After two weeks of driving it was a relief to bring the car back and get onto the train to Seattle. Amtrak’s Coastal Starlight is considered one of the great scenic train journey’s in the world. Leaving in the evening, it was stunning to wake up and see the early morning light across the plains of southern Oregon.

Volcanoes seen from the train

No shortage of forests in these parts:

Portland had been on the list but in the end I couldn’t spare the time to stop over. This was all I got to see of the city as the train passed through:

A grey and blustery Seattle awaits:

A “P-Patch” community garden brightening up Seattle:

Oregon grape Mahonia Aquifolium in the sculpture park

Jimi:

and the Tango!

After a day looking round the very modern city of Seattle I took a trip into a more primitive lifestyle at Feral Farm, about an hour and a half east from Mount Vernon. Here Matt VanBoven and his friends combine perennial gardens with…roadkill deer. The roadkill- not only deer but that what the fare while I was there- is collected and processed by the residents of Feral farm, the skins tanned, the meat made into jerky or served up in delicious stews. There is a great commentary on Matt from a previous visitor here, with a great photo of Matt and the deer.

There was much discussion of the imminent collapse of the modern world and survival strategies that would be needed thereafter. Matt admitted one of the great drawbacks would be the likely decline of the availability of roadkill post-collapse, and mentioned something about getting a bow-and-arrow (though he didn’t mention how he would manage without the neighbors’ freezer).

Matt was a mine of information about local plants and ecology, and his garden full of fruit. This part of Washington seemed to be berry heaven and new discoveries for me included the Thimbleberry rubus parviflorus:

These are a exquisite- melt in your mouth!

Salmonberries rubus spectabilis are also good- another new one for me:

Matt counting the rings of a giant Douglas Fir

Beneath a giant Western Red Cedar:

In the Forest Garden at Feral Farm

Common Milkweed Asclepias syriaca-something I haven’t yet managed to propagate myself

Pokeweed phytolacca americana- something I am growing successfully, often considered just a weed in the US.

Mat had built some really col mini-cabins, this one with cordwood masonry:

In the Northern Cascades:

As in Yosemite unprecedented late snow- we met folks who were skiing here:

Primeval forest:

Oyster mushrooms:

From Feral Farm I traveled to Anacortes with my guide and local permaculture networker Kelda who had arranged for me to visit the famous Bullock Brothers on Orcas Island. We arrived just at the start of the three week Permaculture Design course. Here Sam Bullock gives the students a tour of the farm:

The Bullock’s extensive permaculture nursery:

The Bullocks became famous some 30 years ago after an appearance on the Cool Temperate episode of Mollison’s Global Gardener series, where they demonstrate the results of grafting apple cultivars onto the wild apples growing in their area. Here is Sam Bullock showing something similar:

Although there was no end of fascinating things to see at the Bullocks’ the most impressive to me was their veggie gardens- one beautiful well-kept and productive garden after another serving the three Bullock families and interns.

Elecampane planted as companion mineral accumulator with apple trees:

Amazing chinampas: a “chinampa” is a mini peninsular or “tongue” extending into a lake or pond providing more edge for growing plants which may thereby need little or no irrigation. A Mexican word, chinampas are used there for growing crops. The Bullocks have constructed lakes and wetlands and dredged up mud to make islands and chinampas on which they have planted willows and fruit trees:

Lots of bamboos:

Giant perennial vegetable called “Fhuki” from Japan:

I was asked to give a presentation on forest gardens in Ireland, which I was pleased to do to the new permaculture students, but was rather embarrassed as one slide after another showed plants that, while fairly unknown outside permaculture circles at home, are commonly found in the forests in the Pacific North West, including Salal Gaultheria Shallon

japanese wineberries, siberian purslane, pokeweed phytolacca americana…

Doug Bullock giving a talk on permaculture history:

View from Orcas twards Vancouver Island:

After a short stay on Orcas I travel back to Seattle and catch another Washington State Ferry to Vashon Island. Puget Sound is eery and atmospheric in the fog:

On Vashon I stayed with friends and past Permaculture students Bob and Jen who live on a wonderful farm run by the local Montessori school.

Bob inspects the tomatillos:

Bob and Jen pick Basil:

Jen, Jamie and Whitney harvest garlic:

Scorzonera and salsify:

Bob takes me around the forests on the island

Our English Ivy is considered a real invasive exotic here- quite a pest in the woods!

There are quite a few smallholdings and farms within a few miles on this idyllic rural island- which has all the peace of west Cork but is just a short ferry ride away from the huge market of Seattle. This is a farm we visited nearby where they were growing wheat on a small scale:

A previous owner had planted hundreds of fruit and nut trees on Bob and Jen’s farm some thirty years ago, including Turkish Hazel:

I spent most of my time picking cherries

which were sold to Molly Moos’ Ice-cream Parlor in Seattle:

Taking the water taxi back to town:

Mount Rainier dominates the landscape from the train heading back to San Francisco:

Panoramic views of San Francisco from Bernal Heights:

The Madrone Tree Arbutus menziesii, native to the Pacific NW and related to our own Strawberry Tree Arbutus Unedo but with much larger fruits:

Leaving the west coast behind the final stop on the American Odyssey was Upstate New York where I visited Christina and Michael near Warwick. Seems there could always be a job for me there pulling pints of Guiness!

