Energy self-sufficiency and externalities

This post was inspired by three inputs.

1. A couple of weeks ago--just a week and a half after we returned from southeast Asia--Sarita and I went out to Virginia to visit our daughter and son-in-law and listen to a man who has been pursuing a practical life philosophy of (what I have learned is called) Permaculture.

I actually first heard Mark Shepard back in early December when I attended the Acres USA 2010 Conference in Indianapolis. He advocated an approach to agriculture that resonated with me. Being somewhat of a marketer/editor, I proposed a slight reordering of the four words that captured my attention and offered him an acronym for how he summarizes his philosophy.

He said he tries to follow a policy of STUN: Sheer, Total, Utter Neglect. Once he has planted a perennial tree, shrub or bush, he wants it to survive on its own with minimal or, preferably, no further inputs or involvement on his or anyone else's part . . . except to harvest whatever crop it may produce.

Two months before I attended his lecture, I had mentioned to an apple tree nurseryman that that was my goal and he told me it was impossible. "John," he wrote to me, "farming, especially fruit-farming, requires heavy investment of oneself--commitment to the task and to the lifestyle. In all my years, I have known of only two operations that depended on 'part-time staff' that were successful. Growing fruit [successfully] requires attention throughout the year -- spraying, pruning, mowing, marketing, etc."

And here was Mark telling me how he has sought--at massive personal sacrifice, I might add!--to break that cycle.

I imagine I will say more about Mark, his philosophy, and, most importantly, his practice, in days to come.

What I want to mention here is his pursuit of energy and water independence. He and his wife have been living off-grid for 23-some years--8 years on their homesteads in Alaska, and for the last 15 years on a farm in Wisconsin. Last year, for the first time, in order to meet government requirements for a food processing plant they wanted to build on their farm, they hooked up the food processing plant to the grid. But for their own use, in their home, they work off of solar and wind energy. And, I imagine--though we didn't discuss it--some wood burning as well.

As I say, that was a couple of weeks ago.

2. About four days ago, a friend of ours, knowing of our interest in and movement toward a more "natural," farm-oriented life, gave us a copy of a special Mother Earth News Guide to Country Skills.

Inside, there was a fascinating/disturbing story called "Choosing Renewable Energy" by a couple who determined to make their home in Ontario, Canada, energy self-sufficient.

I was stunned by a couple of the things they said. Especially what he said about a significant mistake they made--he made--when they first started down the path.

"[M]y focus was on generating our own electricity at least partly because I was interested in the technologies," he said.

I resisted advice that the first thing we should do is analyze our electrical consumption, a task I found boring and unrewarding. I wanted to be the builder of an exotic system, not a parsimonious bean-counter with clipboard and calculator. This urge to obsess about electrical generating equipment rather than first changing our energy patterns was a mistake.

I console myself with the knowledge that it is a near-universal trait of home energy newbies. Any solar and wind power dealer will tell you that the first task with new clients is to talk them out of their preconceived and wildly incorrect impressions about living with renewables.

?????

His wife explains:

Conventional energy is ever-present, so easy and relatively cheap as to render it almost invisible. It takes no more effort than flipping a switch, spinning a dial or turning an ignition key. The upshot is that energy use has remained a largely unexamined activity in our everyday lives.

By contrast, when this couple switched to renewable energy, they found themselves

spending a lot of time thinking about energy, which seems to be the way of life for most renewable energy users. We check meters, adjust our tasks to the available energy and negotiate with each other whose task is more worthy of the power.

Yow!

And then this last item.

3. Last night I began watching A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.

Early in the film--about five minutes in--one of the interviewees comments,

One barrel of oil, the refined product of which--42 gallons of gasoline--you can buy for a little over $100, will produce as much energy, as much work, as you will get from 12 people working all year for you.

Put another way, by another interviewee:

It would take an average man, performing physical labor for 25,000 hours, to produce the amount of energy that is contained in that one barrel of oil. That barrel of oil, if it is pulled out of the ground in Iraq, can be pulled out of the ground for $1. You invest $1 and you get back 25,000 hours of human labor! That energy source is so dense, it's essentially free energy.

Yeah. That's the way it appears. Except it's clearly not.

There are massive "external costs" or "externalities," as economists like to call them.

Conclusion. The problem with most modern agriculture--and all annual agriculture, according to Mark Shepard--is the externalities. Societies throughout history have consistently ignored them . . . to their own eventual destruction.

Look at all the great civilizations of the past, Shepard urges us. Take a look at the hulks of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, North Africa, the Mediterranean. You see these remains of massive buildings sitting in the midst of deserts. Perhaps those hulks should serve as warnings to us.

Those buildings used to sit in the midst of the most verdant, fruitful places on earth.

What happened?

The soils became depleted. They became salted. They could no longer support the intensive agriculture that had been placed upon them. Why? Because no one was counting the full costs.

