Peak Water December 18, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, Human Ecology, Overshoot, Population, book review, climate change, collapse, water , add a commentPeak Water Civilisation and the World’s Water Crisis
Alexander Bell
Luath Press 2009
Hardback 208 pp
If oil supply peaks and begins to decline times will be hard. Standard of living will decline and people may go hungry but they will be able to adapt by powering down and making do with less.
If water supply- for domestic use but also for irrigation- peaks and declines people have no option but to migrate.
UK journalist Alexander Bell spells out his thesis starkly in this fascinating and clearly written book: many of the world’s major regions are past or on the brink of peak water and face growing populations with declining supplies. (more…)
The Heretic’s Guide to vegan Cookery November 12, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, Health, Science and Rationaltiy, book review , 1 comment so farBook Review: The Heretic’s Guide to Vegan Cookery
Warning! Not suitable for Breatharians
Andy Murray
The Good Elf Press 2009
187pp
Astrology is an amazing tool to run your life by, without having to waste time with the fraudulent pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of Science. Astrology explains wars, thunderstorms and plagues. We can even use it historically. For example, if we know exactly when and where Queen Elizabeth was born, we can find out exactly who she was without having to waste time on fictitious history books. With it we can even discover why Einstein was so damn clever. Astrology is way better than sex.
You don’t have to be a vegan to enjoy Andy Murray’s brilliant Heretic’s Guide, which is packed with dozens of tasty simple recipes to satisfy even the most hardened omnivore at least some of the time, you dont even need to have any great interest in cooking or even food. That is because for our amusement and philosophical delectation there are numerous passages in between the recipes giving us fascinating and hilarious perspectives from the Mecca of New Age beliefs in Britain, the town of Glastonbury near where the author lives.
While waiting for the pumpkin soup to cook or in between making preperations for the Hazelnut and Celery Risotto you will be able to work up an appetite by rolling around clutching your belly after reading the sure -to-become-classic passages “Reiki Reiki Rise and Shine” “Cooking with Astrology” or “Breeding Gurus for Profit”.
This book has it all really- great advice on cooking with fresh ingredients and all the usual good reasons to grow your own and buy local; loads of easy to follow recipes including a big choice of soups, salads and dips; and inspirational chapter on cooking in the great outdoors, including a useful guide to wild food; Posh Things to Do with Vegetables; Main Meals; Side Dishes and Extras; Desserts, and Cakes and Biscuits.
And then the alternative Contents covers everything else- Cults, Gurus, Satanism, Religion, Crop Circles, Homeopathy- nothing is sacred and nothing is spared the sharp rib-splitting egg-whisk of Murray’s irreverence.
Homeopathic Cookery Doubters of this form of cookery pour scorn on the fact that a diner might receive a drop of gravy and a shred of carrot on a plate. How can this be a meal, they ask? What they fail to understand is that carbon,the building block of all life, has a memory. A potentised meal maintains a complete carbon hologram, the information of the whole, even down to the smallest atomic sum of its parts.A homeopathic amount of food is of course more than sufficient to provide all the nutritional benefits that would be expected from a plateful of food, and puts paid to any shrill cries of fraud. Filthy skeptics who come to the homeopathic table having already made up their tiny minds will trhow down their napkins and walk away still believing what they believe tio be true, and little can be done to change their wrongness.
Even the his own sacred Creed of Veganism is given the once-over. This is something I know a little about, because I once lived in a vegan community on the Welsh Borders. I was not especially into veganism per se and went there to learn to grow vegetables; I happily lived a vegan diet however, but was aware of an accute divide between some of my fellow communards, who seemed to be at each other’s throats all the time.
On one extreme there were the the vegans who were happy to eat anything so long as it was vegan, including skip food, vegan chocolate from Malaysia (or somewhere) and chip butty’s. This group of vegans were also keen to give over some of the best land we had to rescued sheep and ageing dogs, and generally turn the place into an animal sanctury.
All this tended to jar somewhat with the second group who apart from being rather snobby in their choice of edibles- Vegan Organic Wholefoods only, no white flour allowed, lots of Miso- didnt seem to like animals at all anywhere near them. Wild animals were OK in their own wild homes, but no pets, farm animals or incontinent retired donkeys of any kind permitted.
