Great TED talk I thought my readers would like…

We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.

I’ve bought a car…..

No, you’re not reading it wrong, I did really buy a car.  It’s a ute (pickup for all you Yanks…), and the main reason I bought it is that it was a steal.  So cheap, I’m almost embarrassed to report it…

A year or so ago, friends of ours’ neighbour apparently came home from work in the ute and said to his wife “the aircon’s not working’.  So he parked it outside, and bought a new one.  Such is the wasteful state of our modern society it appears.  I became aware of it of course, but he wanted $800 for it, a fair price too, and I didn’t have $800 lying around, so I ignored it.  As did the owner.  It sat there, all forlorn, accumulating grime from stuff falling out of trees above it, looking more and more like no one loved it.  Eventually, I think, the neighbours must’ve complained about the poor old thing bringing property values in the street down, and he told our friends he was going to have it towed away.  Or I could have it for $200.  So of course, said friends called me to let me know.

Armed with jumper leads, we drove the Citroen up to the ute, and it started first kick…..  the aircon fan belt had come off the pulley, and was rubbing on the water pump, causing some alarming smoke (at least to the women present at this event!).  My multi meter told me the battery was totally stuffed, refusing all charge from the obviously operating alternator.  Unfazed, I jumped in and drove it down the road and back, and thought, “definitely worth a couple of hundred bucks”…

The owner arrived home by then, and said it would need new shock absorbers, as it “wallowed” along as one drove it, and the windscreen would need replacing to pass roadworthy certification, and it did look terrible after sitting there for a year or so.  A deal was struck regardless, and I took it home a couple of days later.

I always buy belts for my mowers at the local hardware store.  They have every conceivable size hanging from their ceiling in a most amazingly organised fashion.  Bring your belt, any belt, and they’ll measure it and match it.  Never failed me.  I ended up with THREE new fan belts (they were all stuffed) for nineteen bucks!  When proper automotive ones cost about $25 a pop!  It’s not like there’s anything wrong with mower belts, they are rated heat and oil resistant, and surely, spinning under a mower with wet grass and rocks and sticks and snakes under there can’t do them any good, and they still last……

One of the headlights was also broken and full of water, and the local wreckers supplied a perfectly good one with all bulbs attached for $55.  A quick oil change and some new wiper blades, and really, anything else was just cosmetic……  everywhere I delved, the car was very serviceable indeed, with brake pads only 25% worn, a brand new air cleaner element in place, and seemingly good enough shock absorbers too.  I spoke to the mechanic who was going to do the roadworthy, and he said he wouldn’t be concerned about the windscreen so long as there weren’t any big stars inside my field of vision.  So it stayed.  All I had left to do was replace the battery, and I got a budget one from Supercheap Autos for $58.  It’s only got 6 months warranty, but it’ll do until I recover from what is a large purchase for us….

The tray looked seriously rusted out, but as I started peeling back the layers, I found far more red oxide paint than rust.  Another mate of mine who also owns a ute happened to visit at this stage, and told me how he restored his rusty tray with Penetrol and then painted it with Hammercoat paint…. neither of which I had ever heard of before.  A hundred bucks later, and admittedly many hours of work as well, it looks a million bucks.  I’m really kicking myself now for not taking “before” photos just so I could show you all the difference.

It sailed through the roadworthy, and the “wallowing” all but disappeared when I inflated the tyres properly.  It’s now road registered, the entire project cost me $800……. and I’ve been told I could easily get $3500 for it!  I’m still pinching myself…..

No more carrying hay bales in the boot of the Citroen, or carrying long lengths of timber and step ladders through its cabin.  It won’t be driven that much I expect, I have no idea what fuel consumption I can manage to squeeze out of it either at this stage, won’t know until I fill it up and do a proper mileage run…  In the long run though, I have serious plans for this vehicle; I want to one day convert it to electric, just like this Ford Courier (same car, different badge)…. then I can use all that excess solar power for battery charging!

