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The catalyst for my latest stream-of-consciousness rambling is the MacArthur Maze Meltdown. A fuel tanker loaded with gasoline crashed in the early hours of April 29, 2007, and exploded. For two hours, 8,600 gallons of fuel burned in a fireball some 100 feet across – and the overpass sagged, buckled, and finally “draped itself over the lower roadway like a blanket.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/29/BAGVOPHQU46.DTL

On a human level, the thing that really leapt out at me was that the truck driver was left to fare as best he might. Burned and shocked, he staggered out of the mess and called a taxi to take him to hospital – while the emergency crews watched the blaze...the fire chief did say that after the fact he regretted not having sent a vehicle to help the man.

The day-by-day, blow-by-blow follow-ups on this almost-calamity saw blame thrown at the driver (who turned out to have served time for the possession of hard drugs, but has been clean and sober for more than a decade), the tanker (defective brakes), and the trucking company ( multiple citations for poor maintenance of its vehicles and flagrant violations of safety procedures).

Yet, these are all proximal causes – not the basal reason. The tanker, when all is said and done, was transporting fuel from a Chevron refinery in Benicia to replenish a gas station on Hegenbeger Road, in Oakland. So the basal cause of the towering inferno was the long-distance transportation of highly flammable fuel.

This is not the first time such an accident has happened. In 1995 a tanker carrying liquefied gas (a mixture of propane and methane) crashed and burned in the MacArthur Maze. Again, the basal cause was the moving of the material.

In this case, nobody was killed, and the contractor triumphantly finished the repair work so the interchange was opened ahead of deadline – two not-so-small miracles. Memorial Day motorists can take to an open road for their celebrations.

This is the core of my story: thinking and acting locally in terms of tangible energies. It's all about deciding that Small really is Beautiful. What if fuel, as well as food, were to be produced and consumed locally?

Mention “alternative fuel” and the kneejerk response is “ethanol.” Lately the press has been awash in stories about ethanol, both for and against. World hunger, whether or not corn-based ethanol provides more energy than it takes to produce it, the benefits of using the corn mountain produced by subsidised growers for the greatest possible monetary profit.

King Corn is seen as either Villain or Victor, yet the general mindset of the populace hasn't changed. The picture I get from these stories is that the oil refineries would be replaced with corn refineries – huge fermentation plants which would truck ethanol nationwide. My inner cynic suggests that ethanol-from-corn would be a boon to the oil industry, given that corn in the USA is a very heavy consumer of oil. From the massive oil-burning machines that plant the seeds, to the oil-derived fertilisers that mainline the plants for growth, to the oil-derived herbicides, fungicides and pesticides that protect the crop from competition and being eaten by animals other than ourselves, to the massive oil-burning machines that harvest the grain, and then the huge oil-burning trucks that haul the harvest to grain silos – this is a crop that gulps oil the way a tick gulps blood.

Ethanol is the active ingredient in plain old booze. And anybody can make it! Ask generations of moonshiners in Kentucky; or peasant farmers brewing up wine, marc, rakija, slivovitz, or tequila...or crush up a bunch of grapes in a bowl and leave them on the countertop in your kitchen. Toss a bunch of lawn clippings into a bucket. Stir some yeast into water and flour. You're making ethanol and carbon dioxide. Of course, you can't just pour this sludge into the tank of your car. The ethanol has to be extracted, nice and clean and ready to burn.

Again, this is not difficult. Take a pressure cooker and remove the pressure valve. Fill the cooker bottom with fermented material, clamp on the top. Attach a coil of copper tubing (any heat-resistant material will do, but copper is both cheap and soft, easy to work without special tools) to the valve hole, and run this tubing through a bucket of water; place a jug or bottle at the free end. Apply gentle heat to the pot – ethanol fractionates at only 79º Celsius/ 175º Fahrenheit, way below the boiling point of water. Ethanol will drip into your receptacle as long as there's alcohol present in the fermented material. This temperature is easily attainable with a solar still – even an inefficient, homemade solar oven concocted from a cardboard box and a roll of aluminium foil will get to 250 Fahrenheit. http://www.solarcooking.org/solarcooking-faq.htm

Ethanol does not freeze when water does, so another method of extraction is to filter the solids out of the mash, freeze the liquid, and drain off the alcohol. Paracelsus described the process in his 1527 book “Archidoxis,” but the principle was known and used for at least two thousand years before that.

There's nothing arcane, expensive, or difficult in ethanol production. Further, it's much easier to make ethanol from sugar than it is from starch. This is why Brazil can produce ethanol so cheaply, and get such a high rate of return over investment: Brazil uses sugarcane, getting 8 – 10 times as much energy from the finished product as it needs to make it. Corn, in the industrial mode, has to be ground, cooked, and chemically cracked before you can start fermenting it in sufficient volume to generate high profits.
http://cascadiascorecard.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/driving_with_al.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
http://www.canren.gc.ca/tech_appl/index.asp?CaID=2&PgId=116

There is no need to fixate on sugarcane either. There are other sources of sugars – or “easily fermentable carbohydrates” as they're more technically known.

