dependent on chemicals
and other shipped-in products. The main lack of cities compared to
farms is food-growing, but farms lack nearly everything else-and most
of that comes from cities. Setting aside for the moment the all-important
issue of social and political cohesion, for cities to
survive a peak-oil crash, the critical necessity is for them to learn
to grow food. For country people to survive, inhabitants will need
to
provide nearly every single other essential good for themselves. And
since many country people are simply transplanted urbanites lacking
gardening or other land skills, but having the isolation that makes
social cohesion unnecessary to learn (for now), their survival is
even more doubtful. If catastrophe comes, the cities may be
unpleasant, but I fear the countryside may be far worse off.
One important tenet
of permaculture is to design for disaster. While giving a talk on
the wildfire that destroyed his cabin at the Lama
Foundation (see page 14 of this issue), Santa Fe designer Ben Haggard
was asked what his biggest lesson was. "Plan for disaster," he
said. "Whatever is the likely catastrophe at your site, count
on it
happening. Because sooner or later, it will."
A technique displayed
in good design that also happens to be a way to
deter disaster is to meet destructive forces with mechanisms or
attitudes that transform them into productive, or at worst, harmless
energies. When this machinery of transformation is missing, even
seemingly mild events wreak havoc. A gentle rain falling on bare
ground will quickly sluice away topsoil and wash downhill in gullies.
If instead plants carpet that same patch of earth, the rain becomes
not an erosive force, but life-giving moisture whose energy is damped
and welcomed by the vegetation. Instead of gullying, the water is
held by the plants, stored over a longer time for them and for the
animals that feed on or live among the vegetation. This is one of
nature's secrets: knowing how to create structures and systems that
convert gales to refreshing breezes, change baking sun into sugars
and living tissue.
What nature doesn't
do, and humans attempt so often, is to treat large forces as enemies
to be vanquished and destroyed. This summer,
as hurricanes repeatedly battered the Caribbean, ridiculous proposals
appeared in letters-to-the-editor columns: Let's build giant fans on
the Florida coast to blow away the storms. Pour oil over the Atlantic
to smooth out the waves. And (inevitably), why can't we toss a few
nukes into those pesky hurricanes? (Whether it's replacing the Panama
canal or toppling Saddam, someone always seems to propose atomic
bombs.)
Sector Acceptance
The conceptual
tool offered by permaculture in these cases is to view large forces
as sector energies: influences from off the site that
are beyond the control of the designer. We deal with sector energies
by designing systems or placing elements to deflect, absorb, or
harvest these forces, or allow them to pass unhindered. This is
nature's way as well, and how she does it offers, as usual, some
profound lessons.
As ecosystems mature,
biomass and complexity increase. Ecologist Ramon Margalef, in his
landmark 1963 paper, "On Certain Unifying
Principles in Ecology" (American Naturalist 97:357-374), suggests
we
think of biomass as "a keeper of organization, something that
is
proportional to the influence that an actual ecosystem can exert on
future events." In other words, we can think of biomass, complexity,
and the other indicators of maturity as measures not only of the
resilience of a system, but as a form of wisdom. That's because as
ecosystems mature, the aftermath of environmental tumult such as
storm or drought depends more on the richness of the ecosystem than
on the nature of the disturbance. A drought that withers a weedlot
doesn't faze an old-growth forest-the forest has learned what to do
with drought. It has grown structures, cycles, and patterns that
convert nearly any outside influence into more forest, and that
protect key cycles during bad times. It has become wise.
Nature uses two
principal tools to achieve this protection from catastrophe. The
first is diversity in space-in size, shape, physical
pattern, and composition. If all the pieces of a system are at the
same physical scale-all the same size, or the same genetic makeup,
for example-a disturbance occurring at that scale will wipe out the
whole system. Diversity in scale brings protection. When a hurricane
hits a trailer park, the trailers blow away, but the bacteria, mice,
and other elements of very different size escape damage. A plague of
cats, on the other hand, strikes at the scale of the mice, leaving
the trailers and bacteria unscathed. Mature ecosystems have enough
diversity in space that any catastrophe may knock out the pieces
living at that particular scale but will almost never destroy the
whole landscape.
The second protective
tool of mature ecosystems is diversity in time-in rate, frequency,
and schedule. Understory shrubs often leaf out
earlier in spring than canopy trees, which lets the shrubs grab
enough light to build plenty of leaves. Then when the trees grow
leaves, the shrubs have the photosynthetic area to gather ample light
in the dappled shade. Another classic example of diversity in time
is
the hatching cycle of locusts. Timed to emerge at intervals of years
having prime numbers such as 13 and 17, they frustrate the predators
whose more regular breeding period requires their food to arrive more
predictably.
Permaculture designers
use similar approaches to design for disaster. Instead of using concrete
embankments and other brute-force tactics
to resist flood, we place fences that can lie down, reed-like as
rushing waters advance and then can be easily set up afterward.
Rather than gouging enormous barren firebreaks into their hillside,
Lama Foundation stacks roads, swales, and plantings together in a
multiply functioning firebreak. When monsoon downpours arrive in
Tucson, instead of standing by as flooding street runoff pours down
sewers, Brad Lancaster harvests the water with cleverly placed curb
cuts that lead to mulched food-tree basins. All these examples are
detailed in Permaculture Activist #54 (November, 2004).
By observing nature's
wisdom, permaculturists follow nature's lead and use patterning,
succession, edge, and cyclic opportunities to
convert large pulses of energy into smooth generators of structure,
harvest, and nutrient flow. Permaculture design inquires into the
nature of some of these "large pulses" and shows how they
can teach
us to use their energy, aikido-like, to benefit ourselves and the
larger ecosystem.
--- Toby Hemenway (www.patternliteracy.com)
is a permaculture educator and author. His latest book is Gaia's
Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale
Permaculture.
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