A short hike along part of the Appalachian Trail. This is actually in New Jersey:

Very different forest ecology compared to the west coast, mainly deciduous with maples and oaks. Another permaculture plant eleagnis umbellata is common here.

American Balddernut Staphylea trifolia growing in the hedgerow. Inside the bladder-like sacs are small but tasty nuts:

A visit to Sister’s Hill Farm where owner Dave shows us his rotating root-crop washer:

Solar powered tomatoes!

Sister’s Hill is run with the help of interns and volunteers and runs as a CSA- Community Supported Agriculture- shareholders take a share of whatever is in season each week:

Drying onions:

Wine tasting and tour of vineyard nearby:

Details of vine-pruning on a display board:

Last stop: Manhattan. The Empire State Building:

View from the top with the Statue of Liberty a speck in the top right-hand corner:

Haven in the urban jungle- Central Park:

Times Square:

Above: rocket stove (foreground) and Storm Kettle behind

This was made out of a Feta cheese tin from the local wholefoods shop and a piece of single-wall stainless steel flu pipe attached to a 90degree bend (which cost about 30 euros). You cut the top off the tin with a pair of tin-snips and make a hole in the lid which then is pushed down into the tin forming a collar to support the flu; the 90degree elbow goes out the bottom through a similar hole in the side of the tin. The tin is filled with ash for insulation (before you slide the lid back over…).

Here is a neat video explaining exactly how to do it.

The stove works on the principle of the insulation allowing a hotter burn- so it is very efficient. We tried a little demo on the course for fun, with two teams, one making tea on the rocket stove, the other with a Storm Kettle. The stove one hands down- ok it wasnt really a fair test. the other team hadnt even managed to get the fire lit by the time our kettle had boiled!

I also recently bought a rocket stove from Wildstoves:

This is the StoveTec Wood & Charcoal Combination Rocket Stove I have been using it mainly for making tea outside whenever the weather is fine, which has been quite a bit lately. It is also easy to use, and well designed, very efficient- start the fire with a few shavings and a few minutes later with just three or four thumb-thickness sticks you have boiling water.

The stove is built to last, and has a handy steel rack for laying the sticks onto, which can then be pushed into the firebox as the burn. Also comes with a windshield, and this one has a ceramic brick you can insert into the firebox to protect the door from burning out when using charcoal.

I have yet to spend time cooking on it, but it would also be ideal to take camping if you have a vehicle. Also would be ideal next to the pizza oven for cooking up the source.

Wildstoves do a range of great looking stoves, including tiny ones for back-packing; if you want to make your own rocket stove (see above) they also supply DIY Rocket Stove elbows.

Another great source of information on stoves is WorldStoves.com

They work in developing countries where they set up factories to use local materials and skills to produce pyrolytic stoves- stoves which convert the fuel- which can be almost any biomass- into charcoal, which can be used as a soil amendment known as biochar. They have recently completed a project in Haiti.

The stoves are extremely efficient, combusting the wood gases also, thus saving wood and cutting down oin respiratory diseases common in many countries caused by cooking fires.

Another great source of information for DIY stove enthusiasts is the Aprovecho Research Centre, who design the StoveTec stoves.

Download their Capturing Heat pdf for details on more deigns for innovative stoves.

Happy stoving!

The first day will include charcoal making (a potential business opportunity), biochar (which improves soil while also combating climate change), rocket stoves, DIY stoves, site surveying & observation techniques, basic triangulation, measurement and levels.

One of the main practicals for the day will be charcoal & biochar making.

The second day will focus on forest gardening, which is an approach that works with nature as much as possible, to generate a high food yield with minimum effort.

Topics for the day include natural succession, deciduous forest layers, canopy distances, wild plants and canopy design. The main practical exercise for the day will focus around design & work in the new forest garden at Carraig Dúlra organic farm.

Both days are open to beginners, however those with some Permaculture experience will also benefit from the practical exercises and demonstrations. You can attend one or both days.

This event takes place at Carraig Dúlra organic farm in Glenealy, Co Wicklow. Participants are welcome to camp at the farm during the course. The cost for the event is €60 each day (coffee/tea/camping included), and pre-booking is required.

More information and booking: Carraig Dúlra · Glenealy, Co Wicklow info@dulra.org · www.dulra.org/practical-permaculture · 0404 69570

by Derek “Deek” Diedricksen

After seeing a short film by Deek Diedricksen linked on Energy Bulletin, which demonstrates his ultra-tiny dwelling called the Hickshaw, I was inspired to write to him for a review copy which, once he had had a look at this blog, he was generous to do a trade for.