There are fruits and vegetables – it certainly isn't necessary to pull these from the human food web either. What about the peels, pits, cores, overripe and damaged produce routinely discarded in bulk on a daily basis?. I have not been able to establish how many freezing, canning, and drying plants there are in the USA. What happens to all the tons and tons of “waste”? Could it be fed directly into a fermentation chamber and distilled for ethanol? Could the routinely discarded pallets, boxes, and other burnable waste provide the heat for this process – or could waste heat from the canning side of things keep the mash a-brewing? Or even provide heat for residential areas, as is already done in Germany?

There are other fuels than ethanol. There's biogas. And biogas is a major mostly wasted product of our ubiquitous landfills. USA-ers routinely toss some four pounds of trash per person per day. Less than one-quarter of this is recycled, leaving three pounds of garbage per person per day to go into landfills or to be incinerated. The jetstream sees to it that the air of every country gets well mixed to provide everybody on Earth an equal opportunity to inhale the noxious substances released by burning trash.

Landfills are potentially an energy gold mine. It is completely feasible that a well-designed plant could aerobically ferment waste for ethanol, channel the cooked material into a secondary chamber for anaerobic fermentation to harvest biogas (aka methane, aka swamp gas, aka mine damp), pipe that to turbines for generating electricity, and then mix the spent slurry with woodchips, sawdust, and other hard-to-break-down materials to make compost.

Imagine it: ethanol from waste in the tanks of smaller, lighter cars custom designed for alcohol; lights, refrigerators, and computers running off methane-fuelled power plants; said refrigerators filled with organically grown fruits and vegetables fed with compost; clothes-dryers spun and heated by gridded methane. To coin a pun, is all this a “pipe” dream?

Just two examples of dreams spilling into the day:
http://www.solidwasteauthority.org/consumers/methane/default.htm
http://epa.gov/methane

Shrimp farms are another major possible source of biogas; the discarded body parts are nitrogen-rich and decompose with abandon into a stinking, slimy mass – usually tossed lightheartedly into the nearest barely legal patch of ocean.

This has to be said: what of sewage, both human and that of other animals – like the millions of cattle, pigs, chickens, and dairy cows kept in close confinement, their excrement washed into noxious slurry lagoons? Properly used, this EEEEWWW!!!! factor material is extremely valuable. My historian friend Eluned tells me that in Victorian England, the much-vaunted gaslights that made streets safer and houses brighter and safer ran off gas tapped from the sewers running beneath the streets. I've read too that council trucks in recent times were fuelled by methanol – essentially dissolved methane. Science magazine ran a story on discovery of a catalyst for converting natural gas (methane) to methanol. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/280/5363/525
Methanol is the substance know colloquially as wood alcohol.

My favourite story, though, is of the Englishman, Harold Bates. Lacking a tiger for his tank, he stocked it with chickens. Though this conjures up visions of the Old Crate in Chicken Run, Bates' design was more practical and used hen droppings rather than their little yellow legs. http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/methane_bate.html
Bates is unfortunately history – but the Straus Family Creamery is still making it. http://www.strausfamilycreamery.com/?title=greenhouse%20gases

When discussing my first draft of this story with my dear friend Sharyn, she raised the issue of possible massive epidemics of influenza, and spread of other pathogens, through the use of excrement. So I went looking for facts, and this is what I found:

When producing biogas, the bulk wet waste will reach 35°C/96°F even without external sources of heat. This material is held in a sealed chamber, because the fermentation is anaerobic – no contact, therefore, with raw excrement. This table shows the kill times for pathogens in a fermentation tank.
Www.ias.unu.edu/proceedings/icibs/ecosan/zhang.html

Taking Salmonella as an example, even in a cool tank, 100% of the pathogens will be killed if the material is held for 44 days. At only 35°, almost blood temperature for a person, the bugs will be history after only seven days.

Suppose that, on the eighth day after the mass has heated to 35C, the slop is run into an aerobic fermentation chamber. Ethanol fractionates, ie, distills off, at 79°C/175°F. This is hotter than the temperature at which milk is pasteurized – 63°C for 30 minutes, or 72°C for 16 seconds.
http://www.foodsci.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/pasteurization.html

My experience with distilling rakija is that it takes about six hours to exhaust a pressure-cooker sized batch of grape skins. 16 seconds is roughly one-quarter of a minute, and there are 60 minutes in a hour. 4 x 60 x 6 = 1440 pasteurization units if I may put it that way.

Onto the third step. Pump the remaining liquid over dry material and conveyor belt it into a composting unit. Commercial compost is made at 130 – 140 °F; 54.4 – 60 °C.
http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/infosheets/Pss319/PSS319InProgress.htm

It seems unlikely that even the most resistant pathogen could survive this triple whammy.

Composting material is in itself a rich source of energy. The Grand Maitre of this clever process is Jean Pain, a French forester who turned a stretch of barren land into a small Eden. Reader's Digest ran a story on Pain in 1981; by then he'd been living better through Nature's chemistry for 15 years. His food, cooking and space heating, hot water, and fuel for his truck were all provided by brushwood.

http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/methane_pain.html
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/PeterBane/Jean_Pain.html
http://www.daenvis.org/technology/Jeanpan.htm

Here in California, every year there are massive forest fires. Homes are destroyed and sometimes lives are lost. The incidence increases as people push further and further into forests, building their houses amongst towering trees. Calls continually increase for more and more understorey clearing, to protect the human habitations. Why not cook up the brush a la Pain?

