mandarine

Let me introduce you to our new tenants in the garden: Mr Orpington, Mrs Orpington, Mrs Orpington and Mrs Orpington, a family of bantams proudly acquired this morning from an almost-neighbour (20 km drive, with the poor things in cardboard boxes).

I had been considering the possibility of having hens in the garden for a long time, and now is the great leap forward for me and them. I count on them for many things:

• eat, peck, scratch, so that after a month, the patch of prairie under their chicken tractor is devoid of any weeds and pests, and I only have to fluff the soil up a little with a broad fork and then plant my seedlings.
• dispose of kitchen scraps, saving me 90% of the work with composting
• lay eggs
• brood some of the eggs and raise the chicks so that we can eat one of our tenants now and then
• entertain us and the kids with their chickenness

In return, they count on me for:

• moving the pen now and then
• replenishing the water bowl and grain plate
• leaving them alone when I can help it

Let us hope this very unequal partnership will give us full satisfaction. After all, they can’t complain. Industrial layers generally have to live on 2/3 of an A4 sheet of paper of real estate. My hens have twenty times that.

I feel as generous as a western executive building a brand-new factory in a Kuala-Lumpur suburb.

I have good friends who are miles away from understanding that our way of life is unsustainable. The minute they learnt they would have a second child, they changed their brand-new car for the same model in station-wagon format. Now they have three kids and will have a fourth one soon, and they have upgraded their car to a mini-van to accommodate the newcomer (in addition to buying a second car for the missus).

When I try to suggest that they should try to invent other ways, all they can say is that they could not manage otherwise. Could not go to work on their bicycles; could not go on holidays by train; could not rent the big car on week-ends; could not take kids somewhere without a full army campsite in the trunk of the car.

Each time someone says (including me) that something pertaining to energy expenses, transportation, or comfort can’t be done otherwise, I feel sad for the next generation, who will have to do otherwise in any case. And if those who have four kids can’t think for the next generation, I don’t know who will.

Energy savings.

A lot of governments worldwide are promoting a gradual switch to renewables. It has long been lip service, but now it will have to be a reality, as even the big petroleum companies are revising their peak-oil estimates - latest is Shell, with 2015. In fact, some are even claiming that we have been on an oil plateau since 2006.

After a peak comes a downhill. After a plateau comes a cliff. Whatever way, the changes that we will have to make to adapt to scarcer oil will be enormous. Even with a 20% yearly growth, renewables will not be able to make a real dent in the total until it is much too late. Even nuclear energy is very very far from allowing such fast ramp-ups.

Let us just take the catastrophic example of bioethanol. Just to reach the 10% bioethanol ratio in US gas tanks, an enormous proportion of corn production has been diverted to be burnt instead of eaten. By an interesting cascade effect, this has sent the price of food skyrocketing worldwide.

A 10% saving in fuel burn can be achieved by simply driving 120 kph instead of 130 kph, therefore losing five minutes for every hour of the trip. Have you never started your trip five minutes late or lingered five minutes along the way sipping a coffee? Why are you in such a hurry anyway? I’d rather take five more minutes for every trip I make than see famin riots all around the world because my pathetic 10% bioethanol has tripled the price of wheat…

Agrofuels are not the way. Nuclear power is not the way. Coal-to-liquids is not the way. Even wind power is not the way.

What then?

As I have said: power savings. Like it is much easier to save a dollar than ask it from one’s boss, likewise is it much much simpler to save energy than to make more. Even a 10% reduction can have great relieving consequences (see above). But I prefer the big cuts. The ones that save 50% or 75%. Let us list some of the things people can do:

