Thatch cottage near our home

Straw-roofed homes like this used to be the norm around here, and a few still remain in every town. They would not work in a dry climate, and they have to be updated every ten or twenty years, but there is no cheaper or more sustainable roofing material. After a while, moss grows on the roof, adding to the protection and the charm.

Hearteningly, a number of the dilapidated thatch cottages near our home have been restored recently, and I have seen entire hillsides of new thatch roofs in County Clare. There are few thatchers left, but they have had good business lately, and their numbers might increase as the method returns.

Feile na Samhain

For hundreds of years, harvest festivals have brought neighbours together as a community, to talk, trade and celebrate the plentiful food before the beginning of the long nights of winter. To help bring back that kind of community network and local crafts, my group, FADA, will organize a Feile na Samhain (Halloween festival) Nov. 1.

As part of the day-long family festival, we will host workshops where local people can learn to:

* make felt out of wool,

* make a basket out of willow branches,

* use a bow and arrow.

We will also have children's theatre, storytelling and puppetry, and children's workshops where the kids can:

* learn about worms and how to make a wormery;

* make their own small windmills;

* weave willow together to make baskets,

* make their own masks.

We will also have booths on gardening, seed saving, bee keeping and forests, while Colaiste Gaol students will offer an exhibition on what County Kildare was like in the early 20^th century, based on their interviews with elderly residents.

Theresa Carter, of FADA and Kildare Transition Town, will talk about the Transition Town movement, which is moving hundreds of communities away from fossil fuel dependence. Davie Philip, of the Dublin organization Cultivate, will speak about the methods communities are using to do this. Eleanor Sutherland will talk about using hedgerow plants to stay healthy, and I will talk about peak oil and the world’s future.

All these are baby steps -- five people might learn how to line boots, ten people might meet and follow up the relationship, a few kids might think differently about the world. But out of threads like this is a community woven. The events of the last few weeks have frightened so many people because their fortunes - their food, housing, relationships, entertainment, everything in their lives -- rise and fall with the fortunes of Wall Street gamblers. The more we restore a free-standing, functional community that feeds and supplies itself, the less dependent we are on an economy composed of a froth of bubbles.

Top Photo: County

Wicklow in the fall.

Bottom photo: Irish musicians and mummers at Donadea forest last December.

The Quay at Naas

This boathouse, across from the Naas library near our home, is one terminus of a canal network that stretches over many miles of Irish countryside, including our land in Killina.

Transition Town meeting

Transition Town Kildare is off to a great start, and I wish every town could see meetings like the one I saw tonight. The event at Aras Bridhe church drew a large crowd from a small town, including parents, schoolchildren, elderly villagers, nuns and farmers, and many people asked tough questions about a future without oil.

Event organizer Theresa Carter -- an amazing woman who spun the Kildare Transition Town group out of our group, FADA -- gave a comprehensive rundown of peak oil and climate change that brought listeners from zero to well-educated in less than thirty minutes. An elderly nun from the parish also read a brief poem about caring for the creation.

But the highlight of the evening came when Trevor Sargent, the former head of the Green Party and now Ireland’s Minister for Food and Horticulture, gave an inspiring speech about Ireland’s post-oil future.

Sargent is an impressive man -- he has begun his own Transition Town initiative in Balbriggan, and helped promote the release of Rob Hopkins’ Transition Town Handbook in the first Transition Town of Kinsale, Ireland. He has recently called for every school in Ireland to grow its own food. He might be the only world leader to ride his bicycle to work most mornings. Tonight, he spoke about peak oil and climate change in a way that was both brutally honest and inspiring.


* It was ecological destruction that caused the collapse of Easter Island and the once-Fertile Crescent, according to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse.

* 64 of the world’s 98 oil-producing nations are past peak.

* Most of the food we buy off supermarket shelves keeps so long because no living thing, other than us, are willing to eat it.

* In the last 15 years, Ireland has lost 15 percent of its farms to development. Every farm lost is also a set of traditions and skills that no longer outlive the aging farmer population.

