transporting organic

TRANSPORTING ORGANIC
Okay, today you get a token article. Tomorrow you get a short article. Friday you get another long guest article. Right now it looks like you are on your own for the weekend. Yesterday I limped into work on a slowly leaking tire, the Green Goo trying valiantly but failing to completely stop the leak. If I am right and the whole world is indeed out to get me ( because, after all, it is ALL about me ), I would swear someone is spiking the road. Here they are in a warm interior shooting down the road, and I’m the asshole for making them slow down to the speed limit and swerve around. Anyway, I had a Near Monday Day From Hell, compounded by knowing I would have to walk home afterwards. And when I just now took the bike down to the shop he was closed down tighter than a whore house the day before payday during a credit contraction. Hence, I don’t have the time for a whole lot of writing. If you’re smart you are already skipping out of work early to go visit family and could care less anyway.
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First, just to warn you, this will be another whiney article on how wrong the slow collapse people are and how wonderful and correct I am. Hey, if you don’t like it suggest some different topics for me. And after a thousand articles you know what topics I cover. I’m not going to talk about crap I have no idea about. You already think I do that with the subject matter I do cover. The fact that recently farmers are adjusting to increased artificial fertilizer prices ( along with other costs ) by going organic ( millions of acres a year according to the Druid Dude in his latest book which I loved and will review shortly ) prompts more happy joy orgasmic optimism amongst the slow collapse crowd. Okay. Great. We are already transitioning to organic. This will be a needed step towards the solar economy that will grow up after PODA. But my question is this. Now that more and more farmers are getting more sustainable, how are they going to get all that to market? A few locations will be favored by the proximities of those farms, but our entire nation is dependent on crops grown far away. Our transportation system cannot be transformed. We lack the energy, the money, and the political will to do so. City cores are no longer ringed by a green belt of farmers. They are ringed by Yuppie suburbs full of SUV’s. Food comes from hundreds and thousands of miles away. In an energy decline, you don’t build up new infrastructure.
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On an individual basis, the move to organic is relatively easy. As is the use of solar/wind/micro water. It is when you try to turn the nation to these sources that things fall apart. Too many people are in too many huge concentrations to grow organically and locally. With a huge project, perhaps a metro area could grow their own salads. But certainly not all their own food. And the surrounding land in poisoned and infertile from asphalt and lawns. There isn’t enough material they can import to transform the soil. Not quick enough anyway. Now, I’m talking about a collapse here. During a collapse, we see disruptions. One systematic failure after another. Negative feedback loops. We won’t have enough energy for long distance transport after a certain point. In the transition from global trade to local sustainability, a lot of people can’t get all the food they need. That isn’t as much of a slow collapse as it is a local die-off. Let’s look at it from another view. In ten years, the collapse of the Soviet Union saw life expectancies fall by decades. We all called that a slow collapse. Life went on for a lot of people. Yet, a lot of people died off from untreated health problems, increased diseases, alcoholism, etc. We are arguing semantics at this point, if you are more than likely to die from a fall from a First World to a Third World infrastructure rather than marauding bandits. For that matter, we don’t even look at ethnic massacres in Africa as a sudden collapse, or a die off. We just call it more of the same, the place going to hell. Perhaps the slow collapse crowd is right. Technically we won’t see a collapse. But it won’t matter to you because you are dead from street violence or an untreated heart condition.
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I’m not trying to win an argument by changing definitions ( mainly it is sarcasm ). I still think in a very short period of time a very large number of people will die. And the biggest cause will be that while we still produce a lot of food, it won’t reach far away locations. Plan accordingly. Or just ignore me since I don’t garden organically.
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