Life After Oil

  ― Tim Holt, Sierra Citizen
   Spring 2006 Issue
   Published by South Yuba River Citizens League, www.yubariver.org

"If we rush into a crisis mentality — totalitarian and draconian measures to keep the cars running, and the houses heated to 72 degrees, and the GNP continually growing — then we will rip off nature.

"We should try to allay anxiety and spread confidence in the natural beauty of the human mind and the natural dignity of life at its normal, natural, ancient, slower pace."

   ― Gary Snyder, Real Work

It's time to get off the freeway and start putting down roots, folks. America's long, cheap-fueled joyride is coming to an end.

With worldwide oil production at or near its peak, and surging demand from China and India, gas prices are about to skyrocket. In the not-too-distant future this will very likely mean an end to the long-distance distribution of food and other goods. It will mean the end of large, centralized retail operations--no more Targets or Wal-Marts. Many people, especially in rural areas, will find it difficult to get to work or even to feed their families. Our society could easily slide into lawlessness, widespread violence and looting--a post-oil nightmare papered over by martial law.

Unless, that is, we begin preparing now for profound economic and social changes. This will mean, in a nutshell, saying goodbye to our highly individualized, mobile society and instead pooling limited energy and financial resources in public transit. It will mean building a local economy that is no longer just an adjunct to the corporate-controlled national economy, but the chief source of essential goods and services. Above all, it will mean growing more food locally--a major challenge given the climate, and current development pressures, in Nevada County.

Denial, resistance, and placing our hopes in techno-fixes like hydrogen-fueled cars won't delay the day of reckoning--it will require fossil fuels, after all, to produce hydrogen--but they will keep the dangerous fantasy of cheap and easy mobility alive for awhile longer.

The good news is that local farmers and ranchers, the Nevada County Land Trust, and a growing cadre of community activists are already beginning to grapple with the challenge of a post-oil future. The most comprehensive planning is being done by the newly formed Alliance For A Post-Petroleum Local Economy (APPLE). Some 40 local residents are currently looking into how the community is going to feed itself, provide basic transportation, and supply energy to homes and businesses as the oil runs out.

With fuel prices still relatively low, the immediate challenge is to spread awareness of the looming crisis and the need to prepare for it.

"For most of the community it's not even on the radar screen," notes APPLE coordinator Janaia Donaldson, an observation that applies to local elected officials as well.

But hopefully that won't be the case much longer. In January APPLE launched an ambitious weekly cable program, "Peak Moment," that discusses how communities, both here and throughout Northern California, are planning for the impending energy crunch. The half-hour program airs Thursdays at 7 p.m. and Tuesdays at 3:30 p.m. on Channel 11. (Two related events, listed at the end of this article, are designed to promote local food production.)

If there is one underlying theme in all the discussions of the post-oil future, it's that of building community. For people who've found themselves at loggerheads in the past, the coming years will provide both a challenge and an opportunity to work together toward common goals. This is already happening at the Land Trust, where a broad spectrum from the community--conservatives, liberals, environmentalists, and representatives from the business community--has come together to preserve the county's open space.

"I don't think labels like liberal and conservative are going to matter very much when we all have to work together to survive," notes APPLE's Donaldson.

"None of the post-oil solutions--whether it's better bus service or carpooling or whatever--will work without community-building," says longtime San Juan Ridge resident Gary Snyder. "If we don't have a sense of community, a sense of place, none of it will happen."

Which brings up one of the advantages of living in a small town or rural area, where everything from putting out fires to irrigating farm and pasture land gets done through some form of communal effort.

Snyder notes with pride that he and his neighbors on the Ridge have helped build homes and even one entire school, the Oak Tree School, through just that kind of effort.

The theme of building community shines through the otherwise grim post-oil scenario James Howard Kunstler sketches in his groundbreaking work, The Long Emergency. Some of his writing could have been lifted right out of the Old Testament: "There will be hunger instead of plenty," Kunstler writes, "cold where there was once warmth, . . . sickness where there was health . . . "

But near the end of the book there is this redeeming, almost rhapsodic, passage:

"If there is any positive side to the stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters, and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom."

If Kunstler is upbeat about anything besides community building, it is the future of farming--specifically, the small-scale, labor-intensive farming that will have to take the place of large, petroleum-fueled industrial farms.

Unfortunately, the current trend is in the opposite direction. Nevada County has lost roughly one-third of its farm acreage in the last ten years, and just as ominously, local agriculture is not attracting new generations of farmers. The average age of Nevada County farmers and ranchers is 57, according to a UC Extension study.

Dan Macon, the new executive director of the Nevada County Land Trust, is determined to reverse these trends with some new approaches. Macon himself raises sheep and grows vegetables on scattered plots between Auburn and Grass Valley.

The Land Trust, under his guidance, is beginning to look at nontraditional ways of boosting farming in the county. The traditional method is to pay farmers a lump sum if they sell development rights to their land to the trust, thus guaranteeing the land will remain open space. That method has saved some 6000 acres of open space in the county over the past 15 years.

But, as Macon notes, saving farmland won't boost local food production if there aren't enough farmers to work it, so he's set his sights on recruiting more young people. He hopes to convince them there's serious money to be made in farming, through "value added" products like mixed green salads or specialty crops like nectarines and blueberries that can fetch premium prices.

"Farming is not presented as a realistic career choice to kids in high school," Macon says. "We need to change that, and at the same time start apprentice programs that link young, aspiring farmers with farmers who are about to retire."

