PeakEngineer's blog

There is a lull in the moving craziness on the Florida end at the moment, so I was able to discipline myself enough to post. We still need to figure out where we're going to live in Ohio, and we'll likely be renting for a year or so up there, which could present some challenges in trying to continue our development of a sustainable homestead. For instance, we need to figure out a way to keep gardening if our landlord doesn't want us to alter the landscaping. We also need to sort out what sustainable solutions we could carry with us to a permanent homestead.

In Florida, we're enjoying the winter gardening season. I pickled 8 jars of hot peppers out of the garden for Christmas presents (and for our own use) and I'm waiting for tomatoes to fruit.

If you have noticed a slowdown in activity in this site recently, it's due to a couple things: our rascally 5-month old and preparing to pack up and move states! I just got the word recently that I was selected for a job with the Air Force in Ohio, and I start in January. So, please bear with me as we uproot and resettle -- hopefully I'll be able to re-energize the blog with projects and pictures from our new farmstead :)

Systems Engineering is a poorly-named field -- it's not so much an engineering discipline as a structured process for producing a design. Just as we can design a homestead , we can apply the Systems Engineering process to develop lasting documents.

The experiment I propose is this: can we apply the elements of the Systems Engineering process to create a constitution that ensures a sustainable and open community?

On a recent trip home to Iowa, a minor basement flood at my parents’ in-town house presented the opportunity to stay at their newly completed off-grid home out in the country. As living on a self-sufficient acreage is of course our dream, we took this as a chance for a taste of sustainable living (well, minus the homesteading aspect).

This picture shows the solar array, wind tower, propane tank, and top of the septic system. If you look in the background you’ll see the line of semis waiting to accept their load of industry-intensive corn being harvested that day. I felt it was a nice contrast between viable sustainable practices…and modern farming techniques.

The horror stories emerging from Zimbabwe following its economic collapse and hyperinflation may provide a glimpse of one possible future for a post-Peak Oil world. An article published today illustrates how desperate the hunger is becoming inside the country. Keep in mind that the government has taken totalitarian control of all the media and there probably many even more terrible happenings going on.

From the article:

Pets are being slaughtered for meat in shortage-stricken Zimbabwe and record numbers of animals have been surrendered to shelters or abandoned by owners no longer able to feed them, animal welfare activists say.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said it could not feed surrendered animals or find them new homes and was being forced to kill them and destroy the corpses.

Animals, like people, are being hard hit by Zimbabwe's economic meltdown, with official inflation of more than 7,600 percent, the highest in the world. Independent estimates put real inflation closer to 25,000 percent and the International Monetary Fund has forecast it will reach 100,000 percent by the end of the year.

Just for your own personal reference, remember that dogs (and other pets) can eat a fairly varied diet (i.e. don't panic if you run out of Purina).

There has been a lot of talk recently -- some unsavory -- regarding the issues of population and sustainability. Many come from the standpoint that in order to have the greatest impact on sustainability, you must personally ensure you contribute zero or negative population growth. Anyone who is serious about sustainability, they claim, is an utter hypocrite if they don’t advocate population control or (gasp!) have more than the 2.1 children per couple necessary for population growth.

Sustainability heroines Miranda Edel and Sharon Astyk have come under ruthless attack from “holier-than-thou environmentalists” claiming that these women have had more than their “fair share” of children. Some commenters at the LATOC Forum advocate authoritarian population measures as extreme as culling our neighbors. Now, assuming we can look past the emotional response to these positions, the argument suffers from a number of logical failures.

Hot peppers are one of the few crops in my garden doing very well against the Florida heat and bugs. I have four hot varieties planted (although I think they might have cross-pollinated to yield some interesting fruits) and also some sweet bell peppers.
The first batch (pictured here) mostly went into our food processor with some cider vinegar to make a hot sauce, with the remainder going into work so my co-workers and could prove our manhood with a pepper eating contest. I plan on sun-drying the next batch and making them into a chili paste or powder (depending on how well I dry them).

In the beginning, it was all so simple. Rub two sticks together, get a fire. Stick a pipe in the ground, get some oil. Trade a cow, get a llama. Simple systems require only straightforward applications of engineering, with little need to examine precisely how individual components might interact. But as our global production system has evolved, so too has the level of complexity amongst the various components. Our society, based on ever-advancing technology of all kinds, has become a seething morass of indecipherable interactions between mind, body, finance, and resources.

What was once a world of isolated simple systems is now what we (so creatively) call a complex system. Complex systems don’t have straightforward relations between cause and effect (input and output) because there are such high numbers of interactions within the system. As such, complex systems fail in complex ways.

The staff at the Energy Bulletin put together a great article today examining the peak production rate of phosphorus. By applying the same methods used by Dr. M. King Hubbert (the man who accurately described Peak Oil in the 1950s) to phosphorus production, the authors discovered that not only had the U.S. reached its peak production in 1988, but the world had peaked in 1989!

Why is phosphorus important, you might wonder? From the Energy Bulletin article:

The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.

and

Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture.

Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

The problem of phosphorus depletion is just one more example of the imminent crunch in resource reserves we face. I wrote about a similar concern in my Peak Salt article nearly a year ago. The difference there is that we don’t actually face a salt shortage until we face an oil shortage -- an example of a subtle but critical interaction between resources. What we in the Peak Oil community are discovering is a complex system of feedbacks and tipping points, just as the world is discovering in the issue of global warming.

Why the similarity? Because the resource extraction/consumption system is of the same type as the global climate system: chaotic. Despite the name, chaotic systems have a certain elegance and structure; however, they present severe problems when we attempt to model them.

In the next post, I will discuss the true nature of the chaotic Global Resource Crunch we’re already experiencing.

I have to apologize for the long absence. Retooling our lives to include a wonderfully distracting little baby has taken some time, but we seem to have things fairly well in hand now. I'm still facing the computer issues, but I'll have a new system in hand by the end of the month. In the meantime, I'll be able to make do. Hopefully not too many people have abandoned the site for dead and we can get back to working on the problems at hand.