A sober message at the Grange.
By Jon
Alden
Everythingwestport.com
Saturday, May 13, 2008
View the photo album now 23 photos |
Dial-up speed | Broadband/DSL speed |
Professor Nancy Lee Wood (left), sociology professor at Bristol Community College, spoke
Tuesday night of the oncoming peril of peak
oil and explored its impact in a discussion entitled “The Future of Food, Famine and Farming: from
Globalization to Re-localization”. Wood travels around the area to
give two or three talks a week about peak oil - the term for the height of the
Earth’s oil supply. She has been at the college for over 13 years, is helping
BCC raise awareness and helping faculty incorporate the environment into
curriculum across a broad range of courses. Environmentalists believe that
after petroleum production peaks, oil prices will rise dramatically as the
world supply dwindles. Estimates for the point of peak oil vary widely, but the
experts seem to agree with its outcome.
Lucille
Chase (lower left), event organizer,
opened the meeting, and described how her experience reading the book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food
Life.” by Barbara KingSolver elevated her
awareness of this global problem, and its potential implications to our
society. “I was so enthralled with the book’s content, I just wanted to share
it with others,” Ms. Chase said. The thought of a meeting started to formulate
in Ms. Chase’s mind, and she remembered reading about Professor
Nancy Lee Wood’s efforts with local agricultural. Ms. Chase later bumped
into Westport Land Conservation Trust’s President, and their conversation
turned to Dr. Wood. Coincidently, the Trust was looking for a guest speaker for
their annual meeting. The two events were scheduled together.
“I was able to get the support of
the Westport Land Conservation Trust, Westport Agricultural Commission, Westport
River Watershed Alliance, Westport Grange, and Town of Westport Alternative
Energy Commission,” Ms. Chase said. “The outgrowth of this kind of interest
could be community gardens with mentor supervision, possible using town land
(Town Farm?), and other highly visible areas to promote local agricultural, education
and cultural activities. I invited Westport teacher Aryn
Bottcher to bring her students to attend and examine the impact of the depletion of the world's oil reserves and its consequences for
the world economy and population.
Peak Oil
Dr. Woods
brought a sobering message home to an even more somber audience at the Grange, a
fitting place for yet another challenge to farming as we know it today. However,
don’t shoot the messenger. It’s not a
question of whether this will happen; it’s a question of when. Americans by and
large seems both ambivalent and somewhat reluctant to change their lifestyle in
recognition of the impending energy crisis due to a dwindling supply of fossil
fuels. Need evidence? A 21 mpg eight-passenger, full-size SUV (Chevy Tahoe) is
voted 2007 Green Car of the Year! See below.
“Surprise!
Founder of Green Car Journal Ron Cogan announced that the third annual Green
Car of the Year Award would go to the big GM Hybrid SUV for its innovation in
demonstrating that a vehicle with lots of people and cargo hauling capability
could still offer fuel economy equivalent to that of a much smaller
four-cylinder sedan.” AutoBlog.com,
Nov 15, 2007.
Dr. Wood’s lecture left a lot of us
scratching our heads (left) when
confronted with the implication of declining fossil fuel reserves and a
burgeoning population. “We need to curtail our use of fossil fuels,” Dr. Wood
said. “Fossil fuels are unsustainable. We have come to pride ourselves on
waste.”
The
practicalities of implementing any program to reduce our dependency on fossil
fuels, never mind on foreign oil, are enormously overwhelming. A previous
forecast looms ominously: By the year 2000 half of all the oil available in the
world would have been used.
Dr. Wood
ran a seven minute segment from the documentary, “A Short History of Peak Oil.”
There is no dearth of experts writing books on this subject. “We get through around 30 billion barrels a
year currently, which amounts to around 82 million barrels every day.
Consumption varies enormously around the world, but no prizes for guessing who
uses the most. The United States guzzles a quarter of all oil produced, China,
at the moment, comes a distant second with around 9 percent and Japan third
with 6.5 percent,” CNN reports
this month.
Dr. Wood
reported that the average U.S. per Person Barrels of Oil Equivalent Used is 26
barrels yearly. Of that an astounding 10 barrels go toward food production: production,
operation and maintenance of mechanical farming equipment; fertilizers; drying,
food packaging; transportation and distribution; and refrigeration. Chilean
wine and Beluga Caviar ($68 per ounce) will become even more expensive in the
long term! “And air travel will only be
for the wealthy,” Dr. Wood said.
Dr. Wood
confined her talk on how we could take a grass roots approach in reducing
consumption of fossil fuels in food production. She presented a sterling
example of how it could be done. “We are loosing the knowledge of how our food
is produced,” Dr. Wood said. “And our daily intake of 3900 calories from the
food we do eat is twice as much as we need.” Agri-business seems enamored with
increasing production of soy beans and corn for bio-fuels. “Today we taste just
1 percent of all vegetables that were grown just 40 years ago,” Ms. Chase said.
“Heirloom vegetables, the superheroes of vegetables are on the decline.”
Cuba in Crisis.
With the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, Cuba faced a premature peak oil crisis. “Cuba
lost 80 percent of its import capacity, and 50 percent of the oil they used,”
Dr. Wood said. “They were raising vegetables in tin cans and pails because a
majority of their land was depleted and would not support food crops,” Dr. Wood
said. Cuba had no fuel for tractors, no fertilizers or pesticides, and no spare
parts for machinery. Agricultural production almost ground to a halt.
Today, Cuba
is a laboratory for organic agriculture and post peak oil. They have decentralized
and diversified farming cooperatives on smaller farms. Urban gardens produce 50 percent of the vegetables for Havana’s 2
million people, and they produce 60 percent of all vegetables consumed in Cuba.
Cuba decreased wheat and rice production, and moved towards voluntary
vegetarianism with meat only twice a week. “Meat is very fossil fuel
dependent,” Dr. Wood said.
Cuba
developed an ecology-based, sustainable agriculture utilizing animal traction, organic composting, green
fertilizers, bio-diversity in crops,
soil and water management, and biological pest controls.
Cuba took
the bureaucracy out of state-controlled agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of
hectares of arable land were turned over to the most productive private
farmers. The agricultural Ministry was downsized with many functions being
turned over to the cooperatives.
“Education
became a national priority for Cuba,” Dr. Wood said. “We need massive education
in the United States because people do not understand the severity of the
problem. We will have to educate 50 million people on how to grow food! We have grown distant and far removed from
food production,” Dr. Wood said. “As we look to move forward into our future,
we will have to re-localize food production. We need to re-integrate into
nature,” Dr. Wood said.
From the
left: (1) An audience of over 100 people attended the
meeting. (2) Dr. Wood makes one of several salient points throughout the
evening. (3) Patricia Cumming of Westport also makes a point. (4) Jennifer
Marshall of SEEAL offers helpful ideas for creating a
sustainable Westport.
“The
Federal Farm Bill that used to help farmers in the 1930’s now just helps
agri-business, and they have subsidized smaller farmers out of business,” Dr.
Wood said. “I don’t think we can look to the federal level for help; it seems
to be non-productive,” she said. “Dealing on the local and state level provides
more hope for solutions.”
“If we are
going to be OK, our neighbors are going to have to be OK,” Dr. Wood said.
- - - - - - End - - - - - -
Community Events of Westport ©
2008 All rights reserved.