The same is happening today.

And it just struck me: What the couple in the Mother Earth News Guide to Country Skills say makes perfect sense. As a society, we need to begin spending a lot more time thinking about our food and energy. We need to begin "checking our meters," adjust our tasks and eating habits to match the real requirements, the real costs, internal and external, short- and long-term.

"Weird" Science #6: What happened with the nematodes?

I ended my last Weird Science post with two photos: one of a nematode that had been trapped by a fungal hypha, and another of a nematode as it made its way into the stem of a tomato plant, unhindered by fungal hyphae or any other defensive mechanisms. And my last words in the post were these:

"Why wasn't this [second] nematode attacked, and where were the fungal hyphae that killed off the first nematode?"

I promised to answer those questions. And the answers are clear. It has to do with the soil in which the plants were being grown.

In the first photo--the one in which the nematode is trapped by the hypha--the plant was growing (and the fungus and the nematode were living and growing) in healthy soil--soil filled with a huge variety and quantity of protozoa, earthworms, arthropods, algae, bacteria and fungi.

The second photo was taken of a plant that was being grown in typical modern agri-soil--soil that had been tilled and sprayed and treated with pesticides and herbicides and NPK fertilizer and in which, therefore, there was almost none of the microbial life that healthy soil exhibits.

Funny (or maybe not): The use of herbicides and pesticides and NPK (and no other) fertilizers can actually, over time, reduce plants' ability to protect themselves from predators. It can increase plants' susceptibility to disease.

As Elaine Ingham, president of Soil Food Web, Inc., suggests in her Foreword to Teaming with Microbes,

Urban dwellers and other growers have been pouring toxic chemicals on their soils for years, without recognizing that those chemicals harm the very things that make soil healthy. Use of toxics to any extent creates a habitat for the "mafia" of the soil, an urban war zone, by killing off the normal flora and found that compete with the bad guys and keep them under control. . . . If toxic material was applied only once in your life, the bad situation we have today would not have developed, but typically with that first application, thousands of organisms that were beneficial to your plants were killed. A few bad guys were killed as well, but good guys are gone, and they don't come back as fast as the bad guys.

Think about your neighborhood: who would come back faster if your neighborhood was turned into a chemical war zone? Opportunistic marauders and looters, that's who comes back in after disturbances. In the human world, we send in the National Guard to hold the line against criminals. But in soil, the levels of inorganic fertilizers being used, the constant applications of toxic pesticide sprayed, mean the National Guard of the soil has been killed, too. We have to purposefully restore the beneficial biology that has been lost.

--Teaming with Microbes, p. 9

"Weird" Science #5: Microbes and Soil

(If you've been following my "'Weird' Science" series, I hope you'll forgive me as I slip in at least one intervening post in the series before I get to the one I suggested would be next.)

As I began digging into Lynn Margulis' Kingdoms & Domains, I was struck by the diversity of microbial life she describes. And I was struck by the thought that microbes are not only invisible to the naked eye, but they are, as it were, largely invisible to our minds. We don't think about them.

Not only do we not think about bacteria and protozoa; we tend to ignore fungi, algae, worms and beetles, too.

As E. O. Wilson says in the Foreword to Margulis' book:

About 1.8 million species [of living organisms] . . . have been discovered and described [as of 2009]. that includes perhaps three-fourths of the extant hundred thousand or so vertebrates, and, at a guess, ninety percent of the quarter million species of flowering plants thought to exist. But the sixty thousand known fungi are fewer than five percent of the estimated total, and the fewer than twenty thousand named nematode worms, the most abundant animals on Earth, are probably an even smaller fraction of the whole. Moreover, all this ignorance shrinks in the dismaying presence of the "dark matter" of the eukaryotic universe--or if you prefer, the Subkingdoms (Domains) of Archaea and Eubacteria. The exploration of what could turn out to be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of well-differentiated strains of these subvisible organisms has scarcely begun.

--Kingdoms & Domains, p. lxi

What Wilson says is one way to look at or think about the diversity of life of which we are unaware.

I would like to suggest a few other ways, too . . . for your thoughtful consideration.

1. Dr. Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University describes an amazing bacterial "social life." Yes, they actually communicate . . . in rather intricate ways. --That's the primary thrust of the following video. But she says something else, about a minute into the video, that ought to catch your attention, I think. Paraphrased: The human body has about a trillion cells in it. And those trillion cells host--either in you or on you--about 10 trillion bacteria. You have about 30,000 genes in you; the bacteria you host have about 100 times the amount of genetic material or information. "So," says Bassler, "when I look at you, I think of you as 1 or 10 percent human and either 90 or 99 percent bacterial."
   
