via Greenleft.org
Richard Downs is a spokesperson for the Alyawarr people from the Ampilatwatja community in the Northern Territory. Last year, he travelled the country on a speaking tour to publicise the situation for Aboriginal people in the NT since the 2007 NT Emergency Response legislation (known as the NT intervention) was brought in by the previous Coalition government. Under the intervention laws, the military was sent into Aboriginal communities.
With the change to the Kevin Rudd Labor government, but with no changes made to government policy, the Indigenous people of the desert land have begun a campaign of resistance.
Specifically, the Alyawarr people staged a walk-off from Ampilatwatja in July, 2009. They walked beyond the boundary of the government lease forced onto their land, and back to their homeland. Downs spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Jill Hickson.
* * *
The situation since the start of the intervention back in 2007 has meant total disempowerment of the Indigenous people in NT. Since the intervention, consultation and partnership projects have been abandoned.
Aboriginal people now have no right to engage with the government at any level. The government makes no attempt to consult or engage Aboriginal organisations on any issue.
We have been shut out completely from any involvement in what the government does to the peoples living in the interior. All decisions are one sided, it’s a top-down approach where the government force-feeds us policy, telling us that they know what’s good for us.
This has taken us back 40 to 50 years.
It has taken Aboriginal people that long to build up our organisations, to implement programs (totally underfunded by governments) and establish a working partnership with the government. We had some measure of control.
It was still a real struggle to get enough funding and resources, but despite this we were able to run enough programs for our people that provided some opportunities for training and employment. We did all our own repairs and maintenance of the buildings in the communities.
But when those army tanks came to stay in our communities, we lost everything. Our offices were closed down. All have gone after decades spent building these organisations and associations. We’ve lost all of them.
At first, there was shock and fear in the communities. It appeared to us that the Australian government was going to war with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. There were tanks and military personnel with guns.
The federal police threatened a lot of people and quite a few people were threatened with guns and targeted with laser-sighted guns.
We couldn’t understand why this was happening. We have nothing to fight with, we are a peaceful people. News of the violence spread like wildfire across the territory and people were really afraid of the army coming in.
People were saying, “what are these red dots on our chest here?” Then they realised, the red dots were laser-sighted guns trained on them. This fear of the military had people in its grip for nearly 18 months.
Then people got over their fear. They have begun to stand up against the government policy of intervention by walking off the communities where we currently live. These communities were created by previous governments, as they have herded us into smaller and smaller spaces, away from our homelands.
If the government wants to form a partnership with us, it is going to have to abolish the NT intervention and recognise that we are the owners of that country and we want respect for our communities.
The current situation with the NT intervention is not working and should end. We want the territory and federal governments to engage and consult with us. The original 2007 Little Children Are Sacred Report that was prepared by Patricia Anderson and Rex Wild has recommendations we should put on the table.
Part of what was implemented was the introduction of the green card, where you have to buy 50% of your goods from certain stores only, which may or may not be near where you live. You can’t travel interstate or travel to shows or events. It prevents people from attending funerals or visiting family in hospital. There is no way to budget for fuel.
It’s not just about control of Aboriginal people, it’s also about control of people in general. In the future everyone on Centrelink will have the green card. Just like with “work for the dole”, which was first introduced in Aboriginal communities, this is just the way the government brings in these policies.
This situation has led to a lot of breakups of communities and families as people move to get away from the restrictions. They moved to bigger towns like Alice Springs and Tennant Creek. Others have moved across the Queensland border. Dozens of different language groups all moved away to get away from the control measures that have been imposed on them, their communities and their homelands.
Part of the policy is the creation of 15 or 20 hub towns throughout the territory and the closing down of our traditional homelands. The hub towns will get all the new houses of the $672 million allocated in the intervention. These hub towns will mean the loss of over 73 communities.
They will force people into these hub towns, creating ghettos. There are 73 language groups in the region. A mixture of different tongues means that some will die away completely. Once you lose the language, the culture, traditions and ceremonies are also lost. This strategy of the government is about ending the traditional customs of our people.
The justification for the intervention was that sexual abuse of children was rife throughout the communities. This was a complete lie, like the “children overboard” lie. If you look at the 2007 Little Children Are Scared report, it clearly states that the sexual abuse of young Aboriginal girls and women is mostly committed by non-Aboriginal people living in the area.
The report also stated that the sexual abuse of young girls and children is not a black issue, it’s a national issue. And the Australian Crime Commission confirms this. It was all lies — the federal government’s excuse to send in the military and take control of Aboriginal affairs.
Why is the government taking this action? Well, it’s all about a land grab. The mineral resources of the NT are very rich. This is much clearer when you look at the issuing of exploration licences. In 2006, there were 180 exploration licences issued, in 2009 there were 400. What is of great interest to the government — and mining interests — are the huge deposits of uranium, gold, oil and iron ore.
At first we did try to engage with the general business manager appointed to our communities as part of the government’s intervention. We tried to work with them, give them advice about the communities but they wouldn’t listen.
That’s when we decided that we don’t want to be part of it. We thought: the country outside of the townships is our traditional homeland, we’ll move back out there.
I asked the old people again, “Is this what you want to do, because it’s not going to be easy?”
“No”, they said, “we want to do this. The way we feel now we feel we have gone back 50 years back to the welfare relations days, to the days of tea and sugar handouts.
“When you had Aboriginal protection managers based in all those communities, telling Aboriginal men, ‘you 20 men over there are going to going droving this season, we’ll pick up and take you there whether you like it or not’. They had total control.”
Our walk-off is aimed at the governments to show them that we can create a homeland. We will be focusing on building the communities with renewable energy and permaculture where people will live off the land in a way where people are comfortable and happy. Relying on government handouts allows greater control by the government.
When we walked off, we had over 250 people with us. We said to the younger generation that they should stay in the community because of the children who need to go to school. They can support the old people by visiting regularly. Also the old people wander back and forth.