My USA friends assure me categorically that USA-ers would never go for Pain-energy! It would be so unsightly, for one thing! I fail to see the aesthetic attraction of the ubiquitous propane tanks, usually arrogantly squatting on concrete pads in front of the houses where the delivery trucks can back right up for refills. What about smells, and flies? Any proud backyard gardener will tell you that well-handled compost does not stink, or launch swarms of pesky Diptera carrying all the diseases in Creation. Furthermore, compost does not explode. For aesthetics: you only have to visit Solviva, at Hopland, California. You'd never know if they didn't tell you that the gorgeous pond-filled landscape is the sewage system.

I have been assured that neither USA-ers in general, nor the permitting agencies, would ever be able to think so far outside the box as to even recognise the concept of localised fuel production. It's so unAmerican, say my peers. Americans like to BUY things, and would rather use oil from Iraq in their cars than descend to methanol drawn from their own sewage. If true, this may well be the saddest epitaph ever written for a civilisation: “I didn't get my own hands dirty.”

Food production in the USA is firmly held in the corporate hands of just ten transnational corporations, which between them wield the whip hand over more than half of global foods. ConAgra, Cargill, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Philip Morris (much more than tobacco), Unilever, Gran Metro, Mais, Danone, Diageo/Guinness. Gary Nabhan, in Coming Home To Eat, tells of listening to a National Public Radio report that Cargill was buying out the Continental Grain Company, giving Cargill alone 45% of the world's grains, as well as 30% of the soybeans exported from the United States. The picture does not change when one replaces energy in the form of food with energy in the form of fuel – only the names of the top dogs. Whether you're in Texas, New York, Johannesburg, or rural England, you'll see Shell and Mobil signs flaunting above refuelling stations.

Returning to the ecosystem model, energy is generated in millions upon millions of microsites, and used where it's made. Plants position their solar arrays to best garner photons, locking solar power into carbohydrates and proteins. Animals, from the humblest spider mite to the mightiest elephant, eat the plants, disassemble the nutrients (just like anagrams) and recombine them to create their own tissues and power their own bodies. Nature does not pipe or tanker energy from site to site, extorting tolls along the way, in order to bloat a few organisms with more life than they could ever use.

Is it feasible for people, as individuals, as municipalities, counties, states, or countries, to follow the ecosystem model? That's an essay in its own right – watch this space!
©2007 Suzanne Ubick

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When Good Business is a Bad Business…or Let’s Play Monopoly

Lately I’ve had the bookworm’s dream ailment: flu bad enough to keep me in bed, mild enough after the first spiky fevers that I could read, and a pile of books from the library – including Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and Janine M. Benyus’s “Biomimicry.” I recently listened to the audiotape of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. My gluttonous revelry in this wealth of thought jarred like a Bay Area temblor when I came to Diamond’s distillate of his view of efficiency and prosperity.

In the afterword to “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Diamond tells two stories that purport to prove that the USA is more efficient than Germany and Japan, which are, he says, mistakenly revered as pinnacle achievers.

I use “USA” and “USA-ers” rather than the terms “America” and “Americans,” out of my training as a curatorial assistant in natural history museums, which demands accuracy in recording specimen origins, and out of respect for international conventions. The USA is one component of the Americas, which comprise the many nations of South America and Central America, as well as Mexico and Canada, which sovereign nations take up largish chunks of the continent of North America.

In the first story, Diamond tells how he and his wife take every chance they can to visit Germany and drink the “wonderful German beers.” They take an empty suitcase so they can bring home a stash of nectar for the drought awaiting them at home. Alas, says Diamond, the Germans are only 43% as efficient as USA makers. They have over 1000 beer makers, are equally as good as the USA at producing glass bottles and steel and rubber conveyor belts, but fail miserably at number of bottles filled; The USA, with only 63 major breweries, sells 23 billion liters of beer per year, twice that of all German brewers combined.

The German government protects its brewers from international competition, he says, through implementing beer purity laws that “are based on what German breweries put into beer and not what American, French and Swedish breweries like to put into beer.” Well? Where’s the problem? If Germans like beer made their way, why shouldn’t they have it? If they want Swedish beer, it’s on the shelves at import stores.

Further, German brewers lack economies of scale, he says, which makes their beer expensive, and their general inefficiency means that not much of that “wonderful German beer” is sold abroad because it’s all guzzled up within 30 miles of the production facility. Diamond concludes that Germans are inefficient because they have “a thousand local monopolies.”

Surely Diamond cannot be saying that 63 national monopolies in the form of megacorporations are better than 1,000 local monopolies? Several questions frothed like yeasty malts in my unruly mind…

Are Germans in reality just wonderfully efficient at producing 1000 kinds of wonderful beer?

Would it help the Germans to adopt USA methods? Would 937 breweries be thrown out of the market? Would that benefit anybody except the 63 megacompanies that would now produce all of the beer, under several labels, in centralized megabreweries?

Would beer quality suffer? A mechanical sensor system on a vat can’t come close to matching the performance of the eyes and nose of a brewmeister. A couple of thousand litres of lost beer is a minor blip in the balance sheets of a big corporation; a disaster for the microbrewer who might be losing his whole batch and his entire profits.

