An exploration of what independence from purchasing fossil fuels or electricity on the market would achieve, and how we could achieve it.
Energy is such a massive topic to discuss, particularly in our age of what Nate Hagens calls- Energy Blindness. The use of electricity or fossil fuels to take the physical work out of our survival, has become so normalised, that do we evening notice it’s happening? I would argue that as a society we have been made vulnerable by how easy it is for us to access different forms of energy, through civic and private infrastructure, and the extent to which the production of our stuff is hidden from us, meaning we can be fooled into thinking that because its easy for us to get energy, energy is easy to get.
We have friends who live off-grid in a small community in the woods. One of them told me a Buddhist doctrine- before enlightenment, gather wood, fetch water. After enlightenment, gather wood, fetch water. Joel and I currently live in a purpose built first floor flat in zone 2, and we barely ever think about gathering wood or fetching water so we’re not even in the before enlightenment stage. Our lives require so many forms and spreadsheets and timesheets that it’s hard to imagine how you could ever fit gathering wood and fetching water in at all. But despite this removal of what is generally considered hardship, we don’t feel like peak human. Ironically- working on a computer is literal backbreaking labour (I have, for real, sat through a lecture at the RCA showing diagrams of how people strain their backs whilst using laptops). But what is for us becoming more and more alarming, is the evidence suggesting that genocidal wars continue to be fought in pursuit of the raw materials needed to generate, store, transport and utilise electricity. We are vulnerable in our reliance. We are potentially tacitly consenting to some of the worst human behaviour, because we need things back home to be easy peasy, and plenty of time for forms and working in the service economy. As the returns on excavating fossil fuels get less, it feels like the global north will do worse and worse things to ensure a steady supply of petrol, gas and electricity for their dependent voting populations and growth based economies.
My understanding of the eco-modernist perspective, is a belief that we can replace fossil fuel based electricity with renewable electricity and not change our lives at all. Even if this is true (and Simon Michaux says its not and we believe him) There’s a number of reasons we find this idea unpalatable-
- The production of cheap goods via mass production has overproduction built in- people actually don’t want the same things as their neighbours, they want slightly or very different things, so mass production is an inapropriate mechanism for meeting human needs. However, the strange financialisation of stuff means it is costed per item rather than net, meaning prices can only be low if huge amounts of everything are produced at a time. We are producing way too many cheap goods and filling up deserts, and oceans and people’s neighbourhoods with cheap things and the packaging for cheap things. We have become the protagonists in the cautionary folk tale, who can’t turn the magic porridge pot off and we are drowning in porridge, except its not delicious porridge, its disgusting plastic packaging that is now in tiny pieces in our brains.
- Everyone I know is working too hard, working too hard to sell (not even make) and buy all the stuff we are making, our money is worth less despite everything being so cheap. Perhaps an explanation for this is that the infrastructure of mass production (including electrical infrastructure, and the infrastructure of care that frees us up to work in factories of yore) is expensive to produce and upkeep- that expense has been kicked into the long grass in the form of loans and debts, and now it’s time to pay the piper. Infrastructure is a debt based system. Our whole economic system requires us to take out a loan for a pound and pay it back at 1 pound 50 so that someone who isn’t productively engaged can have the extra 50p (I’m just describing capitalism here in case that isn’t obvious). We will never experience the labour saving benefits of our labour saving devices unless we build a new economic system, otherwise they are worktime producing devices.
- 1+2=3 we are working too hard in complicated systems that essentially produce too much stuff, and extracting the resources to create all that stuff is disrupting the natural systems that we depend on.
This is my very simple model for why climate change is happening, it is happening because we believe a myth that life before fossil fuels was impossible, and life now is the only way.
There are lots of reasons to build a care home on a farm, but testing this myth is one of our main reasons.
- I believe that I will be happier if I can design out the need to buy things that come in plastic packaging.
- I believe I will be happier if I’m doing something that genuinely makes wars for resources unnecessary.
- I believe I will be happier if I only need to make the things that me and my family and community need, and the rest of my time (however much that is) is free to play an instrument, or do some embroidery, or take a walk. (I love making things so it’s almost like I would have no job at all just full time essential hobbies:-))
I know that this is not a vision of happiness for most people. That’s ok with me. I’m really mostly interested in meeting the people who get it, and having a go- running the experiment and seeing what its really like.
