Rural life is extremely energy intense, especially in terms of oil. Exurban living – people living “consumer lives with prettier views” – depends on very long supply lines. Alex Stefan at Worldchanging explains why the exurban lifestyle is not only not “green”, it is at risk in an environment where energy prices can go nowhere but up.

[W]e know that big, dense cities are greener; that the energy used in shipping food is a small portion of its overall impact, that transit is more energy efficient than driving (and indeed, that cars are the largest contributor to climate change), and that the benefits of urban living in compact, walkable, wired communities can extend far beyond living in smaller homes, served by more efficient infrastructure and not owning a car, to include a dramatic overall drop in one’s environmental impact. What’s more, we know why these things are so[.]

Unfortunately for people living in rural areas, we know a lot more about how to live a prosperous-yet-low-impact urban life than we do about how to live a rural life of equal prosperity with a small ecological footprint. Rural areas are poorer than urban areas, and offer fewer opportunities. Envisioning how people in rural areas  will be able to prosper and live decent lives  in an environment bereft of cheap and abundant energy is a challenge that has yet to be faced.

The planet is beset with a number of unprecedented crises that, as Dennis Meadows points out, are symptomatic of an underlying problem: exponential physical growth in a finite world.

At Countercurrents.org, Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a compelling case that “going local” – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations – may be the single most effective thing we can do to begin to tackle the problem.

Norberg-Hodge points to food as a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localization.  Local food systems can help reinvigorate entire rural economies and have social and environmental benefits:

• While globalized agriculture demands monocultural production of cash crops, a food system oriented towards local and regional markets gives farmers incentives to diversify.
• Diversity creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species.
• Diversified farms can get by without heavy machinery or heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• Most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen.
• Small diversified farms employ more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.
• Local food systems provide better food security.
• Small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures.

Agribusiness interests dominate at the state, national, and international levels. For example, the Agribusiness Council is upfront about its aspirations for dominance of the global food system:

The Agribusiness Council (ABC) is a private, nonprofit/tax-exempt, membership organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. agro-industrial competitiveness through programs which highlight international trade and development potentials as well as broad issues which encompass several individual agribusiness sectors and require a “food systems” approach. Examples of such issues are commercialization of new technology/crops, environmental impacts, human resource development, trade and investment policy, natural resource management, and rural development.

touts its incestuous relationship with  the U.S. government:

Initiated under Federal government auspices by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, The Agribusiness Council was formed by a group of business, academic, foundation and government leaders in order to facilitate American agribusiness participation in agricultural trade and development programs with developing countries – and represent private-sector agriculture interests to Federal government decision-makers.

and makes no bones about its objectives:

As an organization with international linkages, The Agribusiness Council seeks to strengthen the U.S. agricultural sector’s international outreach through stimulating private enterprise trade and investment solutions in Third World agro-industrial development.

Agribusiness interests may be too entrenched and government too corrupt to change. But we can change. We have the power to opt out of the global food system and to begin to grow local food systems, from the ground up.

We are in the midst of a time of great uncertainty about the future. Peak oil threatens to disrupt not only global financial systems, but also “the economy” as we have come to think of it as an engine of inevitable growth. Even more serious but perhaps longer term, global warming and climate change threaten to disrupt the 10,000 year period of climate stability that allowed human civilization to emerge and the ecosystems within which all species on Earth – including humans – are enmeshed.

For all species, including humans, nothing is more critical than food. Jason Bradford in a post at The Oil Drum argues that reliability of food production in the face of change requires resilience rather than efficiency. A food production system capable of surviving disruptions and failures and of responding quickly to changing circumstances is essential.

Our existing food system is not resilient. As a result of government policies, financial pressures, cheap fossil fuels, and market trends over the past several decades, our food system has become dominated by a relatively few large players. As a result, our food system has become rigid and brittle.

The key to resilience in social-ecological systems is diversity. Biodiversity plays a crucial role by providing functional redundancy. Social and economic systems are no different.

Bradford sketches out what a resilient farm might look like:

A resilient farm has diversified operations to buffer against volatility. The benefits of diversity accrue in many ways.

Organic and especially agroecological farms are less dependent upon outside inputs that can change in price rapidly and unpredictably. Crop rotation plans include many species of plants and animals that are complementary in functions, such as legumes fixing nitrogen, grasses building soil carbon, and animal manures making nutrients more readily available to plants. Instead of buying mechanized services or fertility inputs, the farm integrates the functional diversity of life to create synergies.

