Monthly Archives: August 2012

Resilience in suburban Anchorage

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by Mary and Todd Logan

Summer is rapidly coming to an end. Long summer nights are waning, and I notice that I need to turn on lights in the morning now. Berries are ripe for the picking, and there is a slight chill in the air. The Alaska State Fair is coming. It is time to take stock, examining our progress in making ourselves more self-sufficient.

Since Alaska is sucking pretty hard on the fossil fuel teat, it is the last place one would expect permaculture to take hold. But there are glimmers of a new day on the horizon. Permaculture courses are beginning to pop up, and we Anchorageites now have our own active permaculture teacher, with more to follow. Alaskans have our own transition and permaculture groups. Farmers’ markets are springing up all over town, with farmers even making use of underused malls during the winter to sell stored root vegetables. Alaska finally has its own energy czar (there is no department of energy in state government). The Renewable Energy Alaska Project is moving forward with their fingers in many different pots. Biking is becoming a big summer and winter sport and for commuting. The population is active in outdoor and human-powered sports, and less focused on shopping. We’re closer to nature up here, and there is a lot more of nature than there are people. Anchorage’s tourism slogan is “big, wild life.”

While Alaskans have an attitude of self-sufficiency and think that we’re very independent, but in truth, we are very dependent on fossil fuels and imports. The recent history of Alaska has been as a territory dependent on imports from “Outside.” Our state is the second biggest users of fossil fuels, in part because of the waning net energy of our oil–it takes more and more energy to produce our oil each year. Our three biggest vulnerabilities could be lumped into three categories: heating, transportation, and food. As we take stock of successes, failures, and ongoing vulnerabilities in becoming more resilient in Anchorage, here are some opportunities for learning.

Heat

Anchorage electric power plants run on Cook Inlet natural gas fields, which are increasingly tight supply, especially in the winter, since our demand pulses greatly in winter. We have developed new gas reservoirs and closed a fertilizer plant on the Kenai Peninsula (at least in winter) to smooth out the pulses. New exploration and discovery are requiring more energy inputs, with more fracking and other techniques to get poorly accessible gas.

Anchorage houses and buildings are heated directly with natural gas. Alaskans are vulnerable to interruptions due to extreme demand from winter cold or from large-scale catastrophes such as earthquakes. I shudder to think what a major earthquake and sustained power outage would do to the plumbing of our housing stock in the middle of winter. Backup power sources are important, and many houses have either a fireplace, a wood stove, or if the house is more recent, a gas fireplace, which wouldn’t be much help in a natural gas interruption. Pellet stoves are for sale, too, but people buying them for backups do not realize that pellet stoves need both electricity and a complex, distant supply chain to run. Electric power is so invisible to us that we assume it will always be available, even in a crisis.

Much of the housing stock was built during the heyday of the pipeline, and it is grossly inefficient and wasteful of heat. The Alaska Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC) is doing a wonderful job of educating citizens and providing rebate programs to weatherize our inefficient homes.

At the house, we have a backup generator, a wood stove, and a wood fired furnace to cover any exigencies. The generator and wood stove are back-up systems.  We use our wood fired furnace routinely every winter to heat the house, downstairs apartment, all domestic hot water, and the garage (via waste heat from the furnace).  Seven cords of wood provides about 100 heating days during the heart of the winter.  We season our cut split wood for at least a year to give hot, efficient, low pollution burns.  We scavenge all our wood from nearby land and road clearing projects as well as from neighbors who occasionally need to get rid of a sickly tree.   We stumbled into several unexpected wood-cutting opportunities this year, so we now have wood on hand for the next 3 winters.

But if everyone in Alaska heated with wood, we wouldn’t be able to heat the housing stock for very long without decimating our forests. Wood makes a nice backup for emergencies, but In Alaska, a future with less fossil fuels will mean less population, more efficient, smaller housing, less heat, or all the above.  Heating with wood has given us a greater appreciation of the amazing amount of energy stored in fossil fuels like natural gas.  If we planned to heat exclusively with wood, we would also live in a smaller and super-insulated house.

Food

Alaskans have recognized our vulnerabilities concerning food security.  While villages off the road system rely in part on subsistence hunting and gathering, all Alaskans are reliant on imports, and those of us in Anchorage particularly so. There are a number of food security initiatives springing up in Alaska.

ADN.com Anne Raup Kenai River dipnets

Salmon is a mainstay of our ecosystem up here. Many Alaskans and visitors love to sport fish, but for stocking salmon in the freezer, dip netting is the way to go.  Each summer state residents can net salmon from several Alaska rivers during the salmon runs.  When the fishing is good, you can catch enough fish to stock a freezer in a matter of hours.   We process our salmon by vacuum packing steaks and freezing them–they’re good for about a year if done properly. We smoke extra salmon. The chickens love the fileted bones and skin, microwaved into a tasty treat. The birds attack the offering like tiny raptors–one can see how birds evolved from dinosaurs.

We planted strawberries gifted by friends in raised beds and raspberries near our fence. The strawberries are expanding rapidly, and the raspberries have “volunteered” to a different part of the yard. We planted them in a spot that was too shady, in competition with young trees. A bird or moose moved the raspberries through the act of consumption and either bird guano or moose poop to a better, sunnier spot. Our breakfasts during late summer include homemade yogurt, granola, and berries that taste like a shot of tart sweetness that explodes in my mouth.