In hand-written, home-made “zine” style, filled with sketches and whacky ideas of tiny shelters and dwellings as well as cool ideas for rain water collection and solar showers, this is probably one of the more unusual and original books on construction you will find.

More a collection of ideas from the clearly maze-like mind of Deek than a detailed step-by-step construction guide (the author warns off anyone looking for detailed plans in the first few pages) there is a wealth of inspiration for the would-be self-builder on a budget.

Especially useful are many suggestions for creating low-budget extra rooms, sheds and garden structures and kids hideouts. Many have design features for multiple-function and adaptability, such as the Expandable Greenhouse/shed/guest house/Back-woods Camp.

There are a couple of projects we might be able to try at the Kinsale College for Green Building students- Ill post up pictures if we do.

Deek specializes in tiny buildings, some of them on wheels, some floating, some underground, some in trees such as his own cabin in Vermont.

Unusual and innovative, with lots of tips on good uses for recycled materials, Humble Homes provides the perfect antidote to the cornucopian binge of McMansions we have seen on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years.

Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

Atlantic Books 2009 316pp

“Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem”.

Stewart Brand is one of the iconic founders of the environmental movement, an original old hippy whose influence on the boomer generation should not be understated. With his latest book Whole Earth Discipline he takes that same movement to task for rejecting science and getting sidetracked by ideology at the very time when the practical application of science through engineering and technology may be the only way to save ourselves.

I came across an early copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by Brand in 1968, on an early visit to a small “back to the land” commune about 25 years ago. It was a thrilling introduction to the possibilities of the burgeoning “alternative” lifestyle of organic gardening and renewable energy I was joining at the time.

Over the coming years, I read about his early involvement in LSD in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and currently have a copy of his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now on my bookshelf.

In a recent interview, I heard Brand take on the environmental movement’s anti-science stance on various issues. I have been grappling with this issue myself for some time now, particularly in the credulous acceptance by most green organisations of “alternative medicine” for which there is no evidence, and the anti-science diatribes that are inevitably summoned up in defense.

More recently I have discovered for myself how little science there is behind the health claims of organic food, and how organisations such as the Soil Association are often pseudo-scientific in their claims and their treatment of evidence.

Whole Earth Discipline challenges the greens on four more holy cows: population, urbanisation, nuclear power and Genetically Engineered crops, and in reading this compelling and fascinating book I have had to do some serious re-thinking around these issues myself.

Of those four issues the one I have been most concerned about myself has been population: what use our hard-won per capita reductions in carbon emissions if this is to be always canceled out by more people? What chance of eco-system restoration if a growing population is constantly increasing the pressure?

In contrast to Brand- who had Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich as one of his early tutors- I do not see population really as a big environmentalist cause, rather it seems to be the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, perhaps because of connections with oppressive regimes, racism and the sheer intractability of the problem.

Brand claims however that world population will most likely peak within another generation at around 9 billion, far less than was being predicted in the 70s and 80s, and that there is one major reason for this: urbanization. Most of humanity now live in cities and as the rural poor move there they reduce their numbers of offspring, so much so that far from a population crash, we are facing a crisis of an aging population.

Brand paints a very different picture of this process of the move to town than that of the conventional environmentalist. The move to the city Brand claims is liberating on the whole, and especially for women. Rural village life tends to be parochial and oppressive, offering little by way of opportunity. Peasant subsistence agriculture is far from the romantic view of the back-to-the-land movement for most, but back breaking toil subject to the vagaries of the weather with no back-up in case of crop failure.

The mega-slums of the developing world may appear to be hellish and grossly over-crowded polluted and destitute to the affluent western greenie, but Brand argues that in fact they are preferable to squalid farming because they offer opportunities to escape poverty. One way this is happening is by the ubiquitous spread of the cell phone: even the poorest of the poor have one, with incoming calls often free.

Not only that, but growing cities mean an emptying countryside which is good for forest regeneration. The point is made clearly: if you want to be green, than the compact life in the city id for you, while those in wealthy countries who set up their small-holdings in remote rural locations are likely to have a larger footprint, subsidised as they are by car transport and long supply lines. (I would be a classic example of this last category.)

Surprising though Brand’s analysis is on cities, his more controversial chapters are likely to be the ones on nuclear and GE crops.

While I attended anti-nuclear demos in my youth- CND was at its height in the late 1970s when I was leaving school- more recently I have been swayed by James Lovelock’s position on nuclear, that which ever way you look at it, coal is the real dirty fuel and if your concern is over future generations, addressing climate change by decarbonising the economy is your first priority.

