Eco-Cities and Eco-villages

When people think of “green”, they think of forests and grasslands with few people. But for a given number of people, it is more green to all live in one small space rather than spread out. High population density leads to many efficiencies: resources and wastes only have to be transported to one location rather than many; distances to work, school, and stores are shorter; electrical power is transmitted shorter distances, meaning less line loss and greater efficiency. Water and sewage pipes, cable, phone, and power lines all become shorter per capita as housing density increases, making basic services more affordable and less resource-intensive. High-density housing in mixed-use developments also makes sustainable living easier because public transportation becomes feasible, and people can walk and bike to work and school. In fact, residents of Manhattan use less energy and fewer resources than anywhere else in America ([1], pp. 228-9). And if people take up less space by living in cities, that leaves more space for ecosystem services and preservation of biodiversity. Finally, because more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, it makes sense to focus on making cities more sustainable.

Some cities in North America have been at the forefront of planning for sustainability. One of the greenest cities in the world is Vancouver, British Columbia. I was there in summer of 2008 and was truly impressed by the beauty of the natural setting but also by the forward-thinking policies of the government and developers. The majority of Vancouver’s residents live downtown in high-rises and compact communities [1], p. 231). The city is designed for pedestrians and bicycles, and many residents have given up their cars. I rode all over the city in buses and found it remarkable easy and enjoyable. By avoiding urban sprawl, Vancouver has become one of the world’s most livable cities. Preparations for the 2010 Olympic Games that it is hosting are making Vancouver even more impressive.

Not everyone can live in the city. How can we make smaller communities sustainable? Enter the concept of the eco-village. Just by coincidence I live very close to one of the most widely publicized eco-communities in the world, The Farm, located in Summertown, TN (http://www.thefarm.org/). It includes the Farm Ecovillage Training Center, which offers regular courses on sustainable living. The Farm was founded in 1971 when a group of hippies left San Francisco looking for the right place to start their experiment in communal living. The right place was the area with the cheapest land, and that's why they ended up in middle Tennessee.

I went there for a tour one day, during which they briefly described the history of the farm. It started as a socialist society, but eventually the practice became unsustainable because there were too many freeloaders. So in the mid-1980's they abandoned socialism, causing a large segment of the residents to leave. They now have a cooperative system in which they work together to develop shared resources and pay dues. It now seems to operate as a sustainable capitalist community, with many of the residents operating businesses that manufacture radiation detectors, publish books, sell mushroom growing kits, produce video, and offer midwife services and classes. The residents regularly offer classes on mushroom farming, yoga, organic gardening, and other topics. But touring the Farm was somewhat disappointing to me. The residents are good at self-promotion on the web, but the Farm itself is a small collection of run-down buildings and unused fields. As a farm it is a dismal failure, with most of the land left to pasture but no animals (they are all vegetarians) and only one commercial crop, soybeans, which they make into soy milk and ice cream (which is quite delicious). I think the reason is that though they were idealistic, the hippies were ignorant about farming practices, and also many/most of them do not like manual labor. I wanted a demonstration of how they managed to live sustainably, but I never got a glimpse, making me suspect that their community isn't truly sustainable. Even the mushroom growing demonstration was simply a slideshow accompanied by partially coherent, rambling pronouncements on politics by someone who seemed to have partaken of too many mushrooms in his lifetime (I fell asleep). We never even saw where they grow the mushrooms! I could view a slideshow on my computer without driving 40 miles. But to their credit, the residents of The Farm live more simply and have much smaller ecological footprints than most Americans. They understand that you don’t have to have a lot of money and “stuff” to be happy.

Perhaps a more successful eco-village is Gaviotas, located in the llanos (grasslands) of Colombia and well-described by Alan Weisman in his book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World” [2]. Like The Farm, it was founded in 1971, but it seems they made greater progress because the founder, Paolo Lugari, had the foresight to bring a team of scientists and engineers to tackle the problems of sustainable living. This team came up with many novel solutions, including a special water pump that could extract groundwater from greater depths and with less effort than with traditional pumps. This pump was connected to a see-saw to put the energy of children’s play to good use. They also developed solar water heaters, the sale of which became a major source of income. Finally, the planting of 1.5 million trees returned part of the llanos back to its preexisting state of tropical jungle by trapping the moisture in a microclimate [2]. The villagers of Gaviotas tap the trees and sell the resin. The genius of the residents of Gaviotas enabled them to succeed in a harsh climate in a country bordering on anarchy.

So when choosing a place to live, you should seriously consider the city. Your ecological footprint will be smaller if you live there.  And when gas prices and transportation costs skyrocket, you’ll be glad that you moved there.

1. Steffen, A., ed. World Changing: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. 2006, Abrams: New York, NY. 596.

2. Weisman, A., Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. 1999: Chelsea Green Publishing Company 1-890132-28-4.