One Tonner EV Ute Conversion

Electric Motor in Engine Bay

Under Tray Battery Storage

Zaytuna the Permaculture oasis in Northern NSW

In 2001, as a Greens candidate for the seat of Ryan, I campaigned on the issue of Peak Oil as a real threat to our lifestyles.  A few people listened, some even voted for me, but to this day, Glenda believes my biggest convert was Geoff Lawton.  At the time Geoff was only starting out as a Permaculture Guru, but he and I were nonetheless invited to share the stage at Northey Street City Farm.  I would do a gig on Peak Oil, followed by Geoff’s now famous Greening the Desert project demonstrating how the future could be survived.  From a few things Geoff said to me at the time, it appeared he was not aware of Peak Oil……

Geoff doesn’t remember me.  Can’t blame him, he must meet hundreds or even thousands of times more people than I ever do.  The point of this is that last weekend, Permaculture Noosa organised a bust trip to Geoff’s place, Zaytuna Farm at The Channon in Northern NSW.  He, and his merry band of volunteers, run the Permaculture Research Institute.  And what a hive of activity it is…….  Geoff calls it a “people farm”, where instead of producing total self sufficiency, he produces new blood, inspired and ready to spread the word on surviving the looming collapse.

Zaytuna Farm is a demonstration site and education centre.  You’ll find it in the village of The Channon in NSW. The farm is 27 hectares of ex beef cattle/dairy farm land with an 800 metre boundary on Terania Creek.   Geoff purchased it in 2001, and Zaytuna has since been constantly developed as a showcase of Permaculture design and land use.

Zaytuna is some 45 km from Byron Bay, with an altitude ranging from 83 metres to 30 metres. Its aspect is towards the east to north east with some steeper southern slopes, and gentle northern ones too.  An extensive series of 15 dams (valley dams, ridge point dams, contour dams) and over 2 km of water harvesting swales have been excavated to drought proof the farm during the dry winters.  Food forests have been established and are constantly being extended as more teaching facilities are about to be built.  An amazing variety of bamboo has been established (at least 30 species) for various uses including fresh shoots for food, timber for building, weaving, fishing rods and living hedges.  Bamboo also makes excellent windbreaks. 

Kitchen gardens for growing a huge variety of vegetables and herbs have been planted around the house and commercial kitchen, with species varying from Mediterranean to subtropical.   There is a one acre staple crop garden in the central valley for amaranth, corn, potatoes, broad beans, peas, kale, pumpkins, melons, sweet potato, and cassava. Dairy cows and goats are milked every day. A 2.2 km electric fenced laneway, 6 m wide, has been established around the grazing areas of the farm with several access gates creating a self grazing system to increase the fertility of  the grazing landscape.

Saanan-Nubian cross goats bred for both meat and milk and a flock of ducks and chickens for meat and eggs are free ranged throughout the food forest systems for both weed control and fertility.  Rabbits have been added to the equation of small animal productions, and Geoff told us that over the past eight months, they have produced 75 offsprings for consumption….!  A small Fox Terrier catches mice and rats, while a Cattle dog keeps the foxes at bay…..  Maybe I should invest in such a fox deterrent too…

An impressive yet simple aquaponics system was demonstrated by Geoff… it’s fired me up to possibly even have a go at making one for Mon Abri, if I can find all the bathtubs to recycle needed to make it all work.

The nursery shade house and poly tunnel system fully run on solar-powered drip and mist irrigation where seedling vegetables, fruit trees, legume trees, forest trees and bamboo, are all propagated on site.

Compost, natural anaerobic pro-biotic ferments and worm farms are the main sources of fertiliser for the farm.

The main buildings at Zaytuna are made from straw bale and natural lime plaster.  All drinking water on the site is harvested from roof water rainwater catchment.  All toilets are composting, and all the grey water produced on site is filtered through reed beds.  The electricity needs for the entire farm are met by solar, the energy consumption for this many people being a paltry 13kWh/day according to Geoff.   Most households are not able to run on such low energy demand!

All in all, the visit was awe inspiring, and proof positive that we can survive all the crises we now face, we only have to face them head on and change the way we do everything.

It’s official…..

