[IPSM] Wales, Tarsands, my family and "Beyond Oil".

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Wales, Tarsands, me and "Beyond Oil".
(Guardian article follows)

Life has an interesting way of being very cyclical. You may not know 
that after I had known A-list founder Mark Jones as a great writer and 
thinker, I discovered that my roots in Wales were from the same tiny 
town (Maerdy) in the Rhondda as he. I had only learned of the family's 
political history shortly before-- a 4 foot something great grandmother 
who used to help blockade the scab scum from getting into the mines. We 
were all coal miners, from a land colonized by the English, land 
destroyed for energy needs and poisoned and made, like so many Welsh, 
permanently short (that would be both height and life expectancy).

That kind of life, a life where the land had been parched and the family 
made ill to get a vicious Anglo Empire the energy needed to keep going, 
was why my great grandmother Kate moved away, ironically (with her 
husband but she ran the family-- right up until 1979 when she died at 
97, and I four years old) to have her husband do the same thing to 
nations on the eastern edge of British Columbia in mines. It was, in her 
words, so that "my boys never have to go down into the pits".

Of course, learning this history after I had made my own allegiance to a 
revolutionary life for myself gave me a better sense of pride in my 
family, coal mining radicals, and of course a sense of belonging. My 
mother became good cyber friends with Mark over the course of extolling 
the virtues of the mighty Kate, and hearing what had befallen our long 
ago homeland.

I sadly know nothing of the history of the Welsh save for the little 
I've found in a very few pages and books. I certainly would not expect 
any in our family to know the language; English energy corporations 
destroyed the land a long time ago, and turned the villages into 
despairing Hells.

When I think about the future that is being proposed on a planet that is 
wedded to oil/energy that they are considering going into production of 
coal-into-oil, I am reminded as to how permanent these things are. I 
think a little about my family, what it would be to know the land as 
healthy and be able to visit it, with relatives who proudly speak their 
language and are not impoverished and separated from their own history 
by the needs of the most powerful imperialist power on the face of the 
earth.

That possibility was destroyed by the English long before I was born. 
Conversations with Mark about Maerdy and my mother about my great 
grandmother will have to do. This too, is the legacy of "environmental 
externalities", an industry euphemism for "collateral damage".

But that fate isn't neccessary for the nations, to name a few, such as 
the Lubicon, the Dehcho, the Carrier or any of the others who stand in 
the way of energy being drilled out of the ground for more of the same, 
the same except for the fact that now we know that this is causing 
destruction globally and is finite in any case.

You see, the environment is not just the environment. It's everything. 
Because so are we, we are our history and history is in your 
contemporary reality, Strip mine your reality and that becomes your 
future, and it becomes a part of your family.

Nothing is inevitable. Any fight can be won-- imagine telling people in 
London 1942 that the Nazis would last less than four years. So, as the 
designs of fossil fuels continue to bring about so much death and 
despair, I found the full circle ever so pleasantly closed with this 
story, a story from a village in Wales, the first one, so they say, to 
go "Beyond Oil".

No wonder, they understand what it means to let this be considered an 
"externality". And I, for the first time in awhile, sit quietly proud to 
be Welsh and hate the English ever more. Charles ain't the Prince of me.

Macdonald

PS: that's not a good note. An excerpt from this poem might be a better 
good bye:

(from "A Place Called Rhondda"
by Emlyn Havard)

The twin rivers gleamed
And were so clean
In a place called Rhondda
Many years ago.

But then they darkened
With coal dust,
As rain flowed from the black tips
That looked as if from Hell they were thrust.

full:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rhoddan/rhondda/valleygreen.htm

Pioneering Welsh town begins the transition to a life without oil
As the supply of cheap fuel dwindles, rural Lampeter embarks on 'energy 
descent'

Felicity Lawrence
Saturday April 7, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2051911,00.html

There is, as the ads say, no Plan B. The age of cheap oil is drawing to 
a close, climate change already threatens, and politicians dither. But 
the people of Lampeter, a small community in the middle of rural Wales, 
gathered together earlier this week to mobilise for a new war effort. 
They decided to plan their "energy descent".

It was in fact the biggest public meeting in Lampeter anyone could 
remember. West Wales has a long tradition of alternative living, but the 
scale of this was different. More than 450 people filed into the hall in 
a place where the total population is just 4,000. They had come to turn 
themselves into a Transition Town - one of a rapidly growing network of 
places that have decided not to wait for government action, but to 
prepare for life after oil on their own.

Article continues
First, the coordinator of the Transition Town movement, Rob Hopkins, 
told them how urgent the crisis is. Hopkins, who helped create the 
earliest Transition Towns in Kinsale, Ireland, and Totnes, Cornwall, and 
advises the 20 or so others that have signed up, describes himself as an 
early topper.