Collect and Purify Water

During short- and long-term emergencies, the most critical resource for you and your family will probably be potable water, especially if you live in an arid region. To prepare for such emergencies, and also to conserve water, you can practice rainwater harvesting.  Rainwater harvesting is one of the easiest ways to move towards self-sufficiency. Because we need water to survive, it is important not to rely completely on the system to provide it; redundancy is desirable in critical life-support systems such as water supply [1].

Because evaporation purifies water, rainwater is usually the purest water in the hydrologic cycle; you can therefore use it to water gardens without treatment. The simplest solution is to place a rain barrel (usually a 55-gallon drum with a valve) underneath the downspout of a rain gutter; the barrel should be placed as high as possible, keeping in mind that any support structure such as a stack of cinder blocks must be able to withstand the 450 pounds of a full barrel. Connect a hose to the valve and place it in your garden. The greater the height difference between the rain barrel valve and the hose outlet in the garden, the greater the pressure that drives the flow, and therefore the faster the water will come out of the hose. Rain barrels should have screens at the top to prevent debris or animals from entering the barrel [2]. Detains on how to construct a rainbarrel are given in [1], or you can purchase one prefabricated.

If during an emergency bottled or municipal tap water are not available and you plan to use rainwater for drinking or food preparation, you will need to go through some extra steps to make sure the water is not contaminated. Waterborne diseases cause nearly 15 million deaths each year. Disinfection kills the pathogens (bacteria, protozoa, parasites, and viruses) that can cause disease. Sterilization kills all living organisms in the water, bad or good. Purification removes potentially harmful chemicals in the water. A simple example makes the distinctions clear. You can disinfect water by pasteurizing it, which requires heating it to 149°F (65°C) for six to twenty minutes ([3], pg. 174). To sterilize the water, simply heat it to a hard boil in a covered pot. Boiling the water requires more energy for heating than pasteurization, but you can reduce the amount of energy required by tightly covering the pot to reduce heat loss. Pasteurization and boiling kill pathogens but do not remove dissolved chemicals such as the salts in seawater. To purify the water, you can remove the dissolved chemicals by boiling the water in an uncovered pot and collecting the condensed steam. Again, this is a very energy-intensive process. Below we will look at a few safe alternatives that require less energy.

The first step in water purification is to filter out suspended sediments that can hold chemical and biological contaminants by forcing the water through clean cheesecloth [2] or by temporarily placing the turbid water in a container to let the sediment settle out. Next, you need to remove biological contaminants that can cause disease. Boiling for ten minutes is the easiest solution. However, if you don't have enough fuel to treat all of your water this way, a more energy-efficient method is to use solar disinfection, termed SODIS ([1], [3]). Ultraviolet light kills the pathogens, and becomes more effective at high temperatures. Simply fix some shelves to a piece of metal painted black, then place bottles filled with water on the shelves and expose them to sunlight for six hours. You can paint the back of the bottles black so they will more effectively absorb sunlight and heat up to higher temperatures, killing the pathogens in as little as one hour [1]. In emergencies or while backpacking you can use iodine tablets, tincture of iodine 2%, betadine, or chlorine bleach to chemically treat water; see Lundin [3] and many other sources for detailed instructions on how to do this safely. There are other ways to kill pathogens, but most of them use high-tech devices such as UV lamps that need to periodically replaced or require electricity and are therefore unsustainable.

After filtering the water and killing the pathogens, most water will be safe to drink. For example, collected rainwater generally has very low concentrations of chemical contaminants, so it usually does not need to be treated to remove them. This is fortunate because it is much more difficult to remove dissolved inorganic chemicals from water. However, if you have reason to believe that your water contains chemical contaminants, you can use sunlight to evaporate the water and then collect the purified condensed water, a form of solar "still" ([4] pg. 471). The Watercone has an ingenious design that allows it to purify 1.6 quarts per day; it can even desalinate seawater ([5], pp. 193-4); see http://www.mage-watermanagement.com/. Or you can set up a still to collect steam produced by boiling water, as described above.

Following the simple procedures described above can help you provide potable water for you and your family during short- and long-term emergencies.

1. Kellogg, S. and S. Pettigrew, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. 2008, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. 241

2. Bates, A., The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. 2006: New Society Publishers. 236 978-0-86571-568-4.

3. Lundin, C., When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes. 2007, Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith. 449

4. Tawrell, P., Camping & Wilderness Survival. Second ed. 2006, Lebanon, New Hampshire: Paul Tawrell. 1080 978-0-9740820-2-8.

5. Steffen, A., ed. World Changing: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. 2006, Abrams: New York, NY. 596.