We are now planning to build a new community in our traditional homeland. We are working on getting buildings up and once we get the bore drilled for our water, more people from the towns will come out and live, deserting the towns.
The young men go hunting kangaroos, turkeys and bush birds for meat, bush food is collected and when the permaculture food gardens are established, we will rely less on the shops.
Our protest camp is on Honeymoon bore. Our presence in this area goes back hundreds if not thousands of years. This was our watering hole long before it was built into a stock-route bore about 80 years ago. It’s part of my mother’s country, my dreaming, that’s why I’m part of the custodianship for this country.
This action is about our self determination. We want to show the government and the Australia people, both blacks and whites, that you can walk out of controlled conditions.
That you can set up a sustainable homeland with solar power, wind turbines and permaculture systems. That you can build your own mud brick hut, recycle water using dirty water to flow back through a pond system, where the frogs and the birds come to, and you create a little green oasis, where the water is reused on the gardens and so on.
This is going to happen at the protest camp as a statement on climate change, on moving away from fossil fuels, using clean energy. We want the site to be a model where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people can say, “well, if it’s happening there then why can’t it happen here”. And it’s about telling the government to take up the challenge of climate change.
It’s about going back and living with the Mother Earth in a way that is not about greed, about digging up everything we’ve got, for short term benefit and for big business.
The Rudd Labor government changed nothing. It was an opportunity for the ALP to show the way forward but despite the apology to the Stolen Generations in February 2008, the ALP government has failed to do anything.
We want to tell Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that we will not meet with them until they abolish the NT intervention, only then will we meet together.
The whole northern part of Australia is a large wilderness, a large pristine part of Mother Earth. The government wants to lease the land to those who would rip it all out and pollute the waterways, the streams, the oceans and the air.
That’s why it’s so important for all of us, Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people to come together and stop this happening.
It’s about solidarity. We want to connect with, and talk to, as many groups as possible both black and white. We want to invite people to come and stay, to assist the community. In February, many people are coming to help put up some buildings. We want to encourage this and bring communities together to see the way we live but also to educate our own people.
We want people to bring our young people technology so they can be empowered to look after their homelands and their people. We want to give the technology to our people in order to preserve our culture and our language, the animals and the plants.
We gave governments power and let them build on that power. We need to take the power back and say we put you people in to those positions. We need look at the justice system and how all people, black and white, are treated. We need to empower Aboriginal people.
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Monday, 8 February 2010
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Sunday, 22 November 2009
The History of Oil
A 45 minute video of Robert Newman, a couple of years old but still relevant and damn funny
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Platform part 2
SS scrap from previous post is now a woodgas reheater with condensate drain, and exhaust pipe
The monorator shell described in an earlier post may not work in a stationary engine, due to a lack of air flow, so the top of that inner shell will be sealed and exhaust gas will be used to pre-heat the wood
The producer gas runs up the 3 tubes on left and down the 3 on the right, the radiator could be larger but this is what I've got on hand
The monorator shell described in an earlier post may not work in a stationary engine, due to a lack of air flow, so the top of that inner shell will be sealed and exhaust gas will be used to pre-heat the wood
The producer gas runs up the 3 tubes on left and down the 3 on the right, the radiator could be larger but this is what I've got on hand
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Woodgas multi function platform
GM Holden 202ci inline 6cyl and trimatic auto - frame from scrap dealer
3 semi complete gasifiers, number one on far right
Drastically shortened 4wd diff (4.5-1) purchased from a lawn mower racer
Number 3 finds a home, construction details here
Woodgas tri-carbs, stock manifold with "chair leg" tri adaptor and gutted Impco 125s
Poor mans tailshaft
Scrap stainless steel tubes and a torched water pump pulley
3 semi complete gasifiers, number one on far right
Drastically shortened 4wd diff (4.5-1) purchased from a lawn mower racer
Number 3 finds a home, construction details here
Woodgas tri-carbs, stock manifold with "chair leg" tri adaptor and gutted Impco 125s
Poor mans tailshaft
Scrap stainless steel tubes and a torched water pump pulley
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Friday, 22 May 2009
The cherries of wrath
via Ilargi
...What will indeed happen can best be described as erosion. It may move pretty fast, but in the beginning it will be destructive only locally, in communities that can no longer issue debt because the federal government won't let them. The California government recently threatened exactly that: to take property tax revenues away from lower governments in order to fill the holes in its own budget. We’ll see lots of that, in many shapes and forms.
Come the end of summer, many if not most bets are off, and we will see a lot of defaults and misery, some in expected, others in completely unforeseen places. But the demise of credit ratings for entire major industrial nations is far too early a call: they simply have many resources that are as yet untapped, if only it's your property taxes, sales taxes, whatever it takes, that now run your towns. Illegal, you say? Who makes the law?
In the fall of 2009, there'll be no more green shoots. They'll be needed just to feed people. And the big fall will start, for sure. But for the main implosions of whole nations, you’ll have to wait till next year. Just as well.
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Australian gas producers - on the land
Massey Harris "row crop" tractor with Melbourne made Kent gas producer
Baling lucerne at Bachuss Marsh - 1943
Charcoal for the engines at the Parkes flour mill
Home built gas producer - 1933
Oliver Hart Parr tractor with coal gas producer
Transporting headers to wharves 1944
Suntyne seed drill behind a Massey Harris model 25 - 1941
Crawler tractor with charcoal gas producer
IH tractor and Sunshine harvester - 1942
Forso gas producer
Baling lucerne at Bachuss Marsh - 1943
Charcoal for the engines at the Parkes flour mill
Home built gas producer - 1933
Oliver Hart Parr tractor with coal gas producer
Transporting headers to wharves 1944
Suntyne seed drill behind a Massey Harris model 25 - 1941
Crawler tractor with charcoal gas producer
IH tractor and Sunshine harvester - 1942
Forso gas producer
Sunday, 3 May 2009
Sunday, 19 April 2009
Why we forgot how to grow food
from the Times Online
"As a food shortage looms, people are digging for Britain — and their dinner table. John-Paul Flintoff gets back to our roots"
Not long before Christmas, a man walked into the care home next door to his house and asked the manager if it would be possible for a group of neighbours to grow food in the vast gardens. The manager said he would be delighted. In the days that followed, the man casually asked various neighbours whether they would like to get involved. They all said yes. So he popped over to the care home with them, and each remarked how large the garden was, and what a lot of food could be grown there.