He's one of those who think that in the next five years we will have 
reached peak oil - the point at which half the world's oil reserves have 
been used up. After that production goes into irreversible and rapid 
decline and our main source of energy starts running out. Since we have 
not so far identified another viable energy source to replace it, the 
only rational response, he said, is to plan our energy descent. "Life 
after oil will have to look very different."

The world, he explained, divides into early toppers and late toppers. 
The early toppers, made up largely of former industry geological 
experts, calculate that world oil production has already or will very 
soon peak. The end of oil is nigh, in other words.

The late toppers, made up mostly of more optimistic oil companies, 
governments and economists, predict we have longer, with peak oil some 
20 to 30 years away. "I tend to believe the people with no vested 
interest, but either way this is one of the most dramatic shifts 
humanity has had to face," Hopkins warned.

By now the people of Lampeter, from ageing hippies to young activists, 
were shifting in their plastic seats (made with oil) and drawing 
anxiously on their water bottles (made with oil) if not reaching for 
their medicines (made with oil). Hopkins told them they were likely to 
experience a range of common symptoms that accompany initial peak oil 
awareness.

One might be an irrational grasping at infeasible solutions. At 
hydrogen, for example. No good, running the UK's cars on hydrogen would 
need 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations or a wind farm bigger than the 
south-west region of England. Or what about biofuels? No again, it would 
take over 25m hectares of arable land to run the UK's vehicles on 
biodiesel, and the UK only has 5.7m hectares of arable land. We need to 
eat too.

Unfortunately, British farming has evolved "into a system for turning 
oil into food", reliant on the energy-intensive manufacture of synthetic 
fertiliser, heavy use of oil-based plastics, and centralised 
just-in-time distribution systems that also guzzle oil.

After Hopkins, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who lives near 
Lampeter, tried to cheer them up. Unlike Hopkins, he said he had been 
persuaded that the end of oil was not nigh, but only nigh-ish. We may 
have another 10 to 30 years. And there was lots of coal for energy.

The problem was that if we switched back to sin fuels that increase our 
emissions, climate change will undo us even faster than peak oil.

The drive for change in Lampeter has come in part from a group of local 
farmers - both Patrick Holden, the Soil Association's director, and 
Peter Segger, the businessman who was the first to supply the mass 
market with organic foods through the supermarkets, have their land 
nearby. Both have decided that the future lies in selling more of their 
produce locally instead of having it trucked round the country.

Segger and his partner Anne Evans have already switched from supplying 
the major retailers to selling half their vegetables within Wales..

Holden confessed to a touch of both survivalism and optimism. As an 
organic farmer who does not use artificial fertiliser, he said he had 
been feeling smug until he heard Hopkins speak a couple of months ago.

But he realised his produce was also part of the problem once it left 
his farm, feeding into the system of centralised distribution. Now he is 
trying to make his farm self sufficient in energy: he has already 
invested in burying half a mile of pipes under a field to extract heat 
from the soil that keeps his house warm.

Four hours into planning their energy descent and over bowls of local 
cawl broth the crowd in Lampeter were considering what they would like 
to happen - a ban on advertising that encourages consumption; turning 
the local supermarket into a giant allotment - and what they could they 
could actually do - install a community wind turbine; encourage 
low-energy buildings using sheep's wool for insulation; swap skills.

Someone suggested that a local landowner give the town an acre for a 
community vegetable garden. There was an awkward silence until someone 
else remembered a playing field that would serve the purpose, if the 
council agreed.

There was plenty of inspiration from pioneer towns.

Transition Totnes has introduced its own currency with notes that can 
only be spent in local shops. Its businesses are being audited by an 
accountant who provides a wake-up call by identifying parts of their 
operations that become unprofitable as oil prices rise. The town is 
planting nut trees which can provide emergency food and timber for 
construction while also acting as carbon sinks.

Lampeter decided emphatically on a show of 450 hands that it would meet 
again to plan its next stage. And then its people spilled out on a clear 
spring night into the car park and, just this one last time, drove home.

How we use oil

· 130kg packaging made from oil-derived plastics is consumed by British 
households each year. Two-thirds of it is used in food production

· 57miles is the average distance a tonne of freight now travels by 
road. In 1953 it was 21 miles

· 95% of our food products require the use of oil, and the supply of 
food accounts for 21% of Britain's energy use

· 3.5 litres of oil is needed to produce half a kilogram of steak

-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
http://independentmedia.ca/survivingcanada
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
    --Bertholt Brecht.