• quit flying. One round-trip across the Atlantic costs you your yearly Kyoto quota. Unless you are prepared to quit driving or live in an unheated house to compensate for the trip, you’d better find nice places and people to visit nearer to you (I am sure they exist — keep looking).
• quit driving. As I have written before, driving is not faster than riding anyway. At least, carpool. Drive shorter trips. The longest trip I now drive is the one to the train station (10 km). And most times, I ride there anyway.
• drastically cut on home heating. Stack up your warm quilts and allow the temperature to drop to 15°C/59F in your bedroom. Reef you heated real estate in winter: have the kids sleep in the same bedroom, work in the living room, and stop heating two or three rooms. Consider setting aside one dollar for insulation improvements for every five dollars spent on the heating bill.
• telecommute. Office buildings and factories are very bad in terms of energy efficiency. And you’ll be able to sell your car.
• eat better, eat local, eat less meat, eat less. The ‘less meat’ factor along with the ‘eat local’ factor allow to considerably reduce the energy bill and the environmental footprint in general. Better food may mean ‘more expensive’ (although that is not always the case when you can eat local if you can avoid the distribution network), but because you will eat less meat and less food in general, the overall budget will be reduced.

Look at the list above: none of the items require any money. Power savings are the cheapest renewable energy source. And believe me, the psychological comfort cost is much lower than people anticipate. At least if you can do these things for moral reasons before being forced into doing them by financial reasons. And if anyone tells you that these things can’t be done, just know that they will be done in the near future, that much is absolutely certain.

Now I must go to my boss with these arguments and ask him when on earth he intends to arrange things for me to telecommute.

Day after day, I am more deeply disturbed by the contradictions between our speech and our actions on the environment front. Every time I hear or see someone complaining about the state of the environment, it seems there is always a third-party that can conveniently be blamed for the situation. Let us pick a few examples:

• the price of gasoline: Chinese growth.
• deforestation: Brazilian peasants.
• water pollution: farmers and agribusiness.
• nuclear plants: the nuclear lobby.
• overfishing: those stupid fishermen.
• biodiversity: sprawling third-world mega-cities
• lack of investment in renewables: the government
• financial insanity: those greedy stock-exchange traders
• ad lib.

No need to use a microscope to see that in each instance, we are a link in the chain that leads to the disorder decried. We drive cars, we eat beef or fish, we prefer to buy the cheaper good, we use electricity and we would not want its price doubled overnight, we want our savings to generate an income, etc.

Just like a throng pushing towards the exit can trample or suffocate dozens of people without anyone actually pushing that hard, each time we are a part of one of these chains, our weight adds up to the weight of all the other actors, putting an enormous stress on the end-links until the Earth gives in. The Brazilian lumberjack felling a 200-ft tall tree is no more guilty than his boss, his boss’s stakeholder, or me.

This is not about buying hybrid cars or compact fluorescent light bulbs. It is not about buying organic or fair trade once in a while. ‘Buying’ is the problem; not the solution.

Climatologists, energy experts, agronomists, social workers: they are not talking about a 20% change in fifty years, but about an 80% change in five years. It is about stopping before doing anything and ask myself: if seven billion people behaved like I am about to do, how would the world end up?

Somehow, it is a moral obligation to change radically right now, so that whatever catastrophes happen, I will have tried my best. And if catastrophes don’t happen, then I will jokingly congratulate myself on saving the world. But there is no carrying on pretending. Fortunately, there are tons of things I can do.

Self-catering is the cultural norm

You have a kitchen. You buy your food, but you cook your meals. And you know you would not relinquish your kitchen and always eat out or call a caterer or buy instant food because:

• you could not afford it (*)
• you’d lose the pleasure of cooking
• you’d lose on quality
• you would not really know what went in the meals you eat

Why cook and not grow?

Maybe agricultural practices of olden times were inefficient enough that any job at the factory paid more food that one could grow otherwise. I doubt that. I would rather say that the social conditions drove people out of the land and into factories regardless of the economic interest for them. In any case, new techniques and practices (mulching, crop rotations, polyculture, cover crops) have considerably reduced the labour needed to grow food on the garden scale since the time when our society bifurcated from distributed micro-agriculture to the ugly industrial model which is currently ruining our lives, the planet, and our kids’ future.