As well as beds for vegetables, there could be fruit trees trained to grow up the south-facing walls, a bed of herbs for the kitchens, and flowers to take inside. The group could perhaps even keep chickens, once the fruit and veg were up and running.
The man went home after each trip feeling tremendously pleased with himself. I know this, because the man was me. Now, it’s not as if I did anything special: I didn’t lift a spade. Many people have done considerably more, as part of a grass-roots movement spreading rapidly across the nation, to grow our own food. And fast. Because for the first time in decades, Britain faces the real prospect of severe food shortages.
About 40% of the food we eat is imported. That includes an astounding 95% of our fruit and most of the wheat in our bread. This reliance on goods from abroad is perilous. During the 2000 fuel strike, Sainsbury’s chief executive wrote to the prime minister to warn that food supplies would run out “in days rather than weeks”. Supermarkets rationed bread, sugar and milk. The situation is now arguably worse: world food reserves are at historically low levels, and last year several countries stopped exporting staples because their own populations were going hungry.
If the problems were only temporary, it would be bad enough. But they’re not. We have become dependent on fossil fuels that are starting to run out. Taking account of all the oil- and gas-derived fertilisers, pesticides, distribution and retail practices, our modern farming uses an incredibly wasteful 10 calories of energy to put a single calorie of food on your plate.
Reverting to old-fashioned farming will be hard because our soil is in poor shape. Fertility has come to rely on annual, chemical top-ups instead of the traditional long-term build-up using animal manure and crop rotation. Suddenly taking away all the artificial fertilisers will result in drastically lower yields. And if we’re to feed ourselves, we can’t afford lower yields — because the UK is more densely populated than China, Pakistan or any African country except Rwanda.
Meanwhile, levels of minerals such as phosphate, which plants need for healthy growth, are falling fast. Global supplies have peaked, and last year phosphate prices rose by 700%. Britain imports 80% of its phosphates. The only alter-native is to return all food waste and animal and human manure to the land, instead of flushing it to sea. And let’s not forget the extremes of weather that will result from global warming. Rising sea levels spell doom for the 57% of grade-1 arable land in east England already below sea level. In 2000, during the unprecedented heat wave, crop yields in Italy and France fell by a third.
Perhaps most importantly, we lack know-how. Most of us today have little experience of food- growing. The farmers we do have are mostly approaching retirement, and there are few of them: agricultural employment has fallen from 40% in 1900 to 2% today, and much of the work is done by casual workers brought in from abroad.
Modern governments have not regarded self-sufficiency in food as a desirable aim, according to Professor Tim Lang of City University in London; but last year that changed. A report from the Cabinet Office concluded that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”. In response, Colin Tudge, the author of the book Feeding People is Easy, called for “a global renaissance in agriculture”. This more or less agreed with the insights of a less well-known environmentalist, Jeremy Clarkson: “We are heading towards The End of Days, and you’d better get yourself an allotment.”
That’s what I did last year, just in time, because now dozens of others are on the waiting list.
All over the country, people are starting to think about producing food. Some because they fancy a bit of the River Cottage lifestyle, but many — including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall — have been inspired by the growing Transition Town movement. Transition Towns were started by an Englishman, Rob Hopkins, after a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. At the time, he never imagined that oil might one day run out. “But then I showed students a film, The End of Suburbia. I have to say it was as traumatic and shocking for me as it was for the students.” The film made it clear that no aspect of life will be the same after cheap oil runs out — which it suggested will happen very soon. “When we got over the shock, we set about looking at Kinsale,” says Hopkins. “We examined how the town might look in 20 years if it adapted instead of pretending it wasn’t happening. We came up with a vision, then backcast it to see how to get there, year by year.”
Unlike other environmental initiatives, this deliberately involved finding the “upside” rather than dwelling on doom. “I like to use the analogy of inviting a reluctant friend to join you on holiday,” Hopkins explains. “If you paint a picture of the beach, the pool and the candlelit taverna by the sea, they’re more likely to come.”
Returning to England, Hopkins helped to create a similar “energy descent” plan in Totnes, Devon — the first Transition Town. Others soon followed. Lewes, Glastonbury and Stroud are full of middle-class hippie types, but in Bristol it’s the poorer districts that have been most dynamic, and across Wales the impetus has largely come from the agricultural community. Today, there are more than 150 “official” groups (who have formally asked to join the network) and hundreds of others still preparing or mulling it over. There are TTs in New Zealand, the US, and on The Archers.
After first talking to Hopkins, two years ago, I registered my own corner of northwest London on the Transition Town website and hoped that someone would join me. Nothing happened. So I cycled to south London to meet Duncan Law, an actor and director who parked the day job many, many months ago to devote himself full time to launching Transition Town Brixton.
The cafe where we met, Honest Foods, had a policy of sourcing food locally. Law asked for a word with the chef, said he knew someone with a vast crop of pears in their garden, and asked if the chef would be interested in buying them? Without hesitation, the chef said yes. I was impressed.
Law took me on a tour of Brixton: him on his recumbent bike and me on my foldaway with tiny wheels. If we looked odd together, the effect was increased by Law stopping every so often to collect apples that had fallen from trees. He told me about an entrepreneur who made £4,000 in the early 1950s — more than Law’s headmaster father earned in a year — by commissioning children to gather blackberries for him. TT Brixton, he said, was about to start mapping fruit trees across south London. (They’ve since done that.)