It does indeed seem that fears over the dangers of nuclear waste have been exaggerated. The total per capita waste from a lifetime of using nuclear fuel for one family would fit into a soda can. France runs 80% of its electricity from nuclear, but while many die every day in car crashes, nuclear seems to be very safe these days. Not only that, but there are new generations of nuclear power stations which are relatively small and which can be deployed anywhere. One scheme is to produce small power stations which contain their entire lifetimes worth of fuel, are buried for the duration of the fuel and simply switched off when that is spent, with no waste extracted.

Brand also points out that all the existing nuclear powers developed weapons technology first, which then gave rise to civil energy uses, rather than the other way round; since Iran actually does need nuclear power, the international community would be in a very strong place to insist how this is developed safely. In the west meanwhile, large numbers of nukes are being used as a source of fuel for power generation.

What Brand skips over in his book with barely a mention is peak oil. He clearly thinks new technologies and fuel sources can fill the gap somehow; uranium can be extracted from sea water, and if that runs out, we can use thorium instead.

Peak oil doomers like myself have long argued against nuclear on the grounds that it will take too long to construct, that the carbon footprint is still high once you have counted the embodied energy in construction and decommissioning;that uranium will peak also before too long should we try to run everything from nuclear. While Brand makes a convincing case for the safety of modern reactors and the promise of new technologies, he is clearly under no illusion about the challenge facing us were we to try to replace existing coal and oil with a range of alternatives, including nuclear, before the climate tipping point. Brand is no techno-fantasist, but a pragmatic and practical engineer.

Perhaps even more of a Holy Cow for environmentalists than nuclear is Genetically Engineered crops. (Brand prefers “GE” to the more common “GM”.) This seems to go right to the heart of what sees as the problem with the ideological position of “romantic” greens who are motivated by a spurious ideological notions of what is “natural”. Tampering with genes, especially crossing the species divide, seems unnatural to many and unholy to some.

But scientists are no more concerned about GE technology than they are about plant breeding and loss of diversity from farming in general, because they know as Brand says that genes are extremely fungible in nature: transgenic mutations, especially on the microbial level, are apparently quite normal, indeed we could hardly have evolved without this process. Although the “strawberry with fish genes” is apparently an urban myth, in fact any given gene may be nearly identical in two very different species so splicing genes from one organism into another may not be nearly as “abnormal” as it may appear.

The problem is not this or that particular kind of farming, but farming in general. Unless you advocate a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles (there are those who do) there is no reason to feel GE crops are uniquely evil or dangerous.

To an ecologist, or to a Gaian for that matter, agriculture is one vast catastrophe. The less of it the better.

Another urban myth which may be partly responsible for the extreme opposition to GE- in common with anti-abortion and anti-vivisection activism, anti-GE sentiment is deemed to justify violence on occasion- is the “terminator gene”, designed to produce sterile genes. This does appear to be unjustifiable, interfering as it does with ancient farming practices of seed-saving, until you read the true story: no “terminator” crops were ever actually produced, in part because of protests, but the real reason for their proposed development was to limit the dangers of the new crops running amok in the wild: in other words, terminator technology was part of the checks and balances that Monsanto were proposing to address some of the environmentalists concerns. Without this, preventing contamination may now be harder.

The absurdity of the opposition to these crops is expressed in the quote given by Vandana Shiva, from her book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000):

“The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that would eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet”- a biological impossibility, since terminator plants would be unable to spread by seeds.

Brand gives a shocking account of how ideologically motivated environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth campaigned extensively against US food aid to Africa during famines in 2001 and 2002 because it contained GE crops, threatening to prevent any African imports to Europe if this badly needed food was accepted. Brand ruefully quotes Brecht: “Grub first, then ethics.”

Starvation was treated as a measure of commitment to the cause. In the service of what was thought to be a higher good, the environmental movement went sociopathic in Africa.

That well funded environmental groups in Europe campaigned so vociferously against food aid that was meant for starving people is surely a shocking indictment that there is something seriously wrong with the movement.

Many of the arguments Brand discusses in favour of GE crops are given here;

-after a decade of real life trials, no evidence suggests any human health implications from eating GE food;

-checks and balances are employed far more diligently in GE than in many other areas;

-GE is already becoming decentralised with many smaller companies and NGOs becoming involved in using the technology appropriately to help the poor and the hungry, with many beneficial effects for the environment including less use of pesticides:

“Developing countries are building their own non -corporate GE programs suited to their unique agricultural needs.” The democratization of the technology may even have been hampered by anti-GE activism: “Only a few big corporate players have survived a period of consolidation, caused partly by excessive anti-GE regulation that drove out small companies”.

And the potential of the technology is impressive: unlike conventional plant breeding, GE can be highly specific and precise in the traits it develops, and has had many successes despite the hampering of environmental protests.

Brand discusses at length how the bogus concept of the “precautionary” principle has been used to scupper development of the technology. In the absence of any clear evidence of danger, the precautionary principle is merely a recipe for social apoplexy. No doubt there were protesters using the same argument when people first discovered fire. In fact there are lots of checks and balances and the scientists who know what they are doing are far more aware of possible dangers than protesters.