Australia WILL be out of oil by 2020

Without oil, modern civilisation doesn’t work

by Mark O’Connor

Treasury’s last Inter-generational Report contains, hidden away on page 91, a simple stunning statement: Australia’s oil will be gone by 2020. The timing could not be worse. By 2020 Peak Oil is likely to have rendered oil imports precarious and costly. And without oil, modern civilisation doesn’t work.

The media ignored this part of the Report, so the ministers of our two major parties and the bureaucrats who advise them, have rarely been required to explain why they let this happen. On those rare occasions the question has been brushed aside with assurances that either market forces will always supply oil (or a substitute) at reasonable prices or Australia has vast reserves of natural gas.

Both these arguments are shaky. Firstly, for many uses, such as aviation, mining, and most road transport, there simply is no good substitute for oil. No one has yet built a gas-powered plane.

It may seem impressive to find an urban taxi scooting around powered by a large tank of compressed gas that has taken over the boot, but the energy required to find and transport that gas, and to compress it to an amazing 2500 psi, and safely seal it in a robust tank, did not come from gas. We are a long way from knowing how to run our civilisation on gas.

And without cheap oil, most business plans might crash. BHP for instance is threatening to pull out of the Olympic Dam expansion unless diesel prices are kept low but the Pentagon’s projection is that oil prices will in time double.

It is also far from clear that market forces will provide oil cheaply, or spread it evenly. The International Energy Agency has provisions to compel equitable sharing of traded petroleum. Yet once Peak Oil bites, energy-producing countries may hoard the increasingly precious stuff, like Russia did with its grain harvest recently, or sell it selectively to their friends. Or to those who bully them.

Energy shortage will affect each country differently, and often via its effects on fertiliser and food production. Australia’s generally thin soils are particularly dependent on fertilisers made from or transported by fossil fuels. As the Immigration Department’s recent Sobels report (p. 89) showed Australia’s future food supplies are not guaranteed.

As well, higher prices may create a rush to “cut green tape”, which is code for going after dirtier and more environmentally destructive forms of energy. Examples include BP’s deep-sea drilling, or the U.S. “fracking” craze with its now well-known health and environmental risks. Optimists argue that the U.S. is now looking to export Liquid Natural Gas, and hence world gas prices are actually falling. Yet some experts believe the shale gas industry drilled the best sites first, hyping prospects to attract investment and that politicians, and the media, desperate to identify a new energy source to support future economic growth, accepted the hype uncritically.

Turning to the government’s second excuse, Australia does not have vast reserves of gas put aside. We have, or have had, very large gas fields, but almost none of this is kept for Australian use, because we don’t reserve gas: we sell the stuff off soon after we find it. Or we all but give it away, in return for ephemeral jobs and often inappropriate or damaging “development”.

The last government to make a creditable attempt to retain Australia’s energy reserves was the Whitlam government – which got into trouble for trying to borrow huge sums to buy back energy reserves that had been sold off while still in the ground. Oddly enough, the lesson most politicians seem to have learnt from this, under the tutelage of the Murdoch Press, is not that further energy discoveries should be retained, but that they should be sold off as fast as “market forces” would like.

Democratic leaders are often so focussed on getting re-elected in one, two or three years, that they make utterly short-sighted decisions to get a temporary upswing in GDP, so they can boast of being “good economic managers”.

On a slightly kinder view, they may be blinded by economic growthism – the belief that if you just keep “the economy”, meaning GDP, growing today, your successors are bound to find some other expedient to keep it growing in the future.

The media often imposes such views. In 2011 when the federal government approved the Wheatstone gas project in W.A. TheAustralian burbled that thanks to this sell-off “Australia is poised to become a global energy superpower”, and implied that Chevron had done us a favour by accepting the deal.

In Pantera Press’s forthcoming debate book Big Australia Yes/No? (of which I did the No case) I wrote: My opponents claimWe will have enough food and water. They do not consider energy, without which neither food nor water can be supplied to large cities in a semi-desert continent. Yet Australia has recklessly sold off its energy resources…True, the 2010 Intergenerational Report Australia to 2050: future challenges, says on page 91 that our known reserves of natural gas would last about 70 years if we continue to use it at 2008 rates. But this is unlikely. After Peak Oil, gas may be used at far higher rates, and hence be gone in a fraction of the time.