Near Balham, we visited Sue Sheehan, a Transition Town supporter who recently started growing fruit and veg in boxes in the tiny space in front of her terraced house. I still hadn’t got the hang of how to be upbeat about peak oil and climate change and ungraciously told her that the crop, though plentiful, would not be enough to keep her alive when the trouble starts. But every lettuce you grow yourself, Law said, saves growing another one miles away and shipping it to you, and all the emissions associated with that.
A few days later, I watched The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil, a documentary film about what happened to Cuba after Soviet oil supplies dried up. It shows how Cubans gradually turned away from a heavy reliance on carbon-intensive agriculture: in rural areas, they learnt to plough with oxen; in cities, all kinds of spaces were turned to horticulture, from window boxes to wasteland. The transition took more than two years, and Cubans had to forgo the equivalent of a meal a day — but by the end, even people in cities were producing half their annual fruit and vegetable needs.
I finally found like-minded people nearer my home, willing to launch a Transition Town. In Belsize library, we hosted a week of film screenings culminating with The Power of Community. It was clear from the question-and-answer session afterwards that the audience was gagging to start growing food. Strangely, they just seemed to want some kind of permission to get started. I improvised: “Just go for it! What can you lose?”
Transition Belsize was born and I found myself co-ordinating the 40-strong food group. The first thing the group did was visit my allotment. My new friends weeded, built a new raised bed, and took home some of my surplus apples. Since then, we have gathered names of people on the waiting list for allotments and put them in touch with householders who possess gardens but insufficient time, expertise, or ability to grow food themselves. We’ve set up a section in the local library with books and magazines devoted to food-growing, co-ordinated bulk purchasing of otherwise costly organic food so a wider portion of the population can access it, and got agreement from the local franchise of Budgens to sell produce grown by local people in gardens and allotments.
Another member, Councillor Alexis Rowell, rather brilliantly persuaded the council to allow residents on its estates to grow food there. Having done that, he went knocking on doors of one neighbouring estate to ask if people would like to grow food there. Over the course of a single weekend, members of the Transition group transformed the previously overgrown and unused gardens. Residents supplied hot soup and drinks, and joined in the work too. I travelled one cold January morning to Stroud, Gloucestershire, where members of another Transition group have done amazing things. Stroud has one of the country’s most successful farmers’ markets, and two Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes, through which householders fund a farmer to supply food to them directly. The first was started in 2001, by four individuals renting an acre of land and employing a vegetable grower. After two years they had formally established a co-operative and rented 23 acres. Today two full-time growers provide veg and meat to 189 households, with enough profit to pay a bonus.
Meat production runs at a loss, and has to be subsidised by the veg, but the farmers see stock as essential to good stewardship of the land, providing plentiful manure. There’s another benefit: marketing. Animals can be very attractive parts of any membership project. For that reason, the CSA houses its pigs in a prominent position, beside notices explaining how the scheme works.
One of the hardest things for the CSA is getting people involved. Most members are happy to pay to receive veg — after all, it’s cheaper than buying from most supermarkets — and will turn up to occasional events on the farm, such as wassailing parties and apple pruning in January, blossom celebrations in May, haymaking in August, a bonfire-night party, and singing to cows in the barn at Christmas.
But schemes like this need a critical mass of members willing to help out more routinely, and might lose energy or collapse altogether if a small minority of volunteers find themselves always responsible for making it work. Wandering over weed-infested fields with two such volunteers, Helen Pitel and Caroline Denny, I see for myself how hard the work is. “But we can’t let this fail,” says Pitel cheerfully.
Among other setbacks, the CSAs have had meat stolen from their packing shed, and had to deal with unsupportive neighbours, such as one who complained about the appearance of polytunnels on the hillside and forced the CSA to secure retrospective planning approval. Even members can be difficult. As part of recent efforts to get them to share trips to the farm to collect food for each other, a list of names and addresses were sent out. Some complained that this breached data security and risked ID theft, reveals one member of the core group: “It sometimes feels like there is a long way to go in building the ‘community’ bit of Community Supported Agriculture!”
I’m not surprised to find that setting up and running large-scale projects of this sort can be difficult, and no less impressed for that reason.
One of the most significant achievements of Stroud’s food group did not involve growing anything. It’s a comprehensive analysis, conducted by members who happen both to be local councillors, into whether or not the district could feed itself. The report by Fi Macmillan and Dave Cockcroft was inspired by an article in The Land magazine, Can Britain Feed Itself?, written by Simon Fairlie, a journalist and campaigner who has a sideline selling scythes (to, among others, me). Fairlie lives in Somerset and has some connection to a local Transition group, but he’s been doing this kind of work for years. His article was itself inspired by a book published in 1975.
Using the same model, Macmillan and Cockcroft investigated whether 110,000 people living in Stroud district could be fed if they relied on the 37,000 hectares of available farmland. The initial finding was encouraging: the district does have enough land to feed itself, though only if people reduce their meat intake to a quarter of the current UK average of 80 kilograms per person per year, and significantly reduce their sugar intake. There would be some surplus with which to trade for staples such as citrus, tea and coffee.
Alas, the analysis doesn’t stop there. Macmillan and Cockcroft go on to examine whether Stroud can feed itself without inputs from fossil fuels, and with land set aside to produce the biofuels needed to replace them. (An additional pressure on land, which they only mention in passing, is the need for land-based textiles, whether from sheep or fibres from hemp and other crops.)
The conclusion, this time, is distressing: “We have nowhere near enough land to produce a significant proportion of our current level of transport and heating fuels.” Crikey. If that’s the dismal outlook for the district of Stroud, set among all those rolling fields, what hope is there for London? Is it time to get out?
