[Open Manufacturing] Mantoast
Bryan Bishop
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/02/-thomas-thwaites-the-toaster.php
"""
Under its rather unassuming name, The Toaster Project is probably the
most ambitious project of the show. It is also a clever and humorous
reflection on today's most burning issues such as sustainability,
industrialization, mass consumption, child labour, DIY culture, etc.
Its author, Thomas Thwaites is trying to make an electric toaster,
from scratch. Beginning with mining the raw materials. And yes, that
means extracting oil to make plastic and even processing his own
copper (to make the pins of the electric plug, the cord, and internal
wires), iron (for the steel grilling apparatus, and the spring to pop
up the toast), mica (around which the heating element is wound) and
nickel (for the heating elements! The end result (which will hopefully
see the light of the day for the RCA Summer show in June) will be a
fully functioning toaster.
The extraction and processing of these materials happens on a scale
irreconcilable with that of a mass product that Argos sells for a few
pounds throughout the UK and that performs the very mundane task of
toasting your bread every morning. The result of Thwaites's endeavour
might not be as neat and clean as the Argos model. But maybe i'm being
unnecessarily bitchy here. See for yourself what the designer is
exhibiting now:
The installation re-creates the first attempt by the designer to melt
mineral and turn it into iron using hair dryers. He later tried with a
leaf blower and then used his mother's microwave and china to finally
obtain iron. And here is the original toaster model:
In the designer's own words which i pasted below:
The point at which it stopped being possible for us to make the things
that surround us is long past. To redress the balance I'm making a
mass produced object by hand - creating a domestic product on a
domestic scale.
(...)
This faintly ridiculous quest to make a toaster from the 'ground up'
serves as a vehicle through which questions about economics,
helplessness and life as a consumer can be investigated. The outcome
will be a toaster that I imagine will bear a very imperfect likeness
to the ones that we buy - a kind of half-baked, hand made pastiche of
a consumer appliance.
Bringing back raw material from the mine
Commercial extraction and processing of the necessary materials
happens on a scale that is difficult to resolve into the humble
toaster. This contrast in scale is a bit absurd - massive industrial
activity devoted to making objects which enable us, the consumer, to
toast bread more efficiently. However, this ridiculousness dissipates
somewhat when you consider that life pre-toasters required stoking the
fire when a piece of toast was desired.
Trying to melt iron using a leaf blower
Part of the project consists of going to the places where it's
possible to dig up these raw materials. Mining no longer happens in
the UK, but the country is dotted with abandoned mines, some having
been worked since before the 'UK' existed, but all currently
uneconomical. We shot some footage at Clearwell Iron mine in South
Wales before Christmas. It had an output of thousands of tonnes a week
up until the end of World War 2 when it was closed. It is now run as a
visitor attraction by Ray and Jonathan, a father and son team. Ray
(who originally worked as a miner at Clearwell) was of the view that
mining on the huge scales seen today (for instance in Australia)
reduces humans to ants, with no understanding of what they're doing.
His son Jonathan is more pragmatic, pointing out that it is the scale
of modern industry that gives more of us access to toasters. Their
points of view are not incompatible; the question becomes 'Are
toasters worth the inhuman scale on which they're produced?'
The only known deposit of Nickel in the UK has long since been
exhausted. In Finland however exploitation of a huge deposit has
begun. I'd very much like to go and bring back a lump of nickel ore
from this remote industrial area, and make it in to an element for my
toaster. I'm also trying to negotiate a helicopter ride to an oil rig
in the North Sea to collect some oil from which I would try (and
certainly fail) to make plastic.
