Tuesday 1 September 2015

The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times

Environmental Book Review 
The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times
Albert Bates
2006
New Society Publishers www.newsociety.com

Hilarious and grim at once, Bates indy-survivalist classic, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, is a 236 page collection of cosmic life-road instructions, including an extensive index and links to many mysterious alternative resources. Mr. Bates, a smiling American gent with an austere grey beard who terms peak oil depletion a “crude awakening,” closes each chapter with a recipe. Not merely asides, each of Bates’s recipes are accompanied by a difficulty rating, and Roasted Chestnuts are generously followed by Quintana Chiltomate Salsa and Fresh Tortilla Chips only one page later. So Bates loves to cook, but more than this, he ardently wants to provide you with a user-friendly guide book to rescuing both your planet and your life. Bates has divided the book itself into steps and stages. Early on in this volume, Bates hashes out ethical constraints around money and usury in major religions (including Islam), discusses non-inflationary money such as barter systems, and features at close an exquisite Mushroom Quesadilla recipe with an RDA index. It is only the first few pages of this adept and densely-packed classic, written by Albert Bates, “codirector of the Global Village institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Tennessee since 1994, where he has taught sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and restoration ecology to students from more than 50 nations.” Followed by a chapter on water dependency, including how to assess one’s “water-readiness,” Bates then offers a chapter on creating one's own energy. Discussing power outages and solar heating, Bates profiles the modular Solar Village design of Jürgen Kleinwachter (apparently developed for widespread use in Africa) which heats by transporting hot oil through piping to a Stirling engine where it makes electricity. Bates expounds on wood, fireplaces, grills and how to make a cob oven. Solar water heating and wind turbines are included, as well as how to estimate horsepower, hydro photovoltaic and biomass potential, making the chapter indispensable to the right reader. As each chapter sports a recipe, let’s fast forward to a zinger: the ingenious “Cleopatra,” a salad which includes bite-sized romaine and almond dressing! In fact, in Step 5, “Grow Your Own Food,” the pleasures of gardening, the reality of urban agriculture, and the fabulousness of organic food include a number of salad ideas too tasty and fantastic to be missed. This chapter also includes details on extending the season through greenhouses, making soil, (the product of decay) through composting, and an insert “What Non-vegetarians need to Know About Soy Foods.” Vermiculture and mulching, food animals, sprouting and growing mushrooms are all included. Step 6: (How to Begin Storing Food) reminds us we are truly on a trip into the mind of a guy who lives in a Tennessee enclave where Survivalism is at the top of menu for discussion on Saturday night. Pressure canners, making jams and jellies, food drying, “crazing” fruit, solar-electric refrigeration, and planning food to store are all detailed Recipe? Let me guess. Jam, but quality Tennessee jam, rest assured. And so, as we suspected, we arrive at the Step discussing “Fallout Shelters” and, from the rolling green hills of the rifle-toting American wilderness, Bates calls for us to “Be Prepared!” It may actually good for Bates to get this Big Daddy business out of the way at this part of the book. Crash Proofing, (write down every appliance and fixture in your home that is dependent on fossil fuel energy) preparing for anything, being fit, encouraging your neighbours to be prepared, providing support if there is a crisis, anxieties, speaking to children about all of this, (I think he may want to speak to a psychiatrist about all of this) and so on. Finally, just when we thought, even if there was excellent jam, we would do anything not to be trapped in a fallout shelter with Bates, comes “Retooling.” Here we explore the impracticality of the automobile in its current form. A lovely, relaxing chapter describing the need for new conceptual vehicles and commercial vehicles, air travel industry “dinosaurs,” refueling systems and alternative fuels. Sadly, Bates’ presentation as future-thinking takes a dive evocative of Bush’s floundered energy policy while he wastes time discussing the merits of ethanol and several other Biofuels, which, by the time of publication, have been entirely debunked for their negative net (they create more CO2 in production than they ever displace). Other fuels such as Biogas, which Vanadana Shiva considers respect-worthy, are also detailed, while Biodiesel is offered perhaps a naiive degree of praise. DME (Dimethyl Ether) initiatives in China (although it takes 3 litres of water to produce one litre of DME) are also given more credit than they potentially deserve. Arriving at the more promising choice, Hydrogen, (H2) “four times bulkier than kerosene, but 2.8 times lighter” we find Bates, similar to an earlier make-your-own Biofuel moonshine rap, actually discussing homemade hydrogen units “a small reformer in the car’s luggage compartment, (made from a used propane tank or beer keg with electrodes bubbling water) generating enough H2 pressure in the tank to force a steady stream of hydrogen gas into the carburetor or fuel injectors, thereby increasing the combustion and decreasing the amount of gasoline burned by 15 to 30 per cent.” Commercial version available, but trust that this guy would know someone with a beer keg version. After a few chapters of discussion regarding lifestyle changes and commuting options, including, “get a horse” we arrive at “Imagine Sustainability.” Here again, Bates is back in grim mode, remarking in a cold way that sustainability is nothing, because everything falls apart, and so what we really need is “a more or less steady-state economy in which we destroy nothing, reuse and recycle, and try to keep the natural world, which provides our every need, healthy and robust…to sustain our puny existences for their natural span…” The rest of the chapter becomes Macho as Bates presents the Four Horsemen of Bio, Robo, CO2, and Nuke. Here Bates lists the content of an average light bulb and compares it to the mining required for stocking such a product. Moving on to housing, he praises several constructions such as teepees for their resilience, “Mongolian yurts thwart Gobi dust storms using a Bernoulli Effect, channeling wind harmlessly around a cone of enclosed space.” The author also presents the Maya as exceptional survivors, having lived through major drought in the form of “two and perhaps three major climate changes.” Exploring his ideas in design