Would jobs be lost in a megaproducer scenario? Big companies have much bigger plant costs and overheads than backyard operations. Labour is expensive. Ergo, labour is cut to the bone. 937 brewers and their employees out of work; hmm, looks like a bad business in a country where the unemployment rate was 9.0% at the end of 2006. http://www.econstats.com/weo/C062V029.htm

Would it be better for the German economy to encourage more small beer makers into the business rather than to sink extant producers, reducing the numbers of those dependent on social programs for income?

Would it be better for the German economy to have local products consumed locally, keeping the money in local communities rather than seeing it sifting out into the coffers of a few centralized businesses and boosting their shares in the stock market?

A point that Diamond did not mention is that the higher price of European products is partly due to another factor than volume of production. European manufacturers, like Canadians, are increasingly subject to expenses not faced by USA-ers: the ultimate responsibility for environmental impact of their products – including packaging. There’s an interesting overview here. There’s also an interesting report here. This second link reports on the rising costs of USA processors who can no longer afford to use refillable bottles because economy-of-scale (big) producers of new bottles have driven small local businesses, like bottle sterilizing plants, out of the market. The producer can absorb only so much of this increase; it gets passed on to the consumer in direct costs. There are further, hidden costs on a national level: negative environmental impacts from the destruction of the local manufactories and the continuous production of brand-new packaging rather than safe reusing of extant items. Some of these perfectly good bottles will make it into cullet for melting down and casting into new bottles. The rest: litter or landfill, with more environmental costs.

Do the higher prices realized for higher-quality beer make it economically feasible for German microbrewers to stay in business? Right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA, locals and tourists alike delight in artisan beers where the entire vattage is consumed within a few miles of the brewhouse. People cheerfully pay two or three times the price of the same quantity of a national brand. The same principle works for artisan bakers, whose breads don’t make it beyond the city limits, go stale in a day, cost $2.49 a loaf instead of 99c for a twin pack of Wonderbread from Safeway, yet stay in business because they sell quality and freshness. Joel Salatin’s nature-mimic, Polyface Farm, thrives on local sales of organic foods from animals humanely reared and humanely killed. http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

If Diamond is correct in his assessment that Germans are “fiercely loyal to their local brands,” as well as fanatically fussy about what goes into their beer, it seems quite likely that these same Germans would howl with outrage if the beer purity laws were rewritten to suit foreign interests over their own.

The second story is very similar. Diamond’s premise is that Japanese food processors are only “a miserable 32%” as efficient as USA-ers. The question again begs to be asked: “Efficient at what?” Diamond’s answer is that USA-ers are very efficient at producing very high volumes of food. He quotes figures of 67,000 food processors in Japan with its population of half that of the USA, whilst the USA has only 21,000 food processing plants.

Again, Diamond goes on to say that this is due to local taste and government policy. He says that as if it’s a bad thing, which still seems both counter-intuitive and illogical to me.

Diamond reports that Japanese consumers will not on any account drink milk, or eat fresh produce, more than 24 hours old. Their milk cartons carry three dates: date of manufacture, date of arrival at the supermarket, and expiry date. The dates are the same: it’s the actual time stamp that varies. The milk has to be produced just after midnight, and expires the very next midnight. This leads to thousands of local monopolies, as in Germany. A producer in northern Japan can’t get his milk to southern Japan fast enough to meet these rigorous standards, so he can’t compete with producers in southern Japan, and vice versa. He’s forced to sell locally and compete on a level playing field. He may not be able to expand his operations infinitely, but that’s not necessarily bad: there is such a thing as the law of diminishing returns. Foreigners can’t compete because there’s a 10-day quarantine period on imported processed foods. So the benighted Orientals “are not exposed to either domestic or foreign competition, and they don’t learn the best international methods for producing food. Partly as a result,” Diamond goes on to say, “the best beef costs $200 a pound, while chicken costs $25 a pound.”

But Japan can well afford to import cheap food from any part of the world. What Japan, like Europe, can’t do is force its citizenry to eat or drink anything it doesn’t consider to be safe or appealing. http://www.hpj.com/archives/2006/oct06/oct16/USbeefunavailableinJapanese.cfm The same Japanese shoppers who shun US beef eagerly load their shopping carts with Australian bovine products. Australian processors took full advantage of the niche opened by the USA fall from grace by providing exactly what the Japanese want: very fatty meat from animals under 30 months old; whose mothers have never been exposed to animal byproducts in feed; meat meticulously cut from the bones to avert any possibility of contamination by brain/spinal tissues or fluids. The wastage of meat left on the bones is more than outweighed by the much higher price realized by the prime, highly saleable boneless flesh. Bulk processed carcasses like those from USA meat plants, where meat is blasted from the bones with jets of high pressure air or water, or raced through speedy mechanical saws, just won’t make the grade. I am personally outraged by forcefeeding with grain, whether beef for Japan or chickens for the USA, but that’s another matter. The point is that the Japanese know what they want and are willing to pay for it.

I find it strange that Diamond uses soap as a marker of a country’s marketing success, saying that you won’t find Japanese or German soaps in common usage in the USA. He admits that you will find Japanese cars and cameras, and German metal products. Were soap as profitable an export as surgical lancets or TV sets…

Perhaps most puzzling of all, Diamond concludes this section by saying that “If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don’t want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation. Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communication – like the U.S. federal government system, with its built-in competition between our 50 states.”

