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EarthFuture.com by Guy Dauncey
[ Continued from October ]
It's Thanksgiving 2025 and the table is loaded with fresh, organic produce. As
anyone who has lived through the trials and tribulations of the last 17 years
will know, that's saying something.
We used to take fantabulous quantities of food for granted. We lived in an edible
paradise - as long as you didn't think about the hunger caused by free trade and
open markets, that was destroying small farms and bankrupting farmers around the
world.
And then came the double crunch of 2008.
The price of oil had been rising steadily since 2000. By 2007 it had reached $50
a barrel, due to turmoil in the Middle East and the growing concern that the world
supply of oil was about to peak. In 2008, when a secret report leaked out that
Saudi Arabia had been exaggerating its reserves for years, the price shot up to
$80 a barrel. That was bad news for motorists, but it was much worse for farmers,
who had to pay sharply increased prices for the nitrogen fertilizer most of them
depended on to produce their crops.
The second crunch came when heat waves, which had characterized the early years
of the century, delivered a whopper. Throughout July and August of that year,
European countries from France to the Ukraine sizzled under temperatures in the
40s, causing turmoil in the hospitals, frying the crops and reducing Europe's
grain harvest by 60 percent. For every 1ûC inc- rease in the optimum temperature,
the yield falls by 10 percent, so the six-degree increase caused a 60 percent
reduction in yields.
With the world' grain res- erves depleted almost to zero from seven years of consecutive
shortages, the futures markets went crazy, pushing the prices of wheat, rice and
barley to record levels. The grim reality of our condition was finally sinking
in at dinner tables all around the world. The old industrial regime, premised
on cheap oil, whose leaders had been willing to start wars and undermine democracies
to keep their grip on power, was collapsing.
It was the psychological feeling that an era was ending, as much as the increased
prices of food and gasoline, which set things in motion. It was like the fall
of the Berlin Wall, 36 years earlier. On residential streets throughout Vancouver,
an urban agricultural revolution began, as people tore up their lawns to plant
vegetable gardens. Neighborhood garden associations formed, as neighbors learned
from neighbors how to compost, how to store water, how to deal with pests, how
to mulch, how to build cold frames, how to keep chickens, how to grow winter vegetables,
and how to exchange a regular toilet for a composting toilet. Boulevards turned
into community allotments filled with leeks and tomatoes, and on weekend evenings
that summer, neighbors started closing their streets to cars, laying out the tables
for community banquets. There was an aliveness in the air, and a can-do spirit
that overcame fear and uncertainty and spoke of the potential for enormous change
if people continued to cooperate and share in this manner.
Out on the farm, from Vancouver Island to the Peace, conventional farmers knocked
on the doors of their organic farming neighbors, seeking their advice as the price
of fertilizer rose. It was the large farms which practised monoculture over large
areas that were hit the hardest by the heat. On smaller organic farms, where there
was a variety of crops, the farmers were able to manage the heat by heavy mulching
and the use of shade-sheets. It took a lot of labor, but the wages were there
and a flood of young people left the cities, happy to live and work in the fields,
where they discovered the romance of hard work, shared music and falling in love
under the long summer moons.
As the impact of that summer played out at the global level, developing nations
forced a rewrite of the world trade rules, backed by an unprecedented worldwide
campaign by citizens. The new fair trade rules allowed protectionism for vital
services such as food and water for heavily indebted nations and required countries
such as France and the USA to phase out their agricultural subsidies. They also
sealed the fate of GM food by affirming the right of nations to say no to GM imports.
The heat is still coming, but with a full table and full hearts, there's more
hope on the menu than despair. Perhaps sustainability wasn't such a crazy dream
after all.
Read Earth Future Part 1 - Where's the energy?
Guy Dauncey is the author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions
to Global Climate Change (New Society Publishers, 2001) and other titles. He lives
in Victoria. www.earthfuture.com.
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