Local growers who've already put down roots in Penn Valley and Chicago Park are starting to explore ways to grow more in the foothills' cooler climate. Cool-weather crops like lettuce and broccoli that would wither in valley summers can still be grown up here in the summer, with a little help on the warmest days from shade covers. And there are season extenders--from simple plastic covers to more elaborate wood and metal frames--that can add a month or more to the growing season in spring and fall.

Working with Mother Nature may prove easier in some ways than working with local elected officials, with their penchant for rezoning farm and ranching land for ranchettes and subdivisions. This sprawl development, of course, is dependent on cheap oil. As gas prices spiral upward, suburban living is going to be less and less attractive for all but the very rich, while at the same time farming, and farmland, will increase in value. Development pressures may ease at the same time that farmers and ranchers experience increasing local demand for their products. The foothills' landscape, in the not-so-distant future, may be a blend of McMansions and small farms and ranches.

Gary Snyder offers a dissenting view, expressing serious skepticism about the goal of greater food self-sufficiency for this area. It's not just the climate, he says, but poor soils that make that goal unrealistic.

"What Mother Nature loves to do here is grow pine trees," he observes.

Snyder suggests a future scenario in which mountainous regions like this one trade forest products for produce from the Valley. In a fuel-challenged era, such an exchange would no doubt require a restored Nevada City-to-Colfax rail line linked to the Valley's main line.

Suburban development, as noted, is one of the main features of a cheap-oil society. So is the county's minimal bus service, one that has experienced drastic cutbacks in the last few years. Local government, with public support, will play an essential role if any expansion is to occur (the transit system, like most in the country, is heavily subsidized by tax revenues--to the tune of 85 percent in Nevada County). Here again, policymakers will very likely get pushed in the right direction as gas spirals up to $6 and more a gallon, and there's a groundswell of public support for better bus service. Indeed, the powers-that-be already appear to be edging in the right direction. The Nevada County Transportation Commission is currently exploring the possibility of a hike in the sales tax that would partially benefit public transit.

A more strenuous form of transportation, cycling, may not work for everyone, but it is certainly a healthy alternative for some folks. To that end, bicycling advocate Janelle Black wants to see more bike lanes in the county. Her organization, the Alliance for People-Powered Transportation, is working with APPLE to offer workshops on bicycle safety and to promote an upcoming Bike To Work event in May. There's nowhere to go but up: the 2000 census tallied only 20 regular bike commuters in the county.

An APPLE committee has just begun to look at future options for powering homes and businesses. The price of natural gas, like oil, is expected to increase substantially, and there are concerns that too much reliance on wood heat as an alternative could cause serious pollution problems, as well as barren hillsides. So in the next few months the APPLE folks will be looking at the possibility of localizing the hydroelectric power generated on the upper Yuba and its tributaries, power that is currently fed to P G & E's power grid. Wind energy is another option, notes APPLE's Rick Hartmann, who suggests that Nevada County could follow the lead of Sierra and Plumas counties, which are forming a joint power cooperative to install wind turbines in the high Sierras.

And with the California Public Utilities Commission currently offering $2.8 billion in rebates for business and home solar installations, energy from the sun could play an increasingly important role in the county's energy mix.

Although the focus will be on local solutions, APPLE is seeking ideas from all over, even as far away as Kinsale, Ireland, which is aiming to be the first fossil-fuel-free community in the country. Ashland, Oregon has come up with an idea that might work in Nevada County: Computer-scheduled, door-to-door vans as an alternative to traditional bus service in low-population-density areas. (Such a system is currently used for the disabled here.)

The little town of Willits, California, just east of Fort Bragg, is one of the leaders in post-oil planning. Its citizens' planning group has already calculated exactly how much acreage they'll have to plant to feed their population. And their City Council voted in January to power much of the city's operations with solar power--an idea supported by at least one local official, City Manager Mark Miller of Nevada City.

In all this preliminary post-oil planning we've yet to hear from the broad masses of Nevada County residents, particularly those folks comfortably situated in their dream homes in the country. Will there be a last-ditch effort to maintain suburban living, the trappings of a cheap-oil society, when the oil's no longer cheap? Will there be a desperate search for alternative fuels and miracle techno-fixes?

Or will we take the other path, the road less traveled in modern times, and seize a rare opportunity to reconnect to the land and to each other in deep and meaningful ways?

We've all given lip service to the noble idea of community in the past, but it's taken second place to the computers, the DVDs, all the distractions of a consumer society. But this time around "community" has to be more than a nice-sounding buzzword. It will be essential to our survival.

UPCOMING POST-OIL EVENTS

• On March 25 APPLE, the Food Democracy Alliance and a number of other organizations are co-sponsoring an all-day conference, "Come Home To Eat. The event, free and open to the public, will bring together local farmers, ranchers and consumers to discuss ways to boost the local food supply. There will be entertainers, children's activities, and of course locally grown food. It will be held at the Grass Valley Veterans' Hall. Info#: 288-1730 or FoodDemocracyAlliance@yahoo.com.
• On October 21 there'll be a Harvest Festival featuring produce from small farms as well as displays of horse-drawn farming equipment (looking ahead to the post-oil era) at the Loma Rica Ranch & Organic Farm near Grass Valley. Info#: 870-3881. Admission price to be determined.

CONTACTS

• Alliance For a Post-Petroleum Local Economy 265-3014 www.apple-nc.org or info@apple-nc.org
• FoodDemocracyAlliance@yahoo.com 288-1730
• Alliance For People-Powered Transportation foothillcycling@yahoo.com