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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (3971)	4/20/2006 8:16:10 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24215

A conversation with Wendell Berry (the cheap energy economy) Tom Healey, CounterPunch ...TH: You maintain that the basis of the economy is the land, the air and the water, including the fertility of the land and the ability to make good use of it. Is that an accurate reading? WB: That's right. Try to imagine an economy without fertile land or drinkable water or breathable air. You won't get very far. The people who've carried on this line of baloney about the "information economy" are fantasists. The idea that you can have a sound economy of money or stocks and bonds with a degraded landscape underneath it is preposterous. We're investing in the development of fuel the effort and the economic power that we ought to be investing in taking care of our land and our forests. TH: You mean alternatives to fossil fuels? WB: No. Any fuel that's burnt is a very curious kind of property. When you think of fuel as a property, you're thinking about a property that is valuable only insofar as it can be destroyed, whereas land, as a property and given proper care, has a permanent value. Given the degraded state of a lot of our soils, it's a property that can appreciate as a "good"--on the condition of good treatment. In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste--a burden. TH: Your colleague Wes Jackson talks about "geologic time"--the tens of thousands of years it took to build up fossil fuels--and how we're using them up in "industrial time"--a couple of hundred years. We're spending the capital that has accrued over tens of thousands of years in hundreds of years. WB: That's right. As Wes is pointing out to anybody who will listen, something like 99 percent of all the oil that's been burnt has been burnt in his or my lifetime. It finally comes down to a question of the stewardship of natural gifts. You have to take care of what you've been given. We've arrogated to ourselves the right to destroy what we have judged to be worthless or of inferior worth--which, like the wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi, turn out to have a very significant worth. The forested mountains of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia will eventually turn out to be worth more than the coal. ...TH: What about biofuels? WB: Well, ethanol, from what I've seen in test reports--and I've seen significant ones and several, and from what I get from Wes and his people at the Land Institute--the conversion ratio on ethanol is a laugh. The ratio between the energy you put in and energy you get out is about one to one. A little more or a little less than one to one, even according to the USDA. So ethanol is just a way to get rid of surplus corn. TH: And it's not going to help reduce our dependence on fossil fuel. WB: No. And to start raising a burnable fuel from your cropland at the present cost in erosion and soil degradation and toxicity is a fool's bargain. ...TH: So I'm way off base thinking that the Heartland is going to transform either East Coast or West Coast sensibilities. WB: The Heartland could do it but the Heartland can only do it if it's willing to take national security or regional security as the complex issue it really is. If the powers that be in Louisville and Indianapolis, for instance, were to ask themselves, "Why should we be living like Phoenix, trucking in everything we use, when we're sitting here in the middle of a fertile, well-watered landscape? Why should we be dependent on long-distance transportation for our food?" TH: That's a great question that's not being asked. WB: It's a real question. It's a valuable question. They won't ask it until they ask another question, and that is, "If you take our present life and subtract cheap fossil fuel from it, what would we have left?" That's the first question and it would lead naturally to the second one. That question is an exercise that I learned from Wes. It has certainly been the burden of a lot of conversation between us. Ask it of almost anything you can think of--the school system, for instance. Suppose you subtracted cheap fossil fuel from the public school system. It's a petroleum-based education. And it's a cheap petroleum-based education, moreover. Things will change as we leave this cheap fossil fuel, cheap energy economy. (15-16 April 2006) Recommended by Tom Philpott at Gristmill. energybulletin.net full article.. counterpunch.org