Composting

Household garbage often contains a large amount of organic debris that contains stored energy. One of the easiest and most satisfying ecological practices is to compost your waste and produce valuable humus, the organic-rich component of soil that is rich in nutrients and microbes and is essential for fertile soil. At our first house my wife and I bought a large plastic container for composting, but at our second house we used a more environmentally friendly and cheaper approach by building a compost container out of stakes and metal screens used for gardens (Fig. Compost_pile). If designed and maintained properly, compost bins do not usually smell badly, but to be safe we placed ours at the back of our yard. The disadvantage is that we have to walk a few hundred yards to dispose of waste in our compost pile, so we reduce the number of trips by using a small container that we fill and then carry to the compost pile. This is about the only effort required for passive composting, which takes about one year to completely breakdown organic debris into humus. Active composting can produce humus much more quickly, but requires much more effort, and in general I prefer the easy approach. We occasionally stir and water the pile, and then remove soil from the bottom of the pile for our gardens. And we follow some simple rules. First, we add no meat or fatty foods like butter that can attract animals and smell when they spoil. We try to use ½ green, wet material such as tree and bush trimmings and grass clippings that are nitrogen-rich, and ½ brown, dry material (decayed leaves, straw, wood chips) that is carbon-rich ([1], pp. 111-121), in addition to any compostable food waste we produce (banana and orange peels, used coffee grinds and tea leaves, eggshells, corn husks, artichoke leaves, and spoiled fruit and vegetables). We add these materials in layers. It’s better to have too much brown than green material, as too much green can cause formation of molds and bad smells. We don’t add weeds to our compost so as to avoid adding their seeds to our gardens when we add composted soil. Compost bins do not need sunlight, so we placed ours in a shady corner of our yard.

Start your compost pile by mixing together yard litter and foodstuffs, mixing in a small amount of soil that contains the necessary microorganisms, and adding a little water. Little may happen in the first few weeks, but once the microorganisms multiply and establish healthy colonies they will start digesting the waste, extracting energy for their metabolic processes and releasing some of the energy as heat. You will know that your compost pile is working when you feel it giving off heat. When oxygen is present the breakdown of organic matter can be described by the reverse of our model chemical reaction for photosynthesis:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ = 6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O

The heat comes from the energy of the sun, temporarily stored in organic molecules by plants utilizing photosynthesis. Essentially the same reaction occurs in our bodies when we consume food; respiration releases the energy stored in the food so our bodies can use it. Oxygen is present under aerobic conditions, and the microorganisms use it to breakdown (oxidize or combust) the organic molecules to extract their energy, but if the oxygen they use is not replaced, then eventually it will all be consumed, and under such anaerobic conditions the above reaction grinds to a halt. What happens next is that anaerobic fermentation reactions begin to breakdown the organic molecules and produce alcohol, the same process that we use to make bread and beer with yeast (the alcohol escapes from the bread during cooking). Anaerobic respiration also produces lactic acid in our muscles when we strenuously exercise: the body cannot replace the oxygen fast enough, so it begins to break down sugars and fats anaerobically (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-lactic-acid-buil). The problem with alcohol production in the compost pile, however, is that alcohol is a disinfectant, so it sterilizes the pile, wiping out the microbial communities. And anaerobic respiration tends to produce odors from compounds like hydrogen sulfide, which gives the “rotten egg” smell you associate with swamps, where it is produced in the same way.

Finished compost should be dark brown. If it is black, your compost pile does not have enough oxygen; you need to add less water, and aerate the pile by turning it over. A simple approach to solve both of these problems is to place perforated PVC pipes, ones that are slightly greater in length than the diameter of your pile, at various heights in the pile. The pipes will suck air in to provide oxygen to aid decomposition, and drain off excess water.

Creating your own soil by composting is one more way to move yourself toward sustainability and independence [1]. And composting, combined with recycling, has greatly reduced the amount of waste we put in garbage cans.

1. Kellogg, S. and S. Pettigrew, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. 2008, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. 241

Buy Green and Encourage Sustainable Design

Besides avoiding purchases of disposable products and junk that is designed to break, and repairing rather than replacing, you should try to purchase products that are designed sustainably, made from renewable resources, and manufactured locally (to reduce carbon emissions from transportation and to help your local economy). When contemplating a purchase, ask yourself, “Do I really need this product? Will it add value to my life? Was the product manufactured in an eco-friendly way? Will its use harm the environment?”

When making purchases, avoid greenwashing, the practice of attaching a green label to a product that is not eco-friendly ([1], pp. 38-9). A perfect example is the Ortho Ecosense line of insecticides http://www.scotts.com/smg/brand/ecosense/brandLanding.jsp, where the word "Ecosense" is displayed in large green letters, but in smaller letters underneath it says "not intended to imply environmental safety either alone or compared to other products". So why are the letters in green and the prefix "Eco" in the name? Because it helps sell the product, even if for the wrong reasons.

New sustainably designed products are hitting the market, but if no one buys those products, then we will lose the opportunity to help make the market more eco-friendly. Consumers have the power to make the market more green by choosing eco-friendly products.

Simple rules should guide the design of sustainable products. Consumers should look for products that follow these rules. For example, Edwin Datschefski (in “The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products”, Rotovision, 2001) states simply (see [1], p. 86) “that things must be cyclic, solar, and safe”, and that “an object’s total beauty should not be undermined by hidden impacts.”

