visited the home of Julian Darley and Celine Rich in Sebastopol, California. They’re the founders of the Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization established to figure out how people might be able to live reasonably well in a world without cheap energy.
When I arrived at their house at about ten o’clock in the morning, Julian, a sandy-haired Englishman around fifty, was standing in his driveway inspecting a new scratch in one of his “solar share” vehicles—pickups run on batteries charged by the rows of photovoltaic cells on the roof of the house.
Running his finger over the scratch, Julian asked out loud to no one in particular, “I wonder if this was intentional?” He called his wife, Celine, a pretty blond Canadian, to have a look. She shrugged noncommittally.
As Julian continued to examine the scratch, my eyes wandered to the enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and grains growing on every square foot of the one-third-acre property. I saw an explosion of squash, sorghum, buckwheat, beans, corn, amaranth, mustard, soybeans, sunflowers, pumpkins, watermelons, lettuces, tomatoes, flax, hops, peppers, eggplants, okra, green peppers, basil, onions, and kiwi fruit. An irrigation system built from conduits and tiny ponds wound through the yard. Eighteenth-century farm implements were lined up against a shack. I was overwhelmed by how much stuff was growing, and by the thought of how much planning and work must have gone into making a garden this productive.
Julian noticed me staring at the garden. “It’s gone a bit wild,” he said. “There are a lot of ideas in here. We’re not expecting anybody to do this but to take some of the ideas that you find appropriate and then turn them into your own garden for the minimum spend—minimum petroleum, minimum money.”
Forgetting about the scratch on his car, Julian led me around the yard. “We’ve tried many different things that you can see, and now we’re really homing in on”—and here his voice dropped to an urgent whisper—“ how you can do it cheaply .”
“I’m interested in learning how to garden more cheaply,” I said. “I paid a lot for my mulch. Is all this hay you’re using for mulch cheaper?”
“That is straw,” Julian said. “Hay is a feedstuff and would attract unwelcome critters. Besides, straw is cheaper.”
The problem, though, he said, is that straw must be delivered by truck, and that just won’t be practical in the post-carbon world, where gasoline costs a hundred dollars or more a gallon.
“Where does the straw come from?” he asked rhetorically. “It comes from the Midwest. It’s a complete energy loser . It’s crazy.”
I quickly learned that, to Julian and Celine, DIY is a matter of mankind’s survival, because they are certain we will be living in a post-carbon world in a couple of decades. But they don’t rule out the personal-fulfillment angle—Julian describes his work as “serious with a smile.”
Everything that takes place in the Post Carbon Institute’s experimental garden and workshop is entered into an EROEI—energy return on energy invested—equation. In other words, how much energy (food calories, electric watts, thermal BTUs, etc.) are you getting out of an activity relative to how much energy it takes?
Julian brushed aside some of the straw with one foot to show me the white plastic conduits hiding beneath it. The water pipes led to green plastic boxes buried in the ground. Inside these boxes were the valves and filters for the irrigation system. Julian lifted the lid on a box to show me, but it was filled with so much dirt that I couldn’t see much of anything.
“This is what the gophers do,” he said of the mess. The gophers even ate through a plastic bag to get to the printed instructions stored in one of the boxes. “The little devils!” Julian said, holding the dirty plastic bag at eye level so he could get a better look. “The instructions are all going
When I arrived at their house at about ten o’clock in the morning, Julian, a sandy-haired Englishman around fifty, was standing in his driveway inspecting a new scratch in one of his “solar share” vehicles—pickups run on batteries charged by the rows of photovoltaic cells on the roof of the house.
Running his finger over the scratch, Julian asked out loud to no one in particular, “I wonder if this was intentional?” He called his wife, Celine, a pretty blond Canadian, to have a look. She shrugged noncommittally.
As Julian continued to examine the scratch, my eyes wandered to the enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and grains growing on every square foot of the one-third-acre property. I saw an explosion of squash, sorghum, buckwheat, beans, corn, amaranth, mustard, soybeans, sunflowers, pumpkins, watermelons, lettuces, tomatoes, flax, hops, peppers, eggplants, okra, green peppers, basil, onions, and kiwi fruit. An irrigation system built from conduits and tiny ponds wound through the yard. Eighteenth-century farm implements were lined up against a shack. I was overwhelmed by how much stuff was growing, and by the thought of how much planning and work must have gone into making a garden this productive.
Julian noticed me staring at the garden. “It’s gone a bit wild,” he said. “There are a lot of ideas in here. We’re not expecting anybody to do this but to take some of the ideas that you find appropriate and then turn them into your own garden for the minimum spend—minimum petroleum, minimum money.”
Forgetting about the scratch on his car, Julian led me around the yard. “We’ve tried many different things that you can see, and now we’re really homing in on”—and here his voice dropped to an urgent whisper—“ how you can do it cheaply .”
“I’m interested in learning how to garden more cheaply,” I said. “I paid a lot for my mulch. Is all this hay you’re using for mulch cheaper?”
“That is straw,” Julian said. “Hay is a feedstuff and would attract unwelcome critters. Besides, straw is cheaper.”
The problem, though, he said, is that straw must be delivered by truck, and that just won’t be practical in the post-carbon world, where gasoline costs a hundred dollars or more a gallon.
“Where does the straw come from?” he asked rhetorically. “It comes from the Midwest. It’s a complete energy loser . It’s crazy.”
I quickly learned that, to Julian and Celine, DIY is a matter of mankind’s survival, because they are certain we will be living in a post-carbon world in a couple of decades. But they don’t rule out the personal-fulfillment angle—Julian describes his work as “serious with a smile.”
Everything that takes place in the Post Carbon Institute’s experimental garden and workshop is entered into an EROEI—energy return on energy invested—equation. In other words, how much energy (food calories, electric watts, thermal BTUs, etc.) are you getting out of an activity relative to how much energy it takes?
Julian brushed aside some of the straw with one foot to show me the white plastic conduits hiding beneath it. The water pipes led to green plastic boxes buried in the ground. Inside these boxes were the valves and filters for the irrigation system. Julian lifted the lid on a box to show me, but it was filled with so much dirt that I couldn’t see much of anything.
“This is what the gophers do,” he said of the mess. The gophers even ate through a plastic bag to get to the printed instructions stored in one of the boxes. “The little devils!” Julian said, holding the dirty plastic bag at eye level so he could get a better look. “The instructions are all going
Similar Books
