The latest international climate conference, COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, gets underway this week. Once again, international leaders converge on the conference center in their gas-guzzling limousine motorcades to pontificate about the urgency of the crisis and their renewed commitment (yet again) to reduce carbon emissions, while angry young protesters amass in public squares, with signs aloft, (surrounded by armored police brandishing their shields and nightsticks) to vent their rage and frustration at the empty promises of the leaders and their utter failure to take meaningful action to reduce our collective dependence on fossil fuels while our planet slowly but inexorably heats up and burns…
It will all be, yet again, a grand exercise in futility. The
reason is simple: this is not a problem that can be solved from the top down. The
power elite throughout the world—both politicians and the business moguls who
underwrite them—have an overwhelming vested interest in the status quo; that
is, in a global market economy based on the endless growth of production and
consumption that props up their own wealth and power. Yet that endless growth
requires more and more resource extraction at one end—which means more forests
clearcut, more mines gouged out of the landscape, more suburbs built out from
crowded urban areas, more land cleared and planted with monocultures, more
fertilizers and pesticides, more oil, gas, and coal drilled and burned for
energy—and at the other end, more pollution and devastation of land, air, and water. And above
all, more carbon emissions pumped into an already stressed atmosphere, and more
money spent in a vain effort to put out the fires, rebuild flooded areas, and cope
with the rising tide of destitute environmental refugees from the dry, torrid
south to the overcrowded north. If any
political leaders tried to change any of this commitment to economic “growth” at
any cost, they would face entrenched opposition from their constituents, both
rich and poor.
The reason is that all economies depend, ultimately, upon
available net energy—which is the energy you have left after the energy you
expend to get that energy. And the net energy from fossil fuels—from oil, gas,
and coal—is astronomically greater than the net energy we can ever expect from solar
or wind. You can never build a solar array with solar energy, nor a wind farm
with wind energy; nor can you use the electrical transform of these energies to
build electric cars or mine the rare earth metals to build the batteries to
operate them. All of these primary infrastructure technologies—solar arrays,
wind farms, hydroelectric dams, nuclear plants, batteries—require an enormous
investment of readily available and transportable net energy to provide the
building materials, the manufacturing facilities, and the transportation needed
to assemble and install them. And there is only one source of the vast amount
of net energy needed for that initial investment in a whole new “renewable”
infrastructure: fossil fuels.
So is there any hope for our future? Collectively, probably
not. Our industrial global market economy is utterly dependent on the net energy
from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and all of us in our industrial
civilization depend on that economy for our life support systems (e.g. water
infrastructure and food dependent on industrial agriculture), our
livelihoods, our transportation, and our communication (via the electrical
grid). When prices of fossil fuels rise (as they must if their rate of extraction
is reduced worldwide), so will the prices of everything else. Yet if we don’t
reduce the rate of extraction and consumption of these carbon-based fuels, our
climate will become more and more chaotic, at an accelerating rate, with
unimaginably horrid consequences for all of us, starting with the poorest and
most vulnerable.
So what can we do? My only answer to this is what has
become my mantra—the slogan of the Garden Guild initiative I have undertaken: Grow
Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness. To unpack these a bit, let’s look
at each in turn.
Grow Gardens: As
anyone who has tried it knows, growing our own fruit and vegetables is not
easy. It requires a basic knowledge of soils, of different kinds of plants,
shrubs, and trees, their growing seasons, and their respective needs for sun,
soil, and water, and so forth. Further, to make growing our own food more economically
viable and healthier, we need to reduce as much as possible our dependence on
external inputs, such as commercial fertilizers, soils, additives, and pesticides.
We can do this by practicing good ecological stewardship—growing pollinator
beds, providing habitat for predatory insects, learning the life cycle of
pests, using compost and mulch to boost organic matter in our soils and to
preserve moisture during the dry seasons, and so forth. All of these skills take
time and effort to master, but they can all be facilitated if we simultaneously…
Grow Community: Our dependence on the global market
economy (which I call “Glomart” for short) has dramatically reduced our need to
get to know our neighbors. And since we do not choose our neighbors, they are
strangers to us, and they can often be irritating—so we have largely stopped building
front porches on our houses; instead, we surround our homes with privacy fences
or dense shrubbery to make our neighbors and passersby as invisible as possible. This is fine as long as we don’t need our
neighbors for anything—as long as we can use our cars to visit friends, go
shopping, or go to work, and our internet connections to communicate. But this suburban
alienation has enormous hidden costs as well. It means that we are more
isolated, more paranoid, more hostile and fearful of others. However, gardening
gets us out in our yards, where we are more likely to strike up a conversation
with our neighbors, or with passersby. And such conversations can form the seed
of community. Furthermore, if unexpected disasters occur—whether wildfires, floods,
earthquakes, or power outages—it helps to know our neighbors, so we can turn to
them for help—or offer help ourselves. In such contingencies, the neighbor you
know can be your best friend. Conversely, if things get really desperate, the
neighbor you don’t know can be your worst enemy. My Garden Guild initiative is entirely based
on this insight—if neighbors who live within walking distance get to know each
other, and collaborate on sharing gardening skills, tools, ideas, and produce during
ordinary times, they will be much better prepared to work together for their
common good during emergencies or disasters. Yet even without such
contingencies, they will benefit from sharing these skills by growing better
gardens and producing more food to share with their neighbors and with the less
fortunate as well. And in this way,
growing community can enable us all to…
Grow Awareness: Besides improving the aesthetic
appeal and ecological health of our own yards, gardening immediately increases
our awareness of the natural world we inhabit, as we observe the seasons come
and go, the birds and other wildlife, the insect pollinators visiting our
flowers, the flow of water across our landscapes, and the interactions of all
of these. And growing community—through chatting
with our neighbors or forming local Garden Guilds—further expands our ability
to grow our own and others’ awareness of how the changing climate is affecting
our gardens, and what we can do about this, both in personal practices and in
community engagement with policymakers and local merchants. Getting together with neighbors who may
differ entirely from us, yet share an interest in gardening, can also open us
to whole new domains of knowledge and experience that we would never get if we
associated only with those we choose as friends. So all these kinds of
awareness—awareness of the rhythms and patterns of the natural world, awareness
of our surrounding community, awareness of others’ interests and skills, and
awareness of the political decisions that affect us, can be enhanced by growing
gardens and growing community. All three injunctions—growing gardens, growing
community, and growing awareness, mutually reinforce one another. So while
there is little to nothing we can do at the global level to stop the climate
catastrophe, we can nevertheless plant the seeds, right in our back yards, from
which to grow a new, relocalized, post-industrial civilization to displace the
dysfunctional Glomart economy that is collapsing all around us.