Rob Hopkins thinks not. He used to believe the most responsible thing to do was to move to rural areas, build a house and grow your own food. “But when I found out about peak oil I came to question that. We had built our own house, and were growing our own food, but this was only going to be sustainable if I am prepared to sit at the gate with a shotgun. What do I do with my carrots if the village up the road is cold and hungry?
“We have to move towards collective solutions,” he says. “Peak oil is a call to those of us who have been out in the highlands to come back and help, because the skills are very much in demand now.” According to Simon Fairlie, supplying our needs in the future will also need considerable movement in the other direction: dispersal of both livestock and humans around the country, not least so that all that human manure can be put back on the land.
For now, the best thing I can do is to make a go of food-growing in London, as they did in Havana. So on my return from Stroud I throw myself with renewed energy into the Belsize group.
Over dinner, the core group wrestles with strategies for growing the group ever larger. We agree to work hard in our own streets, as individuals, then the next street, and so on. One attractive idea is to deliberately grow “too many” seedlings, giving ourselves a perfectly amiable pretext for knocking on doors and inoffensively getting neighbours started on food-growing.
Back home, inspired by the Guerrilla Gardening movement to grow beans on a patch of scrubby land beyond the end of my garden, I stare across at the vast gardens of the neighbouring care home, and notice — not for the first time — just how big and bare they are. Then I look down the road and notice that one of my neighbours, five doors down, has likewise been cultivating the wasteland. I knock on his door, we get chatting, and in no time he’s touring the gardens of the care home with me. A few days later, I ask a family with girls about the same age as my own daughter. They visit the site too.
I set up a neighbourhood project on an online food-growing network and soon my neighbours sign up. I decide to ask them over for drinks. We’ll watch the first episode of The Good Life, then The Power of Community. In a few weeks time we will have achieved nearly as much here as Belsize, down the road, achieved all last year. After that, who knows, we might set up our own veg-box scheme…
But I shouldn’t get carried away. In The Transition Handbook, published last year and already reprinted several times, Rob Hopkins offers what he calls a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. We truly don’t know if this will work.
“Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this: (a) if we wait for the government, it’ll be too little, too late; (b) if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but (c) if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.'
"As a food shortage looms, people are digging for Britain — and their dinner table. John-Paul Flintoff gets back to our roots"
Not long before Christmas, a man walked into the care home next door to his house and asked the manager if it would be possible for a group of neighbours to grow food in the vast gardens. The manager said he would be delighted. In the days that followed, the man casually asked various neighbours whether they would like to get involved. They all said yes. So he popped over to the care home with them, and each remarked how large the garden was, and what a lot of food could be grown there.
As well as beds for vegetables, there could be fruit trees trained to grow up the south-facing walls, a bed of herbs for the kitchens, and flowers to take inside. The group could perhaps even keep chickens, once the fruit and veg were up and running.
The man went home after each trip feeling tremendously pleased with himself. I know this, because the man was me. Now, it’s not as if I did anything special: I didn’t lift a spade. Many people have done considerably more, as part of a grass-roots movement spreading rapidly across the nation, to grow our own food. And fast. Because for the first time in decades, Britain faces the real prospect of severe food shortages.
About 40% of the food we eat is imported. That includes an astounding 95% of our fruit and most of the wheat in our bread. This reliance on goods from abroad is perilous. During the 2000 fuel strike, Sainsbury’s chief executive wrote to the prime minister to warn that food supplies would run out “in days rather than weeks”. Supermarkets rationed bread, sugar and milk. The situation is now arguably worse: world food reserves are at historically low levels, and last year several countries stopped exporting staples because their own populations were going hungry.
If the problems were only temporary, it would be bad enough. But they’re not. We have become dependent on fossil fuels that are starting to run out. Taking account of all the oil- and gas-derived fertilisers, pesticides, distribution and retail practices, our modern farming uses an incredibly wasteful 10 calories of energy to put a single calorie of food on your plate.
Reverting to old-fashioned farming will be hard because our soil is in poor shape. Fertility has come to rely on annual, chemical top-ups instead of the traditional long-term build-up using animal manure and crop rotation. Suddenly taking away all the artificial fertilisers will result in drastically lower yields. And if we’re to feed ourselves, we can’t afford lower yields — because the UK is more densely populated than China, Pakistan or any African country except Rwanda.
Meanwhile, levels of minerals such as phosphate, which plants need for healthy growth, are falling fast. Global supplies have peaked, and last year phosphate prices rose by 700%. Britain imports 80% of its phosphates. The only alter-native is to return all food waste and animal and human manure to the land, instead of flushing it to sea. And let’s not forget the extremes of weather that will result from global warming. Rising sea levels spell doom for the 57% of grade-1 arable land in east England already below sea level. In 2000, during the unprecedented heat wave, crop yields in Italy and France fell by a third.
Perhaps most importantly, we lack know-how. Most of us today have little experience of food- growing. The farmers we do have are mostly approaching retirement, and there are few of them: agricultural employment has fallen from 40% in 1900 to 2% today, and much of the work is done by casual workers brought in from abroad.
Modern governments have not regarded self-sufficiency in food as a desirable aim, according to Professor Tim Lang of City University in London; but last year that changed. A report from the Cabinet Office concluded that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”. In response, Colin Tudge, the author of the book Feeding People is Easy, called for “a global renaissance in agriculture”. This more or less agreed with the insights of a less well-known environmentalist, Jeremy Clarkson: “We are heading towards The End of Days, and you’d better get yourself an allotment.”
That’s what I did last year, just in time, because now dozens of others are on the waiting list.
All over the country, people are starting to think about producing food. Some because they fancy a bit of the River Cottage lifestyle, but many — including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall — have been inspired by the growing Transition Town movement. Transition Towns were started by an Englishman, Rob Hopkins, after a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. At the time, he never imagined that oil might one day run out. “But then I showed students a film, The End of Suburbia. I have to say it was as traumatic and shocking for me as it was for the students.” The film made it clear that no aspect of life will be the same after cheap oil runs out — which it suggested will happen very soon. “When we got over the shock, we set about looking at Kinsale,” says Hopkins. “We examined how the town might look in 20 years if it adapted instead of pretending it wasn’t happening. We came up with a vision, then backcast it to see how to get there, year by year.”
