Placement exercise - minimising work at the farm
| Building Sustainable Communities | Week 9 |
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From a permaculture perspective, money is a "designed" system. However it is also a very fragile system.
For example, a stock market disaster in a foreign land 3000 miles away (the Wall Street crash), or the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, sent huge shock waves throughout the world's economies. Clearly the conventional international monetary system isn't resilient, for it does little to prevent:
Following every crisis a wave of new regulations are launched to prevent them from re-occurring. However, such measures are more like elastoplast stickers, since they don't address one of the underlying causes - that for most companies, shareholder value is paramount and must be maximised at all costs.
By contrast, permaculture is about diversity, resilience, and multiple ways of meeting our needs. We need to buffer ourselves against the global money-mono-culture. People want long term economic stability over their lifetimes, something conventional economics doesn't really provide.
Another big difference between a sustainable design system, such as permaculture, and global economics is found in planning timescales. Economics works in 3 to 5 year cycles; permaculture works with natural resources which can have planning cycles of up to 200 years.
We need to redesign our economy. A LETS scheme is one attempt, which is partly successful; however at present its really a supplement to the need to work in the conventional economy. Much thinking has gone into the possibility of an alternative economy. I'm sure that a monetary system derived from permaculture principles would be very successful!
Supermarkets suck money out of the local economy. For every £1 spent in a supermarket, probably only 20p goes back into the local economy through the pitifully small number of jobs a supermarket offers (despite causing the loss of many more jobs in local greengrocers and shops when it comes to town).
They also externalise their costs well - through lobbying of government to grant planning permission, and by developing out of town with big car parks. Few people factor in the cost of running a car in order to drive to the supermarket to buy their food.
Reflection: it sounds obvious, but it costs money to shift money. The fewer people getting their hands on your cash, the further it goes. A supermarket represents a long chain of paws-on-your-cash, from the hapless farmer, through the fat middleman, to the even fatter CEO at the top. Local food, by contrast, has passed through few hands, contributes more to the local economy, tastes better and helps you live longer.
We tried a placement exercise in the afternoon. Using string and masking tape on a plan of a farm yard, we traced the movement patterns of a farmyard worker's daily tasks collecting eggs, carrying sacks, transferring food and so on. Having observed the enormous wasted effort through various oft-visited elements being placed at opposite ends of the farm yard, we then proposed a re-arrangement of the yard. The reduction in distance travelled was impressive: a few simple changes reduced the journey distance by over 5 times.
This process illustrates one of the permaculture principles - that of minimum work for maximum gain.
Cars are the real monster energy junkies that no one seems able to do away with. A modern motor car offers, typically, 80 brake horsepower. That's around 60kW. An electric kettle consumes 2kW, so driving your car fast on the motorway is like boiling 30 electric kettles simultaneously, hour in, hour out!
Even cruising around at moderate speeds, a car engine is working hard overcoming rolling resistance and air resistance. As a piece of efficient technology, a car rates pretty poorly. Only around 5 to 10% of the engine output power actually makes it to the wheels; the rest is lost as heat and noise.
By contrast, a bike is extremely energy efficient. Furthermore, cycling keeps your body working optimally, helping to guard against illnesses and ageing.
Perhaps the worst aspect of conventional cars, as well as facilitating the death of 10 people daily on the UK's roads, is the huge quantity of carbon dioxide they produce, helping accelerate the unwanted process of climate change.
As we all know, carbon dioxide acts as a massive insulating blanket on the earth; without it, the earth would be a frozen planet. However, since the industrial revolution, levels of carbon dioxide have been rising steadily. What's worse though is that this rate is accelerating. And cars, as personal and business transport, are playing a large part in this process.
Reflection: I actually felt uneasy at the fact that our whole permaculture course (bar one person) drove to Cobnor Activity Centre. Fi and I thought about catching the train, but a shared lift was on offer, so we took it. Still we felt uneasy! The five cars we travelled in covered, between them, a total of around 400km to Cobnor and back. See the calculations ahead for how I work this out, but that's around 80kg of carbon dioxide, about the same as a 25 year old oak tree. And that's for just one weekend journey by a small group!
A typical car produces around 150 to 200 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilometre it travels. The average car travels 10,000 miles a year, or about 16,000 km/year. If we assume a C02 output of 175g/km, that's 2.8 tonnes of C02 a year per car.
I estimate that there are around 10 million cars in the UK in daily use. Between them, they pump out about 28 million tonnnes of C02 every year.
Trees absorb C02 as they grow - a square kilometer of newly replanted forest will absorb between 200 and 500 tonnes of C02 a year until it reaches maturity in around 100 years.
If we were to absorb all the C02 that UK cars produce every year, how much forest would we need? The answer, assuming that the forest can absorb an average of 350 tonnes of C02 for every square kilometer (km2) of land, is:
forest area (km2) = 28 million tonnes C02/year * 1km2/350 tonnes
= 80,000
If this forest were planted in a square, its sides would be 283 km long (about 175 miles)!
Conclusion: cars, in their current form burning fossil fuels, are completely unsustainable. Alternative technologies, such as electric cars running on renewable energy, would be much more sustainable. The best solution however would be to restructure our societies so that we have less need to travel enormous distances for little purpose. Give up your car!
| End of Week 9 |