Interesting essay about the petro-nutritional complex or how much oil goes into feeding us, from the obvious — fueling the tractors and delivery trucks — to the less obvious — the fertilizers and the ores and raw materials to make the trucks, tractors, etc. Once again, George Kennan — the author of the successful containment strategy, saw where we were headed.
Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.””The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”
Reading this as I finish up Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel [hereafter GGS] is pretty disturbing. Diamond explains how civilizations and nations were born as a result of agriculture and the ability to store food (ie, energy) surpluses and move beyond the hunter/gatherer subsistence lifestyle.
Manning’s book claims that we’ve lost our way, that agriculture — or more correctly agribusiness — is undermining what we call civilization. I have to agree with that argument, to some degree: what do we know about what we eat? And how does the increasingly vertical nature of corporate farming affect our health, both individually and collectively? Is obesity an accident? Manning thinks not:
About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.
I was buying some fruit juices yesterday and everything my son wanted was actually a “fruit juice cocktail” meaning its first or second ingredient was likely to be corn syrup, sometimes even before water. Look at the labels of the stuff you eat and drink and see how often corn sweeteners show up, especially where more impulsive choices are made.
All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap.
10:1 investment to return? That can’t continue, obviously, so what’s next? How do we get back to our roots as farmers who saved grains and used them to smooth out the cycle of feast and famine? Having not read his book, I can’t say Manning is wrong on anything, but I do wonder if he has actually missed the larger issue. I think it might make more sense to call the corporate farming he describes — and obviously loathes — agribusiness and re-assess it as part of a hunter/gather strategy. Consider that it’s all based on oil: you can’t grow oil. You can’t make more of it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And we keep looking for more of it, just as our hunting and gathering ancestors did.
According to GGS, our rapacious ways are nothing new. At various times in history, man conducted a slash-and-burn hunting strategy against various other creatures — large mammals, of which we know very little in the Americas, as our forebears crossed the Bering land bridge, various other mammals and birds as recently as last century — without realizing what he was doing. Natural History magazine[1] (my regular read at my son’s piano lessons) had a good article on the demise of the passenger pigeon that may have thrived in flocks as large as 25 billion and in fact may have required large densities to perpetuate itself. Once the well-known indiscriminate slaughter reached a tipping point, nothing short of a captive breeding program would have saved them. How little we understand about the world but how much power we have over it.
We are as gods and might as well get good at it, as the preface to the original Whole Earth Catalog had it in 1968: hard to tell if we’re getting better or not.
fn1. No link since they don’t make archives available and I don’t feel like digging them out of Google’s cache.