The point at which it stopped being possible for us to make the things
that surround us is long past. For example, my first attempt to
extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hairdryers, a leaf blower,
and a methodology from the 15th century - this is about the level of
technology we can manage when we're acting alone. I failed to get pure
enough iron in this way, though if I'd tried a few more times and
refined my technique and knowledge of the process I probably would've
managed in the end. Instead I found a 2001 patent about industrial
smelting of Iron ores using microwave energy. Microwaves are so much
more convenient and so I tried to replicate the process using a
domestic microwave. After a bit of careful experimentation through
which I realised I was unlikely to blow the thing up or cook my
insides without realising, I got the timing and ingredients about
right and made a blob of iron about as big as a 10p coin. I'm rather
proud of it, though it's only enough to make perhaps one bar of the
grill to hold the bread. Still, it's proof of concept.
The project won't be a 'how is it made?' industrial promo or an
anti-industry tirade either. It's about scale, the total
inter-reliance of people and societies, the triviality of some
(anti-)globalisation discourse, what we have to lose, and DIY.
All images courtesy of Thomas Thwaites.
"""
Samantha Atkins
- s
Bryan Bishop
> Some people apparently think they have a lot of time to waste. Ignoring
> specialization of labor and mass production and generations of specialized
> tools and processes is totally pointless except to illustrate just how
> unreasonable resenting where we are re these thing can be.
Meh. Most of those tools aren't "open" in the sense of open
manufacturing, so that's practically what you have to do anyway.
Otherwise it's the "give a man a fish" story all over again.
> Perhaps the author should also rediscover electricity and metallugy and
> organic chemistry from scratch.
And what if he does? But anyway, this isn't really "from scratch" in
terms of discovery because this is about manufacturing and making
stuff knowhow. In computer software, it would be termed proprietary
closed-source software because you're unable to remember a string of
bytecodes for platforms (and it's just a nonideal way to remember very
large programs). So, if you give him the tools that he can investigate
to the extent that if he did want to do what he is currently doing, he
could simply "unravel the tree" or "unravel the toolchain", then all
of this would be much easier- this can be done in terms of open source
software, especially by the infrastructure provided by GNU. fenn
recently re-commented:
" the Linux crew have a much more complicated task ahead of them. We
have an advantage, since one man can understand foundry, bench work,
machining, engineering, and electronics, and know most every nook and
cranny of each subject. One person cannot hardly hope to understand
and be up to date on the latest versions of the kernel, X, GCC, and
Gnome, and proficient at coding for all of them."
Kevin Carson
> Some people apparently think they have a lot of time to waste. Ignoring
> specialization of labor and mass production and generations of specialized
> tools and processes is totally pointless except to illustrate just how
> unreasonable resenting where we are re these thing can be. Perhaps the
> author should also rediscover electricity and metallugy and organic
> chemistry from scratch.
Unfortunately, much of the specialization of labor takes place within
a centralized corporate framework, often with extremely long supply
chains, that may be too fragile to survive large-scale economic and
energy supply dislocations. It's a useful experiment to try to
reverse engineer the whole production process and figure out what the
actual minimum prerequisites are for building something--not so that
everyone can make his own toaster from scratch as an end in itself,
but so that an alternative division of labor can be built up from the
ground if necessary.
S.M. Stirling, in the first book of the Nantucket triology,
transported Nantucket island back to the Bronze Age world, and then
tried to imagine how it could reconstruct an industrial economy from
the resources that Nantucket possessed in isolation or could obtain in
trade from the world of ca. 1250 BC. He started with a basement
hobbyist's machine shop, the assumption of some temporary residual
electrical generating capacity from small generators and stockpiled
fuel, and even smaller-scale generating capacity from the few
on-island wind generators. He started, also, with the ability of one
machine tool to produce others, and with the high priority project of
manufacturing steam engines and adapting some of his machinery to
machine power.
From this groundwork, he depicted the growth of a fictional economy
very much like Emilia-Romagna and the other local industrial districts
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel describe in The Second Industrial
Divide. This point is relevant to the stress you place on
mass-production. In fact, Sloan-style mass production (large batch
production to amortize costs from enormous capital outlays on
specialized machinery) was only one possible path of industrialization
made possible by electrical power, and in my opinion the worse one.
Far preferable is the Emilia-Romagna model of integrating small,
general-purpose machinery into craft production and then switching
frequently between short production runs on a just-in-time basis.