Garden

We have learned that amending our poor soils is an ongoing process. Vegie production needs good soil structure, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium (N-P-K) and a number of micronutrients. Fish make an excellent fertilizer for the garden, but since we have bears coming through the yard on an almost daily basis, we are hesitant to bury fish heads and guts on the property. We gut our fish at the river, recycling them into the ecosystem via seagulls. In the garden we improve soil structure with compost, composted manure, and leaf mulch.  We provide nutrients by adding locally produced fish bone meal and ashes from our wood furnace.  We protect the garden from moose and the chickens from bears with electric fences, which work quite well. During a vacation last year we overwatered using automatic watering, and had slugs. This year we were more careful with the water, and used Sluggo preventively when they started to appear.

Chickens

These birds apparently can’t read french, spanish, or english!

We have had barred rock chickens for 4 years. They are cold hardy, great layers of beautiful brown eggs, and they are amusing. Our first flock of four was winnowed to two last year after a hawk and a bear each made a meal of one.  This year we re-homed the still-productive pair and started a new flock.  Our only local chicken breeder closed two years ago, so we obtained day-old chicks from a hatchery near Cincinnati.  They come by way of overnight Priority Mail.  We got a lot of strange looks this spring when we walked through the post office lobby with a loudly cheeping box.  Our new birds will start laying in late October.  Five of the birds have already gone to friends.  We plan to keep six, and will sell the rest before the snow flies.

We’ve improved the coop and run over time.  We added nesting boxes that open to the outside so that you can harvest eggs without going in the coop.  For our new larger flock, we added a second level in the coop to give more floor space during the long winter months.  Since losing one bird to a hawk, we’ve fully netted the fenced run overhead with seine net remnants from a local net shop.

Storage and water

Our detached garage serves extra duty as a heat source for the chicken coop, root cellar, and freezer. We keep it heated to 40 degrees in the winter, just warm enough to melt accumulated snow and ice off of the cars.  A wall-opening into the chicken coop helps moderate the coop temperature.  The garage temperature provides good root cellar conditions for keeping potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables from the garden. We are learning to put up food through canning, and smoking.

Water is not a big problem in Alaska. Since we use a well and septic system, we have opted to add a hand pump to the top of our well for power outages, since our well requires electricity. There is a creek nearby, too.

We are still learning things with the greenhouse.  We enjoyed great early season lettuce, spinach, kale, and chard.  Tomato plants have grown like crazy, but actual production has been less than expected.  Cucumbers too have been slow to produce.  These latter two need pollinators to fruit, which are lacking indoors.  Our manual pollination efforts are clearly not as efficient or effective as mother nature.  The celery looks great, and we plan to replant a fall crop of lettuce in the next several weeks.

Transport

Transport is where Alaskans’ footprints fail miserably in sustainability. While ecofootprint may only be a partial measure of emergy sustainability, which is more inclusive, the tool quickly provides a superficial snapshot of energy use relative to others. I have my class take their ecofootprint measure, and each year, our footprints explode to 3 or 4 or 5 worlds when we add in our air travel. Busted! Alaskans like to travel, and they fly everywhere. Residents of bush communities must travel by air, especially in summer, since winter ice makes travel by snow machine or dogsled easier across frozen ground.

There has been a flowering of winter bike commuting in Anchorage, with more and more people commuting via fat tire bikes or bikes with studded tires. But that increase is just a beginning to the transition we need. Anchorage spends a large amount of effort and energy to clear its expanding network of roads from snow. That effort was especially visible this year with our record snowfalls–we ran out of snow-dumps for storage of snow removed from road and parking lot surfaces. In a future of more extreme weather swings and lower energy support, a combination of dog sleds, bikes, skis, foot travel, and innovations such as packrafts would make all of Alaska accessible, albeit at a slower, fitter pace.

Will Anchorage ever be truly sustainable? No, probably not. Alaska has a population of almost 700,000, with almost 300,000 in Anchorage. Before fossil fuels, Alaska’s subarctic and arctic ecosystems supported small populations of seasonally migratory Alaska Native Peoples who were dependent on careful marshalling of resources through hunting and gathering. But as long as Alaska has fossil fuels to produce, Alaska will support a larger population. Alaska is a little slower and a bit behind the lower 48 when it comes to trends, fads, and the mainstream in general. Our summers are short, and we make the most of them. One last kayak trip, packraft, or bike overnight, harvesting, syllabi and course updates to make. . . gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.

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Taboo topics–nuclear waste

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by Mary Logan

Sometimes  we are better defined by what we don’t talk about than the topics that our media, politics, and culture do focus on. Talking about radiation is taboo. Since radioecologists discovered energetic systems principles during the study of radioactive fallout, we can frame the discussion of nuclear waste hazards using systems principles, thus illustrating how the principles apply to our modern economies. This is a complex issue, so it is important to always start with topics by viewing the larger scale first to understand the big picture. We need to know why understanding this new hazard, radiation in the environment, is necessary, since our governing leaders are denying the dangers. We need to understand the linkages between the physics, chemistry, and ecology of nuclear waste.

How are taboos and energy related?

In anthropological terms, taboo means forbidden. Taboos often arise as religious strictures that promote fears to protect the group or support hierarchies of status through conformity of group behavior. Harris (1993) considered taboos as cultural restrictions that help to adapt human cultural systems to their environment, creating cultural rules without requiring special knowledge, and promoting group think. So taboos often have to do with energetic principles, dictating how to behave to maximize power in the system, with dictums about food and other behaviors such as sex that impact population size and community survival. For example, Harris (1977) suggested that the religious taboo in India against eating beef in India may have developed from an energetic basis of allowing more efficient use of the food chain–humans eat grains instead of the higher emergy beef. Harris also suggested that the ancient Israelites prohibited the consumption of pigs when deforestation in the Middle East made pig production ecologically unsound. But in countries with large amounts of resources, our secure lifestyles have made taboos less important.