Inherent diversity means no single crop failure will ruin the farm, and soil imbalances are prevented. The focus is on soil health, with all fields going through periods of planting in perennial and deeply rooted species to build soil organic matter and mobilize minerals such as phosphorus from deep layers. Fungi associating with roots locate source rock and solubilize minerals that are trans-located to leaves. Topsoil fertility is therefore built from below.

Landscape structure is created to provide habitat for native and naturalized species that participate positively in the farm food web, such as pollinators and predators. No need to buy pesticides when raptors have homes in the trees, predatory wasps have nectar sources, frogs can breed in clean water, and ground beetles have zones of refuge from tillage, for example.

While the emphasis is on letting the biology do the work, renewable energy infrastructure also creates resilience. Farms are often ideal places for wind and solar technologies, and on-farm biofuels are likely to have positive energy returns.

A resilient food system requires in the farm economy as well. Creating healthy and resilient rural economies requires transforming the entirety of our food system.

What might healthy and resilient rural economies look like? Again, Bradford sketches an outline:

It will be organized akin to an ecosystem, or food web. Farms and renewable energy infrastructure occupy the level of primary producers, with businesses acting as conduits for feeding omnivorous humans. In contrast to our current food system, which is linear in structure, the future food system will cycle nutrients back to the farm. This structural constraint will mean that much more food is grown for local populations.

Farms might be more self-sufficient, producing a wide variety of products, for trade, barter, and gifting as well as cash sales. This is a strategy many of our friends are already pursuing, seeking to diversify their income sources and means of support as a way to increase their personal financial resilience.

There structure impediments to our markets which inhibit building resilience. For example, the best and often the only use for much of Oregon’s farm land – even in the Willamette Valley, especially where irrigation is not available – is  as pasture. Grass-fed livestock avoids the health and environmental problems associated with grain-fed livestock and feedlots, while recycling nutrients back into the soil. But the lack of inspected slaughterhouses and butchering facilities means that marketing is a challenge, especially for small-scale producers, as access to retail customers is restricted to the big players.

Similarly, the dominance of giant chain supermarkets makes it difficult for local producers to find outlets for their goods. Buyers for the chains can’t be bothered with small producers. You have to go to independent locally-owned markets like the First Alternative Co-op in Corvallis or to an online marketplace like Eugene Local Foods to find locally grown produce, local cheeses, or locally raised meats and poultry.

Developers push “destination resorts” as a boost to rural economies. But destination resorts don’t do anything for the people already living there – rather, they are pretty much self-contained units, alien invaders that remain distinct and disconnected from the local rural economy. For an idea of a model of tourism that is immersed in the local rural economy looks like, look to France and gîtes ruraux – accommodations at a private farm that can be rented for a week, a weekend, or a short stay.  Gîtes foster a real relationship between the owner of the property, the visitor, and the surrounding countryside. The additional income goes straight to farmers and other residents of the rural area, adding resilience to the local rural economy. In France, gîtes are vigoroulsy promoted by the government.

So here’s an impromptu agenda for beginning to build healthy and resilient rural economies: allow and encourage local processing of poultry and livestock; encourage independent, local markets; and authorize and promote direct rural tourism.

More ideas, anyone?

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

• Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
• Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
• Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
• Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
• Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
• Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
• Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
• Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.

Here’s a great idea from Portland: a tool lending library. The Oregonian has the story:

If you need a table saw, a 10-foot pipe clamp or a 20-foot pruner, you’ve normally got three choices: Buy it, rent it or borrow it from a neighbor.

Portland is fast becoming a leader in a fourth way: checking it out for free at a tool lending library.

The city’s first nonprofit tool library, founded in 2004 in North Portland, is up to 2,300 members. Its second, in Northeast, has already drawn 800 members in 16 months and just expanded to a far bigger space. A third, in southeast Portland, is scheduled to open this spring, which would make Portland the only U.S. city with a trio.

The volunteer-run tool libraries offer low-cost home and garden lessons as well as tools. They help people save money and connect to their community.

Imagine: guys would no longer have an excuse to stuff their garages with every tool they see at Home Depot. Of course, that wouldn’t stop them. On a positive note, divorce or death (as males mostly croak first) coupled with the surviving spouse’s desire to sweep away the past means a good portion of these boy toys might eventually end up in the library:

About 900 of the more than 1,100 tools at the Northeast Portland Tool Library were donated, helping give the library a hardware store’s worth of inventory.

Now that the dust from the collapse of the Copenhagen talks has settled, we can begin to see what actually happened:  the old world ended at Copenhagen.

Paul Gilding at Business Spectator observes that while Copenhagen failed to deliver action on reducing emissions, it delivered a very clear outcome. It shattered assumptions that had previously framed the debate and so provided an historic shift in the approach to the issue. The world stopped debating the rules of physics and chemistry. As a result, old assumptions about the pace of change and the process by which it would be delivered were finished.

