Thoughts on Glasgow

 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.