Taboos have occurred in all cultures in history, but the subjects of taboos have changed in industrial society. The shift to a high energy culture in the past 200 years has promoted cultural feedback loops that enhance further use of energy in many ways. While food and environmental taboos are no longer as prevalent, economic taboos that encourage growth and consumption may have replaced them. Historically, restraining economic taboos dictated where we could cut down a tree in the commons or whether we could hunt totem animals or hunt out of season. Our society has replaced those taboos with laws, and the laws have been commandeered by corporations who apply cultural pressure that encourages us to use more resources. Except for rare journal articles, books, and conference talks, the growth ethic is primarily questioned by free agents on the Internet who have no vested interests in the dominant industrial society. Our culture has created cultural feedback loops that limit the discussion of limits. Most importantly, there is a religious taboo against the discussion of any form of population control, including birth control, abortion, end of life planning or assisted suicide. And until recently, the high priests of capitalism have been in charge of the message of growth, shunning any who propose alternatives. No funding for you!

Kurt Cobb threw out the question last week, “Can we bear the legacy costs of industrial society’s toxic pollution?” With this question, he is challenging a taboo, since growth ideologies represent the goals of our civilization. If we question environmental pollution, we question our growth ideology and our assumptions about our way of being and reasons for living. It is time to talk taboos, since taboos will also change (or change back) in descent, as less energy inputs redesign our cultural behaviors.

In descent, natural selection will occur through a number of both traditional and novel mechanisms. Traditional problems such as chronic diseases and disease of aging will kill the elderly as diseases we have suppressed reemerge. Many will suffer from increased epidemics as healthcare becomes less effective or available and populations become more crowded and with decline in public health factors provided by an adequate environment, such as clean water, air, sanitation, and nontoxic food. We can protect against many of these threats through preventive health measures, if we are proactive and educated about the issues.

Are there any taboos now about environmental pollution? I can’t think of many. Increasingly, if you’re not paying attention, you or your heirs will be part of a grand genetics experiment on natural selection. One of the most dangerous forms of invisible threats is environmental pollution from long-lasting, toxic industrial wastes, including heavy metals, pesticides, and radioactive isotopes. These threats cannot be seen or felt or tasted, so we defer the worry about accumulated health impacts of low levels of pollution to descendants. Protecting oneself from these invisible threats requires either owning your own watershed (and air-shed!) and control over your food chain, or it requires education and expensive technology to detect the threats. Taboo behaviors will shift, and issues of descent will become matters of survival. Medical health taboos will need to redevelop about seen and unseen dangers to the group, to protect uninformed members about complex, rapidly shifting relationships between the energy basis of our economy and the environment.

The food chain hierarchy and biomagnification

Uptake and turnover of matter within a food chain is complex (Fry, 2006). Biomagnification is the concentration of matter such as radioisotopes up the food chain as energy transfers occur and matter is passed from producers, to consumers, to predators, from trophic level to trophic level. Persistent environmental pollutants such as PCBs, DDT, heavy metals such as Mercury, and radionuclides are passed in this fashion.

The evidence on low-level chronic radiation’s effects is gamed politically, as complex ideas are difficult to convey, damage is invisible, and research has been very poorly funded. Radioecologists originally learned about food chain interactions developed from the study of Isotopic tracers at Hanford, Washington and elsewhere in the 1950s. But radioecology appears to have fallen out of favor, judging from the interest on Wiki. And the associated, medicine-related field, Radiobiology, appears to avoid the ecological piece of integration of radiation into food chains and ecosystems. Instead, there are sanctions against exploring how radioactivity travels through ecosystems and food chains. For example, the World Health Organization is muzzled against speaking out on nuclear issues. Evidence of the damage exists from Chernobyl and elsewhere, but you have to dig for it (Independent WHO, 2012). The nuclear industry promotes the idea of minimum safe dose levels, which is probably not the case. Chronic low doses result in cancers for individuals and long-term genetic degradation of populations. During nuclear accidents, media focus is on rapidly decaying isotopes such as Iodine-131, with less emphasis on the longer lived isotopes that will travel up the food chain over time. The few researchers trained in radioecology are having difficulty being heard, and most employees in the nuclear industry have signed employment contracts with gag clauses. There are major political and economic ramifications of contamination of our foods, so taboos about discussion keep the genie in the bottle. Since we can’t see it, and no one is talking about it, that means it is not there. So we’re going to have to do the best we can on this one.

(Odum & Barrett, 2005, p. 205, after Ophel 1963) How come we have to go back 50 years for diagrams like this?

Contamination through internal emitters is far more dangerous than external exposure. As we breathe, drink, or eat a radioisotope, it gets absorbed and taken up into organs, carried around for months, years, or decades, while it continues to impact tissues. Our journalists discount the difference between internal and external exposure and the media avoids internal contamination issues, which are complex and threatening. Manmade unstable radioactive isotopes have very long half-lives with slow rates of decay, so they accumulate over time up the food chain. Radionuclides continue to accumulate in the background and up the food chain if the input rate exceeds the rate of natural decay. Some plants such as lichens and mushrooms have high uptake rates, so animals that eat those plants have higher

http://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/projects /fingernails/results/foodchain.html As usual, the food chain does not portray humans, since we are not part of nature

contamination rates. For example, people who eat caribou that eat lichen are much more vulnerable to high rates of contamination. In the ocean, isotopes are taken up by phytoplankton, which is eaten by zooplankton, which is eaten by herring, which is eaten by salmon. Salmon is then eaten by seals, or bears, or eagles, or humans. Mutations increase over successive generations, as faulty DNA information accumulates and is then

(EP Odum & Barrett, 2005, p. 203)

passed on. The greatest danger over time is to complex organisms with more DNA, such as humans, that are higher up the food chain. Humans are more easily damaged or killed than lower order organisms such as bacteria or insects (EP Odum, 1983, p. 248). Humans take up isotopes rapidly, concentrating them far beyond the dilute levels in the environment. Isotopes in your body follow chemical pathways, lodging in your heart muscle, or your bones, or your fetus, releasing more slowly over time, depending again on a number of factors.