After Copenhagen, it is clear that when the change does come, the pace will be rapid, the process chaotic and the transformation radical. The attempt at consensus is over. Power has shifted to a new club whose membership is dominated by the world’s biggest emitter – the U.S.; China, the world’s second biggest; and India, biggest newcomer in emitter circles.

After Copenhagen, we know that either coal is finished, or Earth’s climate as we know it is finished. The world’s approach to climate change before Copenhagen – embodied in the Kyoto protocol – is too complex and misses the key objective, which is to keep coal (and unconventional sources of oil such as tar sands) in the ground. Coal is the target: every coal mine, every coal company, every coal train and ship.

When governments begin prohibiting new coal plants and demanding that existing plants be phased out, we’ll know they’ve become serious about global warming.

Fat chance, given the implications for the global economy.

Some, like James Hansen, believe it’s both necessary and possible to maintain our high-energy economy. He puts his faith in a techno-miracle: 4th generation nuclear, relying on conventional nuclear to carry us through to the bright day when unlimited, safe power becomes a reality.

Others, such as Jan Lundberg, think we’ll have to give our fantasies of dominating nature and of endless economic growth, reject an unworkable system and culture, and look to the only sustainable model humanity has known: indigenous, traditional society based on tribes.

Then others, such as John Michael Greer, think it’s foolish to imagine that our political leaders could do anything other than what they are doing: try at all costs to keep the present system running as best they can all the while knowing that the fossil fuels necessary to sustain it are being exhausted, putting off the inevitable explosion as long as possible. What will be, will be; and we’re not likely to end up with anything like the complex, centralized nation-states we know today.

I suspect they’re all on to something. While pulling a nuclear rabbit out of the hat seems unlikely, maybe solar thermal  could keep the lights on, however dim. Here, we’re growing food, getting to know others around us who do the same or contribute in other ways, doing our best to help and support each other. Disillusion has set in – we may at last be getting over the illusion that the world will change with the outcome of the next election.

The old world ended at Copenhagen. The new world is beginning to be born, right here and before our eyes.

The Lazar Foundation has given a $1,000 grant to Post Carbon Oregon, saying it “is proud to support your work”.

The Lazar Foundation funds innovative and strategic projects that protect the environment in the Pacific Northwest: Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

We do this blog and our newsletter because we believe it is crucial for people to be thinking about what to do to meet the awesome challenges of our time. Peak oil is a threat to civilization as we know it; global warming is a threat not only to our local environment, but to the stability of Earth’s ecosystems upon which all life – including human life – depends. But the funding to do this work has proved to be extremely sparse. So we’ve been doing it on a very short and thin shoestring.

All of us at Goal One Institute are profoundly grateful to The Lazar Foundation for their financial support – and especially for their recognition of the importance of our work.

By Irina Just

A few years ago, downtown Lebanon received its final deathblow when the city council approved the new Super Wal-Mart at the south end of town.

But some Lebanonistas still refuse to surrender. This spring, a group of enthusiastic folk (labeling themselves with the unfortunate moniker “partners for progress”) under the motto “working together for a brighter future” started a Thursday afternoon farmers market – right in the heart of downtown Lebanon.

I was a skeptic, doubting that any effort to bring something new to downtown or to revitalize this misbegotten town would succeed. But from the first Thursday on, I was hooked.

I soon began to plan my entire week around Thursday afternoons. I compiled my shopping list all week long with Thursday afternoons in mind – but I would revise it on the spot should any fresh, new produce surprise me, to take advantage of the bounty of quality, home grown food and home made products. I no longer had to pine for big city markets such as the Pike Place Market I frequented when we lived in Seattle. I no longer had to drive to other farmers markets in Corvallis, Albany, or Sweet Home to get fresh, home grown food.

And what a draw! Vendors came from Jefferson, Harrisburg, Sweet Home, Lebanon and many places in between. There were no junk or antique dealers – just real, fresh, local foods and quality hand-made products.

I was intrigued by the idea that I could buy everything for my entire dinner right here, on a half-block stretch . . . and so I did. I bought pizza dough; bread; dessert cookies; all the veggies imaginable to prepare a week’s-worth of suppers and then more for canning or freezing; fruits for desserts, cakes and pies. I found salad stuff; herbs of all sorts; mushrooms locally grown or picked by hand, varieties I had never before heard of: lobster, pink & Phoenix oyster, chicken, ashy coral, fried chicken, hedgehog. There was organic goat cheese, made right here but usually available only in Portland or Eugene. There were flowers, cut and potted, soaps, lotions and potpourris; hand spun and knitted bags, hats and caps, handcrafted gifts and homemade preserves. And when the egg lady discovered there were only 11 eggs in her carton, she stuck a lemon cucumber in the 12th spot. “There, now it’s full”. I laughed and of course bought the mélange. And from the Worm Lady, I gleaned new insights into composting my kitchen scraps.