I believe Stirling's book is worth reading, because local economies
may well find themselves in a milder version of the situation his
Islanders faced. When Peak Oil results in most long-haul trucking
capacity and air freight being shut down, new refrigerators and
toasters from Whirlpool may not be real plentiful in the stores, and
ditto for repair parts. In those circumstances, people who can custom
machine replacement parts to keep stuff going, and recreate locally
the gaps in the industrial supply chain, may be quite valuable.
--
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Samantha Atkins
> On 2/11/09, Samantha Atkins <sjat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Some people apparently think they have a lot of time to waste. Ignoring
>> specialization of labor and mass production and generations of specialized
>> tools and processes is totally pointless except to illustrate just how
>> unreasonable resenting where we are re these thing can be. Perhaps the
>> author should also rediscover electricity and metallugy and organic
>> chemistry from scratch.
>>
>
> Unfortunately, much of the specialization of labor takes place within
> a centralized corporate framework,
Not really. Specialization leads to free lancing and to finding maximal
trades for ones sharpened skills. Corporations of the old type are a
dying breed. This becomes more true as most work becomes knowledge work
in effect. Specialization plus modern communications and the internet
free workers to an extraordinary degree.
> often with extremely long supply
> chains, that may be too fragile to survive large-scale economic and
> energy supply dislocations.
With JIT supply chains they are actually more dynamically reconfigurable
and hearty than in days of yore when almost everything was done in house
and huge overheads were warehoused away. That dynamism is essential in
a world of accelerating change.
> It's a useful experiment to try to
> reverse engineer the whole production process and figure out what the
> actual minimum prerequisites are for building something--not so that
> everyone can make his own toaster from scratch as an end in itself,
> but so that an alternative division of labor can be built up from the
> ground if necessary.
>
It is not necessary.
> S.M. Stirling, in the first book of the Nantucket triology,
> transported Nantucket island back to the Bronze Age world, and then
> tried to imagine how it could reconstruct an industrial economy from
> the resources that Nantucket possessed in isolation or could obtain in
> trade from the world of ca. 1250 BC. He started with a basement
> hobbyist's machine shop,
Huh? No such thing as a machine shop existed in 1250 BC.
Our survival depends literally, or at least the survival of this number
of humans on making damn sure that there is a replacement for oil and
that the supply chains and power we depend on continue. Otherwise
giga-death will occur. So I don't think we have a lot of time to
reinvent everything done before. Now, if you want to talk of
alternative energy that is workable, and of nanotech based manufacturing
of the future and of bioengineering then I am very interested. That
said, I have interest in preserving as much technology as possible even
in the face of a huge economic or other disaster.
Am I in the right place?
- samantha
ben lipkowitz
> Kevin Carson wrote:
>> On 2/11/09, Samantha Atkins <sjat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> often with extremely long supply
>> chains, that may be too fragile to survive large-scale economic and
>> energy supply dislocations.
>
> With JIT supply chains they are actually more dynamically reconfigurable
> and hearty than in days of yore when almost everything was done in house
> and huge overheads were warehoused away. That dynamism is essential in
> a world of accelerating change.
does anyone have any actual data on these mythical corporations? where do
the materials necessary to build a laser printer actually come from? and
are there plenty of alternatives? (or insert your favorite consumer
product here) I recently read a report by the US military that there was
not a single PCB stock manufacturer in the entire US nor any companies
with the capability for large scale production if they needed to.
>> but so that an alternative division of labor can be built up from the
>> ground if necessary.
>
> It is not necessary.
isnt that what we're trying to do here? create a social structure that
allows alternative manufacturing capability to come about..
>> Far preferable is the Emilia-Romagna model of integrating small,
>> general-purpose machinery into craft production and then switching
>> frequently between short production runs on a just-in-time basis.