There are many examples of home interior products that are designed sustainably.  Bamboo is becoming a popular choice for wood flooring because this fast-growing wood is beautiful, durable, and renewable. For carpeting check out DuPont’s Smart-Strand, which is made from corn, is recyclable and biodegradable, and costs no more than comparable nylon carpeting. Using renewable corn instead of non-renewable oil to make the plastic saves a gallon of gas for every seven square yards of carpet.  Eco by Cosentino is a durable surface made of 75% recycled content composed of post-industrial or post-consumer materials bound by an environmentally friendly resin which comes in part from corn oil (See http://www.pr.com/press-release/158589). Vetrazzo’s recycled glass countertops contain 85% recycled glass by weight. The glass comes from curbside recycling programs, post-industrial usage, windows, dinnerware, stemware, automotive windshields, stained glass, laboratory glass, reclaimed glass from building demolition, and other unusual sources such as decommissioned traffic lights. Ivy Coatings make a zero VOC, non-toxic paint that can help improve indoor air quality.  Finally, Ultra Touch Insulation is made from recycled denim jean (also http://www.pr.com/press-release/158589).

Designing sustainably takes creativity. As stated by the inventor Edwin Land, creative and effective design requires the “sudden cessation of stupidity” ([1], p. 84). When you encounter a creative sustainable design for the first time, the usual reaction is to say, ‘why didn’t anyone think of this before?” because it is better in every respect than the old design, and yet it is simple. A design I recently encountered, the parking lot swale, elicited that reaction from me. Parking lots often flood because asphalt and concrete are impermeable. They need a sink for water to flow into and infiltrate into the ground during heavy rain events. The only permeable surfaces in parking lots are the islands, which are usually raised beds surrounded by concrete barriers. Water does not flow to the islands because it does not flow uphill. A smart and simple alternative is to make the islands depressions into which water will flow (Fig. Parking_swale_schematic.jpg). The depressions do not need to be surrounded by concrete barriers, and they effectively drain water from the parking lot (Fig. Parking_lot_drainage.jpg). And the parking spots themselves can be partially carpeted with grass (Fig. Green_parking_lot_Ikea.jpg) or porous concrete. These measures reduce the risk of flooding, allow water to infiltrate and recharge the aquifer, reduce the “heat island” effect caused by the high heat absorption and thermal mass of asphalt, and reduce the amount of rainwater shunted into storm systems, which saves energy used to pump and treat the water. Also, by increasing the amount of plants, they help increase water retention, remove pollutants, act as windblocks and noise mufflers, and beautify the parking lot. And all of these benefits come for free, because the sustainable design costs no more than the old unsustainable design.

One of the goals of the sustainability movement is to close the manufacturing loop. Currently most products track a linear path from resource extraction to manufacture to use to disposal. In a closed loop products are never disposed of; they are either reused or recycled. How do we know if sustainable practices were followed at each step in the lifecycle of a product? One way is to see if the product has been certified. For example, a Cradle to Cradle (C2C) platinum certified product is produced sustainably, and at the end of its usable life can be recycled, or is biodegradable, as described in “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (North Point Press, 2002).

1. Steffen, A., ed. World Changing: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. 2006, Abrams: New York, NY. 596.

Our Relationship with Nature

*Please note: I haven’t been posting recently because there have been so few comments that I was not convinced anyone was reading my entries. If you read this entry, please post a comment (click the “Comment” link at the end). You don’t even have to write anything; I just want to use the number of comments to estimate how many people are reading. If no one is reading these, then I’m not going to bother posting any more. Thanks, John

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.  ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964

There is a basic antagonism between the philosophy of the industrial age and the philosophy of the conservationist. – Aldo Leopold

Environmental problems develop when there is an unhealthy relationship between humans and the environment. The ways people approach, treat, and think of nature depend on their self-image. According to Wilson [1] there are two competing types of human self-image, exemptionalist and naturalist. Exemptionalists believe that humans exist apart from environment and hold dominion over it. In western civilization, most believe that God made the environment for our benefit, and that we have the freedom to use it as we see fit. Using technology, we can improve our current environment or adapt to any new environments. In contrast, naturalists believe that humans have perfectly adapted to our environment through millions of years of evolution, but that we are now rapidly destroying that environment. However, we can only be happy when we live in our original, natural environment because it is prescribed in our genes. The basic principle of organic evolution called habitat selection states that species prefer and gravitate to the environment in which their genes were assembled. Thus, we are completely dependent on our environment, including other species.

Wilson supports the Naturalist view. He states that the failures of the Biosphere 2 project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSphere_2) show that we and our environment are fragile and that our current technology cannot be used to create artificial sustainable environments. Exemptionalists claim that new technologies (power of the human mind) and free-market economies will provide adequate resources for the growing population; however, Wilson points out that there are limits to the amounts of water, arable land, oil, and food (including seafood), that can support us, and all of this is complicated by global warming. Exemptionalists are taking a gamble when they advise pressing forward with current policies and assume that technology will provide solutions to these growing problems before they become disasters. Ecologists like Wilson don’t like these gambles because they know that if we lose, we lose everything.

