Ed Dowding

The trial of six green campaigners has collapsed after an undercover policeman who had infiltrated their group offered to give evidence on their behalf.

via BBC News – Trial collapses after undercover officer changes sides.

What a dude! Goes in to find out if anything bad is going on, does his job, a few protests get slightly derailed, then comes out*, changes sides, and busts the Met for entrapment.

* Ok so he was rumbled, rather than doing it voluntarily, but now he’s doing the right thing, and that’s impressive. Way to go Mark!

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I remember my geography teacher saying that the next world war would be about water. There have been a few issues already, but as Egypt rejects Nile water agreement I think we can probably see this a key moment in history.

Switzerland, which has the largest reserves of fresh water, must be getting nervous. And it makes Spain’s investment in renewable energies and solar technology look even more sensible, since they’ll be able to use it for desalination and pumping.

Make no mistake, if you thought people have kicked up quite a fuss over ideologies and economics over the past century, you might wonder what they’ll do when the very staples of their lives are threatened.

This, in part, is the reason why I can see no more important purpose in the (my) world than growing food sustainably, and community building.

Update 15/05/10: Salt killing crops, driving migration in storm-hit southern Bangladesh – Worsening sea water storm surges and overuse of irrigation have left fields, wells and ponds in parts of southern Bangladesh too salty to grow crops, leading to a growing exodus of farmers from the region. Last year Singh got a ton of rice from his land. This year he may get less than a tenth of that amount. “I am very much worried how I will feed my family members this year,” he said. Thousands of farmers are becoming landless and migrating elsewhere within or outside of Bangladesh, residents said. Many farmers tell of neighbours who have left for Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, or for neighbouring India over the last six months to a year.

Here’s some figures for renewable power generation in 2006:

• 62.9% – Austria
• 48.7% – Sweden
• 29.9% – Portugal
• 17.1% – Slovak Republic
• 19.2% – Romania
• 17% – Denmark
• 12.4% – France
• 4.6% - UK
  

In November 2009, Spain generated 53% of its demand from wind alone last week (it was a bit windy). So if you’re from the UK, be embarrassed: we’re getting our bottoms kicked by Hans, Abba and the Siesta Monkeys.

Since so little seems to influence peoples’ thinking about energy and the environment, I wonder if world cup style national pride could be leveraged to get some action here? The protests about petrol prices would be that much more potent if the protesters were aware that José Siesta and Pierre Le Grenouille were loading up their electric cars for a quarter of the price, whilst also benefiting from much cleaner air, having to work less since they’re paying less, and generally being far better served by their governments.

There’s also the angle that the UK seems to be slated to have a lot of nuclear. All this is planned by EDF, a French company. Nuclear, as we know, has astronomical decommissioning costs which are never budgeted for so are not fairly compared to renewables whose decommissioning costs are tiny. So it’s not a massive leap – certainly one the Daily Mail would be adept at – to suspect that France is deliberately hobbling the UK with nuclear, whilst also increasing its own competitive advantage by investing in wind power.

If energy prices effect where industry locates in the free market of Europe, shouldn’t we be treating this as a national economic welfare issue?

So ‘competitiveness’ and ‘employment levels’ join national security, economy, and ethics and morality as reasons to invest every penny we have in renewable energy generation.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you have low-cost, clean energy almost every other problem vanishes.

I finally got around to watching A Farm for the Future (available on Google Video) a few nights ago, and found it to be a great introduction to the concepts of permaculture.

Key things to realise (some not from the programme):

1. Current methods of farming will not continue to feed you during your lifetime.
2. We (and I mean all of us, including YOU, reading this right now) are running out of oil.
3. Before it runs out it will get much more expensive.
4. Oil is the most expensive component of current methods of food production.
5. Your food is going to get much more expensive.
6. We import about 40% of our food (in the UK)
7. As food gets more expensive, other countries are going to stop exporting it so they can feed their own populations.
8. Oil-fuelled production food production is only 10% efficient in energy, and about 20% efficient in land use.
9. We could – if we choose to – produce up to 50 times more food from the same land. (Ok that’s a touch unrealistic since there are bound to be inefficiencies, but let’s be conservative and say just 5 times as much. It still makes sense, right?)
10. We haven’t even got touched on the nutritional or lifestyle benefits yet. I’ll leave that to other posts, but suffice to say you could live a healthier, happier, longer life.

Here are my notes from the programme itself:

• It was in 1981 that we crossed the “using more than we’re finding” threshold with oil.
• “It’s not just that current lifestyle are unethical – they’re unsustainable”.
• 10 calories of fossil fuel are required for 1 calorie of food (global average).
• GM crops are also dependent on fossil fuels, even though they may use less – ergo they are not a long term answer.
• A litre of oil is the energy equivalent of 1 person working for a week; the oil we use equates to 22bn (unfed) slaves (c.3x world population).
• There are 150,000 farmers in the Uk, with an average age of 60.
• Normally cattle are taken off fields in the winter since they turn pasture into mud. But with a blend of tough/soft, deep/shall rooted (etc.) grasses you can leave the cattle there year round. Thus no hay production required, or unused land area. It took 60 years for one chap to perfect that, in one area.
• Don’t dig. It destroys the life in the top 6″ of soil which plants thrive on. (See other posts on permaculture, too.)
• Don’t look after plants, cultivate soil.
• 95% of all food is dependent on synthetic fertiliser.
• Permaculture: conscious design of a better system (Wikipedia link).
• Khaki Campbell ducks eat lots of slugs and lay lots of eggs.
• Willow, lime, and ash leaves / branches are good fodder crops for animals.
• In a well considered permaculture plot, 12 man-days maintenance and 40 man-days of harvest will feed about 10 people per acre.
• Nuts are more efficient to grow than cereal crops. Sweet chestnuts can yield 2 tons per acre (about 60% that of wheat, with much less effort).
• During WWII, 40% of food came from small domestic production.

I suppose the question is “Neat. Is there any large scale permaculture so that we can feed lots of people? All the ones, like me, maybe in the cities, who don’t garden?”

Large scale production permaculture is probably going on somewhere (I understand that Pittsburgh Permaculture showcases examples), but to a certain extent it’s a bit of an antithesis to the small, intensive, and hyper-local principles. However the cities still need to be fed so.. a few answers:

1. The goal is community efficiency not self-sufficiency
2. It can be a great business opportunity, especially if more people know about why it’s being done.
3. It’s not an industrial farm, so don’t expect it to behave like one. If the old models aren’t working, don’t expect to see permaculture behaving in the same way. (That said there are some neat multi-storey urban farms.)