By Andre Piver - VPOE
Feb. 28, 2010

We have more stuff and less time, connection and beauty, while living at the speed of our fossil-fueled machinery. No longer knowing the source of our stuff, we have lost the blessing, the skill and the satisfaction of quality and craft. We have allowed a whole life to be torn apart and marketed back to us needing to go to the gym, the nutritional supplement store, the daycare  centre and eventually the nursing home.

The price for all of these dubious rewards is that Climate Change is in runaway mode.  e.g. melting permafrost represents 20% of the fixed carbon on the surface of the planet and is composting and liberating methane  which is 21 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2.;  the warming oceans are less able to hold dissolved CO2; both of these cause the temperatures to rise more which causes both of them to occur even faster and so on.

The greatest global impact for all life is accelerating drought which is already occurring and running up against depleted aquifers and the predicted flooding of low lying areas with sea level rise affecting the most fertile lands. For humans the most devastating repercussion is crop failures. So yes re-localizing the capacity to grow food is an absolute necessity. Existing and predicted local impacts of CC include the loss of our glaciers, more of our precipitation in the winter mostly as rain with diminishing seasonal snowpack and earlier run-off ,this  eventually combined  with increasing burn-off of our highland tree cover. All of these  are reducing creek flow during our increasingly hotter and drier summers and climate modelers predict migration to this region by drought refugees from at least two directions.

We have already extracted most of the easily accessed oil and what remains is ever more difficult, and expensive to procure. Depletion of known reserves stopped being matched by the finding of new ones as early as 2005 while the pace of increasing consumption in the developing world has accelerated wildly.  In his book “Why Your World is going to get a Whole Lot Smaller”, Jeff Rubin who was the most quoted economist in all Canadian media as head of CIBC World Markets predicts $2.00 per liter gas around the corner as just the beginning of where it is headed.

The impact on the cost of everything we take for granted will be astronomical. The USDA has stated that 80% of the cost of conventionally produced food is fossil fuel. Think of the impact on the cost and transport of mass produced metal or plastic from far away. We cannot count on these long supply lines when they are also subject to the functioning of credit markets . In 2008, hundreds of thousands of tons of food did not leave wharehouses for a while because the purchasers could not obtain letters of credit from tottering financial institutions.

We may understand this intellectually but most of us are emotionally unable to sense what this really means about the style of life that we have known during our entire lifetimes. We can’t get how precious and rare is the cheap energy which underlies everything when a liter of gasoline is cheaper than a liter of bottled water.  In one year we are burning through fossil fuel created by more than two and a half million years’worth of global solar capture in plant photosynthesis.

A local economy is not about money; it is about material relationships. These are the missing part of a natural human ecosystem, where the social has not been separated from the material interdependence that has always existed in the village.

Its time to get back to the garden. We have just the excuse we’ve been waiting for to learn how to count on each other once again.

More information at Transition Nelson