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.

Stuff that lasts

Walk into any store, here in Ireland or in America, and you are quickly overwhelmed by consumer choice, by the thousands of products screaming for attention. Almost all these products, though -- shoes, CDs, deodorants, toys -- have one thing in common: they break quickly and are meant to be thrown away and replaced. All of them will become less replaceable as they cost more to make in Third-World factories and transport around a planet.

One solution -- the one mentioned in the mainstream media -- is to get more energy some other way and use it more efficiently, by replacing our technology with more advanced technology. The proposed solutions, however, are generally hypothetical (clean coal) or rare (electric cars, solar panels). I would love to see solar panels on every roof, rings of wind turbines around small towns, and electric rail systems linking towns together, and we still might be able to get there. But even in the West their use has not come close to a critical mass, and we certainly do not have the natural resources to cover the world with them. Moreover, all these things eventually break, and to my knowledge, no one has ever built a solar-powered solar-panel factory.

Another choice is to learn the old skills of life before fossil fuels, and I'd like to see everyone learn how to rein and bridle, keep bees, create hedgerows and build with cob. But the fossil fuels and the modern world will not disappear tomorrow, or completely. Most of us are better off making this long journey to a simpler life one step at a time, without completely abandoning the advantages of modern technology. (Re: Me and you, sitting here, at our computers)

One practical approach is to buy durable goods and learn how to use them, even if only in case of emergency. Ironically, this often means re-adopting "obsolete" technology that was more common fifty or a hundred years ago.

Take the straight razor. It costs much more initially than a plastic disposable razor, and using it requires some practice, but properly maintained it can last indefinitely. A razor bought today could be passed to children decades from now.

John Michael Greer uses the example of slide rules. Once people have become proficient at using them, they can calculate almost as fast as a person with a calculator. I am told that some of the calculations for the first space launches were done with slide rules, and that the first astronauts landed on the moon carrying some. Less than thirty years ago the dictionary entry for “computer” was a person who computed with a slide rule. Yet most people my age – in their thirties – have never used or even seen one.

A simple mortar and pestle can grind all kinds of ingredients that are so cheap and little-used today that we underestimate how important they can be when preserving or cooking food, or how far away they grow.

Wind-up clocks are surprisingly difficult to find where I live, except for decorative facsimiles that actually require batteries. Like straight razors or grinders, they must be purchased by mail order and are expensive, as their main market seems to be aficionados.

Bicycles are an amazing invention and famous example of sustainable transportation, and can be maintained and repaired. Like clocks or acoustic instruments, however, they require some industry to create – with the additional necessity of at least some globalized trade to create rubber tires. Also, most bicyclists I know are urban, and tend to take for granted the presence of well-maintained paved roads.

Washboards and wringers would allow clothes to be cleaned without electricity and dried quickly, yet I have yet to find any, as they are too old for stores and too mundane for antiques dealers.

Even with devices that require electricity, simpler is often better. A vinyl album can be played with a cactus needle if the real one breaks, and even if there is no electricity, one might be able to hook it up to pedals.

In some cases -- musical instruments, pottery wheels - the knowledge and techniques are more important than the items themselves. Take, for example, knitting. The first references to knitting were in the Renaissance, but there is no reason to believe that Stone Age people could not have knitted. As far as we know, they did not – the technique had not been invented.

All these items cover the vast middle ground between the microchip society we live in today and the survivalist, post-apocalyptic world our media is so fond of portraying.  They give off zero carbon emissions, often have replaceable parts, and can often be patched or repaired in a way that an Ipod cannot.

Most of these items, though, require at least some industrial society – even solar ovens made with a box and foil. We forget how recently aluminum foil was an exotic and rare commodity – well into the industrial age, the U.S. government almost covered the newly-built Washington Monument with shiny foil to show what a wealthy country we were.

I don’t anticipate the industry to create these things vanishing in my lifetime -- and hopefully not ever -- but we will need decades to rebuild the local factories that used to be the centrepiece of most mid—sized towns. When I reported on small towns in Missouri and Kansas, most towns seemed to have an abandoned factory, the former center of the economy there. When I saw these communities decades later, however, the buildings had at best been converted into apartments and at worst into a meth distribution centre. We desperately need entrepreneurs to invest, not in anticipated technological breakthroughs, but in restoring a single shoe factory to America.

Better yet, someone could build the first solar-powered solar panel factory in the world. For all the technology we have around us, it would be our first true investment, rather than living off a prehistoric credit card.

PHOTO: The road outside my office in Dublin. Teenagers drive the horse buggies all around the neighbourhood, offering rides to tourists.

Wild Food

For millions of years all food was wild, gathered from under trees, off leaves and out of streams, and even after people began to slowly shift to farming they gathered the edibles around them.

Nettles are not only one of the most common plants in Ireland, they are extremely nutritious – high in protein, iron and vitamins. It is versatile, and can be made into a cooked green, soup, tea, pudding, put into pancakes or scrambled eggs, even home-made beer. For those who have never tried them, they have a slight fishy flavour from their high levels of iodine, and go well with seafood.

Nettles are best as shoots picked in spring, but I am not picky, and will eat them even in summer, picking them from the field next door and making them into soup for lunch at my office the next day.

Dandelions are also nutritious, and in Europe are grown as salad. Gardeners often wrap the leaves together in a cloth, which blanches out the colour and eases the bitterness.

When you see an Irish field in summer, it will often be covered in purple clovers, yellow cowslips and white daisies – all flowers that can be eaten raw as salad greens. (If you want to try any of these, do make sure you know what they look like, to know that yellow flower is an edible cowslip and not a poisonous buttercup.)

Cowslips can also be made into wine, as can elderflowers – we have bottles of both on our shelves. In fact, many plants can be made into wine or beer with the addition of water, sugar and yeast – fermenting roots like parsnips made the original “root beer.”

There are many more local plants that I have read about but not yet tried – goosefoot is ubiquitous around here, for example, but everyone assures me its taste relegates it to the “desperate” category.

Many nut trees grow in Ireland -- hazel, chestnuts, beech and walnuts. Acorns can be made edible by leaching them for a day or two in water – either a running stream or water that is changed twice a day.

Most older people here seem to possess such knowledge, and perhaps every Druid and Neanderthal before them. Now such resources are almost forgotten, and would go unused even in a crisis unless we retain and spread the knowledge.



















Of course, our nation does not rise and fall with nettles, but this is one of thousands of skills we have lost. And while somebody, somewhere has scientific knowledge Druids and Neanderthals could not imagine – say, to build wind turbines or solar panels – how many of us have this knowledge, or even a rudimentary grasp of science?

Famines might seem distant tragedies to us right now, with supermarkets around every corner, and let’s hope it stays that way. But I also live on a lush island teeming with food and surrounded by fishing waters, that saw the most famous famine in history. If such times ever come again, we will need to see, not just boarded-up stores, but the metric tonnes of food all around us.

(Upper photo: Beara, Cork. Lower photo: our land at Killina)