>>
>> Islanders faced. When Peak Oil results in most long-haul trucking
>> capacity and air freight being shut down, new refrigerators and
>> toasters from Whirlpool may not be real plentiful in the stores, and
>> ditto for repair parts. In those circumstances, people who can custom
>> machine replacement parts to keep stuff going, and recreate locally
>> the gaps in the industrial supply chain, may be quite valuable.
ensuring people will be able to do this is a nice side effect of our
efforts towards individual empowerment and technological literacy.
> Our survival depends literally, or at least the survival of this number
> of humans on making damn sure that there is a replacement for oil and
> that the supply chains and power we depend on continue. Otherwise
> giga-death will occur.
certainly.
> So I don't think we have a lot of time to reinvent everything done
> before.
How much is "a lot of time"? We put three guys on the moon in ten years,
starting from scratch. I think the peak oil mostly hype is intended to
raise fear in people for political purposes without giving them a grounded
education about resource crises. We're going to see it happen, and get
used to it, and work around it. See the Y2K bug for a historical example.
> Now, if you want to talk of alternative energy that is workable, and of
> nanotech based manufacturing of the future and of bioengineering then I
> am very interested. That said, I have interest in preserving as much
> technology as possible even in the face of a huge economic or other
> disaster.
>
> Am I in the right place?
Not sure. You seem to be going after large scale alternative energy
infrastructure, which is more of a national policy issue than about
individual empowerment. Likewise for nanotech (real nanotech) which
would benefit from a few billion in development funding. Cellulosic
ethanol, algae biofuel, and thermal depolymerization are here today.
They aren't widespread because of governmental policy issues, (patents)
not lack of access to the necessary tools and knowledge.
What can we do about these issues?
> - samantha
-fenn
ben lipkowitz
> Some people apparently think they have a lot of time to waste.
> Ignoring specialization of labor and mass production and generations of
> specialized tools and processes is totally pointless except to
> illustrate just how unreasonable resenting where we are re these thing
> can be. Perhaps the author should also rediscover electricity and
> metallugy and organic chemistry from scratch.
In all likelihood, the "artist" was probably just attempting to prove this
famous quote:
"Left to his own devices he couldnt build a toaster. He could just about
make a sandwich and that was it."
So it's not surprising he chose the most roundabout likely-to-fail way to
do it. He was using hair dryers in the iron smelting experiments which
could easily have supplied all the difficult to make parts. But then, the
easiest way to make a toaster from scratch is to burn some wood in a pit.
Kevin Carson
> Huh? No such thing as a machine shop existed in 1250 BC.
No, in the story Nantucket ca. 1998--and everything on it--were
transported back to the bronze age. The subplot I discussed involved
reconstructing an industrial economy from the technology possessed by
Nantucket in isolation.
> Our survival depends literally, or at least the survival of this number
> of humans on making damn sure that there is a replacement for oil and
> that the supply chains and power we depend on continue. Otherwise
> giga-death will occur.
I don't think this is true, literally or figuratively. You seem to
assume that present levels of centralization and energy consumption,
with continent-sized or global market areas and thousand mile supply
and distribution chains, are necessary for our standard of living. I
disagree strenuously. The existing economy is enormously wasteful of
energy and other material inputs, with scales of production far beyond
optimum efficiency, precisely because energy and transportation inputs
have been subsidized so heavily. Our existing industrial economy is
like a Rube Goldberg contraption, with only about half or less of our
total labor being actually necessary for the use-value we consume--and
the rest of it going either to the moral equivalent of digging holes
and filling them back in, or to the portion of commodity price that
consists of embedded rents on artificial property rights.
As far as the food supply in particular, the collapse of the present
model of large-scale agribusiness won't mean starvation. Far from it.
Conventional agribusiness on the present model is actually less
efficient, in terms of output per acre, than small-scale intensive
techniques. It is, however, more efficient in terms of output per
man-hour (that is, if you consider only man-hours at the point of
production--it still costs about a third less in total labor time, on
average, to grow and can your own vegetables than to earn the money to
buy them at the supermarket, when marketing and distribution costs and
oligopoly markup are taken into consideration). Large-scale
agribusiness developed in an environment where privileged access to
large tracts of land made efficient land use unnecessary, and the
agency problems of labor created an incentive for
capital-substitution.
