At long last, our poultry project is beginning to yield results.

Facilities are through the shake-down period and running smoothly, and we’ve been collecting an increasing number of eggs over the last few weeks.

Muscovies are at the water trough (there are automatic waterers inside the shed).

The trough is big enough so that the ducks can get in and swim around a bit, which they seem to enjoy immensely. This trough used to be right on the other side of the fence, belonging to the sheep. But the ducks much preferred the large trough to their small tub, and were constantly going under, over, around and through the fence to get at the sheep’s water. So we gave up and switched. Note the “duck deck” under the trough. Turns out ducks love to eat mud. The trough quickly came to be perched on a mesa. Putting a 4″ x 8′ deck under the trough solved the problem.

Two Khaki Campbell drakes and Khaki Campbell and Rouen hens are at the outside feeder.

The ducks are finally getting old enough to begin laying eggs. And this week, off some went to the slaughterhouse – all seven Pekins, and all but one of the Rouen and Khaki Campbell drakes. Or at least that was the intent. One of the Khaki Campbell males slipped out the door while I was gathering them all up (I had neglected to install a latch that could be operated from the inside, an oversight that has since been corrected) and, in the dim light of pre-dawn, I inadvertently replaced it with an unlucky Rouen drake. Which is why you see two Khaki Cambell drakes and no Rouen drake in the photo.

fortunately for us Scio Poultry Processing is just up the road a piece. It’s a soon-to-be USDA-inspected facility owned and operated by our friends Joe and Karen Schueller at Rain Shadow El Rancho.

The ducks arrive in crates.

Go in the front door, and come out in cryovac packages.

That’s a dozen ducks, which should be plenty for holiday dinners and more.

We chose to raise ducks rather than chickens because free-range chickens are readily available and affordable, whereas ducks are a delicacy, a luxury item we couldn’t otherwise afford. Getting the infrastructure in place was neither quick or nor particularly cheap, but now we have in place durable, efficient, predator-proof facilities adaptable for a wide variety of poultry.

David Korten, speaking at the recent Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California, says our economic system has not only failed – it’s evil, and deserves to die:

So what is real wealth? We might say it is anything that has a real intrinsic value: land, labor, knowledge, food, education.

Most valuable of all are those forms of wealth that are beyond price: Love, a healthy, happy child, a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution, membership in a strong caring community, a healthy vibrant natural environment, peace—none of which find any place on Wall Street balance sheets or in our calculations of GDP.

Pull back the curtain, as the financial crash has done, and the truth is revealed that Wall Street acquires its power by destroying real living wealth to create phantom financial wealth. Wall Street is more than immoral, it is an institutional manifestation of evil.

The full text of Korten’s speech was published in Yes Magazine. A one-page version is not available, so you have to click through five pages (most annoying!). The excerpt quoted about is found on the second page.

Korten argues that our economic and political systems no longer work for or protect the public interest:

From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached.

Korten pleads for an economic system based on three foundational principles: ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy; and for a shift from a “production-oriented” measurement system to one focused on the well-being of current and future generations.

Bring down Wall Street? Fat chance. But then again, who could have imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse and disappear, virtually overnight?

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.

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

Gail Tverberg at The Oil Drum has a post exploring the unthinkable: what if declining energy supplies mean that the global economy in the future will be shrinking rather than growing? This is a possibility politicians cannot even begin to voice, much less confront bravely and honestly.

The only politically palatable analysis of the current crisis assumes that we’re merely in the downward part of a cycle of economic activity that will inevitably go back up if only we can apply the right stimulus and keep global financial institutions patched together long enough to weather the storm.

But the reality we are banging into is that the earth is finite and we are starting to reach some of its limitations. We face immediate energy and climate crises of monumental proportions. As Daniel Lerch argues at Post Carbon Institute, the problems at hand require not a few trillion dollars thrown at them but fundamental changes in how the modern industrial world works.

Tverberg has this graph illustrating it’s easy to pay for “promises” is when the economy is growing.

But the reverse is true when the economy is shrinking rather than growing: the burden of “promises” – and debt, too (which is a “promise” to pay interest plus principle), – quickly becomes crushing.

In an economic contraction paradigm, it no longer makes sense to either borrow or to lend except in the rarest of circumstances.

Lerch argues we have not diagnosed the problem correctly. We have failed to recognize that we’re now in a “World Without Cheap Oil,” “Beyond the Limits to Growth.” Because we have misdiagnosed the problem, we are not pursuing the correct solutions.

We have crossed an historic turning point that has taken us outside the frame of what we thought possible. The world no longer works the way we have come to expect, and the old way of doing things no longer applies. Looking ahead a few decades, it seems likely that the world will be very much poorer (at least as traditionally measured by GDP).