Wilson [1] believes that economists, who generally take the exemptionalist point of view, promote policies that are inconsistent with sustainability. Their economic models ignore human behavior, and they ignore the environment. A big problem is that they assume that there are adequate resources for all countries to have the same standard of living as the U.S.. However, the U.S. can only maintain its standard of living by using the resources of other countries (“economic miracles are not endogenous”), which we will demonstrate in detail later. Finally, economists do not use full-cost accounting, i.e., they don’t include the loss of natural resources. In this book I advocate a naturalist approach to solving environmental problems and achieving future sustainability.

The different approaches to nature are illustrated in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Elves lived symbiotically with nature and are presented as pure and good, while the ugly and evil orcs used resources like trees in a non-renewable way and transformed their environment into a wasteland. Clearly, to Tolkien it was evil to destroy the beauty of nature. In the Lord of the Rings some humans sided with elves and some with orcs, just as today humanity is divided between naturalist and exemptionalist camps (I’m not trying to say that exemptionalists are as ugly as orcs).

I am a naturalist rather than an exemptionalist, so I believe it is most effective to work with rather than against nature. You must always keep in mind that Nature is a powerful force; it is constantly at work, and while your short bursts of work may be more intense, and the use of energy from oil can magnify your efforts, eventually Nature will win because it has limitless time. How did streams cut through mountains to create water gaps? How did ancient mountains almost completely erode away? In ”The World Without Us”, Alan Weisman [2] describes what would happen to our structures (cities, buildings) if humans disappeared. It wouldn’t take long for nature to completely erase the evidence of our existence.

1. Wilson, E.O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1998, New York, NY: Vintage Books. ISBN 367 0-679-45077-7.

2. Weisman, A., The World Without Us. 2007, New York, NY: Picador. ISBN 416 978-0-312-42790-0.

Industrial Agriculture

The American farm is not what it once was. Agriculture is now a commercial operation, not a family operation. On the modern industrial farm, monocultures (a single crop, usually corn) have replaced polycultures, and farm animals are often nowhere to be found. In the past, we took animal waste and used it to fertilize the crops that fed the animals; this comprised an efficient closed loop system. Now we house animals in feedlots, where the waste is no longer a resource but a pollutant, and at the farm we have to use fossil-fuel fertilizer in place of manure.

Unfortunately industrial agriculture is now firmly entrenched in the U.S.. Pollan [1] gives an excellent introduction to the problems of industrial agriculture, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels, less healthy for us and the environment, consumes more resources, and is therefore less sustainable than old-style agriculture. As noted before, it now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food, whereas in the 1940's it only took 0.4 calories to produce on calories of food energy. Pollan [1] points out that unless we make the food system more dependent on renewable solar energy than non-renewable fossil fuel energy, it will be difficult or impossible to make progress in the U.S. on health care, energy independence, or climate change.

The use of monocultures and loss of agricultural biodiversity in industrial agriculture is particularly troubling. For example, long ago there were many varieties of bananas grown in the tropics. But consumer preference soon led to the predominance of a single cultivar (bananas are grown by propagation because they are seedless) named Gros Michel. That cultivar was wiped out in the 1950’s by Panama disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas) and was replaced by the Cavendish, which is very popular because it is grown year-round and has long shelf-life. However, because of the way it is grown, it lacks genetic diversity, which makes it vulnerable to disease, and it therefore could be wiped out like its predecessor Gros Michel. Growers are concerned that the Cavendish could be wiped out in a pandemic, perhaps caused by the black sigatoka fungus, within the next twenty years, and there are no similar plants to replace it. This would be a huge loss because the banana is the most popular fruit and the fourth most important food crop worldwide ("A future with no bananas?". New Scientist. 2006-05-13. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn9152-a-future-with-no-bananas.html). Thus, high biodiversity gives us food security.

Like our monoculture lawns, monoculture crops are unnatural and therefore require lots of energy to maintain. Modern grain crops are annuals rather than perennials, and modern varieties did not develop over millions of years in perfect tune with the local climate. Rather, they were developed quickly through breeding and genetic engineering to grow fast, not to be hardy. They are not as well adapted to the local environment as the weeds, which is why the weeds take over if we don't fight on behalf of the crop. The less hardy and well-adapted a crop is, the more energy that is required to make it grow. To reduce the amount of oil-derived energy used to produce crops you must work with rather than against nature. Use perennials as crops rather than annuals. Choose natural varieties that are well-adapted to the local environment (known as heirlooms), even if they have lower yields. The resulting increase in genetic diversity will increase our food security. And decreasing our reliance on oil in agricultural production now will better prepare farmers and our society for the post-oil world. We will discuss these solutions in more detail later in the section on Organic Agriculture, but where you can have the most influence on changing the food production system is in the choices you make as a consumer.