For the above reasons, Joel and I are very keen that the Care Home Farm is off grid; paying for energy in the market, means you have to exchange your time in the market, the market makes its demands and there’s no negotiation. It also means that you’re externalising a cost. Our government prioritises military spending over supporting disabled people, and maybe one of the reasons is that in the UK we are using more than our fair share of resources and we have to violently protect that privilege. Being off-grid and intersufficient is a peace protest. It’s a commitment to letting the rest of the world live in peace too without our pesky resource extraction and vulnerable labour market exploitation.
So if we’re not going to buy electricity from the grid, what are our options for being intersufficient for energy;
- Replace as much fossil fuel energy as possible with human energy. Joel and I are hot for pedal powered machinery. We already have a pedal powered overlocker- we’re pretty sure most motor driven machines can be driven by bikes, hand cranks or other exercise equipment. This is a mid way step that allows some ‘labour saving’ but without the fossil fuel dependency. Flour mills, combine harvesters, sewing machines, and washing machines, bandsaws already have pedal powered alternatives that people have converted for themselves and use. The design question that leads on from this is how do you make the machinery in the first place- this is where I’d be utilising renewable energy or maybe biodiesel generators. It seems that most cast iron machinery lasts a few generations when it’s maintained well.
The main thing that you can only partially replace with human energy, is heating. I say partially- because I have noticed a big difference between being outside and working at something physical in the winter (you get warm quickly), and sitting still working on a computer in a room (you get cold quickly). Some other basic staying warm technologies that our society seems to have left behind are- wearing wool (its actually warm as opposed to cotton which is soft), being around other people and animals, dancing and heavy curtains.
This is a cool video about using a compost pile for heating;
I’m interested in testing systems where you build a compost toilet/composting room underneath part of the house to do the same thing. Apart from utilising these technologies, I assume we will coppice a woodland and burn wood for heating buildings, water and food; any simple ways that we can raise the temperature of buildings and people, even a small amount, will lessen the amount of woodland we need to coppice. We have a good friend who is a forester and he has given me some figures to add to The Spreadsheet. I think we can make big wood savings by carefully designing our homes, incorporating thermal mass, having winter rooms that are smaller and cosier when it’s particularly cold, and by generally living less indoors and being deliberately more physically active.
It’s been very interesting picking Kathryn’s brains about composting. We had quite a long discussion about wood chip- how can you make wood chip without electricity (Joel and I believe a hand crank grinder is a possibility as we built one for oak bark scratting last year). Wood chip is really important for compost, it’s hard to compost kitchen waste without one, of course chickens and pigs happily eat kitchen waste (minus inappropriate ingredients like pork and citrus), but otherwise it might still be useful to have a biodigester and use some gas for cooking. We attended a really interesting lecture about biodigesters at LMU a few years back. In all of these systems the circularity is crucial. You need to return the nutrition to the soil that you’re removing by growing food. So you need to be producing large amounts of compost. You need to be ‘recapturing’ the carbon that you’re releasing by burning wood’ back into the trees and roots that you’re cultivating.
A crucial concept in all of this is one we’ve heard through Chris Smaje- ‘skimming’; even our own bodies are only skimming energy, i.e. we use a lot of our energy digesting food in order to get energy, we skim some for movement and brain function etc. This is how our energy systems currently work (we use large amounts of energy mining and burning and transporting energy), and on the farm it will be similar, there will be opportunities to skim some energy from certain natural systems, but we need to be careful not to take to much that the system loses momentum. Which is why reducing our energy dependency is the priority; building a version of human thriving that is almost free of electricity or biodiesel. What can we do, that ‘sparks joy’ within the systems we need- does working together in social environments make physical labour more enjoyable? We know that ‘being in nature’ is very good for humans, can ‘working in nature’ give us the same benefits and the things we need at the same time?
We had a discussion in our meeting last month about where people’s absolute red lines were for electricity use. I honestly don’t think I have any (but we’ll find out!!), as long as I have time. I’m really happy lighting fires for hot water and cooking, using candles in the winter, or just going to bed early- I think designing lots of time is the priority. I’ve lived on a boat with no fridge, and camped for weeks at a time. I’m also stubborn and I love a challenge.