We can’t assume that Australia will keep a strategic reserve of its own gas to protect us from the world peak in gas. Some experts predict global gas supplies will peak as early as 2020, though others predict no decline before 2030. Studies of how civilisations fall, such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse, show a common cause is that populations outgrow their resources.

Sure there are plenty of politicians and advisers who think there is no problem. Maybe by the time our gas runs out, we’ll have invented something else. Or we’ll have discovered another major field that some enlightened future government won’t sell off.

Yet we have a history of grossly over-estimating energy resources. The desire of exploration companies to boost their share-price by overstating a find combines with the tendency of journalists, once they have taken on a story about a find, to exaggerate its implications. We have often been assured we have centuries’ worth of a resource when in fact we have only decades.

The U.S. Professor of Statistics Albert Bartlett gives a withering account of this pattern in his article Arithmetic, Population and Energy. He points out that despite claims that the U.S. had “more than 500 years” of coal, and more recently that globally “coal will last us for at least 119 years,” it seems coal may in fact be peaking now. Similar points are cogently made in Richard Heinberg’s Forward to the recent report Will Natural Gas Fuel America in the 21st Century?

And now even industry is getting worried, and claiming that our sell-off of gas may leave us short of energy as early as 2015. According to Andrew Liveris, the Australian CEO of Dow: “Most obviously, Australia has no evident energy strategy…You tend to get what you plan for. And if you don’t plan…

About the Author

Mark O’Connor is the author of This Tired Brown Land, and co-author of Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, by Mark O’Connor and William Lines. He blogs at He blogs at http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/.

Garlic’s in…….

Garlic is something I use every day.  Any time I start cooking anything (unless it’s a chocolate cake!) I reach for the garlic and onions.  I love the stuff, and its medicinal properties are well understood.  These days though, you have to be careful when buying garlic, most of what you see on supermarket shelves is total crap that comes from China.  The bulk of the world’s garlic is produced in China where the cost of labour significantly reduces the cost of manual processing that garlic requires. For this reason, in those countries that accept imported garlic like Australia but, interestingly, not Europe, buying imported garlic is cheaper.  A lot cheaper, as much as 75% in fact!

Despite this, Chinese garlic does not meet with food safety protocols (at least those in Australia). According to Henry Bell of the Australian Garlic Industry Association, “garlic from China is doused in chemicals to stop sprouting, to whiten garlic, and to kill insects and plant matter. He also reports that garlic is grown in untreated sewage” (http://www.theage.com.au/news/epicure/fresher-and-smellier/2005/07/18…) .

Garlic is whitened by using chlorine or with a mixture of sulphur and wood ash. Whitening garlic supposedly helps to “make it look healthier and more attractive to consumers”. This is plain crazy……  what on Earth is wrong with purple?

What's wrong with purple garlic?

In fact this obsession with white foods has led to the bleaching of lots of food products (flour, salt, sugar) using chlorine dioxide or benzoyl peroxide.  It gets worse…..

Growth inhibitors are used to stop garlic from sprouting and can be made from hormones or chemicals. When garlic begins to sprout, the garlic clove loses much of its potency. Growth inhibitors together with gamma irradiation is supposed to extend the shelf life of garlic.  It doesn’t work in any case, when I have bought this crap, it’s gone off before I got to the end of the bag……

Gamma radiation is also used to sterilise many products, and in Australia, this treatment is not accepted for foodstuffs. This does not prevent food treated by gamma radiation to enter the country.  And if you try to plant it……  it doesn’t grow!  You are in fact eating dead food.

Australia also requires that all garlic regardless of origin is fumigated with methyl bromide at entry to Australia. Methyl bromide is a colourless gas and a potent chemical used as an insecticide, fungicide and herbicide.

