The Oil Drum

Animal rights group PETA recently announced a $1 million reward for the first person to make in-vitro meat (leading Bruce Sterling to dub them "People for the Ethical Treatment of Alien Lumps of Flesh").

While PETA's aim here seems to be to be to publicise their opposition to the consumption of animals (as shown in the quote below), there is another angle to this story which is perhaps more interesting for those interested in energy issues - which comes back to "the oil we eat."

"Why is PETA supporting this new technology? More than 40 billion chickens, fish, pigs, and cows are killed every year for food in the United States in horrific ways. Chickens are drugged to grow so large they often become crippled, mother pigs are confined to metal cages so small they can't move, and fish are hacked apart while still conscious — all to feed America's meat addiction. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering. In addition, in vitro meat would dramatically reduce the devastating effects the meat industry has on the environment.

"Of course, humans don't need to eat meat at all—vegetarians are less likely to get heart disease, diabetes, or various types of cancer or become obese than meat-eaters are—and a terrific array of vegetarian mock meats already exist. But as many people continue to refuse to kick their meat addictions, PETA is willing to help them gain access to flesh that doesn't cause suffering and death...."

"Can we rely on it that a ‘turning around' will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer "yes" would lead to complacency; the answer "no" to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work." E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

I would rather have titled this essay "Where the Hoe Meets the Soil" but that phrase is not part of our cultural lexicon, which is itself a symptom of the problem I am working to address. Setting aside any prolonged discussion of whether or what about the modern world should be saved, this essay is primarily about what it means to "get down to work" as Schumacher puts it. But very quickly, to me saving the modern world means setting a goal for the human economy to be properly scaled relative to the global ecology, and maintaining a sufficiency of social stability necessary to manage a transition.

Archdruids take breaks from time to time, but the peak oil debate does not, and during my recent vacation a lively discussion sprang up on The Oil Drum about the future of agriculture in a postpetroleum world. The point at issue was whether today’s mechanized agriculture will remain in place, or be replaced by a new rural economy of small farms using human and animal labor, as the world skids down the far side of Hubbert’s peak.

Summarizing a vigorous discussion of a complex topic in a few paragraphs is a risky proposition, so I’ll focus here on the two essays that defined the debate, Stuart Staniford’s The Fallacy of Reversibility and Sharon Astyk’s Is Localization Doomed? Staniford argued that those who expected a nonmechanized, small-farm economy in the wake of peak oil were claiming that the history of agriculture over the last century would simply run in reverse, tracking the decline in fossil fuel availability in the same way it tracked the growth in fossil fuel production.

The following is a guest post by TOD reader Doug Fir. 'Doug' graduated in the 70's with a BS and a MS in Fisheries, Forestry, and Agriculture. Presently, he and his family work a small hay, timber and livestock operation. The policies impacting climate change legislation are linked in complicated ways to energy depletion. If anthropogenic induced climate change ends up being real and urgent, it will have direct impacts on energy and food production. For these reasons we periodically post thoughtful analysis on the topic of climate change here on theoildrum.com.

The consequences of climate change are often presented in the media as coastal flooding after the melt of Greenland or Antarctic ice. That is the headline most often seen, however the real problems will be much more extensive. I'd like to look at some of those problems, in particular those of wildfire and agriculture, and provide a little background to better illustrate their severity.

Jamie Walker at The Weekend Australian has an interesting article on the movement to the south of "Goyders Line" - the line that defines the limits of practical farming in South Australia.

See the link for an accompanying video. The ABC did a documentary on the history of Goyder's line last year as well.

An inch still means everything out here on Goyder’s Line. It can make a man or break him, realise his dreams or turn them to dust. An extra inch in the rain gauge will fill a paddock knee-high with wheat, washing away the bitter seasons and piled-up debt. That inch – 25mm – is what Kym Fromm lives for.

Yet when this third-generation farmer looks out of his home’s dirt-streaked windows, beyond the sunburnt sheep and crop stubble he’s turned them loose on, towards a horizon that shimmers in the heat, he wonders what’s going on with the line. It was the one thing people thought they could count on in an unpredictable land. It was supposed to be immovable, a fixture among the dancing whirlwinds and blown hopes of the early settlers, whose ruined homesteads dot the countryside. Fromm’s not so sure: inch by inch, year by year, the line seems to be closing in.

Map from South Australian Archives

Over the past week, Stuart Staniford and Sharon Astyk have written thought-provoking essays on the nexus of Peak Oil and relocalization, with Staniford suggesting that peak oil will not result in relocalization of agriculture because the industrialization of agriculture is not practicably reversible, and Astyk rebutting that idea. I think that both essays make important points, but I would like to offer a third perspective: that we have insufficient information to reach a conclusion about when energy scarcity will result in relocalization of agriculture, but that we will likely cross this threshold in the not-too-distant future and should prepare accordingly.

This is a guest post by Sharon Astyk, a very small farmer whom the biofuels companies have yet to offer to buy out, and a writer with two forthcoming books about peak oil and climate change, one (Depletion and Abundance, Fall '08, New Society Publishers) about appropriate responses for families, and the other (A Nation of Farmers, Spring '09, same publisher) about food and agriculture. Her writings can be found at http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com .

Stuart Staniford's latest opus has taken a shot across the bow at those who advocate Relocalization and de-industrialization. Embedded in his argument is a compelling critique of the prospects of certain parts of the Relocalization analysis. Staniford shows his customary brilliance in analyzing the ways that the biofuels response is likely to overcome impetus towards Relocalization.

But that profound analysis is embedded in a paper that contains some serious errors of reasoning and misrepresentations of the Relocalization movement that I think deserve critique. And his final conclusion, that this should put an end to all hopes of Relocalization deserves some further consideration.

Why Peak Oil Actually Helps Industrial Agriculture

Claas (Caterpillar) Lexion 570 combine harvester in action. Image courtesy: Wikipedia.