John Jeavons, experimenting with intensive raised bed techniques, has
reduced the land needed to feed a single person to 4000 sq. ft.
That's a spare diet, consisting of 80% legumes, tubers and cereal
grains and only 20% fruits and veggies. But that only shows the
possibilities; we're nowhere the point where only a tenth of an acre
per capita is available, and if you add a little more land you can
throw in fruit and nut trees, fodder for a limited amount of
high-protein livestock like guinea pigs and rabbits, poultry, etc.
If anything, the present agribusiness model is probably responsible
for a great deal of starvation in the Third World. The main reason
for starvation isn't insufficient total production, but
maldistribution of purchasing power: namely, a combination of the
facts that 1) production is primarily of cash crops for the urban and
export markets, and 2) former peasant smallholders who have been
evicted from their land by quasi-feudal landlords in collusion with
agribusiness interests cannot afford to buy the food produced on their
former land, at any price.
The answer is not to preserve the present energy-guzzling economic
model with a replacement for fossil fuels. It is to stop subsidizing
energy inputs and stop subsidizing distance between things, and make
more efficient use of less energy.
ben lipkowitz
> On 2/12/09, Samantha Atkins <sjat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Huh? No such thing as a machine shop existed in 1250 BC.
>
> No, in the story Nantucket ca. 1998--and everything on it--were
> transported back to the bronze age. The subplot I discussed involved
> reconstructing an industrial economy from the technology possessed by
> Nantucket in isolation.
As a kid I often had this fantasy of being mysteriously teleported back to
ancient Rome or Babylon, where I would use my superior knowledge of
science and technology to gain the support of political figures and
(re-?)create industrial civilization from scratch, but without all the
mistakes. But what were the mistakes?
> As far as the food supply in particular, the collapse of the present
> model of large-scale agribusiness won't mean starvation. Far from it.
> Conventional agribusiness on the present model is actually less
> efficient, in terms of output per acre, than small-scale intensive
> techniques.
It depends how quickly it collapses. How will New York or Los Angeles feed
itself if tomorrow all the trucks stopped? I think this is what you were
arguing earlier. So, which is it?
> John Jeavons, experimenting with intensive raised bed techniques, has
> reduced the land needed to feed a single person to 4000 sq. ft.
Don't forget you also have to add minerals such as phosphorus sulfur
potassium and trace elements, (either in the form of fertilizer or a large
quantity of organic compost) proper soil drainage and salinity, and enough
time water sunlight and cultivation to fix the required nitrogen and soil
humus. This is a simple matter for one garden but when you start talking
about seven billion gardens it becomes a different proposition entirely.
> The answer is not to preserve the present energy-guzzling economic
> model with a replacement for fossil fuels. It is to stop subsidizing
> energy inputs and stop subsidizing distance between things, and make
> more efficient use of less energy.
Ships are extremely efficent in terms of energy use per mass*distance
traveled. It takes less energy to ship an apple from new zealand to new
york than to move it by train from california to new york. Which
"distance" is longer? Anyone want to calculate the energy cost per apple
to transport a pickup truck full of apples 100 miles? Focusing on energy
costs is misguided. (*cough* fawzi *cough*)
Bryan Bishop
> Our survival depends literally, or at least the survival of this number
> of humans on making damn sure that there is a replacement for oil and
> that the supply chains and power we depend on continue. Otherwise
> giga-death will occur. So I don't think we have a lot of time to
> reinvent everything done before. Now, if you want to talk of
> alternative energy that is workable, and of nanotech based manufacturing
> of the future and of bioengineering then I am very interested. That
> said, I have interest in preserving as much technology as possible even
> in the face of a huge economic or other disaster.