Murray gives a total of 7 Vegan groups, including the Fat Vegan, the Sensitive Vegan and the Style Vegan, but presumable fitsd into he first category of The Common Vegan:
The most widespread of all vegans, the common vegan has been quietly animal free for years and still hasn’t died. Usually healthy, fit and happy, they tend to be quite normal, although sometimes a little willowy to stand in a strong wind.
For Murray, veganism might well play a role in a sustainable future, but is mainly just about bloody good food. While no longer a Vegan myself, my animal-free taste buds have been re-awakened by the Heretics Guide and who knows, so have some of my chakras.
And with that I think Ill go and make a quick Potato Rosti.
The Real Dirt on Organic Food August 5, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Environment, Food, General, Health, Peak Oil, Science and Rationaltiy , 13commentsUpdate Aug 10th: Thanks to Robbie for sending me the link to Dominic Lawson’s piece on the FSA report and responses from the organic movement in the Times.
Lawson quotes research suggesting farmers may have lower cancer rates possibly because pesticide use may protect against cancer! Now that has just got to be corporate spin…
The findings in last weeks’ FSA report that there is little to choose between organic and “conventional” food in terms of the major nutrients is hardly a surprise.
For many including myself, less rigidly defined labels such as “local” and “chemical-free” have been more important especially if we can see for ourseleves how the food is grown.
What is more surprising perhaps is some of the responses from some parties in the organic movement, which are not helping us understand the issues raised, or move the discussion onto other aspects of sustainable food and farming.
Rob Hopkins wrote to me to ask:
Might it be possible that this is actually an example of bad science, which just might have set out to prove a point, been subject to some kind of political interference and the might of the multinational food industry? Clearly it is very useful for some quite unpleasant institutions if we all believe organic farming is a waste of time. Might one argue that to believe that such a study is completely impartial and rigorous is somewhat naive? Might this report be an example of where we need to take what is presented as ‘good science’ with a rather large pinch of ‘organic’ salt?
In order to assess whether or not the review meets the highest standards of science, it is necessary to understand something about how science works, and this is an issue which goes right to the heart of what is wrong with environmentalism, because the movement in general is poorly informed about science, despite being dependent on it for assessing the general health of the environment. (more…)
Permaculture Design Course in Cashel August 2, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, General , add a commentJust got back from saying goodbye to 14 new permaculture Design Course Certificate holders who completed a 9-day course in Cashel, Co. Tipperary.
Above: Mayor of Cashel Cllr. Eddie Bennet (second from left) with course organiser Micheal of Aimsir Bia discuss a design for an educational center in Cashel town made by one iof the course design groups
The event was organised by local sustainability group Aimsir Bia and The Tipperary Institue, and supported with funding from the UK Carnegie trust
Tutors included myself (permaculture design; forest gardens; woodlands; local currencies);
Philip Quinn (stone building-
Feidhlim Harty (water and wetlands-
David Brickenden (cob building-
http://timberline-ireland.com/; and staff from the Tipperary Institute (energy and housing)
The Aimsir Bia group have already achieved a great deal in a very short period of time, including establishing allotments, school gardens and a community salad garden, and have many other community and sustainability projects in the pipeline.
Above: the Aimsir Bia salad garden
Part of the course took place in the community garden where the canopy payer of a forest garden had been planted earlier in the year with fruit and nut trees supplied by Woodkearne Nurseries. The area was mulched with cardboard and straw and groundcover plants including rubus Betty Ashburner, alpine strawberries, comfrey and herbs were planted as an understory to the fruit trees and bushes.
Other activities during the course included making charcoal; creating a cob bench; dry-stone walling; and site visits to The Apple Farm.
The course ended on Sunday with presentations by the four design groups of sites in and around Cashel The quality of the work and the variety of ideas the groups came up with was of a very high standard and the Aimsir Bia group intend to implement some of the designs in the future. Design certificates were presented by the Mayor of Cashel. A short documentary including interviews with some of the participants will be available online via the Carnegie Trust and Tipperary Institute in the future.
Below: course participants Sean Laffey and Roger Lonergan (L-R) and course organiser Kevin Healion of the Tipperary institute taking a breather on the mulch
It was a great experience for me also and a privilege to be amongst such a group of creative and talented people. Many thanks to everyone who put in such a lot of hard work to make this event possible, and good luck to all with your future endeavors.