But there is no built-in competition. Every successive food scare throws into greater prominence the fact that the USA is actually provisioned by a few giant multistate monopolies. The latest is the salmonella infection vectored by peanut butter. Con-Agra produces both Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter in jars; but its basket holds many other eggs. (Click here for more info) Brand name shampoos in small bottles with big prices, may be the identical liquid sold as supermarket brands in big bottles with small prices. Some people will pay for sizzle, others just want the steak – it makes economic sense to sell both and maximize market share, right? But there’s no competition between one’s left and right hands.

The apparent variety and abundance on supermarket shelves is like beauty: skin deep. 80% of the spinach consumed in the 50 states, regardless of the name on the bag, is grown by one company based in one state, growing spinach in monoculture on one acreage and processing it in one plant, maximizing the efficiency of spread of E. coli when contamination occurs. http://www.lifeintheusa.com/food/vegetables.htm In the name of efficiency, i.e. maximizing of profits, these giant corporations keep their operations house-bound, from the sprouting of the seeds to the packaging of the leaves to the trucking of the plastic bags of greens to their final destination. The wealth thus is concentrated rather than being spread thinly. Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” points out that Rosie the Free-Range chicken is just one brand of the same company that sells chicken by many other names. Juliet’s quandary over her forbidden love for Romeo could be easily overcome today: Romeo might well be going by a number of legal aliases. All those barcodes are designed to keep the supermarket shelves and freezers filled with the products that sell fastest or for the highest profit, ditching those with smaller market share and those spinning off smaller profits. Muddying the waters, perhaps literally, food processing companies may themselves be only one division of a megacorporation that has big slices of other pies.

Innovation and competitive ability seem to thrive in all kinds of environments. The secretive Japanese manufacturers turn out a dazzling array of feature-loaded electronic goods which outcompete the offerings of the chatty U.S. manufacturers on their home ground, as I note on each visit to Costco. The Swedes, far from weeping into their rejected beer, sell the Germans flatpack furniture and Swedish meatballs. IKEA parlays its awesome niche designs and fair-trade presence into both profitability and competitiveness, peddling its wares as successfully in the USA as in Europe. I have yet to see an IKEA store anything but buzzing, with lines of buyers waiting at every checkout point – despite arriving at 9.30 for breakfast prior to the store’s opening at 10am! The restaurant is always full of people who share my clever idea and hit the sales floors running, strengthened for the fray by a fast, tasty, cheap, IKEA breakfast.

Perhaps the USA is losing market shares, apart from shares in the stock market, because it’s holding to an outmoded standard of efficiency. The USA is a net importer, with a large and growing trade deficit (national debt) – by its own official showing. http://www.census.gov/indicator/www/ustrade.html

Perhaps the standard model of efficiency, that is, production of very large volumes of generic products that can be multiply branded with only minimal tweaking, has become obsolete. Biomimicry is the new wave – and perhaps the New Efficiency will look a lot like an ecosystem: heaped up convolutions of niches – each niche a local monopoly.

In a very simplistic representation: Bison selectively eats species of coarse grass, poops and pees. Nitrogen and phosphorus in pee is immediately locked down by soil biota and mined by plant roots. Flies, worms and beetles eat bison poop, each extracting particular nutrients; some further process fibre, others take up the animal’s metabolic products (like enzymes), others devour the minerals. Birds, rodents and reptiles eat flies, worms, and beetles. Snakes eat birds and rodents. Birds eat snakes, beetles, worms and flies. Everybody poops. Everybody dies. Bacteria and fungi consume everybody’s poop, breaking it into simple compounds, rather like the old game of making as many words as possible from “Constantinople”. Grass roots suck up the residues, pump nutrients into the grass plant, leaves sprout, and a bison comes along to mow them.

The New Efficiency may use biomimicry to
build local economies
develop local markets
encourage entrepreneurship
create more jobs
encourage development of local food webs
to minimize environmental damage
to keep local farmers on the land
to develop specialised products which can be branded for sale to connoisseurs as being synonymous with high quality (think Smithfield ham; Amish quilts; National Geographic documentaries; your favourite group’s music)

In this model, resilience, sustainability, and prosperity would be attained through multidimensional interaction of thousands upon thousands of local monopolies. The amazing biodiversity of rainforests, mangrove swamps, and coral reefs is due to the full exploitation of every possible niche where systems interact like an Escher drawing. There is no waste, no pollution, no degradation in an intact ecosystem. Efficiency of the system is close to 100%, although individual units may be running way lower. This model is already in use.

http://green.businesspatrol.com/out_link.php3?id=1486
http://www.oceanarks.org/education/resources/shea/
http://www.gtz.de/de/dokumente/en-eco-industrial-parks.pdf

It seems that Monopoly will always be the business game du jour. Perhaps though it will change focus so it is no longer winner-take-all, but win-win.

Suzanne Ubick ©2007

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Suzanne's Second Essay -- More Food For Thought!

Following on my paradigm shift after watching “Oil – The Politics Behind Terrorism”, I got a bad case of Lady Macbeth Syndrome. “Alas,” I found myself brooding, “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand…” Especially if those perfumes are made from alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, and esters distilled from crude, and fixed with other materials derived from petroleum drilled in the Middle East.