(1) Should we be interested in these things because of "inevitable
impending doom"? Perhaps we have evidence of this doom, so maybe
that's some background motivation for being interested in open
manufacturing, but I think Paul's elaborations on this point from a
few months ago were more interesting, i.e. do it because we want to do
it and not because we want to be scarcity-preoccupied (which includes
worrying about the collapse of scarcity)- but anyway, Kevin replied
and showed that such collapse may not be terrible, and maybe it will
be terrible, but either way, whether or not there is a collapse, or is
not a collapse, or it's a terrible collapse or nonterrible collapse, I
still think these topics are worth our pursuing of them.
(2) Nanotechnology has been mentioned on this list a few times before.
The "secret" truth behind it is that many of us have interests and
backgrounds in molecular nanotechnology, of the type that Eric Drexler
publicized. For evidence of this-
* http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/5fe51b215b47d21d/93f740e10df2c61e?lnk=gst&q=drexler#93f740e10df2c61e
* http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/61049490386f146/ba6f56d96b1cfb68?lnk=gst&q=drexler#ba6f56d96b1cfb68
* http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/332e408d6cf0e267/26f82cc450948342?lnk=gst&q=drexler#26f82cc450948342
* and a few of the other members, just by personally knowing them etc.
But on the other hand, there is a general understanding that there is
much that current technology can do. I am not interested in waiting
around for molecular nanotechnology to happen. Even Freitas and
Drexler realized this and began to do some simulations to keep
themselves occupied-
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/04/robert-freitas-interview-at-lifeboatcom.html
http://lifeboat.com/ex/interview.robert.a.freitas.jr
Erm, anyway, it was back in 2007 when they were doing their "diamond
mechanosynthesis tooltip design". There was an article that I can't
dig out a link to at the moment, but it was talking about Freitas and
Merkle in the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience and
computational chemistry simulations of nine tooltips. My point though
is that while it's interesting that they are doing these simulations,
IIRC anyone can download some of the F/OSS computational chemistry
software packages and do those simulations as well, which is certainly
worth doing, but by no means calls for ignoring subtractive and
additive manufacturing technologies. I sometimes wonder what
background Drexler, Merkle and Freitas have in industrial automation
and manufacturing- I suspect Freitas might have a significant
background, but in general it just doesn't feel very coherent with
respect to large sectors of human civilization that have been left out
of popularizations of "accelerating change" by the likes of Ray.
Kevin Carson
> As a kid I often had this fantasy of being mysteriously teleported back to
> ancient Rome or Babylon, where I would use my superior knowledge of
> science and technology to gain the support of political figures and
> (re-?)create industrial civilization from scratch, but without all the
> mistakes. But what were the mistakes?
Well, Stirling IMO shows his Nantucket Republic, over the course of
the trilogy, making many of the same ones--although I don't think he
recognized them as such.
For example, the Republic preempted ownership of vacant land on Long
Island and the mainland, in Patagonia, and the like, and then doled it
out to homesteaders as rewards for military service and other forms of
public service, or with the requirement of some waiting process and
"good citizenship" to demonstrate worthiness. IOW, pretty much the
homesteading program Lincoln followed. So the groundwork was laid for
recreating the whole system of artificial property rights in land,
with absentee ownership of vacant and unimproved tracts, and a
restriction of labor's free homesteading rights.
Likewise, the island started out running the economy on an emergency
basis, with labor credits for helping break ground for an emergency
expansion of land under cultivation to avert starvation, and other
essential conscript work, in return for pro rata rights to food and
other essentials from the public commissary. The Town Meeting
attempted to restore private exchange and a currency as quickly as
possible, and get out of direct management of the economy. But they
wound up with something very like a conventional, 19th century banking
system. And I would have liked them to seize the chance to create a
system of mutual credit, barter currency, etc., that would have
enabled ordinary people to exchange their labor directly with one
another and advance credit against future production in ways imagined
by William Greene, P.J. Proudhon, and Bernard Leitauer.