But Thursday afternoons in Lebanon were about more than buying great food and other things. It was a chance to chat with the vendors, to learn about their business, to share their experiences, successes, and failures. It was a chance to visit with other customers, to share recipes and ideas. It made for a perfect opportunity to meet your friends for a joint shopping spree. It was personal, direct, communal – and very lively.

The market ran from May 28 to September 24. For 18 weeks, once a week, a dozen dedicated farmers and producers spent four hours sitting in pouring rain, freezing cold, scorching heat, and all kinds of weather in between. They brought what they had grown, harvested, made or produced. I learned about crop failures, about the virtues of greenhouse tomatoes (available much earlier than mine!), about the rarity of some mushrooms, and the reason cheese wasn’t always available (you can’t milk a nursing goat!). I began to understand more about natural processes, about farmers’ problems as well as their successes – and I enjoyed what I discovered.

There was life in the street of downtown Lebanon, a real sense of community and camaraderie. I’ll miss those Thursday afternoons, and fervently hope the organizers will continue their efforts next year.

I will be there, shopping list in hand, ready to abandon it should a great find or a new variety appear to whet my proverbial appetite for fresh, local food, goods and services, with a dose of friendship thrown in gratis.

A post by Jason Bradford at The Oil Drum: Campfire is particularly interesting because it features a lengthy quote from Eugene’s Mary Wood in which she explains how a “carbon challenge” from Mayor Kitty Piercy asking residents to do two new things a month to reduce carbon resulted in changing her and her family’s life. Here’s just a bit of it:

At some point along the way, I noticed that Mayor Kitty Piercy’s carbon challenge had evolved into a new – and infinitely richer – way of life for us. The challenge of two carbon-reducing initiatives a month had grown into a family enterprise, a source of joy and pride, a learning experience, a family identity, and a well-spring of self-esteem and responsibility for our children. Perhaps most important, it had become a shared statement of purpose, a moral fabric for family life – a daily expression of the trust covenant shared with our children. My husband often comes in from the garden and says, “It’s a wonderful life.” And I have to agree. I invite you to embrace this new world ahead — with courage, passion, and a sense of adventure — and join in the Great Family Turning.

That’s a wonderful lesson. Giving up our perverse obsession with growth doesn’t mean living poorer lives. Rather, it means living richer lives, lives infused with purpose, meaning, and joy.

In October 2008 San Francisco formed a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force charged with assessing the impact of declining supplies and rising prices of fossil fuels and coming up with a plan to mitigate the ill effects. Now the Task Force has posted a working draft of its final report.

To avoid what the Task Force sees as “a much darker future,” the report makes more than 70 recommendations, including:

• Energy: conduct waste audit, develop diverse renewable wind, solar, & tidal energy plan, build smart grid, consider feed-in tariffs.
• Economy: source locally; revise tax policies (”progressive” business taxes, carbon tax, demand-sensitive parking fees, city vehicle tax, gasoline tax based on price floor), invest in infrastructure based on future viability (no “orphan” projects, invest in short-haul water freight, rail).
• Food security: buy local, create city Board of Agriculture, provide incentives to use vacant land available for food production, make city parks and golf courses available for garden plots, tax fast food to fund local food production, plant fruit & nut trees along streets, tear up concrete & plant street-side gardens, allow small-scale animal husbandry, create neighborhood compost centers.
• Transportation: impose congestion & parking charges; make intercity & regional public transit cheap, convenient, direct, reliable; build mixed-use neighborhoods, encourage telecommuting, make biking safe & convenient and establish bike-share program, promote car-free lifestyle & make it possible, switch freight from trucks to rail & water.
• Built environment: require all new buildings to be zero energy, retrofit existing buildings, include blower test in building inspections, require energy audit on sale or remodel, use solar assessment district to finance solar installations.
• Protecting vulnerable populations: Implement grow-your-own food program for low income families, eliminate all parking requirements for new residential construction & convert garage space to living space, provide discounted passes for public transit, implement bicycle & neighborhood electric vehicle plan, provide programs to reduce energy use for low-income families esp. renters, prepare rationing plan to allocate resources during shortages on per capita basis.

The task force is expected to finalize the report by today (Tuesday March 17) and then submit it to the Board of Supervisors.