But unlike Lady Macbeth, the shock of my realization did not cause me to sleepwalk; rather, it woke me from the sleepwalking of my daily rounds.

My new fixation has not endeared me to my social group…I’ve been told to get real, because the biggest consumer of oil is automotive, so there’s no point in sweating the small stuff, especially as the administration will do as it pleases about oil. I’ve been told that the hearer finds the subject too disturbing, and doesn’t want to think about it, not at all. And I’ve been snickered at, with the half-sneering challenge of “Go for it!”

Well, going for it is proving to be absurdly easy. A very little googling has turned up alternatives to everything from face cream to the vexatious toothbrush question. I’ve started making my own laundry cleaner with borax, washing soda, Fels naphtha soap, and water. Easy-peasy. Unfortunately, grating the Fels naphtha brought on a migraine attack, so my next batch will be made with Ivory soap. Dr Bronner’s soap can be substituted for shampoo, dishwashing liquid, bubble bath, used to wash clothes, and apparently even for brushing teeth! That last idea has me gagging slightly: I’ll stick to the baking soda/salt mix I routinely use. I’ve located bio-degradable toothbrushes made with acetate handles and boar bristles. One can even buy water-based nail polish and mascara. Granted, this is not as easy as going down to Safeway and loading a shopping cart with all my needs from under one roof and paying with one check; I have to go to several sources and make several small payments. There are products galore for making your house green as well as pretty and comfortable; from organic paints based on casein extracted from sour milk, to insulation materials derived from shredded blue jeans, to lime plasters for stucco work; timber may be engineered, or replaced entirely with bamboo, or stuff made from recycled plastic milk jugs and yogurt cartons.

One of the biggest bugbears tossed at me by my social group has been the Sacred Economy. If everybody behaved like me, and eschewed oil, we’d all be down the wazoo in no time; the stock market would crash; before you could say “Jack Robinson” this would be a third-world country.

Oh yeaah??? As we say in South Africa, “You got another think coming your way.”

I’m still spending money. I’m buying some raw materials, like borax, washing soda, and baking soda, to make my own products. I’m buying other products ready-made, like toothbrushes and dental floss. The difference is that instead of my money being sucked into the black maw of the never-satiated megacorporations, my money is now going to support many small manufacturers, even occasionally mom-and-pop set-ups. Ironically, I may end up spending MORE money than before; it’s over $4 for a boar bristle toothbrush, as opposed to 10 nylon-and-plastic ones for a buck in a bulk pack from Walgreens. Dr Bronner’s soap costs more, even at Trader Joe’s, than Joy or Dawn from a dollar store. So how is this situation bad for The Economy? Especially seeing I pay cash instead of adding to the enormous Quagmire of Debt?

Incidentally, mindfulness in these small matters guts the Inflation Bugbear. What if your shopping basket doesn’t match the standard basket used in inflation surveys? What if your personal rate of inflation runs at zero, or a negative figure? Aaah. The fear factor (middle-aged white women are supposedly peculiarly vulnerable to Baglady Syndrome) suddenly goes way down. Aah. Feels good, self-empowerment does. One has to except medical insurance costs from this situation: if anything will turn the people of the United States into a nation of Bag-People of all genders sheltering under freeways and mourning the good old days, the mockingly named health care is the thing to do it. But doing my shopping now with mindfulness as to the source and ultimate sink of the stuff I use in my daily life has increased my spending mindfulness, and shows up areas of waste because there’s less grey. Routinely buying everything from a one-stop-shop masks weak spots because it’s easy to look at the total rather than tease out the actual amount spent on individual items or categories.

I’ve been thinking about this energy thing for a long time now. This week gave me particular intensity of thought because of Thanksgiving. My husband has a large extended family, and we get together for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This week I was notified that my contribution to the feast would be desserts, for 28 people, and that variety would be appreciated. Okay! Now, I could have gone to Costco and bought the food. But I was raised in a culture where one does not offer bought food for special occasions.

I decided to make apple galette, lemon sponge cake, chocolate layer cake, and cherry tartlets. I made the pastry for the galette and the dough for the tartlets on Wednesday evening and refrigerated them. Thursday afternoon, after work, I got started. The only mechanical aid I used was a hand operated food processor, which can whip egg whites to meringue stiffness in a very few minutes. It’s faster and quieter than the electric mixer languishing in a cupboard. Apart from this insurance policy for a light sponge cake, I did the rest by hand.

My husband came to help. He had a great time rolling balls of dough, poking holes with his thumb, and popping in cherries. Chatting and joking over the job made peeling five pounds of apples go by on the fly. As the Amish say, many hands make work light. Three hours later, the kitchen table was covered with baked goodies and the dishes were washed. Cost of ingredients: $23.25. Job satisfaction and boost to self-esteem: Priceless. Other invisible gains: quality couple time; bonding over a joint project; food that’s not too far from healthy; a real contribution to the family gathering rather than the mindless expenditure of money and time on picking up ready-made desserts; a pleasant fatigue rather than empty exhaustion.