Quasi-scientific propaganda against climate change is no different from quasi-scientific propaganda against genetic engineering. Both try to harness science to a political agenda.

In the coming years, GE seems certain to spread and eventually to be accepted: “The fact is that the fastest-moving countries now with GE crops are the developing nations that have the scientific competence and confidence to stand up to excessively cautious environmentalists- China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Argentina, the Philippines. as they go, so goes the world.”

As I write this I am getting forwarded emails asking me to sign the Avaaz petition against the recent decision by the European Council to allow GE potatoes to be grown here. I wont be signing, but I know most of my colleagues- many of whom have pulled up GM crops themselves- will.

In the future however, the strategy is likely to be to aim the benefits of the produce at the consumer: if the technology is good enough, people will simply prefer the better product. The proof will be in the pudding.

Brand returns to the issue of the dysfunction of Greens in his next chapter, Romantics, Scientist and Engineers

Here he suggests that one of the driving forces of green movements has been the romantic notion of decline. As a peak -oiler myself a lot of bells rang as I read through the book and I found myself stopping to question how much of my beliefs about the inevitability of collapse and “the long descent” are ideological rather than based on real evidence.

Clearly the potential for collapse is very real, and perhaps an over-optimistic world view based on “positive thinking” has contributed to the recent financial collapse, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued in her book Smile or Die.

Without discussing the ins and outs of the collapse theory- he has already outlined some of the worst scenarios of climate change in the opening chapter- Brand explores the idea that romantic greens are ideologically opposed to finding solutions, whereas engineers believe there must be a solution to everything.

A new set of environmental players is shifting the balance. Engineers are arriving who see environmental problems neither as a romantic tragedy nor as a a scientific puzzle but simply as something to fix.

I myself used to buy into the still prevalent myth of the Fall from an idyllic past: for thousands of years,so this particular myth goes- humans lived in harmony with Nature, responsive to Her (usually feminine) deepest energies and understandings.

At a certain unspecified point in our history, we lost our way, separating from Nature and playing God by manipulating natural laws. It is because this myth is still so powerful that anti-GE and anti-nuclear sentiment remains so strong and vitriolic- Thou Shalt Not meddle with the Deeper Law.

In reality, there never was such an idyllic harmonious past; Rousseau’s Noble Savage never was.

Nature does not care about us, nor does it have plans or desires; rather, any species that were to evolve the adaptive advantages of opposable thumbs and the neo-cortex would have come to dominate our predators and competitors in the same way we have.

Being close to nature has always meant short life-span, high infant mortality and constant resource wars. It has only ever been our technology- starting with fire- that has allowed us to escape such an existence.

As Brand outlines so succinctly in his opening pages, the fundamental problem of humanity is not separation from nature, but existential: everything we do has a footprint; yet we want our children to survive and prosper.

Brand takes a brief look at how these retro-romantic views have been associated with, and are not incompatible with, Nazism: yearning for a purity in nature not found in culture; and an elitism only possible in the well fed to moralize to the hungry.

But the engineer’s approach is very different from any kind of deluded new age pseudo-therapy, rooted as it is in science and practical experience. There is surely no guarantee that we will be able to pull off the kind of techno-fixes Brand describes in his last chapters- which includes such things as giant sunshades in space and the sequestration of carbon through biochar on a massive scale- but the worst aspects of the romantic’s world view should not hinder these attempts which may be our last chance.

Every environmentalist should read this life-changing – and maybe even planet-changing book.

The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated- too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem. Far from taking a new dominant role,environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and well-honed strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system- climate dynamics.

Having now reached the shortest days of the year I am in a position to evaluate its performance, and I can say it has served me very well. Obviously there has been a huge difference in power availability between summer and winter, but in fact the last 10 days here have seen constant sunshine -along with freezing temperatures- and I have probably had more power so far in December than October.

As I said in the earlier post, on a system like this you cut your cloth according to your measure, so giving an account of my energy consumption would be misleading- I would use more electricity if i had it! In fact though I use and need very little- on average 1-2Kwh/day would be loads to run computer, one or two lights, radio and some power tool use. Some days I would use more, and I made good use of an electric chainsaw during the longer days. The only major increase in power consumption is likely to come from a washing machine which I intend to get in the near future, the model I am looking at only uses 1.2kw per cycle, and would easily be achievable on any sunny day any time of the year.

I did run short of power a couple of weeks ago and have invested in a small petrol generator as a back up, mainly to protect the batteries, and to ensure I need never be without some power if I want it. I have only had to run the generator on a handful of evenings during cloudy weather when I have run the batteries down with power tools during the day; it would not however be too much of a hardship to do without the generator and only use power when available.

