kelpiewilson

An archive of articles and reports by the author of Primal Tears

This site is an archive of writing by Kelpie Wilson. You'll find dozens of magazine articles and news reports on the topics of energy, the environment, sustainable living, human evolution, eco-spirituality and women's rights.

*NEW*  I am re-posting some of my best writing from past publications in a series of "Reprise" posts below. Sadly, because of the lack of progress toward sustainability, much of it is still very relevant. Perhaps there is a more receptive audience these days for this analysis.

For my blog on green technology, visit www.greenyourhead.com

Reprise: The Lysistrata Strategy

by Kelpie Wilson
Wild Earth
Winter 1997/98

Can you imagine what life would be like if everything weren’t always getting more crowded, dirtier and poorer every day with the threat of war and ecological collapse hanging over our heads? The root cause of our global impoverishment is growth. Growth – both the economic kind and the population kind, makes every ecological and social problem worse and more unmanageable. Growth may bring vast wealth to a few, for a limited amount of time, but the legacy of growth is topsoil loss, over-fished oceans, deforestation, global warming, species extinction, pollution, disease, starvation and war. The world needs a strategy to stop growing and start living sustainably. We now have six billion people and may grow to twice that number in the next few generations if we don’t do something. Growth not only needs to be stopped, it needs to be reversed, for a time at least. Some ecologists think that two billion is a reasonable number for the Earth to support in perpetuity.

The good news is that we could humanely reach an optimum global population of two billion in only three generations. When my parents were born, there were only two billion people in the world. If every woman on earth today had no more than one child, the number of people of reproductive age would halve in the next generation. By the end of another two generations, we could achieve our goal of two billion. Think of what a bright new day it would be for those two billion people and the other species they share the planet with. There would be enough of everything, including clean air, clean water and wilderness. War would become a thing of the past and the human war against nature would end.

If we had the will, we women could put the brakes on growth by simply stopping up our wombs for a while. With the planet headed toward ecological collapse, someone’s got to take charge. Could women do it? The only precedent I can think of is a literary one: the classical Greek comedy Lysistrata, by Aristophanes.

Reprise: Virgin, the Dynamo, and the Prize

Virgin, the Dynamo, and the Prize
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Wednesday 14 February 2007

Like most American kids in the 1960s, I was an avid Star Trek fan and I rooted for every new development in the US space program. I'll never forget staying up past midnight to watch Neil Armstrong take Man's first steps on the moon.

But by the time of the first shuttle disaster in 1986, I was less concerned with the Star Trek mission and more concerned with the fate of the Earth. Apart from the human tragedy of the disaster, the setback to the space shuttle program didn't seem to matter much, and the image of the Challenger flameout at 48,000 feet over Florida seemed symbolic of the utter failure of Western society to create a sustainable civilization on Planet Earth.

The recent release of the IPCC's fourth assessment on climate change is just one more milestone documenting the disintegration of Earth's planetary life-support systems. The world must act quickly, but I am not impressed by the announcement last week that Sir Richard Branson, founder of a company that is building a fleet of excursion vehicles for the space tourism market, has offered a $25 million prize for the invention of new carbon-sequestration technologies.

Reprise: Diane Wilson - An American Hero

An Interview with Diane Wilson
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Tuesday 28 March 2006

Diane Wilson is the author of An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas (Chelsea Green, 2005). It is a remarkable book, telling the story of Wilson's life as female shrimp boat captain and an environmental activist fighting devastating toxic pollution from chemical and plastics manufacturers on the Texas Gulf Coast.

But I have to confess, when the book was first recommended to me, I hesitated to read it. As an environmental activist, I have my own personal history of endless hours of research, boring meetings, scary confrontations, nasty intimidation and the infighting that goes along with these struggles, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to hear all the gritty details of someone else's pains and triumphs. Lois Gibbs, the courageous activist mother of Love Canal, said the same thing in her review of An Unreasonable Woman in Orion Magazine. But like Gibbs, I was hooked after the first page. For one thing, the Texas Gulf Coast seems to be unlike any other place on the planet.

Molly Ivins and others have called An Unreasonable Woman a masterpiece of American literature, and I agree. First, there is the poetry of Wilson's language. I can only compare her to fiction writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. She wraps her tender descriptions of her beloved Lavaca Bay around poignant inner reflections, while rendering the home-grown dialogue and emotionally tense social ecology of her community with complete authenticity.