Even though they started out with something very much like
Emilia-Romagna, based on production with small-scale general purpose
machinery, the guy who created the Nantucket industrial miracle (Ron
Leaton, owner of the original hobby shop and something of a shop geek)
was salivating at the chance to rebuild factory mass production on
what became the Sloan model. Overseeing the creation of new factories
in the Thames valley, he eagerly described the area as the "Silicon
Valley of the industrial revolution."
> > As far as the food supply in particular, the collapse of the present
> > model of large-scale agribusiness won't mean starvation. Far from it.
> > Conventional agribusiness on the present model is actually less
> > efficient, in terms of output per acre, than small-scale intensive
> > techniques.
> It depends how quickly it collapses. How will New York or Los Angeles feed
> itself if tomorrow all the trucks stopped? I think this is what you were
> arguing earlier. So, which is it?
If they abruptly stopped, it would clearly be catastrophic. But
Samantha was arguing that the transition from the present
energy-intensive, centralized system with its mass production
industry, to a decentralized system of small-scale production with
simpler machinery, would *itself* be catastrophic.
I certainly hope for more transition time than that. I expect it to
take place over a decade or two, and hope at least to have time for a
learning curve like that Cuba had building an economy of neighborhood
market gardeners to fill the gap when Soviet-bloc petrochemicals were
cut off. I'm interested in the questions raised by Stirling insofar
as they address a technological basis on which the transition might
take place--but I certainly hope the transition isn't as abrupt as
that.
> > John Jeavons, experimenting with intensive raised bed techniques, has
> > reduced the land needed to feed a single person to 4000 sq. ft.
> Don't forget you also have to add minerals such as phosphorus sulfur
> potassium and trace elements, (either in the form of fertilizer or a large
> quantity of organic compost) proper soil drainage and salinity, and enough
> time water sunlight and cultivation to fix the required nitrogen and soil
> humus. This is a simple matter for one garden but when you start talking
> about seven billion gardens it becomes a different proposition entirely.
Jeavons did it almost entirely by recycling all agricultural and human
waste, to form a closed loop. In cases where soil is substandard to
start out, Louis Bromfield improved it with nitrogen-fixing green
manure crops, focusing primarily on deep-rooted legumes that could
pull trace minerals up from the subsoil as well. Heavy use of
cisterns and water traps will also be necessary, in many areas.
> Ships are extremely efficent in terms of energy use per mass*distance
> traveled. It takes less energy to ship an apple from new zealand to new
> york than to move it by train from california to new york. Which
> "distance" is longer? Anyone want to calculate the energy cost per apple
> to transport a pickup truck full of apples 100 miles? Focusing on energy
> costs is misguided.
From California to New York is already way, way too long. Absent
subsidies to centralism, we'll need to shift a large portion of our
diet to local, in-season crops or locally canned stuff. The days of
using heavily subsidizd irrigation water and heavily subsidized
transport to grow stuff in California and ship it to Massachusetts,
that could more efficiently be grown in Massachusetts in the first
place, will soon be over.
And don't forget that there are "last mile" costs on both sides of the
comparison. The cost of getting produce from the market gardener to
the point of sale and from the point of sale to your home, under the
localist model, are duplicated under the present system by the cost of
getting stuff from the ship to the truck distribution system, and
then to the stores, and then to your home. I expect a great deal of
production will shift to places at, or very near, the point of
consumption: home gardens, neighborhood shared gardens, etc.
Nick Taylor
> As a kid I often had this fantasy of being mysteriously teleported back to
> ancient Rome or Babylon, where I would use my superior knowledge of
> science and technology to gain the support of political figures and
> (re-?)create industrial civilization from scratch, but without all the
> mistakes. But what were the mistakes?
I actually go to the trouble of finding out how various basic technologies work for this very reason. Ever looked into how hide-tanning is (was) done? How on earth did someone invent that?
> It depends how quickly it collapses. How will New York or Los Angeles feed
> itself if tomorrow all the trucks stopped? I think this is what you were
> arguing earlier. So, which is it?
http://tinyurl.com/d6vsd9
So in the UK, it's been estimated to be about 3 days... mind you, that's from the "Scary McFearalot" Blair Govt.