So now you know why I really need to grow my own.  But it’s not easy in this sub tropical climate, garlic likes a Mediterranean climate (like Tassie!) where the summers are dry, and winters cool and wet….  the total opposite of Cooran.  I’ve tried and tried, and while I know people around here who’ve succeeded, I have mostly met failure.  But I’m having one last crack.  At thirty bucks a kilo, it’s also getting expensive when you use it like I do.

Garlic needs a good six months in the ground to grow properly.  My French mate Serge, who has more green thumbs than fingers and toes combined, has successfully grown his garlic near Gympie.  He tells me in Normandy they plant it on the shortest day of the year, and harvest on the longest.  You can’t do that here, Christmas is way way too hot for garlic, and Permies in my area recommend planting on the Autumn equinox, and harvesting on the Spring equinox.  Except March has been way too wet of recent years (garlic just hates wet feet..) and I think it’s still a bit warm.

This year’s Easter weather finally seems to have brought an end to La Nina and the accompanying flooding rain.  So over the past week or so, I have been enjoying the milder weather and doing lots of “chop and drop”, building mounds of arrowroot greens and weeds and comfrey, to which I must get around to adding the goats’ bedding to finish off another couple of cubic metres of compost.  Over the past couple of years I’ve built up a raised bed of such compost, just to grow root vegetables….  and it’s ready for action.  So last weekend, I bought a whole kilo of organic garlic a farmer grew just 30km away in the Mary Valley.  Surely if he can manage it, so should I?  I forked over my deep bed (which was full of worms), added some blood and bone and composted chook poo, and mulched the freshly made bed.  From the kilo of garlic, I got about 200 cloves, and I planted the lot in one hit.

Wish me luck.  It should have sprouted within a week, especially as we are again victimised by some rogue heavy showers…..  hopefully it’s not going to be too wet again!

So much for debunking the Club of Rome….

On March 2, 1972, just five days off my 20th birthday, a team of experts from MIT presented a ground breaking report called The Limits to Growth to the world.  I didn’t get to read it for another twenty years, but it made a huge impression on me, it was the beginning of my discovery of the Matrix, and more to the point, my abandonment of it, bit by bit.  Most people who “remember” it as the book that predicted the end of the world by (insert date here – usually 1 January 2000) have never read it…….

What the report did do was predict that within a period of 100 years from when it was published, civilisation would collapse from resource depletion, pollution, over population, and lack of food.  It caused quite a stir at the time….  but soon enough, those who must have growth, the usual suspects like bankers, went out of their way to “debunk” the whole thing using misinformation…..  and sure enough, everyone forgot about it and went on their merry way to over exploit the planet, and populate it to death.

Just so we all understand what we are discussing here, this chart expresses best what the Club of Rome’s most likely scenario looked like.  You’ll notice that apart from the timeline at the bottom, there are no numbers on this chart, it is merely a general idea of what the crude computing power of the time was able to spit out.

Notice the total lack of collapse around the year 2000…?!  But guess what, recent research supports the conclusions of the controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: the world is indeed on track for disaster. At least so says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited the report.  Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the current business-as-usual scenario. What he found was that the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”

And this is what his findings look like:

That shaded area is the thirty year period since the report’s release (it unfortunately doesn’t cover the period to this day), and it clearly shows that we are right on track for population to start dropping within eighteen years, and major problems by 2050.  In fact, Turner seems to think population will start collapsing 20 years before the Club of Rome thought it would……

And I still have people writing to me saying it’s all a load of rubbish, we have a Premier who thinks we can run our transport system on old tyres and carpets, and economists are still talking up a “recovery”….  Don’t know about you, but I feel like screaming.

UPDATE.

Out of the blue, I found this great presentation given at the 2009 Commemorative Lecture by Dr. Dennis L. Meadows, one of the authors of The Limits to Growth Report.  It’s long at 48 minutes, but do yourself a favour, make yourself a cup of your favourite poison, and watch it to the fascinating end……..

Tassie beckons……

I’ve mentioned my desire on this blog to move to Tasmania, and also been asked why I would want to make such a dramatic move.  So tonight I will attempt to explain what brought me to this conclusion.