Metabolism and spatial concentration of emergy

Matter cycles round and round in the system. In the biogeophysical world, isotopes disperse into the air via steam, smoke, or explosion, and are transported via wind, and attaching to water droplets to fallout in rain onto ground or water. With enough uplift, isotopes rise into the jet stream, they can travel around the globe on bands of jet stream winds. Fukushima’s plants are still steaming, but isotopes’ travel is dependent on weight of the isotope, weather, and other factors. Groundwater and surface waters spread isotopes through the water cycle. If isotopes reside in a tree, they may get expelled as pollen or smoke in a fire and spread by weather, or on a fungus or mushroom in decay, which then recycles into soil. If isotopes are in the soil, they may get taken up by your spinach or flushed into the water cycle. Isotopes will decay into stable isotopes over time, but they do not go away, as matter is neither created nor destroyed. Concentration is greater in nutrient-poor soils, in thin vegetation, and poor drainage (EP Odum, 1983, p. 250). Residence time in any one spot and distribution depends on a number of factors.

“The ultimate effect of a pollutant or toxin is not only related to its transformity, but more importantly to its concentration or empower density (emergy per unit area per unit time, i.e. seJ/m2*day) in the ecosystem. Where empower density of a stressor is significantly higher than the average empower density of the ecosystem, it is released into, one can expect significant changes in ecosystem function” (Ulgiati & Brown, 2009, p. 318).

Spatial concentration of materials in Tokyo?

At the same time that nature is redistributing the waste, man’s use of fossil fuels concentrates the isotopes. Japan’s situation illustrates some feedback loops that are making the problems worse within economic systems. Authorities are concealing contamination and failing to create evacuation zones. This spreads radiation by allowing people to export food, waste, and other products from contaminated areas. The city imports goods which are then consumed. Incineration spreads isotopes by air, since incineration does not destroy isotopes. Sewage and waste handling policies may further spread or concentrate the materials. Both emergy and matter concentrate spatially. Is the spatial concentration of radiation isotopes increasing over time in the Tokyo city center, above? Nature redistributes matter slowly through natures renewable energies at the smaller scale, it can redistribute quickly at the larger scale impacts of storms, earthquakes, volcanoes or other catastrophes. Here is a small scale example of concentrated waste from a landfill being redistributed in a village, creating groundwater hazards. The same can happen with radiation–concentrated wastes can be dangerous to public health, and nature works to redistribute them.

Man’s nonrenewable energies may also focus concentration but also allow more extensive transport spatially through trade and other mechanisms. Imports and exports both spread materials–industrial economies result in industrial levels of pollution. Decontamination is not effective, since we cannot get rid of materials–we can only redistribute them. Because post-industrial cities are fossil fuel-intensive, concentration of pollution could be significant if this occurs. If a nuclear accident contaminated fields destined for biofuels, we could even create pollution from our tailpipes, as environmental loads increase. Time will tell. By not evacuating a heavily contaminated area, we commit to the path of spreading radiation over time. Man has concentrated uranium, and nature works, with man’s help, to redistribute it.

http://www.emergysystems. org/lectures.php Inverse Relationship Material Flow & Energy per Mass

“Material concentrations are highly skewed, with many deposits of low concentration and a few deposits of high concentration. Since materials are cycled by energy, and energy is hierarchically organized, materials are organized similarly, in hierarchies, with decreased quantities at each level of scale in inverse relation to concentration. . . Emergy per unit mass is inverse to the quantity. Materials of high value are scarce because more energy is required to make them. . . Part of the environmental problems of our time appears to result from displacement of chemical substances from their normal position in the energy hierarchy” (Odum, 2007, p. 120-22).

Feedback loops and material cycling of nuclear waste

We have concentrated many of our industrial wastes locally, where the pollutants are avoidable in the short-term. Over the longer scale of time, nature sequesters long half-life isotopes in glaciers, sea bottom sediments, and other mechanisms and eventually returns them back into the ground. But nature or man disperses other pollutants quickly by air, water, or mechanical means, such as explosions or wars. Sudden dispersal may occur  when the complex, interconnected systems start to break down or become chaotic. The high complexity in society can also be the means of our downfall.

With nuclear hazards, we have dug dangerous materials out of the ground, concentrated them greatly, and then reprocessed them into lethal manmade isotopes. We enrich uranium to make bombs. The US military is escalating the use of  depleted uranium in wars. We have concentrated our spent nuclear fuel into swimming pools perched on top of cooking nuclear reactors that heat to the temperature of small stars. We have reprocessed the nuclear waste into fuels with higher concentrations of plutonium, which is particularly deadly, as nuclear plant disasters can now distribute mixed oxide fuel with high plutonium content. Internal emitters such as plutonium and uranium are particularly dangerous as they emit alpha particles and have a half-life of many generations. Read here for an earlier post on this topic.

