Bluntly: prepare your community for a world with no food distribution, no electricity, an economic depression and financial meltdown -- and lots of hungry people.
~ Farmers Weekly: It's All Downhill From Here, by Lara Johnstone ~Karl Marx had it wrong. Class has, to be sure, been a major factor in history; but class itself is a derivative concept that is based on the ultimate causative power in history: sex. Marx’s famous formulation must be revised: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles based on the division of our species into two sexes, jealousies emanating from this division, exaggerations of the differences between the sexes, misunderstandings about sexual reproductive power, and metaphors derived from sex. Together, these closely related matters constitute the most important, but largely neglected, set of motive forces in human history. Control -- or the claim of control -- over the means of reproduction has been even more fundamental to history than has control of the means of production.
~ SeedArmigideon:: "The fact is one cannot begin to search for a solution to a 'Hell Hath No Fury....' problem that has yet to be accurately defined.." ~"It is important to understand the distinction between information and intelligence. Information is an assimilation of data that has been gathered, but not fully correlated, analyzed, or interpreted. Intelligence, on the other hand, is the transformation of information into knowledge and insight." -- Admiral Jeremy Boorda, Joint Military Intelligence College
~ Santa Clausiwitz NSA PsyOps :: How Will World War IV (We Need to 'Cull' the Surplus Population) be fought? :: Slamdunk Tzu CIA PsyOps ~
Farmers Weekly: It's All Downhill From Here,
by Lara Johnstone
01 December 2006
Social activist Lara Johnstone is a woman on a mission -- to alert all and sundry, and particularly goverment ministers and other people of influence, that the era of abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end. With the growing interest in biofuels, and the acute implications of the energy crunch for agriculture, her message may have special relevance to farmers.
"In 1956, M KING HUBBERT, a Shell geologist, invented the peak oil concept, and correctly predicted the US production peak of the early 1970s.
'Peak oil' refers to the peak in global oil production. An oil field's production inevitably and irreversibly declines once about half the oil in the field has been extracted. Peak oil refers to the global phenomenon.
Worldwide, 54 of the 65 largest oil producting countries in the world have passed their peak and are now in decline. According to Matthew Simmons, CEO of the world's largest energy investment bank, a large amount of data indicates that crude oil production peaked in December 2005, with subsequent decline, and notes 'if that trend continues for another 12 months, it will be fairly easy for people that want to be realists to say we actually peaked at the end of 2005.'
After the peak, every barrel is more difficult and expensive to produce, but because of increased population and economic growth, demand continues to increase, which creates a growing gap between supply and demand, further spiking the price.
Declining oil production will have massive repercussions on the way we live. In early 2005, the US Department of Energy comissioned a risk mitigation study on peak oil: Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, commonly referred to as the Hirsch Report.
It warned of dramatic price volatility, saying that 'without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented', and that 'viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking'. Recently, it priced such mitigation at a minimum of $20 trillion of investment -- prior to peak.
Studies on net energy (also referred to as the energy returned on invested ratio) are crucial, and help us to evaluate whether, all factors considered, a particular energy source provides more energy than it takes to produce it. Current net energy study results report that no combination of alternative energies can sustain current consumption in the absence of massive investment, as aforementioned.
Tom Whipple, a respected peak oil journalist, informed the economic growth fanatics -- who ignore the question as to how we are going to feed ourselves in an energy-scarce world, let alone industrially produce biofuels -- that 'there are acceptable alternatives to putting produced corn in your petrol tank. There are no substitutes for eating.'
The failure of our goverment and corporate officials to recognise that the magnitude of the crisis on transportation, food production, medicine, water distribution and our economic paradigm, all hugely dependent on cheap oil for their survival, requires immediate implementation of massive energy-descent mitigation strategies, informs us that the only remaining option is preparation on the personal, family, and community level.
Consequently I propose two possible small-scale mitigation strategies:
- Some precious beliefs are fatally threatened: our fantasy of eternal economic growth and its financial paradigm; our throwaway lifestyle; our ideas that our societal rules are more important than are the rules of nature; our definition of ourselves as a 'successful industrial society' of consumers, owners, and so on; our indistural form of agriculture. We need to create a new world in our minds, based on the ideas of solar energy, permaculture and total re-use of everything, where landfills become extinct, where every discarded material is an input to another productive process -- the way the planet does it.
- Implementation of our power-down, energy-descent, relocalised world could look something like this: the creation of local cooperatives, for example biodiesel, building, housing, solar and wind energy utilities and urban permaculture gardens; new local renewable energy initiatives; new financial paradigms (local community currencies); and population reduction.
Bluntly: prepare your community for a world with no food distribution, no electricity, an economic depression and financial meltdown -- and lots of hungry people.
Contact Lara Johnstone.
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Lara Johnstone is a former employee of Dr. Brad Blanton, the founder of the Center for Radical Honesty, a graduate of the Center for Radical Honesty's Course on Honesty, and Course on Forgiveness & Co-Creation, and a member of the Radical Honesty Community.
In appreciation for their efforts, each month, an Upstairs at Harry's Employee is provided a GREEAN FARMERS 'SQ Worms Certificate, and a SQ Worm Sosiety Soil Soldier Edu-Documentary DVD, to educate her family and community on the importance of waking up to the potentially impending disastrous consequences of the collision of exponential population and economic growth; colliding with exponentially depleting finite resources.
~ Upstairs at Harry's Cafe's steps towards Organic Community, by Lara Johnstone ~Garden Route Churches & Schools: The information is for you to share with your family, congregation, school, teachers, students, and fellow regional Southern Cape community pastors. The DVD documentaries are to provide you and your congregation/school with additional educational information, to the issues stated in the Farmers Weekly article It’s All Downhill From Here, for their each one, teach one, sharing to their families, customers and other ignorant local community members.
~ GR Churches & Schools: Surviving Peak Oil & the Power of Community, by Lara Johnstone ~Bluntly: prepare your community for a world with no food distribution, no electricity, an economic depression and financial meltdown -- and lots of hungry people.
~ Farmers Weekly: It's All Downhill From Here, by Lara Johnstone ~There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat.
THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.
The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.
~ The Future of Food (documentary), by Lily Films ("If you control the oil, you control the country; if you control the food, you control the population.") ~
These eco-pioneers regard their 1/5 acre urban homestead as a sustainable living resource center where they are setting out to live by example while also inspiring others to "just do it!"
Their objective is to live as sustainably and self-sufficiently as possible in an urban environment in harmony with nature and each other, while also inspiring others to "think globally, act locally." Their homestead supports four adults, who live and work full time on a 66’ x 132’ city lot (1/5 acre).
The homestead's productive garden now grows over 6,000 lbs of organic produce annuallyThe yard has over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants. The homestead's productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually. This provides fresh vegetables and fruit for the family’s vegetarian diet and a source of income.
~ Path To Freedom; Living an Urban Organic Gardening Revolution ~When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate.
This documentary tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call "The Special Period."
~ Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, by The Community Solution ~