for sustainability, and a list of elements for design, including those that sustain “values” of the society such as individual liberty and family ties, the author comments that “we want to sustain the regenerative ability of natural systems to provide life-supporting service that are rarely counted by economists…” Bates then explores population growth by comparing it to economic “growth” and citing a bacteria theory, a little over-simplified if you ask me, as he concludes his chapter with economists Kenneth Boulding’s 1971 Misery Theorem.” If the only thing that can check population growth is misery, then it will keep growing until misery makes it stop.” Bates hopes perhaps there is a more cheerful solution, but if that is so, why supply the most disturbing one? Macho. Chapter (Step 11) “Quit your Job” is precious, as are the chapters that follow it. An ode to the “Slow Movement” with headings such as “creative loafing,” “glossary of surf speak” and “dismantling useless things” for inspiration, Bates strongly advocates achieving a quality of existence on the basis of the idea that material wealth will never produce happiness, and that to increase happiness and comfort, we must scale back. Advocating ecological agriculture and the way that “permaculture undertakes the harmonious joining of humans in their agriculture” the chapter wraps up with a perceptably apologetic spicy orange pumpkin mousse. Step 12 “Utopia by Morning” is surely one of my favorite discussions in this book, because here Bates is happy again, revelling in something he not only knows well, but something he hinges his own macho hippy dude hope upon seeing thrive. Because more people now live within cities than outside them, the redesign of cities has become more urgent. Bates refers to New Urbanists as ”those in the city-building business who just won’t give up.” To our delight, Bates is a Jane Jacobs fan. “Jane Jacobs epitomized the old guard. The author of Death and Life of American Great cities, The Economics of Cities, Systems of Survival, and The Nature of Economies, she wrote in Dark Age Ahead an obituary for contemporary city streets: Not all roads are community killers like those that have become so common in North America and in countries influenced by North American highway planning. Some roads are famous for fostering community-life, as they bring people into casual, pleasant and frequent face-to-face contact with one another. Many an ordinary Main Street used to do these services, but Main Streets have proved easily transformable into bleak, standardized community killers...” A Jane-inspired Bates writes that, “versatile boulevards are little-known in North America, and those that do exist are seldom more than a ghost of what they could be.” Curious, for a guy who spends so much rural time on The Farm, but indeed an insight. “Elsewhere in the world, especially in places with Mediterranean cultures, boulevards are places to which people flock for a stroll when the day’s work is done, to see neighbours, get word of strangers, pick up other news, and enjoy a coffee or a beer and chat while they take in the passing scene, including sidewalk play of children. People in cities and neighbourhoods in much of the world understand their boulevard to be at the heart of their communities. A well-designed boulevard is always well provided with trees along its margins and medians, because a major concern of serous boulevard designers is to create environments welcoming to pedestrians.” Nice, and a fresh aspect to the author, who suddenly shines as a bit of a poet trapped into canning fruit. In his new metropolitan tone, Yet more captivating, Bates now turns to a discussion of “Ecocity.” “The Ecocity movement turns new urbanism up a notch. Ecocityists are dedicated to reshaping urban landscape…they want to return biodiversity- including fish, frogs and dragonflies-to the innermost hearts of cities by reopening paved-over creeks and wetlands, returning nature to back lots and planters, and giving nature a longer leash. Ecocity is about growing food in de-paved streets and producing electricity from solar alleys. It is about adding greenhouses to rooftops, terraces, and window boxes for heat and kitchen gardens. It is less about rerouting cars and trucks within cities, and more about eliminating them altogether.” So should Bates not take a break from The Farm and spend some time living in such places? It seems, in fact, that Bates does tour, and that he has developed a special admiration for activists in several. To Bates, China is a land “which will add another 2 billion people in the next 30 years – 18,265 additional people every per day, a small city twice a week, a city the size of Vancouver or Sydney twice each year. With the natural systems that nourished their ancient civilizations now threadbare and seriously imperiled, it is not hard to imagine why the Chinese are interested in Ecocities.” “If one thinks of an Ecocity as a collection of self-sustaining Ecovillages, Bates declares it possible that China can accomplish an Ecocity transition more easily than in the West. There follows a description of wonderful international communities and populist communes throughout history. Ecovillage: Bates has a fondness for the Ecovillage, having spent the past 35 years of his life living on The Farm, a proto-ecovillage in Tennessee. He spent the years from 1992 to 2004 travelling as an emissary for the Ecovillage movement to hundreds of experiments of six different continents. He saw many success stories and many failures. Remarkably, he feels that many Ecovillages fail simply because they don’t have enough members. “Sustainable community is not about dominance, it is about listening.” Bates then addresses developing consensus and solution-oriented behaviour, and how to honestly express yourself without blaming or criticizing, as well as how to clearly request what you need without demanding. Again he provides resource links on this topic. Afterword, the final chapter, Bates reminds us that we have had many stories and myths since antiquity regarding the Earth as our mother, our changing nurturer, our Goddess. He cites the myth of Khali as particularly appropriate for our times, “mad dancing, dishevelled hair, and eerie howl…The world is created and destroyed in Khali’s wild dancing; redemption comes only when we realize that we are invited to take part in her dance, to yield to the frenzied beat, to find her rhythm.” Bates comments, “Peak Oil may be a trigger for a global economic depression that lasts many decades. Or it may not…But if Peak Oil doesn’t wake us up to the precariousness of our condition…annihilating the evolutionary systems that sustain us…what will?” So, “let’s not squander this moment. This will be the Great Change.” Dessert is Candylion Frogurt.
Bates, A. K. (2006). The post-petroleum survival guide and cookbook: Recipes for changing times. New Society Publishers.