Reprise: More Food Is Not the Answer

More Food Is Not the Answer
By Kelpie Wilson
In Good Tilth
July/August 2008

With food riots across the globe in the news, the immediate cause of food shortages is simply this: grain prices have doubled over the last year and poor people can no longer afford to buy enough food. There is no one single cause for the price rise; it is a combination of supply and demand.

Steady population growth means about 70 million new mouths to feed every year, and increasing affluence is also spurring more people to buy more meat. Meat is grain-intensive - it takes about seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Biofuels are another new demand on grain stocks, and a potentially insatiable one. The grain used to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.

There is more than enough grain to feed every hungry human on the planet, but the poor cannot compete with wealthier buyers of meat and biofuels. Markets are not interested in feeding hungry people - they want to make money, so from a capitalist point of view, the only solution is to increase supply in the hope that it will drive prices down.

On the supply side, serious limiting factors are coming into play: dwindling water supplies and increased drought exacerbated by climate change; increasingly degraded land and soils; the rising cost of energy used for everything from water pumping to transport, and the growing cost of fertilizer and other inputs.

The world wants more food - a lot more food - but the planet will not be able to provide it. For this reason alone, more food cannot be the answer.

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, says that while there have been food price spikes in the past, “This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before.”

Brown doesn’t use the term, but it is likely that we have reached “peak food,” the moment when world grain output has achieved its maximum and we will have to work very hard to keep it from declining.

One of the top reasons to believe we have reached peak food is that we have apparently reached peak oil. In his book, Eating Fossil Fuels, Dale Allen Pfeiffer shows how utterly dependent modern agriculture is on fossil fuels, not just for the machinery that plants and harvests, but for the energy to irrigate fields and for fertilizers. About 30 percent of farm energy goes to fertilizer, much of which is made from natural gas. Like oil, natural gas is becoming increasingly expensive as production nears peak. Without oil, we might not drive cars, but without fertilizer, we might not eat.

Food and fuel are intimately connected. Not only is fuel essential to produce food, but because food can substitute for fuel, the price of food is now locked into the price of oil - a price that will continue to rise in the long term.

Report shows the way forward

Globalization has promised to lift every person out of poverty by growing the economy so large that wealth will eventually trickle down to all. But this is a false promise that ignores physical limits to planetary resources.

A groundbreaking United Nations report that presents a serious challenge to the promises of globalization and biotech was released April, 2008. The IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development) is directed by Robert Watson, a former director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it shares some similar features to the UN Climate assessment reports.

Reprise: Wearing My Hair Shirt

By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Thursday 29 March 2007

Al Gore is really doing it, bringing climate awareness to the doorsteps of opinion makers and forcing them to consider all of its implications. Of course, no good deed ever goes unpunished in this country.

Aside from all the sniping about his annual home power bill (which turns out to be so high partly because he spends an extra five grand or so to buy windpower and might also have something to do with a vice president's security needs), lots of the usual "free market uber alles" types are accusing him and all green-minded folks of forcing them to wear the dreaded "hair shirt" of mandatory reductions in their energy use.

Incredibly, those who aren't complaining about the sacrifices are indignant about Gore making it all seem too easy. In Robert J. Samuelson's New York Times editorial last week titled "Hollywood's Climate Follies," he accuses Gore of painting the issue as "saints vs. sinners" and failing to acknowledge that: "The lifestyles that produce greenhouse gases are deeply ingrained in modern economies and societies.... Those who believe that addressing global warming is a moral imperative face an equivalent moral imperative to be candid about the costs, difficulties and uncertainties."

It's hard to tell exactly what triggered Samuelson's outrage, but it seems to be a line from Gore's Oscar acceptance speech where he said: "We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it.

But what will it take to renew that resource? Everywhere the conventional wisdom is that Americans will never give up their big cars, big houses, air conditioning set at 65 degrees on hot summer afternoons and incandescent light bulbs blazing throughout the house. This is the American way of life, and the idea that it cannot last seems to drive some people into hysterical fits. Don't just do something, panic! Al Gore and the greenies want to send us back to the 1970s!

Reprise: Birth of a New Wedge

Birth of a New Wedge
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 03 May 2007

Terrigal, New South Wales, Australia - As delegates met in Bangkok this week to debate climate change solutions contained in the IPCC's latest report, one technology not mentioned in the draft report was being closely examined at a conference in Australia in the beach town of Terrigal, just north of Sydney.