To increase power availability I could put up a wind turbine, but at this stage it might be better to invest in more batteries- I only have approx. 1000Amph storage at present- and maybe a couple more PV panels. This might be sufficient as I dont expect to be increasing my electricity consumption drastically any time soon. The great advantage of PV over wind is that there are no moving parts, no maintenance and they are modular- I can add in more panels whenever I have some spare cash.

In short I am satisfied that I can live just on a modest solar array even in cloudy gray Ireland. For my situation it has been a good option; for a family of four, maybe not unless supplemented by wind.

I also want to mention my new Rayburn wood burning range that I  installed in the cabin just this weekend. It replaces a cast iron stove, but I missed the range  from the roundhouse for baking, and I am delighted with it so far. Ranges are a great option, doing everything at once: space heating, water heating, oven for baking, hob for cooking. It might require a little more wood than the stove, but that is one source of fuel I have plenty of. It should mean I use less gas for cooking at least in the winter months, and increases resilience as I could do without gas altogether if I had to.

Best of all, the range was free- many thanks to Liam and Ger who were replacing it with an oil burner, and to Ciara who pointed them in my direction!

We also got to play with the PV demonstration panel we have at the Kinsale college.

The meter reads 3.19 amps from an 80watt panel.

The Long Descent- A Users Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

John Michael Greer

New Society Publishers 2008

John Michael Greer has written a fascinating and engaging, but also contradictory and perplexing account of how he sees the industrial age ending.

His primary thesis is that collapse will not come as a sudden, abrupt End Of Days or Die Off scenario- one minute thriving bustling affluent society with the universe at its feet, the next a crumbling pile of rubble with nothing but wisps of smoke to hint of its former glory- but will follow a “catabolic” process of progressive disintegration, over possibly a couple of centuries. In Greer’s scenario, short periods of abrupt and sharp downturns- the beginning of which we are experiencing now- punctuate longer periods of relative stability. Like an organism that begins feeding on itself, society will collapse in a series of stepped-down stages as it becomes progressively unable to meet maintenance charges with income.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the chapter “Tools for the Transition” Greer has a most interesting discussion of the merits of the slide-rule over the pocket calculator, and explains why it is infinitely more suitable to a low-energy world:it is durable- a solid aluminum slde-rule could last nearly geological time-scales-, independent, dependable and perhaps most significant of all its use of transparent- a future archeologist would be able to work out exactly how to use it. I have never actually used a slide-rule, but this discussion has inspired me to get one, and even teach its use on permaculture courses as an example of durable technologies. There are many other insightful observations Greer makes in this chapter, including comments on salvage and organic agriculture, and what will endure into the post-collapse world.

What  sets Greer’s book apart and make it really interesting is his focus on “The Stories we tell Ourselves”. He weaves his discussion of the Long descent around what he sees as two modern myths- the myth of unending progress and technological supremacy on the one hand, and imminent catastrophe and collapse on the other. Both are myths or stories that fail to see the much more likely outcome of catabolic collapse.

His analysis of Peak Oil and other resource depletion are astute and draw on earlier writers such as Catton:

More than 20 years ago, William Catton pointed out in his seminal classic Overshoot that the downslope of industrial society would force human beings to compete against their own machines for dwindling resource stocks. His prediction has become today’s reality.

Falling broadly into the category of ecological writers who see human society as essentially subject to the same natural limits as other animals, our prosthetic habits of tools and technology merely giving us temporary escape, Greer covers a lot of ground you will find elsewhere, and this is the first contradiction, because his stance throughout the book is that he is presenting a radically differnt vision to the one presented by many peak oil writers: but who exactly is he referring to?

Yes, there is Jay Hanson’s Die-off.org; there is Matt Savinar and his bulletins on special offers on survival food; and no doubt in America, Greer will come across far more of the hard-core survivalist types than we might in Europe; but in general, I would place him very much in the tradition of the main Peak Oil writers- Heinberg, Kunstler, Simmonds and co.. These are the voices who have shaped the Peak oil movement in the past few years with their reasoned and measured descriptions of the current evidence and what they see as the likely impacts over the next years and decades. By no means do they paint a rosy picture, but nor do they predict an immediate once-and-for-all end of everything. Indeed, the title Greer uses seems to be even a reference to Kunstler’s main work on the topic- The Long Emergency- as well as Holmgren’s well-known Energy descent scenarios.

So I found it a bit confusing to read on the one hand that “the fallacy that bedeviled the Y2K survivalists was the belief that government, business, and citizens, faced with an imminent threat and presented with a clear, constructive response to it, would sit on their hands and do nothing until collapse overwhelemd them.”(p91)

and then that “Statistics from Russia, where a similar scenario played out in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, suggest that population levels could be halved within this century”

and “One dimension of that context is likely to become the preeminent political fact of the age of peak oil: the impending decline- and, at least potentially, the catastrophic collapse- of America’s world empire.” (P100-101)

I mean, how catastrophic is “catastrophic” exactly? Is there like, the Y2K fallacy-type catastrophic, which is what most people think about peak oil but is wrong, and then the “Long Descent” John Michael Greer-type catastrophic which is really quite different and which only Greer has been perceptive enough to see?!