Our empire requires more and more energy diversion from growth to maintenance as resources contract over time. As emergy yield ratios of our energy sources declines, our ability to support increasingly complex systems will fail. When systems fail, the danger of environmental pollutants that escape will increase, especially if explosive mechanisms disperse pollutants widely. As our nuclear plants degrade, we must sustain cooling of nuclear waste or safely store it, since maintaining the highly concentrated, deadly, and explosive fuels requires complex systems. We are only 100 minutes away from a meltdown event at any one of our 435 nuclear power plants around the world, with a loss of coolant accident (LOCA). Complexity is failing more often, with at least eight ”partial meltdowns” in the US and increasing patterns of blackouts as our energy basis wanes. When one considers the feedback loops in place, the number and age of plants, and our motivations to support growth, the future of environmental contamination from nuclear plants can only grow.

http-:www.nukepills.com:nuclear-reactor-maps US reactor map

Americans fear other countries’ nuclear development, and they fear nuclear plant terrorism as a boogeyman, but we are projecting our fears on others when we need look no farther than ourselves for the source of our potential undoing. Any number of threats arise from failures in our complex systems, from sustained regional blackout or droughts, hurricanes or tornadoes, which could create dirty bombs out of our power sources. “We have met the enemy, and he is us” (Walt Kelly, Pogo).

A summary of energetic systems principles

Because researchers conceived many energetic systems principles during the study of isotopes as they are moved through ecosystems, we can use the hazard of nuclear waste to illustrate these systems principles.

  1. Material cycling distributes the isotopes biogeochemically across the landscape. Renewable and nonrenewable energies transport industrial waste matter across the landscape, metabolizing and spatially concentrating them in ecosystems and economic systems through self-organization.
  2. The process of transformity concentrates isotopes as they flow up food chains hierarchically, concentrating emergy and isotopes at the top levels of the food chain, and degrading the complex information of DNA.
  3. Autocatalysis or positive feedback loops create growth demands that impel society to continue on a hazardous path long after it should have stopped, producing large quantities of environmental pollution with long lag times on impacts.

Impacts of environmental hazards will become clearer over time as the results of our grand genetics experiment begin to accumulate and become widely known. Eventually our cultural system will redevelop taboos or religious strictures that help to keep us safe. Many feedback delays exist in the processes of vertical food chain concentration, horizontal emergy concentration, and in concentration of genetic mutations in the population over time. So there will be a delay before we have taboos that tell us what foods to avoid. Osei (2006) identifies a number of taboos related to ecological sustainability in Africa. He reminds us of the Akan Philosopher’s words, that “it is not a taboos to go back for values that one has forgotten or left in the past.” But if we allow industrial-scale pollution to lay waste to the biosphere, we will need to form new taboos geared towards avoidance of new, man-made, invisible dangers.

The topic of nuclear waste is difficult to write about–each time I write the words expand quickly beyond the limits of the post while I try to chase the connections. We cannot understand the details without first understanding the principles. So the details of protecting yourself will have to wait.

Header art: Castle and Cherry Blossoms, Japan (Martha Odum, 1962)

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Gender roles and descent

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By Mary Logan

This post is about how gender roles might change in descent. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while, but Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article this month in The Atlantic instigated this post. Ms. Slaughter makes the point that women cannot keep up with the demands of work and home in the current American culture, even with the many adjuncts that the hierarchy created by fossil fuels provides, such as day care and fast food. Slaughter states, “Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men.” But Ms. Slaughter fails to recognize an even more pressing issue going forward. All of us will need to work cooperatively to become more self-sufficient as we restructure of our culture post fossil fuels, which requires more time at home, making the juggling all the harder if we refuse to give something up. And women are not good at giving things up, as evidenced by our current quandary of too many roles to play. As Ms. Slaughter found, I have finally found a way to live that is true to myself, rather than the expectations of others, expectations reflecting corporate values. Taking back control by working less was positive in many ways. This is my story, but you can find broader coverage of this topic and the header poster in a Fall 2011 issue of Yes Magazine. And I see that Sharon Astyk is on a similar wavelength about gender roles; maybe it is the dog days of summer that refocuses our thoughts on family. This post is a bit shorter, because I have lots of questions and no answers, and I’m interested in hearing what others think.

I am 56, and I have been happily married for 34 years. I chose the profession of nursing so that I could have an adaptable, flexible, mobile career where I could have it all. I wanted family and a good career doing something that was socially useful, that was also amenable to transition and descent. I wanted a bomb-proof career guaranteed to be an option no matter how descent played out, since caring for others never goes out of style. We had one daughter, and I worked in critical care and then in academia, teaching nursing. At about the age of 50, the hormones wore off or wore out, and healthcare started to seem more and more ridiculous as I started to reconsider my career. I kept removing fun things from my life to cope, until finally there wasn’t much left except work and family, and family was starting to come second. My value system was starting to fray.

And the work wasn’t satisfying. Nursing education was a pink-collar ghetto, with heavy workloads, committees, and the need to also work weekends in a stressful critical care setting, which was my specialty, to stay current.  Various certification boards prescribe the curriculum, with a research course that focused on reductionist methods, yielding fragmented pieces of evidence that did not fit into a whole. My pharmacology course focused on treatments developed by for-profit companies using reductionist science. There was no time for holistic systems courses, and no leeway to think outside the restrictive box of western medicine. The overwhelming details and complexity of nursing science expanded rapidly, occupying teachers and students alike with an overload of detail and specialization. I “trained” nursing students to become cogs in the machine of industrial healthcare, which conflicted with my values of holism and descent. Class size, technology, and committee work kept expanding, while pay relative to men’s pay did not.

Crones have a tendency to speak out and act out.  And in Alaska, uppity women are part of the culture. A popular bumper sticker up here reads, ” Well behaved women seldom make history.” The attitude is infectious. After jettisoning large chunks of my life and saying no to too many things, I finally scaled way back on work, too. I stopped in time to enjoy the last year of my daughter’s time at home; I just wish that I had stopped sooner. I shifted gears, and I now work as an adjunct, with control over what I will and won’t do. It is much easier to jettison empire without the corporation on your back.  In nursing, which is about 95% female in the US, “retention” of nurses in the workplace is largely a function of autonomy and not more common satisfiers such as pay scales (Morgan and Lynn, 2008). Women want control and a say in workplace design, and we’re not getting it, at least in healthcare. In the US, healthcare has adopted the corporate business model, which is the antithesis of care.