The thing that worries me most about this energy-hogging, push-button society lies in the erosion of self-esteem and the loss not only of skills but also of the desire to learn them. I see it in myself. Why bother to maintain a 3 x 5 index card system when I can hit “Print” and add the resultant paper to a mound of other papers that I will someday get around to filing? Why bother to do mental arithmetic when I can pull out a calculator – our more tech-savvy relatives use their cell phones to work out their share of the pizza? Why bother to sew when the local Goodwill provides brand-new, tags-on, brand-name clothing for less than it would cost to buy the fabric? Also, I hate putting in zips! If I had a real motivation to do it, I’d learn to do it well and lose my fear, just as Laura Ingalls found in Little Town On The Prairie, with her hatred of making buttonholes.

I live very well through skimming the fat from this consumer-driven society. But I don’t think I’m living right.

Sources for non-petroleum products:

Acetate-handled boar bristle toothbrushes:
http://www.internatural-alternative-health.com/SCAT/FUCHSTOOTHBRUSFUCHST_3606.cfm

http://www.dld123.com/q&a/qandatemp.php?id=Q62

Beauty products: http://www.dld123.com/debraslist/list.php?topic=Body%20Care

Shaving: Preserve razors have handles made from recycled yoghurt containers and can be re-used. Toothbrushes likewise. If I understand this correctly, you get to send in the used item and get a new one, at a small price, whilst your old personal care items are made into plastic lumber. http://www.recycline.com/products/preserverr.html

Legs can be depilated with sugar paste – I’ve tried it, it works, and it’s only a light sting rather than real pain. Lime is used by Muslim women to depilate the entire body. Other depilatory methods: http://www.fatfreekitchen.com/beauty/facial-hair.html

Acetate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate

Rayon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon

It seems faintly wrong that it may actually be better to use acetate and rayon fabrics than cotton. However, even organic cotton carries a heavy ecological price; if deep-well irrigated, as is Pima cotton from Arizona, there’s aquifer depletion and soil salting to consider. Heavy machinery is still used in the production of organic cotton for ploughing and cultivation of the land; it would be interesting to compare the total oil usage of organic and industrial farmers. Organic large-scale farmers rely on repeated mechanical cultivation to suppress weed growth, and may make many more passes over the land than their herbicide-spraying brethren. Stone-washed cotton fabrics (think denim) have further deleterious effects on the environment. http://www.sacredland.org/endangered_sites_pages/sfpeaks.html

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Suzanne's First Essay

When I was studying Latin, my teacher had a favourite story about a little old lady who always used to say “How do I know what I think until I’ve said it?” This was supposed to encourage us students not to open the mouth until the mind was fully engaged. However, my mind is like a ragbag, full of odds and ends of varicoloured, vari-sized bits of this and that. I often don’t know what I think until I’ve said it, preferably in writing because that can be tweaked and edited as I twist my inner kaleidoscope and new patterns emerge.

This time the kaleidoscope was twisted by my watching the video “The Oil Factor: Behind The War On Terror” by Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy. The shock and awe factors of this video, regardless of one’s political leanings, have made it impossible for me to live as I have been doing. Serendipitously, I’ve been reading about John Woolman, the Quaker, who considered selfishness to be the reason for wars. In 1793, he challenged his peers to “Look upon our treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions, or not.”

This is uncomfortable reading, because Woolman is holding a pitiless mirror right where it shows the log in my own eye. It holds as true today as it did in Woolman’s time, or Noah’s, that there has to be a market for any product or service; somebody has to buy it for its supply to be worthwhile – and it is still up to us, as it was in Roman times, to “caveat emptor” to ensure that we are not buying a bill of goods. Diatribes against oil companies, agribusiness, armaments manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, Halliburton, or George Bush would be so much smoke screen to divert my attention from my own complicity in the horrors perpetrated against people who happened to be born in oil-rich countries.

This is not entirely a new thought; it’s just that I’ve never put it into words before now. I have always been very strongly attracted to the ideal of self-sufficiency, as far as that can go in a real world where no man is an island. I like the idea for the possibilities of personal and financial freedom; the less energy I need to BUY, the less I need to work for money to pay for that energy, or those products. During my 2005 visit to Sipan, Kuzma Stjepovic said to me “You know, it takes a lot of time to live here.” And it’s true, not because people are slaving brutishly to survive a nasty short life, but because living life takes time and a lot of personal input if it’s to be done well. Visitors to Sipan often comment on the “laziness” of the inhabitants when a bit of gosh-darned old gumption could make them rich. As they say on Sipan, “I don’t need the money that badly.” This is an honourable descendant of the motto of the Republic of Ragusa, of which Dubrovnik was once the capital: “Freedom is never to be sold, not even for much gold.” Ragusa paid out gold, mule loads of it, and grudged not a groat of it because they bought their freedom with it. This system worked well for five centuries, until Napoleon sent his storm troops down the Adriatic coastline in the early 1800s and the Dalmatians were faced with a man whose currency was conquest.

I love the plain old simplicity of directness: panel on roof, sun shines, electrons trickle into battery until called upon to light the night, chill the milk, allow me to immortalize my thoughts upon my laptop, or drench my ears and heart with glorious music. I am truly happier when dipping water from a drum into a dishtub than opening the taps in the sink of my standard middle-class fitted kitchen. It is definitely easier to open the taps. I enjoy slicing vegetables with a knife and board. Handling the vegetables, seeing their colours, inhaling their distinctive aromas, snitching little titbits while I work, provides as much nourishment as the actual digestion of the food.