   
    
2. Based on a study of the bacteria on 51 different people's hands, researchers found that the average person had more than 150 different species of bacteria living on his or her hands. But get this. The researchers summarize their findings in this way: "[W]e identified a total of 4,742 unique phylotypes [species of bacteria] across all of the hands examined. Although there was a core set of bacterial taxa commonly found on the palm surface, we observed pronounced intra- and interpersonal variation in bacterial community composition: hands from the same individual [i.e., the left and right hands--JAH] shared only 17% of their phylotypes, with different individuals sharing only 13%." [Emphasis added.]
    
3. "Good soil is absolutely teeming with life. . . . A mere teaspoon of good garden soil, as measured by microbial geneticists, contains a billion invisible bacteria, several yards of equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few dozen nematodes."
   -- Teaming with Microbes, p. 19.
    
4. "Remember that teaspoon of good garden soil? Perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 different species make up its billion bacteria--a healthy population in numbers and diversity."
   --Ibid., p. 24.
    
5. "[A]n acre of good garden soil teems with life, containing several pounds (about 1 kilogram) of small mammals; 133 pounds of protozoa; 900 pounds each of earthworms, arthropods, and algae; 2000 pounds of bacteria; and 2400 pounds of fungi."
   --Ibid., p. 28.
    
6. Allan Savory presents a fairly standard food-web energy pyramid in his Holistic Management book (mentioned in my Monday post, "Weird" Science #3: Soil, Part 1):
   
   
   
   
   I think this is pretty common knowledge: Animals are unable to convert solar energy into forms useful for metabolism. Therefore, in order to survive, they (we!) depend upon plants and algae to convert the energy from sunlight into organic matter--carbohydrates, fats, proteins and innumerable vitamins and phytonutrients--that we are then able to ingest and metabolize for our life needs.
   
   However, Savory pushes this energy pyramid idea forward several more steps . . . in ways I had never imagined . . . primarily due to my blindness to the world of microbes and soil:
   
   

   The energy pyramid also extends below ground where the energy flow greatly affects . . . a biologically active soil community that [also] requires solar energy to be conveyed underground mainly by plant roots or surface-feeding worms, termites, dung beetles, and others.

   --Holistic Management, pp. 151-152.

From here, things get really strange.

I first heard about what I am about to share in a series of lectures from Acres USA. But now I am reading all about these things, in detail, in Lowenfels and Lewis's truly wonderful Teaming with Microbes.

In the same way we humans have domesticated and now farm plants and animals for our benefit, so (say leading soils researchers) plants have established interdependent, symbiotic relationships with most of the protozoa, earthworms, arthropods, algae, bacteria, and fungi that surround their roots. The plants send food (about half of all the carbohydrates and other nutrients they produce) down to their roots . . . and then, through their roots, they exude these nutrients (in a liquid called exudate), into the soil. This exudate, in turn, feeds the bacteria and other organisms that live in the rhizosphere (the area of the roots).

Meanwhile--hang onto your hat!--the microbes in the soil protect the plants' roots. Literally. And, in many ways, they also feed the plant.

As Lowenfels and Lewis explain things: "In return for exudates, [mycorrhizal] fungi provide water, phosphorus, and other necessary plant nutrients" (p. 25). Similarly, some plants prefer nitrogen in the form of ammonium (NH₄) while others prefer it in the form of nitrate (NO₃). Well guess what? The types of nitrogenous compounds available to plants are largely controlled by the microbes in the soil: "In fungally dominated soils, much of the nitrogen remains in ammonium form." In bacterially dominated soils, certain bacteria will convert the ammonium into nitrate. . . .
******
I'm going to quit here.

. . . Oh!

No I'm not.

I wanted to show you two photographs. So let me do that and then I'll quit.

These two photos are from Teaming with Microbes, pp. 12 and 13.

I said above, "[T]he microbes in the soil protect the plants' roots. Literally."

Lowenfels and Lewis discuss many ways they do this besides what I am about to show you. But these two photos did for me what the authors say they did for them. They woke them up--and they snapped me to attention--and they caused me to think: What is going on that I am unaware of down there under the soil?

The authors explain: "[O]ne autumn, . . . a gardening friend e-mailed two stunning electron microscope pictures. The first showed in exquisite detail a nematode trapped by a single looped fungal strand, or hypha. . . ."

Continuing with the story as the authors tell it:

Wow! This was quite a picture--a fungus taking out a nematode! We had never heard of, much less seen such a thing, and it started us wondering: how did the fungus kill its prey? What attracted the blind nematode to the rings of the fungus in the first place? How did the rings work?

The second image showed what appeared to be a similar nematode, only this one was unimpeded by fungal hyphae and had entered the tomato root. . . .

The authors ask about this photo: "Why wasn't this nematode attacked, and where were the fungal hyphae that killed off the first nematode?"

--Stay tuned for the answer in "'Weird' Science #6"!