The amount of energy available defines how all systems self-organize into designs–that includes family systems. How will gender roles play out in descent? How do men and women respond to transition, and will family roles change (or change back) as well? How do both genders redefine success in a world with a diminishing or absent corporate ladder, and the need to do more manual labor at home?

Gender and the stress response during transition

Gender responses during stressful transitions may lead us to interpret and respond differently based on gender. There is a biological gender difference in how we respond to stress, both hormonally and behaviorally. The classic (Cannon, 1932; Selye, 1926) model of response to stress is fight, flight, (or freeze) involving either aggressive or avoidance behaviors. But early stress researchers used male samples. Taylor et al. (2000) examined women, and proposed that women are perhaps prone to a different model of stress response of tend and befriend, where affiliation behaviors such as maternal tending and contact with peers is predominant in reducing stress of threats. It seems clear that both mechanisms would be adaptive in survival of communities, and the authors suggest that the befriending response could be especially prominent, perhaps for both genders, in situations of resource scarcity. Too much competition in this situation leads to extinction. What this suggests, then, is that we need the women to step up and speak out in the renegotiation of community. Have the male-dominated competitive behaviors become dominant in a century of capitalism, and how do we recollect the cooperative?

As I look out at the blogosphere, the majority of audible voices talking about descent are men. Where are the women? Are they so exhausted and overburdened by multiple roles that they have no time? Did women exchange the values of home and family for corporate values when they left the home for work? Immersion of both parents in increasingly corporate work values probably impacts the values at home. Can women still have it all in a world of descent, where the work at home includes more labor, less hired help and less technology?

In descent, the cultural shift within families will be great, as families and communities reorder themselves. In transition, while we are shuffling infrastructure, roles, and systems of control such as money, how do we straddle the dominant culture and that of descent? Growing your own veggies, keeping animals, and making your own food takes time, yet we still have obligations to the old system–we must have money or savings to pay the utility bills to straddle the dominant system and descent. How much more frugal will we have to become, in both energy efficiency and frugality?

As both men and women return to working at home in sustainable roles, we might revert to functional, specialized roles that were found in pre-industrial societies. Inequities in gender power could re-emerge or expand. Capitalism treats women’s home-based roles almost as poorly as it does Mother Nature by undervaluing or devaluing those contributions. How will that change?

But men aren’t happy either

I watched my husband’s federal career get more and more hectic, as the system compiled more and more bureaucracy and very little was ever subtracted. Computerization added Blackberries. Technology helped to erode boundaries, and the importance of work started to dominate the home life, to the point that workers were expected to be available at home or during other meetings, with instant decisions. Men are just as overwhelmed by the complex bureaucracy that we have woven, where yearly additions pile on, and we subtract very little. After a very long career, he is happily retired, making beer, bread, yogurt, and getting a life. He is much happier being the change he wishes to see in the world, and he looks years younger now.

Trapped elders aren’t happy either

Friends my age who still work full-time seem more and more unhappy, trapped in jobs that they don’t like, with a bewildering amount of responsibility, workload, or lack of control. Wolfers and Stevenson (2009) call it a new gender gap; that women are less happy than women of 40 years ago, and less happy than men in their lives. Secure healthcare insurance or a better retirement income are the carrots that keep some of my friends at their jobs. Some friends’ egos are heavily invested in their work. Many are additionally stuck with mortgages in defunct housing contracts. Our communities will not be free to innovate and redesign until we default these contracts and allow people the mobility and economic freedom to move on with change. We have chained ourselves to old promises of insurance, pensions and loans to the future which are not a sure thing. And are aging workers taking a job in our contracting economy that our unemployed daughters or sons might want to occupy instead? Our failing economy has trapped older workers in jobs, preventing employment for our youth. At the very least, we could job share or work part-time, making everyone happier and freeing up time to allow for creativity in forging new ways of being. The wisdom of our elders could be better employed in helping to create a new culture of relocalization. But that would not maximize profits.

If we’ve got so much surplus energy, how come all of us are working so hard?

What I’d like is to keep the power that we’ve gained as women, and the ability to work as I want. But I don’t think that in descent we can have it all, with many kids, a high voltage career, and be happy too. Our bureaucracy tends to expand over time, as profit-chasing feedback loops accumulate. The amount and technological complexity of work piles up while becoming less meaningful. Having it all requires making a lot of money so that you can live your life without limits. But living without limits means that you cede control to the corporation that controls your life. What a paradox.

As corporate life continues to expand into our personal lives, how much will we endure before both men and women say “Enough?” Women’s voices are especially important, as women seem to be geared physiologically and emotionally towards cooperative behaviors that are critical in relocalization. How much of what you are doing today reflects your values, and how much do we absorb from corporate culture? Do we define success as useful social contribution to the group, or is it making the most money for the company? If you had complete control over your life, what would your own personal values say, and how would you behave? Are you happier living the corporate life or would you be happier walking away from empire? I’m interested in hearing what others think about this?

Adbusters Kickitover.org Are we Happy Yet?

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Our Rube Goldberg Economy

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by Mary Logan

Two prominent energetic systems principles that drive our complex economy are hierarchy and autocatalysis. Earlier posts highlighted the concepts of energy transformity and hierarchy. The concept of autocatalysis can be seen in many circular loops in our current society, such as current proposals for geoengineering technology to fix the problems that industrial and post-industrial technology have wrought. Autocatalysis is also known as the positive feedback loop, and it is the engine for our growth economy.