And it gets worse. Greer points out that one of the more fragile aspects of industrial life is the health system and councils that “It is probably best to assume that by the time the next wave of crisis arrives, your only health care will be what you can provide for yourself” and goes onto say “You probably wont live as long as you expect, and if you need high-tech medical help to stay alive, you’ll have to accept that it may stop being available without warning.”

Well that’s reassuring Michael, I mean for a minute there I thought you might be just another one of those survivalist doomers.

Don’t get me wrong. I happen to agree with this analysis and I also share and welcome Greer’s prescient wise words about acceptance of death and how this is one of the things we need to adress if we are to face the future- any future- with fortitude, but it all seems strangely at odds with his repeated admonitions of whoever he sees as the bulk of Peak Oil commentariat for painting too stark a picture of the impending collapse.

In addition, there are many compelling reasons to feel that our situation at all-time Peak Energy is fundamentally different from past collapses. the higher they climb the harder they fall, as they say, and our dependency on fossil energy and on a functioning economy from day to day is so complete, and our culture so lacking in resilience, and our traditional skills deficit so absolutely vast, that our society seems peculiarly vulnerable.

And then there is climate change, which again will effect people very personally and is already doing so. Overpopulation, species extinction general environmental degradation means that unlike the first character in an earlier collapse, our contemporary urban refugee may have nowhere to go.

Greer is right to emphasize the lessons of past collapses and how they may unfold over lengthy periods of time, and I love his vivid story of two hypothetical characters who live through very different times but who experience collapse in a similar way: the only difference is, in the contemporary scenario, there may be nowhere left for the environmental refugee to flee to.

In this we are given a fresh perspective, but as Orlov has made so vividly clear, collapse will be an essentially personal affair- for many in the developing world, it happened last week with the loss of their job and repossession of their home, and for many more it will happen next week. For some, collapse surely will be indeed a rather abrupt affair, as they suddenly find themselves out on the street unsure of their next meal, their previous life of luxury bought on futures’ markets just a distant dream. For many in this situation- as well as those who suddenly find their life-support systems switched off, or who go hungry because they were unprepared for the supermarket supply-chain disruption,  the historical fate of society as a whole will be largely irrelevant.

Greer continues his exploration of stories and myths with a look at New Age beliefs, and he has some interesting observations about for example the origin of the “create your own reality” myth:

Of course each of us does play a part in creating the reality we experience; subtle factors such as expectations and assumptions have a much more powerful role in the way our lives turn out than most people realise… As the New Age movement gained members and lost focus, though, gimmicks of this sort became the basis for a philosophy of cosmic consumerism that claims the universe is supposedly set up to give people whatever they happen to want, so long as they ask for it in the right way.”

He even gives an analysis of David Icke’s Lizard theory which he sees as a kind of projection of “the shadow” – a way of overcoming the reality of limits: if you cant get everything you want, if the universe isn’t exactly what you want, it must be the fault of those evil shape-shifting lizards.

It seems rather paradoxical though, that while for the most part he takes a “meta-theoretical” perspective on different world views and how they emerge, some of his thinking itself appears to be rather New Age: his recommendations for health care in the future seem rather ill-informed and naive:

…While there is some quackery in the alternative field, there’s also much of value, and the denunciations of alternative health care that come from the medical establishment are mostly just attempts to protect market share.

This itself is surely one of the most pervasive of New Age myths: conventional medicine is mainly just out to make money from your illness and is more likely to make you sick then anything else; “alternative” medicine is more “holistic” and treats the whole person in a “natural” way. In reality, “alternative” medicine is simply treatments that have not been proved; once a treatment has been demonstrated to be effective through double-blind clinical trials, it becomes simply “medicine”. (see for example John Diamond, Snake Oil 2001).  His specific recommendation of acupuncture betrays a sloppiness not apparent elsewhere in the book:

Many of the most effective alternative systems- herbalism and acupuncture come to mind- evolved long before the industrial system came into being and use very modest amounts of sustainable resources to treat illnesses.

As a number of recent publications have shown, there is little evidence that acupuncture works, and what evidence there is, is weak: it could scarcely be confidently considered as an effective remedy, and the suggestion that having been created in pre-industrial times is something in its favour is again a classic New Age absurdity. Systems of health care like acupuncture didnt have the benefit of modern medical science and don’t even recognise the existence of the cardio-vascular system, simply because this had not been discovered at the time. When you read about acupuncture’s recent history- how Mao encouraged it in revolutionary China because there wasn’t the resources to provide modern medicine for the peasants, even though he didn’t believe in it himself, for example, and how “sham” acupuncture- using retractable needles as a placebo achieves just as good results as the traditional methods, it is clear Greer has simply failed to do his homework on this one.