Saturday night barbecue for the class at Michael Hickey’s house
Forest Gardening in the Irish Times June 22, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, Forest Gardening, Permaculture , add a commentWe were fortunate enough to have Irish Times columnist John Gibbons attend our last permaculture course in Cloughjordan, and he had a great write up in his column last week:
Permaculture offers one vision of a future where human ingenuity and adaptability will allow us to survive, and indeed thrive, in the age after oil, writes JOHN GIBBONS
High time agriculture got back to its healthy roots
IF YOU go down to the woods today, prepare to be surprised. A new movement is taking root that in a low-key way challenges almost everything we think we know about agriculture and our relationship with food. Last week’s column asked: how can we feed ourselves without ready access to the fossil fuels upon which conventional agriculture depends utterly? It wasn’t meant to be a rhetorical question.
The basis of all agriculture is soil. Healthy soil positively teems with life, including earthworms, fungi and essential bacteria. Mature topsoil is the product of hundreds, even thousands of years of slow growth, decay and decomposition. Within human timescales, soil is essentially a non-renewable resource.
The plough has shaped human history even more profoundly than the sword. Where for 10,000 years we depended on a delicate balance of nutrients to maintain the soil upon which our civilisations stood, the energy revolution and industrial farming in the last century saw us throw away that rule book. Full Article here
Book Review: When Technology Fails April 5, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, Peak Oil, Permaculture, Science and Rationaltiy, book review, collapse, survivalism , add a commentWhen Technology Fails- A Manual for Self- Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency
Matthew Stein
Chelsea Green 2000, 2008
494 pp
Matthew Stein’s massive survival manual When Technology Fails packs into one volume everything you need to survive “The long Emergency”- (a phrase later used by Kunstler in his 2005 book of that name on peak oil and its consequences) from fire making and hunting, gardening and wild food gathering, technology and power, metal working and constructing simple shelters.
There is a detailed discussion at the start of the book on the environmental crisis, pollution and resource depletion, as well as climate change and peak oil- and the consequent need to learn many new skills to survive; perhaps this section isnt srictly necessary for such a book.
More of an encyclopaedia than a handy book to throw in your grab-and-run bag, it probably suffers from trying to do too much; nevertheless, there is a serious amount of information here to help survive emergencies, powerdowns, social collapses and energy descent transitions- most of it useful and well laid out, while some of it smacks of New Age-ism and gives advice which would be more of a hazard than a help in a survival situation.
The “When Hi-Tech Medicine Fails” chapter in particular should come with a severe health warning: a credulous mish-mash of a range of Quackeries from homeopathy and acupuncture through naturopathy, “energy healing” and even the Power of Prayer. Anecdotal “evidence” is offered about miraculous cures achieved through the services of members of the whacky Christian Science cult. He quotes Larry Dossey’s Healing Words as providing “numerous scientific studies ” which “now confirm that p[rayer does, in fact, have a positive effect on healing” when in fact it does nothing of the kind.
Futile of course to suggest that if you believed in the Power of Prayer you wouldn’t need a survival manual, but even worse is the section promoting the use of colloidial silver for a range of illnesses including some serious conditions.
Quackwatch surveys the evidence forand the dangers of use of colloidal silver here. Stein presumably thinks that if uncritical self-medication with such stuff lead to argyria, you always have the Power of Prayer as a Back-up.
The early section on Survivor Personality Traits is also tainted with pseudo-scientific nonsense. While stories of survivors of disasters are interesting and may provide useful insights, Stein seems to make he contradictory claim that your intuition is more useful than your rational mind- at least in emergency situations.
Now, there may well be situations where intuition is simply all you have to go on- and clearly we have evolved instinctive responses to danger which have allowed our species to survive as well as it has. This doesnt mean that intuition is superior to rational thought- after all, this is an emergency preparedness manual, the whole point is to use your rational ability to prepare for emergencies ahead of time. I dont see any scientific evidence tha shows people with New Age beliefs such as those promoted by Sein are more likely to survive an emergency.
These reactionary and dangerous ideas are enough to put me off he book entirely, and it is certainly a matter of concern that Peak Oil luminaries Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler would endorse it.
Nevertheless, there is much to offer in the other chapters, which are oddly rational and practical in their approach(!)
Each section begins with a view of the global situation vis-a-vis current use of resources and environmental impact. There is then a survey of different techniques with a brief description, and a wealth of resources and further reading to conclude.