Consumers drive the food production system. Americans want cheap food, and they tend to prefer sweet and highly processed foods. Also, they don’t want to know how their food was produced, and they don’t want to have to cook; it’s too much effort. So why do we often feel fat and stupid? Our ancestors used to spend much of their day growing, preparing, and cooking food. Today food is an afterthought. Most parents don’t ask the question “what will we have for dinner tonight” until they get home from work. They don’t have the time or energy to pick fresh vegetables and prepare a balanced meal. For breakfast, our grandparents took the time to make eggs, bacon and toast every morning; our parents replaced that with the convenience of cereal and milk. Now we don’t even leave enough time to eat a bowl of cereal, often rushing out the door with an instant breakfast or a protein bar.

To me the protein bar symbolizes everything that’s wrong with American food culture. Families used to sit together at the table, talk, and enjoy their food. Now we don’t have time for that, so we choose to rush off to the car with a bar that looks like a turd and tastes like cardboard. Protein bars are highly processed, so we don’t recognize the taste of any of the ingredients. And no wonder! If you read the list of ingredients, you will find that it is extraordinarily long, and that you don’t recognize the names of most of the ingredients. Most of them are synthetic chemicals. If you gave your grandparents a protein bar they would probably frown, take one bite and spit it out. They would not consider a protein bar to be food because it contains no recognizable ingredients, and therefore has no recognizable taste. And when you told them how much it cost per ounce, they would laugh at you. The more processing it takes to make a food, the more expensive it becomes per ounce, and the more profit the food manufacturer makes. So of course, food companies try hardest to sell their most highly processed foods by heavily advertising them. So why do people buy them? For the convenience (I think protein bars would survive a nuclear war), and because we think they are good for us. However, in my experience the people who rely on highly processed foods such as protein bars are less healthy than people who eat “real” food. Protein bars are just another type of fast food, and we all know that fast food is unhealthy. The trend towards increasing proportions of fast food and processed foods in our diets has led to an epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes in the U.S..

One of the most damning indictments of industrial agriculture is that it is unethical. People sometimes joke about where the meat in their hot dog came from, usually agreeing “you don’t want to know”. We sometimes hear from animal rights groups about atrocities committed in slaughterhouses, but those groups have lost credibility in the eyes of much of the public, and the average person can’t just walk into a slaughterhouse to verify the claims. It’s amazing to me that animal feedlots have not been subjected to greater public scrutiny. Part of the problem may be that the American public still has a soft spot in their hearts for farmers, and they don’t want to hassle them, but again it is not family farmers but large corporations that run CAFOs. Why do the media and the public handle them with kid gloves? I’ve read about reporters being turned away at the doors of CAFOs (e.g., [2]), but that never stopped investigative journalists in the past. As a result, I don’t know as much about CAFOs, slaughterhouses, and food processing as I should (I almost wrote “As I would like”, but I’m not sure I would like to know, which may explain the public being satisfied to be left in the dark). But I have read about what happens to egg-laying chickens [2], and it so upset me that ever since I read about it I have paid 4x as much for cage-free eggs.

In conclusion, the food production system in the U.S. is seriously flawed because it harms human health, it degrades the environment, and it is unethical. It is broken because the federal government’s subsidy system rewards the overproduction of corn. These subsidies make processed foods made from corn inexpensive, leading to the expansion of fast food companies such as McDonald’s. In fact, McDonald’s is probably the primary beneficiary of farm subsidies. The goal of our food production system is to maximize productivity, so we subsidize Happy Meals but not healthy meals. In 1973 we decided as a country to produce as many calories per acre as possible, and that is when America started getting fat. We now live in the "age of plenty", eating more calories than in 1970 but spending only half as much of our salaries on food (currently on average we use 16-17% of our salaries to buy food compared to about 30% in 1970). On the plus side, industrial agriculture requires fewer people to produce food, freeing people to do other things, and very few people in the U.S. are starving. But is industrial agriculture good for us? And is it good for the environment? I think the answer to both questions is no.

Pollan [1] lists some simple principles for improving agriculture in the U.S.. Improved Food Policies should: 1) strive to produce a healthful diet for all people; increase the quality and diversity of calories rather than the quantity. 2) aim to improve the resilience, safety, and security of our food supply. 3) reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change. He notes that "while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food". To make food production more sustainable he recommends that we resolarize farms, reregionalize the food system, and rebuild America's food culture. He ends by listing "21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people, and to mitigate climate change." As noted by Brown [3], “"The wildcard in the food prospect is climate change. Crop ecologists estimate that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in grain yields."

What changes can we make in agriculture to make sure that it can feed the 10 billion people predicted to be on the planet in 2010? Is it even possible to adequately feed that many people? It depends on what they eat [4]. If everyone on earth becomes a vegetarian, then it may be possible.