I say that, just like we can show that the average speed of a car is not much higher than that of a bicycle if we count the time one works to pay for the car, we can show that the time one works to pay for food is not much shorter than the time it would take to grow said food (**).

Obviously, I have taken the real-estate factor out of the computation. Not everybody can afford 300 square meters of vegetable garden + 500 square meters of cereals and another acre of grassland for one ewe. This is another matter and relates to a future post on why we pack people into cities in the era of the internet.

My project for 2008

I wager that personal agriculture can make a new dent in the over-centralized, over-specialized, industrial model, just like personal computers wiped out mainframe systems when nobody expected them. In 2008, I will try to prove something: I will spend one hour per day in my garden (maybe two because I am a beginner; maybe three because one must not forget the pleasure factor) and I will try to feed my family.

I will blog about my endeavour. In French. Soon.

Meanwhile, enjoy this song (by French artist Ridan) which expresses my current state of mind better than I could.

Je préfère être pauvre avec mon âme que vivre riche avec la leur ; si le blé me file du bonheur, je me ferai peut-être agriculteur

I had rather be poor with my own soul than be wealthy with theirs; if [growing] wheat makes me happy, maybe I’ll turn farmer

Footnotes

(*)

If you are not sure you are ready to come into my world with the podcast below, click this link for a really good starting point in the shape of a cartoon (thanks to Charlotte). It’s funny, it’s extremely eloquent, and it is so true before christmas.

In case you can spare one hour of wasted time (commuting, washing up, walking the dog, working out), I invite you into my world:

‘What will we eat when the oil runs out?’. Lecture by Richard Heinberg. (From The Soil Association)

You may have seen it coming; I think I have reached a tipping point in my life. I want out of the treadmill of (debt- and) wage-slavery. My career as a classical engineer for the aerospace industry will have to gradually give way to a new life as a farmer. Not the intensive-type farmer. Just the type of farming that can feed family and some neighbours and leave time for whatever things I feel must be done (like continuing with the well-paying engineering work while it remains so interesting, working for LibriVox, developing websites for community initiatives, blogging, reading, raising kids, cooking meals for guests, whatever makes life the best experience possible).

Additionally, the new way of life will probably be more robust in case when we get hit by one of the looming crises (oil, finance, climate). Funny that the lifestyle I want should also probably be the life I would have to adopt sooner or later anyway, like all those who fled cities and returned to homesteads during the great depression or WWII. If no crisis comes, so much the better.

I do not think the tone of the blog will change much, but I will sure write more about my farming endeavour and try to share some of my enthusiasm.

I was trying to prepare a short post on what I thought was a clue to the ‘natural’ diet of humans. But before I started writing, I had to find documentation to back up my claims. As often, I started out with a small idea which I believed was original, and the internet opened up monumental double-doors to a gigantic library where thousands of people were discussing the very same idea and scores of other similar ideas, and had been doing so for a very long time, so that all I could do was listen (read) before talking (writing my post).

My small idea

If I was left without fire nor kitchen appliances and I had to choose between:

• a basket with raw peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, wheat grain, carrots, spinach, lettuce, and onions,
• a cage with a live duck or rabbit, a raw egg, juicy wriggling woodworms, and hopping grasshoppers,

I would probably turn a vegetarian on the spot. There is no way you can make me kill a duck with my bare hands and then tear bits of raw flesh apart with my teeth. The best I could do would probably be the egg, the worms and the crickets.

From there, I decided that without fire, humans are psychologically vegetarians. A hot steak straight from the barbecue is yummy, but a warm steak straight from the antelope is yucky.

But I am supposed to have a scientific mind, therefore I must doubt everything — starting with everything I say, because there is a very strong subjective bias.

What I found on the internet

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I cannot remember when it started. Maybe the turning point was shortly after I started on my first job eleven years ago, when I explicitly told my wife that although I had one of the most prestigious degrees in France, I would not go for the associated prestigious careers. Instead of using my position to get the highest paychecks, I’d be using it to get the best quality of life possible.

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