Vert-à-Go

The Saskatchewan Eco-Network will host the 4th Annual Saskatchewan Environmental Film Festival (”See the Change, Be the Change”) this weekend at the University of Saskatchewan.

The Organic Connections conference starts today in Saskatoon. Tomorrow, I’ll be checking out the trade show and taking part in some of the workshops. I’m also looking forward to the talks by farmer and alternative agriculture guru Joel Salatin (”Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal”) and peak oil expert Richard Heinberg (”Now That the Party’s Over”). Xingji Xiao will be speaking to conference delegates about organic agriculture in China (he is the leading expert on the topic and was the first organic inspector in China) on on Tuesday morning.

The three-day conference features an organic tradeshow, workshops and a strong program covering topics of interest to producers, processors, consumers and traders in the areas of marketing, healthy living and production. It is also an opportunity to celebrate good, healthy organic food and recognize the people who contribute to putting it on tables around the world. (Organic Connections web site)

Farmers interested in making the switch to organic growing methods will find the Transition to Organic workshop series invaluable, while experienced organic farmers can learn more at the Advanced Agronomic workshop. The Organic Incubator will also give everyone the chance to meet fellow producers, processors, buyers, marketers, and certifiers, as well as the speakers, in an informal environment. To schedule an impromptu meeting in the space, talk to the organisers at the Organic Connections booth.

See you there!

When: Sunday 16 November to Tuesday 18 November

Where: TCU Place, 35 22nd St E, Saskatoon (Google map)

For more information: Organic Connections web site, info@organicconnections.ca

Public Talk: After Peak Oil

Date: 11 June 2008

Time: 7 PM

Place: J S Wood Library

Join guest speakers Rob Dumont, Ph.D. and Ewen Coxworth, Ph.D., as they discuss the implications of peak oil. Many studies are concluding that sometime in the next 10 to 25 years, world oil production will reach a peak and then decline.

Ewen and Rob will survey the search for alternatives for fuelling the world’s transportation systems. In addition to greatly improved vehicle energy efficiency and increased use of public and active transportation modes, alternative energy sources are needed. These may include biofuels based on urban wastes and forest products, and renewably-generated electricity to power plug-in hybrids. A vision of a possible Canadian energy system in 2058 will be described.

Hosted by the Saskatchewan Environmental Society (SES)

(photo by Travis Gray)

I went to hear Richard Heinberg speak at the Broadway Theatre last night in support of his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines. It was not a talk for the faint-hearted.

Heinberg is one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. I first read about the issue of peak oil about a year ago in James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, and it completely threw me for a loop. Peak oil is part and parcel of the undeniable argument that oil, like every other resource on our finite planet, is someday going to run out. Up until fairly recently, it was assumed that we had many years of oil left, and that in our infinite human ingenuity, we would come up with some kind of alternative energy source long before that distant day would come to pass.

Unfortunately, it looks like all the previous oil reserve estimates were wildly optimistic. And guess what? We haven’t come up with anything else that comes even remotely close to making up the energy shortfall.

So how much have we got left? The main problem with pinpointing the peak of anything is that you can only see it clearly in the rear-view mirror–once you’ve already passed the hump and have started heading down the downward slope. But Heinberg believes there are some fairly obvious hints that we are riding the top of the wave right here, right now:

• global oil production has plateaued in the past three years (the all-time record set in May 2005 has not been bettered since, despite the incentive of very high prices)
• oil companies are now drilling 3-4 times as many wells just to achieve the same level of production
• oil production has already peaked in 33 out of 48 oil-producing countries, including Kuwait, Russia, and Mexico (the US peaked in 1970)
• the number of big oil field discoveries is dropping off
• new fields are depleting more quickly
• prices are spiking to all-time highs (a decade ago, oil was selling for US$12 a barrel. Now it’s at over $100)

Even the CEO of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, has declared that “after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.” It took us 200 years to reach the peak, but skyrocketing demand means that it will run out way sooner than that. Once all the cheap, easy oil is gone, it will take an ever-increasing amount of effort to extract an ever-diminishing amount of oil, until we will eventually reach the point where it will take more energy to get it out of the ground than we can get by burning it. Heinberg thinks that we have already started feeling the oil pinch, and it is only going to get worse from here on out.

The potential implications of mismanaging the forced withdrawal from our oil addiction are pretty obvious, and very grim. Food inflation. Economic collapse. Ever-increasing environmental devastation (deforestation for biofuels, a return to coal, tar sands development). Oil wars. Wait, doesn’t that sounds familiar already? It’s pretty easy to see ahead to the collapse of industrial civilisation as we know it. After all, 26 civilisations have already collapsed. Why should ours be any different? As Heinberg says, the party’s over. Our way of life is going to change forever, and if you’re under 50, it’s definitely going to happen in your lifetime.

But what will we eat when the oil runs out? Unsurprisingly, Heinberg’s answer was ‘local, local, local’. We need to start growing our own food, emulating the famous WWII Victory Gardens, embracing permaculture, establishing more community gardens, and waking up to the fact that farming is going to become much more dependent on manual labour in the decades to come.

If you weren’t able to make it out to Heinberg’s talk, you can watch a very similar version here:

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5     Part 6