Until the Green Revolution the limiting factors on agricultural yield were nutrient availability and soil moisture. Using energy from oil, farmers erased these constraints by applying oil-derived fertilizers and pumping water for irrigation. An eleven-fold increase in fertilizer use combined with a three-fold increase in irrigated area and the adoption of high-yielding hybrids of corn, wheat, and rice led to a tripling of world grain harvest [3] (Fig. World Grain Production and Consumption). However, in many areas this high-intensity agriculture is unsustainable because it relies on the non-renewable resources oil and deep groundwater. Like oil, on a human timescale deep groundwater is a single-use resource: once we use it, it's gone. And oil and water shortages are appearing nearly simultaneously, giving farmers a double-whammy. This may cause grain production to actually decrease in the near future. Since demand continues to increase due to the annual addition of roughly 70 million people per year and the expanding use of grains as biofuels, the outlook is for increasing grain prices and increasing numbers of hungry poor people. In addition to grain shortages, we must also worry about the decline in the world fish harvest due to the recent collapse of some marine fisheries. The per capita wild fish harvest is now lower per capita than at any time since the early 1960’s (Fig. World Wild Fish Harvest Per Person). Catastrophists point to these trends and claim we are facing a global food crisis, but their predictions in the past have frequently proved inaccurate. For example, catastrophist Brown made the following food supply predictions that are obviously inaccurate: "Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices" (Brown 1974); "Global food insecurity is increasing...the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing" (Brown 1981). However, we have to admit that the current trends are troubling, and that we have to come up with new solutions to prevent a global food crisis and sustainably produce an adequate food supply for 10 billion people.

Perhaps the biggest problem in affluent countries like the U.S. is that we now take food for granted. As observed by Smil [4]: “When judged by the allocation of labor force, ours are predominantly service economies. They depend, however, no less than millennia ago, on adequate food production. I find it astonishing that this truism is so widely, and so easily, discounted. Saving, as so many economists do, that agriculture does not matter as much as it used to because it now accounts for just a few percentage points of the GDP betrays a touchingly naive trust in arbitrary accounting procedures and the most profound ignorance of the real world. Our postmodern’ civilization would do quite well without Microsoft and Oracle, without ATMs and the WWW—but it would disintegrate in a matter of years without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, and it would collapse in a matter of months without thriving bacteria. Our first duty is to take care of these true essentials.”

How can we expand agricultural yield in a sustainable way? One approach is to breed crop varieties that we can grow in arid and cold regions that are currently not farmable. Another is to multicrop, i.e., to grow two or three crops each year rather than harvesting one and then leaving the land bare and unproductive for the rest of the year. China has used some of these methods to greatly increase their food production. Some catastrophists like Brown predicted widespread starvation in China in the 1980's-1990's (see [4]), but China is now a grain exporter.

To avoid future global starvation we need to stabilize world population, change our buying and eating habits (pay the true cost of food by being willing to pay extra for organic foods), move down the food chain by becoming vegetarian (eat foods from lower trophic levels in the food chain), stop growing crops for fuel, develop less energy-intensive forms of agriculture such as no-till farming, and use water in a sustainable way (no deep groundwater mining) by raising water productivity [3]. These topics will be explored in later chapters.

1. Pollan, M., The Food Issue: Farmer in Chief, in New York Times. 2008: New York, NY

2. Pollan, M., The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 2007.

3. Brown, L., Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. 2008, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

4. Smil, V., Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-first century. 2000, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Food

"I believe that the great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell. As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. We can learn to synthesize material for every human need from things that grow." — George Washington Carver

Most people are unaware of the radical changes in food production since WWII. One hundred years ago most people lived and worked on farms; today most people do not, and many have never even been on a farm. We have changed from an agrarian society to an industrial society. As a result, most people think that food is produced the same way it was 100 years ago. I personally knew that there were significant changes, but reading Michael Pollans’ book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] was a revelation to me, and as I’ve read more I’ve continued to be amazed and sometimes appalled at current food production practices in the U.S..

The changes began with the Green Revolution in the middle of the 20^th century. Through the use of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, new varieties of crops, use of new pesticides and herbicides, and industrialized systems, factory farms were able to greatly increase the grain yield (amount harvested per unit acre). This industrial system of agriculture is unsustainable. It relies on energy from a non-renewable resource, oil [2]. On average, it now takes ~10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food energy. In the process, oil-derived fertilizers and toxic pesticides and herbicides are used, and CO₂ is emitted, in great quantities. Massive scale farming also began the era of perverse subsidies, perverse because they are harmful both to the environment and to the economy. Examples include paying farmers to overproduce crops such as corn and to leave fields bare during growing seasons, which can cause erosion and soil depletion, instead of employing crop rotation. Intensive agriculture also requires more water, and has led to the overuse of groundwater and falling water tables. Also, the standardization of crop strains during the green revolution has resulted in decreased natural and agricultural biodiversity. With less biodiversity, the food supply is at a greater risk to pathogens. In sum, the green revolution led to an energy-intensive, monoculture style of farming that is worse for the environment and produces food that is less healthy. You can also argue that it allowed for an expansion of the population, which allowed for an even greater negative impact on the environment. And as the growth in yield slowed, it was overtaken by the increase in population, so by 1985 the per capita production of crops began to decline, and grain reserves began to decrease [3].