* Potato sales in Ireland have gone down, but sales of small waxy potatoes – which do not grow here, and must be imported – are up an amazing 20 percent. Apparently it is because they do not have to be peeled, and most people cannot be bothered to peel their own potatoes.

* We need not just a return of local gardens, but local abattoirs and local industries.

* Ireland’s 1926 Acquisition of Land and Allotment Act, which got rid of the workhouses when the nation became independent, compels local authorities to give people access to land for growing food, and more communities could invoke this this law to force local food production.

* In the next few decades, the world needs to drop oil or the planet will drop a lot of people.

* The French Revolution was partly spurred by food riots, and the young officer sent to put down the riots was named Napoleon Bonaparte. The prospect of food riots haunted him for the rest of his famous career, and when he became Emperor, he dictated that every mayor of every town was responsible for creating and maintaining a farmers’ market – a legacy that France has enjoyed ever since.

Photo: Kildare Town

American Conservative article

Some people wanted to see the article I wrote for the American Conservative, but let me know that the old link did not work, as the AmCon has apparently changed their set-up.

You can see my article "Future Perfect: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Peak Oil" here if you register for a free three months, or here if you don't want to do that. I recommend the three months -- the AmCon is worth it.

World's prophets gather in Cork

I wrote this article for Permaculture magazine last year, and I think the statute of limitations has run out for reprinting it. It was an amazing experience, not just for hearing the speakers but for having a chance to sit and talk after hours, or at least meet, with peoople I have always admired -- Rob Hopkins, Albert Bates, Julian Darley, Jeremy Leggett, Colin Campbell and many others.

BY BRIAN KALLER

Rarely does an event bring together oil industry leaders and community activists, an English lord and an American farmer, Chinese scientists with the former CIA head -- all to discuss the future of oil-powered civilization.

The consensus: brace yourself, both on fossil fuels and climate change.

“The peakists have won,” said former US Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, addressing the sixth annual convention of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. Oil industry scientists and business leaders, he said, increasingly admit that an oil crisis is coming, although his and many governments remain in denial.

“Until we get the engagement of the public, we are not going to be able to grapple with this issue,” he said.

Most experts believed peak is imminent. Oil industry executive Ray Leonard suggested the current plateau of oil production may last another decade before declining, while Petroleum Review editor Chris Skrebowski predicted the plateau would last a few more years and then peak around 2011. Talisman Energy CEO James Buckee was perhaps the grimmest, said that “we are at peak and looking at an exponential decline” in the coming years.

Despite this, “don’t expect too much progress in relation to containing greenhouse gases,” Schlesinger bluntly told the gathering. The giant populations of China, India and Indonesia are escalating their energy use, he said, and will likely try to extend their fossil-fuel credit with coal or bio-fuels.

Former oil geologist Jeremy Leggett warned the conference against that very possibility, saying coal or bio-fuel emissions could raise global temperatures enough to release methane trapped in melting ice, or unleash other “feedback loops.”

Other peak oil experts have been more hopeful about climate change; ASPO member Kjell Aklett, for example, has said that oil will run out too quickly for doomsday climate scenarios to happen. His 2003 report, however, did not take increased coal use into account.

Nate Hagens of the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute gave another reason for opposing bio-fuels, noting that supplying much of the world with current levels of fuel production would require turning much of the world’s arable land over to fuels instead of food production. He also noted that as the climate changes, droughts are likely to reduce the crop production needed

Many speakers, however, offered more hopeful signs: new developments in electric cars, increases in the use of solar and wind power, and a revival of local and regional sustainability. Airtricity CEO Eddie O’Connor promoted a pan-European grid of wind turbines off the Atlantic coast that could offer a constant supply of electricity, while other scientists promoted a revival of nuclear energy.

Others are making progress at the local level. Community activist Rob Hopkins described how his town of Totnes, and dozens of other communities around the world, are becoming “transition towns.” Totnes residents, he said, are organizing local gardens, “re-skilling” for a post-oil world, and interviewing elderly neighbours about traditional ways of life.