The section on food is wide-ranging, with good information on both gardening and wild-food gathering. Stein advocates Jeavons’ Bio-Intensive method; the section on permaculture is only a few paragraphs, with no mention of perrenial food crops or edible forest gardens, nor permaculture principles.
The sections on natural building, off-grid electricity and traditional methods of home-crafts such as soap-making, clothes-making, pottery etc provide useful introductions, though perhaps not much more than that.
In short, there are probably other survival manuals which are more useful as pocket-sized books for emergency situations; and specific permaculture books and building manuals would be more useful for long-term survival/powerdown scenarios.
Most worrying is the apparent unquestioning acceptance of the reactionary ideologies promoted here by at least some of the wider peak oil/permaculture community.
Forest Gardening at the ART August 29, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, General, Permaculture , 4commentsI had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to attend a 2-day course on Forest gardening with Martin Crawford at the Agroforestry Research Trust.
The course was professionally delivered by Martin who has encyclopedic knowledge of his subject and was a fantastic experience, re-inspiring my own attempts and forest gardening and showing me some areas i need to focus on more if I want to achieve success. Lunches were provided by his wife Sandra using as much produce from the garden as possible including an amazing array of jams and chutneys, dried fruit and, my favorite, chestnut pate.
Situated in the Dartington Estate near Totnes in Devon, Martin designed and planted his experimental forest garden in the early 90s and now, 15 years after its design, it stands as perhaps one of the important examples of perennial agriculture, and a demonstration that this is a viable and productive method of food production in the cool temeprate climate of Britain.
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Martin Crawford discusses Apricot trees underplanted with comfrey;
The E.F. Schumacher Forest Garden in the Dartington Estate
The Forest garden has always been an iconic feature of permaculture design, and the image of a successful food forest of fruit and nut trees underplanted with successive layers of fruit bushes, climbers, herbs and perennial vegetables, ground cover, roots and tubers and even fungii, has been for many- myself included- a kind of Holy Grail of
the permaculture concept: the designer would become the recliner, lolling in a hammock in a Garden of Eden of her own making, the only concern being Fear of Falling Fruit.
A visit to the Eden Project August 15, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Environment, Food, Gardens, Peak Oil, Permaculture, climate change , 1 comment so farThe Eden Project in Cornwall was established 7 years ago and has become a world famous visitor attraction with its iconic huge bubble-wrap domes providing the closest you’ll get to an experience of the rain-forest this side of the Amazon.
I was visiting my sister this week, who lives nearby in Bodmin, and got the opportunity to visit, with my father. (more…)
Fruit and Nuts at Derryduff August 9, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, Permaculture, Trees , 1 comment so farI am off to attend a Forest Gardening course with Martin Crawford at the Agroforestry Research Trust in Totnes, Devon, next weekend, so I thought it would be appropriate to tell you how some of my own fruit and nut trees are doing, seven years after moving to Derryduff.
Of greatest excitement, I have a walnut!
A single, solitary specimen, but a walnut nevertheless- on a grafted tree of the cultivar “Broadview”. It is only planted here two years and just 3ft high, but the fact that it has a nut at all so early in its life is hugely encouraging and shows that it is possible in this climate.
As a timber tree, walnuts and related varieties grow like the clappers in the moist warm Irish climate, and should be considered for that reason alone. (more…)
Crash Course- Preparing for Peak Oil June 23, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Food, Green Building, Overshoot, Peak Oil, Permaculture, Powerdown, survivalism , 1 comment so farBook Review
Crash Course- Preparing for Peak Oil
by Zachary Nowak
Green Door Publishing 2008
Peak Oil is upon us, and collective action on a large scale seems unlikely. Technical solutions are chimerical. Each of us must decide what the future may hold and begin working on a plan to face that future.
When Zachary Nowak began drafting this essential resource list oil was pushing $70 a barrel. Now nearly double that, peak oil seems ever more of a reality and its consequences are being felt even in the oil-guzzling west with an growing sense of urgency: the party really is over and all the chickens are coming home to roost (to mix metaphors): food riots, truckers strikes, inflation, rising unemployment, bankruptcies and the looming shadow of global recession.
It increasingly looks as if the time to prepare may have been yesterday, but as the title suggests, a crash course of emergency and more long-term preparation is still possible and Nowak provides an entertaining primer in the basics. (more…)