The energy flywheel

Odum, 2007, p. 47, Fig. 3.6-Autocatalytic growth where available resources are in excess

Production within economic systems consists of the interaction between inputs of energy flowing in one direction from a concentrated condition to dispersed, along with  feedback from a storage of assets interacting to drive cycles of materials through work, round and round. Autocatalysis is the combination of the storage and a feedback loop that uses “the products of growth to accelerate the capture of more energy so that growth goes faster and faster . . . with the products of production (in storage tank symbol) being fed back (to the left) to amplify capture of more energy” producing maximum power production and exponential growth when resources are unlimited.

“Each energy transformation process within the energy hierarchy has an associated storage from which the autocatalytic feedbacks originate. . . . To have a longer period of accumulation for levels with less energy flow requires a larger storage. . . Growth and succession on any scale require and are accompanied by development of the storage necessary to maximize the energy intake with feedback pumping. When resources from transformations are stored, both energy and emergy accumulate” (Odum, 2007, p. 81). [This is how the energy hierarchy concentrates materials through successive concentration into centers of organized complexity.] ”Autocatalytic feedback [and hierarchy] are general design characteristics of self-organization” (Odum, 2007, p. 119). And ”when available energy levels are large enough, the system develops a self-interaction to accelerate even faster, a super acceleration” (Odum, 2007, p. 46).

Systems are ultimately controlled by the amounts and types of energy sources outside of it. The system “gradually fits itself, its storages, its material cycles, its feedbacks, and its design to that pattern which maximizes energy in the combination available to it. . . Surviving systems are those that feed back their stored energy to stimulate the flow of energy” (Odum & Odum, 1976, p. 46). Odum suggests that the US economy was in super acceleration until 1973, when surplus energies became less constantly available. Autocatalysis maximizes power by processing more energy, with less emphasis on efficiency and more on growth. Examples of autocatalytic loops in our economy include control of the media, science, and politics through amplification of information, to promote consumption and to lower restraints of regulation that control growth. The goals of the system shift to wealth acquisition and promotion of consumption.

Ortega, Gusman, Borelli & Salek, from 7th Biennial Emergy Conference Jan. 2012 Autocatalysis and hierarchy at work in successive iterations of expansion of civilization over time

Flywheel from MT Brown 2004 Picture Worth a Thousand Words (from Odum, 1976) Another Rube Goldberg machine?

During the global spread of civilization, growth economies set priorities for development of fuel, transportation, and water resources. Large stocks of different energy sources interacted, creating a flywheel effect or reinforcing feedback loop for economic growth and a chain reaction. Because storages or stocks are not flow limited, the rate of use can increase over time. Production pathways for fossil fuels generated storages, and consumption prevailed by reinforcing production. Environmental resources were coupled to fuel-using economic production.  Negative feedback cues that should have controlled the rate of growth were suppressed, and amplifiers were maximized. But as stocks/storages are drawn down, surplus energy and emergy yield wanes, and growth slows and stops by lack of inputs rather than inhibition through negative feedback. The system becomes flow limited, dependent on renewable resources, as the competing feedback loops develop from flow-limited ways of living. But since feedback loops have delays, the tendency in autocatalysis is to overshoot and collapse.

Energy cannibalism

So what happens when limiting factors slow or stop growth?

“Each time an environmental product is further transformed into a more highly developed product in the economy, additional Emergy is added and the transformity is increased. If the higher transformity is developed by collecting and concentrating dilute energy, using more emergy from the free environment, the emergy yield ratio (EYR) of the product is increased. If, however, the emergy for the transformations is being supplied by the economy, the net emergy yield decreases” (Odum, 1996, p. 146).

As  EYRs approach net, “more and more of the economy and human service becomes involved in getting the fuels, and fewer other activities are possible” (Odum, 1996, p. 140).  

davidprince.org energy cannibalism?

Energy cannibalism (Pearce, 2008) is the circular reasoning that occurs when we trial net negative energy sources, leading to thermodynamic limits. With each step of fuel transformation in borderline energy sources such as biofuels, net emergy decreases. It is like raising yourself by your own bootstraps against gravity, or like the ouroboros eating its own tail. It just won’t work. My brain hurts thinking about these impossible solutions. We can frame some current examples of energy cannibalism using a classic Aldo Leopold quote, “Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to stay warm.” 

  • As Smolker and Peterman illustrate, on the way up sources became sinks as we burned fossil fuels, but on the way down, sinks become sources as we burn biofuels and further degrade the biosphere’s abilities.
  • On the way up, fuels become food as “potatoes are made of oil”, but on the way down, food becomes fuel as biofuels are tried as replacements.
  • On the way up, our interest/debt based money system encourages wealth acquisition and expansion, but on the way down, this growth-based information system promotes dysfunctional behaviors seeking more growth, delaying feedback from the competing feedback loops representing the renewable economy. Because Mother Nature has no cash, she has no voice.
  • On the way up, we add more and more complexity to bureaucratic systems, but on the way down squeezing more growth out of a system with declining resources makes it crash.

Shifting dominance in competing feedback loops eventually allows the secondary renewable based loop to take over (Meadows, 2008). In this case, emergy yield ratios and decreasing benefits of complexity are the driving factors that switches the system to a renewable emphasis and a simpler system. The relocalization movement as pushback to industrial agriculture and consumption is an example of a competing feedback loop that groups are trying in different regions, as negative feedback stabilization is too weak to be effective.