We still think and act as if the world goes on as before. How much precious resources will we waste trying to sustain the unsustainable? The realities of our situation demand that our remaining capital be husbanded and directed only to investments that make sense within a no-growth or negative-growth environment.

Investments in energy conservation, non-carbon renewable energy with high EROEI, and in maintaining, improving, and equitably distributing the goods and services that result in high quality of life make sense and are crucial. There’s no reason a decline in GDP need mean a decline in quality of life, as GDP has always been a  crude and poor proxy for human happiness and well-being.

Yet we seem determined to squander resources blindly and furiously in one last attempt to keep the growth bubble inflating and restore business as usual. The drama in our politics today is how long the illusion can be maintained – and what happens when falters.

At this moment, after Obama’s election and before choices or decisions are made that begin to foreclose other options, all seems possible. Letters of advice to the president elect proliferate, projecting the hopes and aspirations of the writers onto the blank slate of as yet unknown and unbounded journey.

Rather than add to a mountain of unsought advice doomed to be ignored, I think it more valuable to take stock of this moment in history and consider where we must go, whether Obama leads us in that direction or not.

Our current economic collapse is unlike any that we’ve seen before, our dream of progress (enabled by a one-time exploitation of fossil fuels) turned into a nightmare of a plundered and broken Earth. The national epiphany that peak oil will precipitate will be the beginning of the great transition that will dominate the U.S. government and the world in the years to come. The reality of peak oil will force a massive overhaul of our economy, including transportation, lifestyles, jobs, agriculture, and industrial production.

The job we have assigned economists is to maintain economic growth. But that’s a limited and twisted understanding of what an “economy” is. The word economy can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos, “one who manages a household.” We need to establish new “rules for the house” -  a new culture – based on a sustainable economy. A sustainable economy, rather than hubristically seek unlimited growth, would recognize and respect the limits and constraints imposed by the “household” that is Earth. Rather than infinite monetary wealth, it would value community, economic justice, and sufficiency.

The overhaul is already in its incipient phase. Al Gore is calling for investment in energy efficiency, renewable power generation – including public investment in wind, solar and geothermal technology – and the creation of a unified national smart grid. Chinese and U.N. officials are calling for the U.S. and other western nations to change their profligate lifestyles and tackle climate change.

The journey before us is ours. As we have learned from hard experience, a leader may help or hinder us along the way. This time, we hope and pray we have chosen well.

This is a guest post by John Foster.

Corvallis has embarked on a community wide sustainability project that could serve as a model for other communities. The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition seeks to:

• Reduce waste and end fossil fuel dependence.
• Eliminate the use of persistent chemicals and synthetic substances.
• Ultimately eliminate the community’s contribution to encroachment on nature.
• Support people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.

The coalition is supported by about 90 organizations including the City government.  It is not, however, a government body.

At the coalition’s first Town Hall meeting, on 31 March, about 600 participants, meeting in small groups, discussed more specific goals for the community.  During the following weeks volunteer working groups held meetings  to refine these goals.   There were 12 groups covering subjects ranging from Cultural Diversity to Waste Disposal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Sustainable Development Commission, whose members are appointed by the city of Portland and Multnomah County, are asking that planners take a second, harder look at the proposed CRC (Columbia River Crossing) – a $4.2 billion project that includes a new 12-lane toll bridge.

The commission points out that people already are driving less because of rising gas prices and that the need to address climate change is urgent. They want an updated traffic analysis using current gas prices and considering other factors, with review by an independent panel with expertise in climate policy, greenhouse gases and oil price and supply volatility.

Jeffvail at The Oil Drum attacks our enshrinement of “growth” from a novel direction.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”: Read the rest of this entry »

John Michael Greer at his site The Archdruid Report (also available at Energy Bulletin) has a thoughtful piece titled “Pieces of the Puzzle,” pondering the uncertainties in our future. He begins by thinking about agriculture, then wanders into energy. He quite reasonably concludes that we’ll feel our way to the future through a process of trial and error.

“. . . nobody alive today has the least idea how an ecotechnic civilization – a society that can maintain relatively advanced technology on the basis of sustainable resources – might best be constructed. All the experience of the last three centuries has focused on the opposite end of the possible spectrum of technic societies, where you’ll find the civilizations that burn through nonrenewable resources at the fastest pace they can manage. We’ve followed that road just about as far as it can go, far enough that the dead end at its terminus should be visible to anyone who is willing to notice it. . .

“In energy, just as in agriculture and in many other fields, all we have are pieces of the puzzle. It will likely take ruthless sorting and a great deal of trial and error to make those pieces fit together in any sort of meaningful way.”

His advice that we not be “fixating on a single response” is both modest and wise. Achieving it will require that we rediscover within ourselves the ancient and universal spiritual practice of letting go of attachment.