Further changes began in 1973, when Secretary of the Interior Earl Butz made monumental changes in the way federal government dealt with farmers. Prior to 1973 the government paid farmers to let practice crop rotation (i.e., let soil lie fallow), generally by planting legumes every fourth year to replenish critical nutrients such as nitrogen in the soil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation). For example, soybeans are commonly rotated with corn so that the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in soybean roots can replace the nitrate extracted from the soil by corn. By controlling the amount of food produced, the government stabilized food prices and kept grain prices high enough to keep agriculture profitable. Butz thought it was wasteful to pay farmers to not plant the primary crop, usually cereals such as corn and wheat, especially when we could replace soil nitrogen using industrial chemicals produced from oil, so he changed the farm program. The emphasis was now on increased quantity rather than quality. Americans wanted cheap food, and large surpluses of grains like corn kept prices so low that the government had to start subsidizing grain farmers to keep them in business.

To increase efficiency, farms grew in size, and most family farms went under or were purchased by corporate farms. New corn hybrids were bred to withstand higher planting densities and tolerate the application of herbicides; the goal was to maximize the number of food calories produced per acre of land. But most of the corn grown today is less nutritious because it was bred for increased starch (larger endosperm), which results in a lower proportion of protein (smaller germ). And it is practically inedible for humans; farmers rarely eat the food they grow today.

Soon the corn surpluses became so large that new markets had to be developed. It was found that beef could be made more cheaply by force-feeding corn to cattle in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) rather than letting cattle graze on grass. Americans preferred the marbled, higher fat content beef that was produced: Grass-fed beef has 1.3% saturated fat, while CAFO cows have 8% fat because they are confined to small areas and do not get any exercise. Because cows did not evolve to eat corn, their bodies are unable to digest it properly. After about five months of eating corn, cows usually develop acidosis, where excess stomach acids eat through the stomach lining and produce ulcers. To combat the effects of acidosis, livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics used in the U.S.. Because of problems related to a corn diet, cows are usually killed after living only 140-150 days; it’s unlikely they would live much longer if allowed to. The cows often have trouble walking to the slaughterhouse because they never develop the necessary muscles. It’s sadly pathetic to see a cow flopping on the ground, unable to walk toward its’ own death.

But we still had too much corn. Why not use corn as a sweetener? Americans have a sweet tooth, but the price of sugar from sugar cane was high, and Americans like cheap food. So in the 1970's food companies replaced sugar with High fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Since 1970 the average number of calories from sweeteners in the American diet has increased 30% [4]. Much of that comes from drinking soda pop, which used to contain sugar but now contains HFCS. If you read ingredient labels, you know that most of the processed foods you eat contain HFCS. Some, like pancake (not maple) syrup, are almost entirely HFCS. For our ancestors wheat was the dominant grain crop, but for us it is corn. Corn is now so widespread in our diet that is reflected in the carbon isotope composition of our hair. As a grass, corn uses a process called C4 photosynthesis that produces C with a higher ¹³C/¹²C ratio than non-grasses like wheat that use C3 photosynthesis and have lower ¹³C/¹²C. The hair of Americans typically has ¹³C/¹²C even higher than that of Mexicans, suggesting that we eat more corn than the true “People of the Corn” (corn originated in southern Mexico). We now eat and drink corn, and the animals we eat ate corn, so almost all of the food we take in is derived from corn.

But still we have too much corn. Why not use corn as a fuel? We could cut subsidies and thereby stop encouraging the overproduction of corn, but that would be politically unpopular: stop giving money to our farmers? Again, voters have a quaint, outdated image of the American farmer and his family, when in reality most farms today are owned by corporations. So President Bush had a great idea that would prop up the ebbing popularity if his political party: pay farmers to grow fuel. When this decision was made in 2007, the price of oil was on the increase. When it reaches a certain level, corn becomes more valuable as a fuel than as a food. So farmers started to sell their corn for use in the production of ethanol, and Americans felt good because when they gassed up their flex-cars they were helping Americas’ farmers and decreasing pollution. However, there is one fatal flaw in logic that you may have deduced. A huge amount of oil is used to produce that corn, so in reality you are not using any less oil to fuel your car even if you use 100% ethanol; you are simply paying Americas’ farmers to grow more corn that we don’t need. Today roughly 50% of corn today goes to feedlots; 32% is exported or turned into ethanol; and the rest is turned into corn sweetener (high fructose corn syrup).

1. Pollan, M., The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 2007.

2. Manning, R., The Oil We Eat: Tracing the Food Chain Back to Iraq, in Harper's Magazine. 2004

3. Wilson, E.O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1998, New York, NY: Vintage Books. 367.

4. Woolf, A., King Corn. 2007