The biosphere as more than the sum of its parts

Because of our reductionist world views, we try to deal with the problems of growth through technology. We use more energy in projects such as geoengineering, creating even more resource cannibalism and environmental degradation, as we slap band aids on

The United States Postal Service’s 1995 commemorative Rube Goldberg stamp

a failing biosphere. We have created a Rube Goldberg economy, where engineers’ technology and a reductionist focus creates unneeded complexity. (Thanks to Albert Bates for his Goldberg cartoons that gave me the idea for the title of this post.)  Instead of removing the trees to make factories to make massive widgets to vacuum carbon from the biosphere, maybe we should just leave the trees and let nature do the work, as Bates said? Instead of creating costly photovoltaic solar panels that cannibalize energy, just plant some veggies, as nature has had more practice and is more efficient at changing sunlight into energy? We are so divorced from nature that we now propose replacing plant leaves with silicone technology artificial leaves (ironically touted in a journal called Nature). Why would we do this? Here are some possible reasons.

  1. Reductionist views–if we think that our system can grow forever through use of technology, we will behave very differently in what we pursue. Thus, we look for high-tech solutions that maximize power for a system that rewards wealth and corporate growth.
  2. We equate technology with energy since technology is typically garnered to produce more energy. In this example of the artificial leaf, nature has had millions of years to perfect the most efficient method to translate sunlight into energy, yet we think we can replace or compete with nature.
  3. Since there are no limits, there is no need to understand or rank the relative embodied emergy of our technologies in terms of which yield the most emergy.  In a contracting economy, we must use the fuels with the highest emergy yield ratio–the ones that work with nature instead of opposing nature.
  4. We have learned that technology grants us more power, so if we can do something, we will (maximum power).
  5. Our systemic goals are wealth and growth; there might be a profit in the investment, with science for sale.
  6. Scientists can garner some journal articles, “bringing money and attention to the field of solar fuel.”
  7. No one asked if this was an important priority for science or why we are doing this–is there a need for priorities in a culture with infinite growth? If we asked why, would there be an answer?

Our autocatalytic loops are firmly in place, and there is no understanding of energy basis or the big picture. Don’t these scientists realize that in a world with fewer resources, we will need to work with nature to become more efficient instead of duplicating nature’s processes at great energetic cost, waste, and pollution? This is what comes of not living within one’s means. Bryan Norton said, “the value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts.” Our reductionist view of both the problems and the ensuing solutions lead us to treat the biosphere as an unlimited toolbox of parts.

Decoupling from reality with circular reasoning

The prime directive of wealth subsumes all else and creates feedback loops–we chase growth to create more wealth in a chain reaction, over and over. Examples are everywhere I look. In my favorite example, healthcare, we medicalize normal conditions of living and then create complex tests, and then we medicate, operate, or otherwise treat. Even dying is now a profit center.

Rube Goldberg healthcare

Medical science first leans towards big pharma solutions, and then it lunges, as “careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is.”  In America, the business of health becomes a paradox, where we “spend more but get less.” Our industries eventually reach the silly endpoint of being a Rube Goldberg machine, where we add more inefficiency, bureaucracy, and features to allow more steps and more players to make more profit from the disease factory, while never removing any steps in the process.

Diminishing returns and competing feedback loops

(source unknown) Transformity of your gym workout

http://maxistentialist. tumblr.com Transformity of plastic spoon?

As energy returns per investment diminish and growth peaks, some of the autocatalytic loops begin to look a little silly. We create uses for fossil fuels such as imported spoons and gym clubs for stationary biking. We attach status to the advertised object or experience, creating want and unhappiness about consumption. We hijack natural systems to create profits for elite capitalists. We have treadmills for dogs, we own massive cars and houses, and we heat sidewalks, while people go hungry. “Emergy is wasted if high transformity energy is used when energy of lower transformity will suffice” (Odum, 1996, p. 163). We cannot keep this up for long, but we will keep it up until people realize that the old growth economy is not coming back.

Welcome to America

http://www.kudelka. com.au Parable of the Broken Window

At some point, the law of diminishing returns on the old system dictates that we switch to the competing feedback loops of a flow-limited renewable energy based system, as the cost of importing spoons or the cost of gym membership overcomes our personal budget and we begin to behave more frugally. Eventually, after some feedback delays, the ridiculous nature of some of the autocatalytic loops in the accelerated economy starts to dawn on people, especially when compared to increasing austerity in personal budgets, and they stop the wasteful behaviors.

Holding back the tide

For those who insist on remaining in the dominant paradigm, the centralized control and manipulation of the system to try to keep and grow what we’ve got in resistance to the thermodynamic certainty of economic contraction eventually fails, as CH Smith points out. When we mask risk, and try to support the current system by holding back the tide, eventually the suppression fails and the system switches more violently than it would have if we had not suppressed it to begin with. For example, if our money managers realized how certain economic contraction is, they might be trying to accommodate it and not paper over economic contraction by printing money. If our economy is contracting, the monetary information system that guides it must contract also. How simple that fact is, yet all of our incentives are skewed towards expanding the money system instead. When the shift or tipping point comes, it will be all the more severe for the suppression and manipulation of our economic system. Time and tides wait for no man – when dams burst, the chaos that ensues is all the more powerful for the pent-up size of the pulse, more likely to cause a big mess.

So what does this mean for us? The higher and faster we grow, the farther and faster we’ll fall, because we lack balancing feedback loops to slow our growth adequately. Our powerful Rube Goldberg economy keeps adding loops to the chain reaction, creating more unnecessary overshoot. The economy is chasing its own tail, like an ouroboros, and it is now starting to catch it and eat it, not sensing the negative feedback which should ensue. We are consuming ourselves. We must restructure our system from the ground up as resources wane, since the feedback loops that drive the current system are too powerful to overcome intentionally. Those reading this post are probably part of the newly developing feedback loops for a relocalized economy. That is why I’m rooting for empire to fail sooner rather than later, before we’ve grown and polluted too much to allow for grass-roots recovery.

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