Unlike other environmental initiatives, this deliberately involved finding the “upside” rather than dwelling on doom. “I like to use the analogy of inviting a reluctant friend to join you on holiday,” Hopkins explains. “If you paint a picture of the beach, the pool and the candlelit taverna by the sea, they’re more likely to come.”
Returning to England, Hopkins helped to create a similar “energy descent” plan in Totnes, Devon — the first Transition Town. Others soon followed. Lewes, Glastonbury and Stroud are full of middle-class hippie types, but in Bristol it’s the poorer districts that have been most dynamic, and across Wales the impetus has largely come from the agricultural community. Today, there are more than 150 “official” groups (who have formally asked to join the network) and hundreds of others still preparing or mulling it over. There are TTs in New Zealand, the US, and on The Archers.
After first talking to Hopkins, two years ago, I registered my own corner of northwest London on the Transition Town website and hoped that someone would join me. Nothing happened. So I cycled to south London to meet Duncan Law, an actor and director who parked the day job many, many months ago to devote himself full time to launching Transition Town Brixton.
The cafe where we met, Honest Foods, had a policy of sourcing food locally. Law asked for a word with the chef, said he knew someone with a vast crop of pears in their garden, and asked if the chef would be interested in buying them? Without hesitation, the chef said yes. I was impressed.
Law took me on a tour of Brixton: him on his recumbent bike and me on my foldaway with tiny wheels. If we looked odd together, the effect was increased by Law stopping every so often to collect apples that had fallen from trees. He told me about an entrepreneur who made £4,000 in the early 1950s — more than Law’s headmaster father earned in a year — by commissioning children to gather blackberries for him. TT Brixton, he said, was about to start mapping fruit trees across south London. (They’ve since done that.)
Near Balham, we visited Sue Sheehan, a Transition Town supporter who recently started growing fruit and veg in boxes in the tiny space in front of her terraced house. I still hadn’t got the hang of how to be upbeat about peak oil and climate change and ungraciously told her that the crop, though plentiful, would not be enough to keep her alive when the trouble starts. But every lettuce you grow yourself, Law said, saves growing another one miles away and shipping it to you, and all the emissions associated with that.
A few days later, I watched The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil, a documentary film about what happened to Cuba after Soviet oil supplies dried up. It shows how Cubans gradually turned away from a heavy reliance on carbon-intensive agriculture: in rural areas, they learnt to plough with oxen; in cities, all kinds of spaces were turned to horticulture, from window boxes to wasteland. The transition took more than two years, and Cubans had to forgo the equivalent of a meal a day — but by the end, even people in cities were producing half their annual fruit and vegetable needs.
I finally found like-minded people nearer my home, willing to launch a Transition Town. In Belsize library, we hosted a week of film screenings culminating with The Power of Community. It was clear from the question-and-answer session afterwards that the audience was gagging to start growing food. Strangely, they just seemed to want some kind of permission to get started. I improvised: “Just go for it! What can you lose?”
Transition Belsize was born and I found myself co-ordinating the 40-strong food group. The first thing the group did was visit my allotment. My new friends weeded, built a new raised bed, and took home some of my surplus apples. Since then, we have gathered names of people on the waiting list for allotments and put them in touch with householders who possess gardens but insufficient time, expertise, or ability to grow food themselves. We’ve set up a section in the local library with books and magazines devoted to food-growing, co-ordinated bulk purchasing of otherwise costly organic food so a wider portion of the population can access it, and got agreement from the local franchise of Budgens to sell produce grown by local people in gardens and allotments.
Another member, Councillor Alexis Rowell, rather brilliantly persuaded the council to allow residents on its estates to grow food there. Having done that, he went knocking on doors of one neighbouring estate to ask if people would like to grow food there. Over the course of a single weekend, members of the Transition group transformed the previously overgrown and unused gardens. Residents supplied hot soup and drinks, and joined in the work too. I travelled one cold January morning to Stroud, Gloucestershire, where members of another Transition group have done amazing things. Stroud has one of the country’s most successful farmers’ markets, and two Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes, through which householders fund a farmer to supply food to them directly. The first was started in 2001, by four individuals renting an acre of land and employing a vegetable grower. After two years they had formally established a co-operative and rented 23 acres. Today two full-time growers provide veg and meat to 189 households, with enough profit to pay a bonus.
Meat production runs at a loss, and has to be subsidised by the veg, but the farmers see stock as essential to good stewardship of the land, providing plentiful manure. There’s another benefit: marketing. Animals can be very attractive parts of any membership project. For that reason, the CSA houses its pigs in a prominent position, beside notices explaining how the scheme works.
One of the hardest things for the CSA is getting people involved. Most members are happy to pay to receive veg — after all, it’s cheaper than buying from most supermarkets — and will turn up to occasional events on the farm, such as wassailing parties and apple pruning in January, blossom celebrations in May, haymaking in August, a bonfire-night party, and singing to cows in the barn at Christmas.
But schemes like this need a critical mass of members willing to help out more routinely, and might lose energy or collapse altogether if a small minority of volunteers find themselves always responsible for making it work. Wandering over weed-infested fields with two such volunteers, Helen Pitel and Caroline Denny, I see for myself how hard the work is. “But we can’t let this fail,” says Pitel cheerfully.
Among other setbacks, the CSAs have had meat stolen from their packing shed, and had to deal with unsupportive neighbours, such as one who complained about the appearance of polytunnels on the hillside and forced the CSA to secure retrospective planning approval. Even members can be difficult. As part of recent efforts to get them to share trips to the farm to collect food for each other, a list of names and addresses were sent out. Some complained that this breached data security and risked ID theft, reveals one member of the core group: “It sometimes feels like there is a long way to go in building the ‘community’ bit of Community Supported Agriculture!”