But there’s a more metaphysical attraction too; the ideals of right living, and living right, ideals that rise to the surface in every generation – uncowed by the long defeat. Doing right surfaces in the first tenet of the Hippocratic oath which medical personnel still swear: “First, do no harm.” This is consonant with “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others;” and every variant of the Golden Rule, which appears in 21 religions. http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm. It’s the ethics of the Native American Seventh Generation philosophy.

Looking around me, as Woolman directs, at my possessions, I am aware that I am indeed doing harm. How? Out of thoughtlessness, out of carelessness, out of desire for comfort, out of looking out for a (financial) bargain, for the sake of (my own) convenience; I am sinning by omission rather than commission.

The facts that our electricity is hydro-generated (ouch, Hetch Hetchy Valley), that our natural gas is extracted locally, that we have few gadgets and never use the central heating, that we drive our car an average of 4,000 miles a year, use public transit, have compact fluorescent lightbulbs in every light socket, no longer comfort me.

Because oil is not simply the source of the gas and diesel we use in our automobiles or the gas we burn in cooking stoves, central heaters and clothes driers. Oil is as central to mainstream life as our blood is to our bodies.

A short list of products made from oil includes: Air conditioners, ammonia, anti-histamines, antiseptics, artificial turf, asphalt, aspirin, balloons, bandages, boats, bottles, bras, bubble gum, butane, cameras, candles, car batteries, car bodies, carpet, cassette tapes, caulking, CDs, chewing gum, cold, combs/brushes, computers, contacts, cortisone, crayons, cream, denture adhesives, deodorant, detergents, dice, dishwashing liquid, dresses, dryers, electric blankets, electrician’s tape, fertilisers, fishing lures, fishing nets, fishing rods, floor wax, footballs, glues, glycerin, golf balls, guitar strings, hair, hair colouring, hair curlers, hearing aids, heart valves, heating oil, house paint, ice chests, ink, insect repellent, insulation, jet fuel, life jackets, linoleum, lip balm, lipstick, loudspeakers, medicines, mops, motor oil, motorcycle helmets, movie film, nail polish, nylons, oil filters, paddles, paint brushes, paints, parachutes, paraffin, pens, perfumes, petroleum jelly, plastic chairs, plastic cups, plastic forks, plastic wrap, plastics, plywood adhesives, refrigerators, roller-skate wheels, roofing paper, rubber bands, rubber boots, rubber cement, rubbish bags, running shoes, saccharine, seals, shirts (non-cotton), shoe polish, shoes, shower curtains, solvents, solvents, spectacles, stereos, sweaters, table tennis balls, tape recorders, telephones, tennis rackets, thermos, tights, toilet seats, toners, toothpaste, transparencies, transparent tape, TV cabinets, typewriter/computer ribbons, tyres, umbrellas, upholstery, vaporisers, vitamin capsules, volleyballs, water pipes, water skis, wax, wax paper. http://www.postcarbon.org/node/2845

As I sit here, I’m wearing my reading glasses, made from oil. My computer is made from oil, as is the telephone to its right. On the left, there is a little bag holding my contact lenses in their plastic case and a plastic bottle containing solution which includes polyvinyl alcohol. All made from oil. Awaiting return, there are two library books with plastic-coated dust jackets. My CD player has plastic components, and oil may well have been the energy source for the smelting and shaping of the metal parts. My scissors have plastic handles. Are these things evil? Not in themselves. Without my eyewear, I would be functionally blind as my natural far point is about 12” from my nose. My life is richer and fuller for library books and music; and I am a nicer person for having my faculties expanded. My phone and computer maintain my family and social connections as well as giving me the blessing of the Internet. Scissors cut paper, fabric, and my hair. Aspirin can be a life saver, besides easing headaches and quenching fevers.

Can these blessings be produced from other sources than oil? Of course. Oil itself is nothing more than organic matter that fermented anaerobically at high temperatures for aeons of time. During this maceration, the animal matter was chemically cracked and the constituents dissolved or melted into Texas tea. Speaking under correction, I understand fossil fuels this way: plants become coal and animals become oil under the right conditions. Both fuels are a bouillabaisse of useful chemicals that can be strained out for processing into products both useful and kitschy.

Given that oil is concentrated organic matter, it follows that organic matter can substitute for organic matter. What is needed is not oil, but one constituent of the oil, which might well be available from other sources.

So that brings in two alternatives: one, check out the source of the oil used to make the handles and bristles of my toothbrushes, and reject anything not home-grown or bought under fair trade conditions from Canada. This sounds very simple, but would not be at all easy. Perhaps a Fair Trade Oil Coalition will spring up to follow the Fair Trade Chocolate Coalition.

The other way is to work on it from the inside out. This is easy, but not at all simple. It requires constant awareness, thought, much expenditure of time, personal energy, making of choices, and quite likely paying more for some stuff during the transition period into self-sufficiency. The payoff of this behaviour is synergistic and spins into sphere after sphere until it becomes quite dizzying to contemplate the picture!

It will take a lot of research to establish the realities of what can be done. But I can start right now by giving myself a mantra: First Do No Harm.