Electric lighting did come up as a must have. Which inevitably developed into – how are LED lights made? Can you make them yourself? Would we need some kind of high tech industrial design studio (I worked in one of these after Uni, but we didn’t make diodes). I see these kind of questions as interesting design challenges. Is making LED lights that reasonable for cities? From my experience on a boat,12 volt lighting systems are very low wattage.
Of course- the Care Home is a different kettle of fish, it needs to be warm, it needs to have electricity. Perhaps the Care Home is on grid and the economics works differently whilst we work up our alternative systems, so that they’re tried and tested before we risk them with our vulnerable wards.
- Solar Power. I’m afraid I’m a solar sceptic. We had PV on our boat and you always had plenty of power when you didn’t need it in the middle of summer when its hot and you go to bed and sunset. Also- I’m wary of systems that we have to buy in for the same reasons as buying energy on the market. If we can make PV cells from discarded TVs, and find a safe way to recycle them afterwards then I’m in. On the call, we discussed using PV during a transitional period. Personally I’m in two minds about this, probably because I don’t feel tethered to electricity (although I admit this might be naive).
- Hydro. Joel and I are big fans of Kris Harbours Natural Building channel on YouTube. He has a hydro system from a stream on his land that he seems to get a significant amount of power from. My theory is that you can combine hydro with keyline water management (which I only briefly learnt about on the Richard Perkins permaculture design course at Henbant Permaculture). I.e you build reservoirs with connecting channels. You allow water to flow between them and you use that water flow to generate electricity. The benefits of this in my mind are- you have the biggest flow in the winter when you need more power. You need to collect and store water anyway in an off grid system- for animals and crops. Also, hydro can work like a natural, lithium free battery. Worst comes to worst and you need electricity but the top reservoir is empty- you can carry the water back up to ‘charge the battery’, or pump it back up with a peddle pump. Hydro makes sense to me as a simple and easy to maintain energy production system.
Joel and I have had a Quick Look at hydro calculations online and tbf we can’t make head nor tail of them. What seems more fun to us, is to try and build a simple hydro system at The Remakery (the makerspace that I work at) and see what kind of output we can get off of it.
Joel and I are both Lowtech enthusiasts (in case that wasn’t obvious). We are completely sold on the mental health benefits of doing most things slowly, by hand-the environmental benefits are a massive added bonus. There is nothing we enjoy more than seeing an instagram video of someone using a hacked together treadle drill to do some traditional carpentry, we are chomping at the bit to put our phones down and pick up a box plane.
Theoretically, every energy need has a lowtech solution- i.e. another redline that came up in our zoom discussion, was refrigeration. Ez told us a story about an off-grid community that had to store their cheese down the well and got bored of pulling it up every time they wanted cheese, which seemed to sway the conversation in favour of refrigerating cheese. Until… Kathryn suggested- unless we’re going to have a stone dairy cooled by a stream. And this is the thing, a stone dairy cooled by a stream sounds way better than a sweaty plastic box in your kitchen that breaks and can’t be mended. A stone dairy, or a stone basement pantry, with a stream cooling system, that you’re also getting hydro off of, sounds too beautiful to be true. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve been conditioned to believe that we don’t deserve the real thing, we have to have the plastic fake version. Things that were perfectly normal to our predecessors are now out of our reach and most theories of consumerism agree that the replacements only give us dopamine hits and not enough delicious serotonin.
Central to our thinking around energy is Kate Soper’s alternative hedonism, the theory that we need to really interrogate how to maximise joy in our lives, once we have a clear idea of what we uniquely love, we can begin the design process of maximising that joy without the huge amounts of waste and overconsumption of resources that have become normalised in the global north. It’s a joy beyond ‘bargains’ and imitations, for Joel and I it’s a joy rooted in making. For other people it might be more strongly experienced through conversation, or growing, but it’s a joy that is currently enclosed. It’s a joy that makes that pain of giving up convenience not painful at all. The pay off for giving up the labour saving devices, is conversely, getting your time back.
Some podcasts that underpin the post:
Teaser image credit: Composting video still, Author supplied.