More than that, the multi-million dollar alternative medicine industry is really just an alternative marketing wing of the mainstream drug companies, making good use of the contemporary fashion for anything “natural” and “alternative” to sell its wares to the gullible. (See for example Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.)

To say “there is some quackery…” is a mind-bogglingly large understatement: the whole alternative healthcare field is rife with the most unbelievable level of manipulation, fraud and deceit. The ignorance and gullibility of large sections of the pblic, and the complicit role the media plays in simply misleading people happens in this area just as much as in the areas of perpetuating the myth of progress. That doesnt mean that science is immune from such aberrations- but it does at least have an internal system of verification quite absent in alternative therapies, and it does actually make real progree using the clinical trial.

By the same token, while Greer’s discussion of the role and future of science in society is valuable and interesting, he makes some big mistakes: his dismissal of Dawkin’s atheism as anthropolatry (the worship of humans) is simply wrong: Dawkins, like most atheists, believes humans are just a clever kind of tool using ape. It is religious and superstitious views- placing humans at the centre of a supposed Creation- that idolise the human.

The reasons for Greer’s blindspots on these matters are  obvious: he is himslef a Druid- an Arch Druid in fact- but in this book tells us little about it, leaving us guessing what he feels makes that spiritual tradition more valid than others, or more valid than the other myths he discusses.

So one gets the impression that he may have wanted his last chapter, “The Spiritual Dimension”, to have been more central to the main thesis than it actually is, and while it raises important points about what the role of religions might be post-collapse, and which ones may come to the fore, it is when he mentions “magic” that he loses me completely.

“There is a rich irony” says Greer “in the common dismissal of the lessons of spirituality as ‘magical thinking’ because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that technical and scientific thinking handle so poorly.”

Is it? I though “magic” was simply what people tend to ascribe to phenomena they dont have an explanation for. This definition would come as a surprise also, I think, to most of the people I know who profess to believe in “magic” which they would probably see more as a way of manipulating the material world through communing with nature spirits and the like.

Greer seems to me to get very muddled here, claiming that Carl Sagan was a “theologian” with his image of “we are stardust” while “magic” is apparently something which has “theoreticians” suggesting it can in fact be studied rationally. This is upside down thinking: science is essentially a method of inquiry which rejects faith-based beliefs; it is not theology when Sagan says we are star dust- Greer misses the point completely- it is fact based on verifiable evidence -which is exactly what sets science apart from myth.

Equally, there is no reason why science cannot handle the realm of “motivations, values and goals” with the same method, and of course there is a large body of scientific literaturee which attempts to do just that. I would refer Mr. Greer to Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell as a good exploration of the issues here.

Greer misses an opportunity to explore the real legacy of scientific thinking, and the likelihood and consequences of a return to pre-rational belief systems in the future.

For all that, The Long Descent is a stimulating and valuable contribution to the Peak Oil literature. I obviously don’t agree with a lot of it, and I find his stance as somehow being more profound than other writers unconvincing, yet he writes well and to some extent does explore the lesser known paths.

I

Charcoal will potentially play an important role in the post-oil world, with many important uses including for use on a blacksmith’s forge-i it burns much hotter than wood; I have read that it can even reach welding temperatures.

The oil drum method is quite simple- in this case I am using an old honey barrel which has a clamp lid. Punture the bottom of the drum with a pick -axe, making a few holes so as to allow air to be drawn from the base upwards. Stand the drum on three blocks. Light a fire in the bottom of the drum and as it catches, begin filling the whole drum with logs- 8-10 inces long and 4-5 inches in diameter is ideal. Place them so they sit in fairly snuggly but no need to pack really tight. Once the drum is full allow the fire to burn for a while until it is hot enough for your spit to sizzle on the side of the drum. At this point, place the lid on loosely leaving a gap and pack earth and sods around the base of the drum leaving just a 4″ gap for air to pass. Burn for about 5 hours- expect lots of smoke! It is important to do the whole operation well away from people or places that might not want to disappear in clouds of smoke.

After ta few hours you can see the smoke lessen and turn a thin bluish colour- this means that the water vapor will have burned off. At this point, close off the last of the air gap at the base with earth and sods and seal the lid tightly- it is crucial to completely seal it so no smoke escapes else you may end up with just a load of ash. Leave to cool overnight or for a few hours. If successful, the drum should be about a third full of charcoal when you come to open it.

Once you have tasted food barbecued on home-made charcoal, you will never go back to imported stuff. There is also a business opportunity here for wood-owners, as the current price of charcoal is up to 10 times the price of the wood. This makes charcoal one of the most significant incomes potentially to make a woodland financially viable, using small-diameter timber.

Improvements of efficiency can be achieved using retort kilns

Other products such as creosote can be made sing similar processes. It is also possible to collect the resulting wood-gas and use it as a fuel for generators or vehicles as was common in the first half of the 20th Century