The gathering was a milestone for the seven-year-old ASPO organization, its first conference since “peak oil” theory received mainstream media attention in the UK and US, and since the price of oil hit an all-time high.

Peak oil theory holds that oil production follows a predictable curve, rising and then falling as growing demand outpaces the dwindling supply. With some variation, oil production of most countries have followed this curve, first proposed by oil geologist M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.

Oil crises were difficult enough in the 1970s; since then traffic and suburbs have exploded across England and Ireland, further tying prosperity to fuel. Cars can be made electric; however, air travel will remain dependent on oil, and speakers at the conference predicted that industry would contract in the decades ahead.

Another problem with an oil crisis is that the Western world has largely replaced its plant-based products for oil-based ones. Business suits, gelatin pills, computers, car dashboards and a million other tiny items are made of plastic, derived from fossil fuels.

Finally, world agriculture is dependent largely on tractors and pesticides – innovations that allowed world population to double in the last 50 years, but depend entirely on fossil fuels.

Hubbert was initially ridiculed for his prediction that the U.S. oil supply would peak in 1970, but was later proven correct. Geologist and Cork resident Colin Campbell was similarly ridiculed in the 1990s when he revived Hubbert’s ideas and predicted a global oil peak in the early 2000s. Seven years later, however, as the elderly scientist stood before the cheering crowd, he smiled like a man vindicated.




Top photo: the view from one of the bridges across the middle of Cork. Bottom photo: The view from the youth hostel I stayed at. I had worked out on a map the nearest cheap hostel to the conference, thinking it would be a short walk. I had not taken into account the topography of Cork, and that much of the walk would be up what could only be called a cliff.

Food preservation

Almost all people, whether Irish villagers, Aboriginal tribes or desert nomads, used to preserve food during the non-harvest majority of the year, and had developed sophisticated methods by trial and error over centuries. The specific methods changed with culture and climate, but people knew how to dry, pickle, salt, bury, smoke and ferment, just as people used to know how to raise food, build shelters, birth babies, raise children and bury their dead. It is only in the last couple of generations, here in the West, that we have forgotten all these things, and expect to be taken care of.

Today, a shocking percentage of people -- a majority in America - don't cook at all. Seventy percent of Americans are overweight, and a recent poll in England found that a third of food was thrown away uneaten. That constant stream of cheap and unhealthy food, though, is going to end soon, and we will have to return to growing our own and stretch most of the harvest long past harvest time.

Of course, the most familiar kind of indefinite food storage for many people is freezing, which still requires electricity but is a good place to start. Rather than eating out, ordering in or making individual meals one by one, you can make a large quantity of a dish in season and freeze it in a dozen meal-sized portions for later. It costs much less than making many individual meals, you can mix-and-match dishes, and the food retains most of its vitamins and flavour from the time it was picked.

Another common method is dehydration. Most people are already familiar with several such foods: raisins and sun-dried tomatoes, herbs, seasonings like garlic, and of course bulk grains and beans. Some parents have discovered the advantages of dried fruit like apple rings or fruit rolls, which children often love and which are much more nutritious than candy.

Drying meat into jerky is an old method of storing protein, and other people dehydrate chopped vegetables as soup starters. Nettles or dandelions can be dried for tea. The Japanese dry seaweed to use in soups, and we here in Ireland pay high prices for it at sushi restaurants, yet ignore the thousands of tonnes of edible seaweed on our own shores.

Your climate will make some kinds of preservation easier or more difficult -- our damp climate in Ireland means we have to watch out for mould when drying, and you may need the help of your radiator or oven. When we dry herbs, for example, we turn the oven to the lowest setting and leave the door slightly open.

On the other hand, we have very little snow or even frost here, and this is a good climate to simply leave things like parsnips, celeriac or other root vegetables in the ground through the winter, and yank them out as you need them. Some people put straw or bags over them to protect from frost, or pull them from the earth and store them in sand.

There are several other well-known forms of preserving – canning, pickling, salting, smoking, preserving in jams, in oil, in liquor – that I'll talk about later, but these methods are a good place to start.