I first visited Tasmania at the age of twenty, a whole lifetime away it now seems.  It was love at first sight.  A rock climbing friend and I trained it to Melbourne, flying to Devonport, and we travelled all over the island, the highlight being the Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair overland walk, some 80km….  As I said on the night of my 60th birthday, the one thing I can clearly remember is being young once!

I’ve since returned five more times.  In 1985, Glenda and I took a two week holiday, even investigating the possibility of buying a photographic studio in Wynyard.  So the idea of living in Tassie is not new.  We didn’t make the move then, only because Glenda didn’t want to live that far away from her aging parents, whom we actually brought with us for another visit two years later…  I also went back on my own once to attend an Australian Institute of Professional Photography National Conference in Hobart, when I was the Qld President of said AIPP, and a judge at the National Print Awards….  I had a glorious opportunity to share some lens space with Doug and Ruby Spowart, both Master Photographers, as we travelled around the place doing nothing better than to create mind blowing photography.  Tassie’s like that, an opportunity around every bend it seems.

We went together again just twelve months ago…… and our daughter Claire came along too.  Glenda attended a wood firing ceramics convention in Deloraine while I showed Claire the sights….  I never tire of Tassie, I just feel like I belong there.  And Claire loved it as well.

I don’t know if it’s me getting older, or climate change starting to get under my skin, but over the past few years I have become really intolerant of the Queensland heat and humidity.  It doesn’t allow me to work as much as I need to in the yard, just when everything goes ballistic there and more work is what’s actually required!  Now Easter is in sight, the weather is becoming far more to my liking, and I’ve started again to spend more time there cutting back all the summer growth.  I thrive in the cold…….

So last year, Glenda and I decided it was time to plan the big move, before it’s all too late, and TSHTF not allowing us to do it.  At least I’m philosophical enough to realise that in the event we can’t sell, or it all gets too hard because of Peak Oil, we are well prepared no matter what here in Sunny Qld.  I do worry we are fast running out of time…..

There are other incentives too.  Real Estate in Tassie is half the price, acre for acre, of what it is here.  I also know several people who have made such a move, and none have ever regretted it.  In fact most agree it’s the best thing they ever did, they tell me the sense of community in Tasmania is far more present than almost anywhere on the mainland.

The Huon Valley

Huon Valley Reflections

Having done a lot of research, we have settled on the Huon Valley.  The Secretary of Permaculture Tasmania has told me she moved from northern Tassie to the Huon because the climate’s better…!  And perhaps we were lucky, but last time we were in the Apple Isle, we got most of the inclement weather around Deloraine and Launceston, while the weather in the Huon was just picture perfect… just like in the photo!  Twice.  No I’m not being a romantic fool, I’m sure the Huon gets foul weather just like anywhere else…

I also like the feel of the place, the way one is never ever very far from anywhere, the way the countryside is still not overpopulated, the lush green hills, and the apple trees on the side of the road…. not to mention the wineries.  And Cygnet has an established Transition Initiative I don’t have to start myself, there are Permies everywhere to make friends with….. and I already communicate with quite a few.

It’s as far away from the madding crowd as one can get without going to New Zealand.  And now we have a total dickhead for a Premier, leaving Queensland becomes ever more appealing.

And you can grow garlic there, piece of cake…!

I’ve been daydreaming on the internet seeking suitable land, and there is no shortage of it.  Were we ready to move now, I have a short list of three pretty well ideal sites picked out, and a house plan already mapped out on a sheet of graph paper!  EVERYTHING I have learned here will go towards the new plan, and this time there will be no compromises.  I actually believe we can do a whole lot better in Tassie, on the right block.  I know how to design a cold climate house that needs no heating, and in any case, so successful is our AGA that I would get another, a refurbished one from the Midlands Cookers people who sold me the parts I needed to fix the current one…  I’ve already sourced manufacturers of stainless steel water tanks, and concrete blocks that look just like the ones we used here!  All I need to do is sell Mon Abri, not something I would have thought I would ever say even five years ago, but such is life…….

How can you resist…….