I’m not surprised to find that setting up and running large-scale projects of this sort can be difficult, and no less impressed for that reason.
One of the most significant achievements of Stroud’s food group did not involve growing anything. It’s a comprehensive analysis, conducted by members who happen both to be local councillors, into whether or not the district could feed itself. The report by Fi Macmillan and Dave Cockcroft was inspired by an article in The Land magazine, Can Britain Feed Itself?, written by Simon Fairlie, a journalist and campaigner who has a sideline selling scythes (to, among others, me). Fairlie lives in Somerset and has some connection to a local Transition group, but he’s been doing this kind of work for years. His article was itself inspired by a book published in 1975.
Using the same model, Macmillan and Cockcroft investigated whether 110,000 people living in Stroud district could be fed if they relied on the 37,000 hectares of available farmland. The initial finding was encouraging: the district does have enough land to feed itself, though only if people reduce their meat intake to a quarter of the current UK average of 80 kilograms per person per year, and significantly reduce their sugar intake. There would be some surplus with which to trade for staples such as citrus, tea and coffee.
Alas, the analysis doesn’t stop there. Macmillan and Cockcroft go on to examine whether Stroud can feed itself without inputs from fossil fuels, and with land set aside to produce the biofuels needed to replace them. (An additional pressure on land, which they only mention in passing, is the need for land-based textiles, whether from sheep or fibres from hemp and other crops.)
The conclusion, this time, is distressing: “We have nowhere near enough land to produce a significant proportion of our current level of transport and heating fuels.” Crikey. If that’s the dismal outlook for the district of Stroud, set among all those rolling fields, what hope is there for London? Is it time to get out?
Rob Hopkins thinks not. He used to believe the most responsible thing to do was to move to rural areas, build a house and grow your own food. “But when I found out about peak oil I came to question that. We had built our own house, and were growing our own food, but this was only going to be sustainable if I am prepared to sit at the gate with a shotgun. What do I do with my carrots if the village up the road is cold and hungry?
“We have to move towards collective solutions,” he says. “Peak oil is a call to those of us who have been out in the highlands to come back and help, because the skills are very much in demand now.” According to Simon Fairlie, supplying our needs in the future will also need considerable movement in the other direction: dispersal of both livestock and humans around the country, not least so that all that human manure can be put back on the land.
For now, the best thing I can do is to make a go of food-growing in London, as they did in Havana. So on my return from Stroud I throw myself with renewed energy into the Belsize group.
Over dinner, the core group wrestles with strategies for growing the group ever larger. We agree to work hard in our own streets, as individuals, then the next street, and so on. One attractive idea is to deliberately grow “too many” seedlings, giving ourselves a perfectly amiable pretext for knocking on doors and inoffensively getting neighbours started on food-growing.
Back home, inspired by the Guerrilla Gardening movement to grow beans on a patch of scrubby land beyond the end of my garden, I stare across at the vast gardens of the neighbouring care home, and notice — not for the first time — just how big and bare they are. Then I look down the road and notice that one of my neighbours, five doors down, has likewise been cultivating the wasteland. I knock on his door, we get chatting, and in no time he’s touring the gardens of the care home with me. A few days later, I ask a family with girls about the same age as my own daughter. They visit the site too.
I set up a neighbourhood project on an online food-growing network and soon my neighbours sign up. I decide to ask them over for drinks. We’ll watch the first episode of The Good Life, then The Power of Community. In a few weeks time we will have achieved nearly as much here as Belsize, down the road, achieved all last year. After that, who knows, we might set up our own veg-box scheme…
But I shouldn’t get carried away. In The Transition Handbook, published last year and already reprinted several times, Rob Hopkins offers what he calls a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. We truly don’t know if this will work.
“Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this: (a) if we wait for the government, it’ll be too little, too late; (b) if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but (c) if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.'
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy
Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy
by Eric Zencey
INNOVATIVE and opaque instruments of debt; greedy bankers; lenders’ eagerness to take on risky loans; a lack of regulation; a shortage of bank liquidity: all have been nominated as the underlying cause of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But a more perceptive, and more troubling, diagnosis is suggested by the work of a little-regarded British chemist-turned-economist who wrote before and during the Great Depression.
Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, was an individualist who bowed to few conventions, and who is described by one biographer as a difficult, obstinate man. A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay, he foresaw the energy potential of atomic fission as early as 1909. But his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy — the world into which scientific progress introduces its gifts. In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank.
He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.
A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.
Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”
Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”
Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.
Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.
It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.
Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth. How can that be done?
Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.
Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing. Banks do this by lending out most of their depositors’ money at interest — making loans that the borrower soon puts in a demand deposit (checking) account, where it will soon be lent out again to create more debt and demand deposits, and so on, almost ad infinitum.
One way to stop this cycle, suggests Herman Daly, an ecological economist, would be to gradually institute a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what Professor Daly calls “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”
Banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” in Professor Daly’s phrase, people who forgo consumption today by taking money out of their checking accounts and putting it in time deposits — CDs, passbook savings, 401(k)’s. In return, these savers receive a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.
In such a system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving or abstinence on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. (Of course, it would not solve the problem completely, not unless financial institutions were also forbidden to create subprime mortgage derivatives and other instruments of leveraged debt.)
If such a major structural renovation of our economy sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider that so too did the abolition of the gold standard and the introduction of floating exchange rates back in the 1920s. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.
Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”
by Eric Zencey
INNOVATIVE and opaque instruments of debt; greedy bankers; lenders’ eagerness to take on risky loans; a lack of regulation; a shortage of bank liquidity: all have been nominated as the underlying cause of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But a more perceptive, and more troubling, diagnosis is suggested by the work of a little-regarded British chemist-turned-economist who wrote before and during the Great Depression.
Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, was an individualist who bowed to few conventions, and who is described by one biographer as a difficult, obstinate man. A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay, he foresaw the energy potential of atomic fission as early as 1909. But his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy — the world into which scientific progress introduces its gifts. In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank.
He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.
A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.
Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”
Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”
Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.
Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.
It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.
Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth. How can that be done?
Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.
Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing. Banks do this by lending out most of their depositors’ money at interest — making loans that the borrower soon puts in a demand deposit (checking) account, where it will soon be lent out again to create more debt and demand deposits, and so on, almost ad infinitum.
One way to stop this cycle, suggests Herman Daly, an ecological economist, would be to gradually institute a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what Professor Daly calls “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”
Banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” in Professor Daly’s phrase, people who forgo consumption today by taking money out of their checking accounts and putting it in time deposits — CDs, passbook savings, 401(k)’s. In return, these savers receive a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.
In such a system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving or abstinence on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. (Of course, it would not solve the problem completely, not unless financial institutions were also forbidden to create subprime mortgage derivatives and other instruments of leveraged debt.)
If such a major structural renovation of our economy sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider that so too did the abolition of the gold standard and the introduction of floating exchange rates back in the 1920s. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.
Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”
Monday, 13 April 2009
Cheap gas producer
monorator slip ring/ water channel
in place and sealed
shell in position
air inlet and stub for downtube
slip fit into airbox - plate on blower end
12v vapour lock wired to startup fan
part 1 is here
in place and sealed
shell in position
air inlet and stub for downtube
slip fit into airbox - plate on blower end
12v vapour lock wired to startup fan
part 1 is here
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Thursday, 9 April 2009
Producer gas and the Australian motorist
An excerpt from Producer Gas and the Australian Motorist by Don Bartlett
..."It is easy for the present generation of drivers, attuned to modern vehicles where electronic gadgets abound, to be ignorant of the simple facts about pre-war - and even many post-war vehicles.
Automatic transmissions were rare. Synchro-mesh gearboxes were not common either. When slowing down for an intersection or when stopping, it was usually necessary to manually adjust "the spark".
You were required by law to extend your right arm out the window and wave it up and down like a wounded albatross to warn other motorists of your intention to reduce speed.
Stop lights at the rear were optional but in effect, you were still required to signal your intention to stop, by holding your arm out the window with your elbow bent upwards to 90 degrees and the palm of your hand opened forward with the fingers, all of the fingers, pointing up.
A right-turn indication was also mandatory and was made with the unbent arm extended straight out of the window. The stop or turn signal had to be given continuously for at least 100 feet before the stop or turn.
I mention all of this, not in an attempt to be humorous but because many drivers on the road today would not have experienced that type of motoring. It needs to be understood in order to comprehend the conditions in which the gas producer system operated.
As the vehicle slowed down for the intersection, in addition to spark adjustments and hand signals, the driver had to use the left hand to make the gear shift – invariably, the gear lever was mounted on the floor.
With one hand out the window and the other on the gear shift, there was not much left to steer the vehicle – although the law said that you must have effective control of the vehicle at all times!
Meantime, your feet were moving rhythmically on the clutch and accelerator as gear changes required the now forgotten art of "double de-clutching".
Then there is the added complication of the producer gas controls. In Tibby's words, "you just played with all of the controls (choke, throttle, butterflies etc) at your disposal until you got things going OK". One contemporary report suggested that "bare feet, prehensile toes and experience at the Wurlitzer organ could be a distinct advantage".
Before entering the intersection, you had to ensure that the gas flow was adequate and, if on water injection, that the setting was appropriate for the load on the engine. Then of course, there were the other motorists going through the same ritual and approaching the same intersection.
If it was night-time and near the coast in 1942, there was the added hassle of the blackout. There were no street lights and your headlights (poor enough anyway by modern standards) had to be masked to allow only a narrow slit of light to the front.
..."It is easy for the present generation of drivers, attuned to modern vehicles where electronic gadgets abound, to be ignorant of the simple facts about pre-war - and even many post-war vehicles.
Automatic transmissions were rare. Synchro-mesh gearboxes were not common either. When slowing down for an intersection or when stopping, it was usually necessary to manually adjust "the spark".
You were required by law to extend your right arm out the window and wave it up and down like a wounded albatross to warn other motorists of your intention to reduce speed.
Stop lights at the rear were optional but in effect, you were still required to signal your intention to stop, by holding your arm out the window with your elbow bent upwards to 90 degrees and the palm of your hand opened forward with the fingers, all of the fingers, pointing up.
A right-turn indication was also mandatory and was made with the unbent arm extended straight out of the window. The stop or turn signal had to be given continuously for at least 100 feet before the stop or turn.
I mention all of this, not in an attempt to be humorous but because many drivers on the road today would not have experienced that type of motoring. It needs to be understood in order to comprehend the conditions in which the gas producer system operated.
As the vehicle slowed down for the intersection, in addition to spark adjustments and hand signals, the driver had to use the left hand to make the gear shift – invariably, the gear lever was mounted on the floor.
With one hand out the window and the other on the gear shift, there was not much left to steer the vehicle – although the law said that you must have effective control of the vehicle at all times!
Meantime, your feet were moving rhythmically on the clutch and accelerator as gear changes required the now forgotten art of "double de-clutching".
Then there is the added complication of the producer gas controls. In Tibby's words, "you just played with all of the controls (choke, throttle, butterflies etc) at your disposal until you got things going OK". One contemporary report suggested that "bare feet, prehensile toes and experience at the Wurlitzer organ could be a distinct advantage".
Before entering the intersection, you had to ensure that the gas flow was adequate and, if on water injection, that the setting was appropriate for the load on the engine. Then of course, there were the other motorists going through the same ritual and approaching the same intersection.
If it was night-time and near the coast in 1942, there was the added hassle of the blackout. There were no street lights and your headlights (poor enough anyway by modern standards) had to be masked to allow only a narrow slit of light to the front.
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