The first meeting of the International Agrichar Initiative convened about 100 scientists, policymakers, farmers and investors with the goal of birthing an entire new industry to produce a biofuel that goes beyond carbon neutral and is actually carbon negative. The industry could provide a "wedge" of carbon reduction amounting to a minimum of ten percent of world emissions and possibly much more.

Agrichar is the term not for the biomass fuel, but for what is left over after the energy is removed: a charcoal-based soil amendment. In simple terms, the agrichar process takes dry biomass of any kind and bakes it in a kiln to produce charcoal. The process is called pyrolysis. Various gases and bio-oils are driven off the material and collected to use in heat or power generation. The charcoal is buried in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.

Reprise: It Takes a Village to Cool the Planet

It Takes a Village to Cool the Planet
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t
Friday 15 December 2006

Last week's New Scientist magazine carried an article with this disturbing headline: "Africa Barred From Carbon Trading." Advocates for African farmers were claiming that European Union policies on carbon credits amounted to a carbon trade embargo on Africa.

Louis Verchon of the World Agroforestry Centre said that if the EU would implement a new scheme to credit farmers who capture carbon on their land, "millions of dollars in carbon credits could begin flowing to the world's rural poor."

The World Agroforestry Centre, in conjunction with researchers from Michigan State University, has developed a method using satellite imagery and infrared sensing that measures carbon storage in African farmland. The Centre has completed a pilot program in western Kenya and is ready to encourage poor farmers to plant trees as soon as it can qualify for carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol.

Reprise: The Tragic Abuse of Corn

The Tragic Abuse of Corn
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 20 July 2005

The wheel it has circled, time without end,
Old life remembers, and welcomes the grain.
For the corn and the seed are one and the same,
That which has been, will be again.
-- from Demeter's Hymn by Lyn Hubert

They are exalted for a little while, but are gone and brought low; they are taken out of the way as all others, and cut off as the tops of the ears of corn.
-- Job 24:6

It was one of those things that you can't quite believe is real. I was flipping through a magazine and saw an ad for a stove that burns corn kernels. For heat. Corn is food, not fuel, I thought, but the ad assured me that "Corn is replenished annually. It is a never-ending energy source, and thus is the new alternative fuel of choice."

Something about it felt very wrong to me. Burning food does not seem respectful. Especially when there are two billion people in the world who don’t get enough to eat.

But it is more than that. Corn production uses tremendous amounts of fossil fuel for mechanized labor, irrigation, drying, transport and fertilizer. I sincerely doubted that corn as a fuel could be renewable on a sustainable basis.

Preface to a Prelude to Peak Oil

This is my book review of Kurt Cobb's Prelude, published on Huffington Post on Friday 11, 2011 - please visit and leave a comment.

Many green groups and other science-based analysts criticized President Obama's recent State of the Union speech for failing to mention the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Instead, the President focused on a "clean energy and jobs" message. Yet perhaps he did the best he could, given our current political reality and the extreme irrationality that infects our Tea Party nation.

Following the hideous violence in Arizona, it was a stroke of genius to call on Republicans and Democrats to sit together, pairing red and blue like a pair of those old-fashioned 3D glasses -- Obama's attempt to show us that America is much more than a two-dimensional conflict between political parties. But the State of the Union address, while considerably more three-dimensional than many I have heard, still fell far short of the reality we find ourselves in. That reality includes more than just the threat of climate change. It also encompasses the phenomenon known as "peak oil."

I don't know what it is about energy and our use of it that inspires so many euphemisms, but "peak oil" is a term rarely used in the mainstream, corporate media. You may hear about "energy security" or "commodity price super-cycles" but never peak oil. And yet most of us know that the world has either passed or is now approaching the maximum volume of oil we can pump from the ground -- aka peak oil. It's the secret everyone knows but that few will mention. And it is the reason that Obama's call for investment in clean energy jobs resonates even with hardcore climate deniers. Polls consistently show high levels of support for government investment in clean energy, even from Republicans. That's because, in our guts, we all know that fossil fuels can't last forever.

My article on WorldStove's biochar Haiti project is up on Huff Po. Visit and leave a comment please! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelpie-wilson/worldstove-transforming-h_b_556250.html