Read Online Made by Hand by Mark Frauenfelder - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Frauenfelder
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them to biodiesel boosters, “and their jaws literally drop.”
“A lot of what we try to do,” he said, “is explore this food-versus-fuel debate, and the crude conclusion is that liquid fuels are very hard to make, so you should treat them very preciously.” In fact, according to Post Carbon Institute fellow Rob Hopkins, a liter of petroleum “contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor.” At $3 a gallon, Julian pointed out, gasoline is an unbelievable bargain. When we run out of gasoline and can’t use gas-powered farm equipment, we’ll need other sources of fuel to produce the food we eat. Julian and Celine built this garden to try as many different human-, wind-, and solar-powered methods as they could think of before the oil runs out.
They also grew flax seeds, which they were initially excited about because the seeds provide omega-3 oil and the plant is the source of linen. But it turns out that making linen requires a number of skills and machines. Flax has to be retted, scutched, hackled, spun, reeled, woven, bleached, and dyed to become linen. For the self-sufficiency purist, flax isn’t practical. But, as Julian pointed out, a local community composed of skilled tradespeople could convert flax into linen. Flax, it turns out, is a DIO—do-it-ourselves—material.
Julian had just started telling me about last year’s basil harvest (“a sea of green and purple leaves”) when an older woman walking on the sidewalk stopped in front of the gate leading to their house and shouted to Julian and Celine, “Guys, is it no on seven?”
She was asking about California Proposition 7, a state measure that had been heavily advertised as an alternative-energy plan that would cut the state’s reliance on fossil fuels.
“No on 7,” said Julian. “No on 7, no on 10, yes on 1A—that’s the railway.”
“Why no on 7?” asked the woman. “To me, it’s—”
Julian cut her off. “Because it’s another fiddle . It’s two Arizona billionaires trying to foist basically Big Solar, which won’t help Small Solar. The Small Solar people hate it . ”
Julian and Celine are against the big guy and for the little guy, not because they have some kind of ideological dislike of large corporations but simply because they don’t think large, centralized suppliers of food, energy, and manufactured goods will be viable when the oil runs out. (In a 2009 talk at the annual TED conference, Rob Hopkins explained that for every four barrels of oil we use, only one new barrel is discovered.) When the pumps go dry, the people who survive will be the ones who are parts of local communities that have figured out how to generate their own electricity and share it with their neighbors. “Our motto,” said Julian, “is reduce consumption and produce locally.”
I press Julian on why Big Solar is bad. Isn’t it better than coal?
“Big Solar means long transmission lines, to Los Angeles, San Diego, and so forth,” he explained. “They are expensive, and you have losses, and so our theme is ‘Shorten the supply chains.’ Do it as locally as you can. Try to trim your consumption to match your local supply. No doubt we’ll need big sources, but that’s not what we try to promote. We promote what ordinary people can do, what towns can do, what regions can do.”
I also learned that coffee and tea won’t be around in the post-carbon world. “If you look at the embedded energy of the things people eat and drink,” said Celine, “coffee and tea are really big. And even if it’s fair trade, those people are concentrating on growing things for the export market rather than helping to make their families self-reliant and growing the staple crops of their community. Now if you’re a Somalian, I could see that growing coffee would be a staple crop, but I don’t think that’s a traditional Vietnamese staple crop. They need to be growing crops that will be feeding their communities, and we need
“A lot of what we try to do,” he said, “is explore this food-versus-fuel debate, and the crude conclusion is that liquid fuels are very hard to make, so you should treat them very preciously.” In fact, according to Post Carbon Institute fellow Rob Hopkins, a liter of petroleum “contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor.” At $3 a gallon, Julian pointed out, gasoline is an unbelievable bargain. When we run out of gasoline and can’t use gas-powered farm equipment, we’ll need other sources of fuel to produce the food we eat. Julian and Celine built this garden to try as many different human-, wind-, and solar-powered methods as they could think of before the oil runs out.
They also grew flax seeds, which they were initially excited about because the seeds provide omega-3 oil and the plant is the source of linen. But it turns out that making linen requires a number of skills and machines. Flax has to be retted, scutched, hackled, spun, reeled, woven, bleached, and dyed to become linen. For the self-sufficiency purist, flax isn’t practical. But, as Julian pointed out, a local community composed of skilled tradespeople could convert flax into linen. Flax, it turns out, is a DIO—do-it-ourselves—material.
Julian had just started telling me about last year’s basil harvest (“a sea of green and purple leaves”) when an older woman walking on the sidewalk stopped in front of the gate leading to their house and shouted to Julian and Celine, “Guys, is it no on seven?”
She was asking about California Proposition 7, a state measure that had been heavily advertised as an alternative-energy plan that would cut the state’s reliance on fossil fuels.
“No on 7,” said Julian. “No on 7, no on 10, yes on 1A—that’s the railway.”
“Why no on 7?” asked the woman. “To me, it’s—”
Julian cut her off. “Because it’s another fiddle . It’s two Arizona billionaires trying to foist basically Big Solar, which won’t help Small Solar. The Small Solar people hate it . ”
Julian and Celine are against the big guy and for the little guy, not because they have some kind of ideological dislike of large corporations but simply because they don’t think large, centralized suppliers of food, energy, and manufactured goods will be viable when the oil runs out. (In a 2009 talk at the annual TED conference, Rob Hopkins explained that for every four barrels of oil we use, only one new barrel is discovered.) When the pumps go dry, the people who survive will be the ones who are parts of local communities that have figured out how to generate their own electricity and share it with their neighbors. “Our motto,” said Julian, “is reduce consumption and produce locally.”
I press Julian on why Big Solar is bad. Isn’t it better than coal?
“Big Solar means long transmission lines, to Los Angeles, San Diego, and so forth,” he explained. “They are expensive, and you have losses, and so our theme is ‘Shorten the supply chains.’ Do it as locally as you can. Try to trim your consumption to match your local supply. No doubt we’ll need big sources, but that’s not what we try to promote. We promote what ordinary people can do, what towns can do, what regions can do.”
I also learned that coffee and tea won’t be around in the post-carbon world. “If you look at the embedded energy of the things people eat and drink,” said Celine, “coffee and tea are really big. And even if it’s fair trade, those people are concentrating on growing things for the export market rather than helping to make their families self-reliant and growing the staple crops of their community. Now if you’re a Somalian, I could see that growing coffee would be a staple crop, but I don’t think that’s a traditional Vietnamese staple crop. They need to be growing crops that will be feeding their communities, and we need
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