The Energy Revolution: Retaking Control with Local Food and Fuel

The “food versus fuel” debate points out the weaknesses of, and the linkages between, our industrialized food system and our industrialized energy system. The key word here is “industrialized” – our food and energy systems are highly industrialized, such that it takes only a few of us, along with some powerful fossil fuels, to provide food and energy for the rest of us.

The industrial revolution was, indeed, a revolution. The tools created to foment this revolution replaced widespread and distributed human labor – powered by food, with highly centralized machine labor, powered primarily by fossil fuels. Most of the textbook accounts of this transition cite the marvels of the increased economic activity that followed, but few accounts – if any, cite the hazards of moving from a food economy to a fuel economy.

As we now work to bring about the next revolution – the one that returns us to an economy based on renewable energy, we should ask each other, “which characteristics of the fossil energy economy should we take with us, and which should we leave behind?” Were there aspects of the carbohydrate economy, which was itself a renewable energy economy, that we should be looking to resurrect for this next revolution?

Without over-romanticizing the old days of exhausting farm labor, we can still admit that there were characteristics of that time that were healthier from a social and an economic perspective. The most notable quality of that time that we should be trying to resurrect was resilience: with millions of family farms dotted across the country, a hardship in one area – a drought or a flood, could be made up by a more fortunate region. But we’ve lost four million farms in the United States over the last 50 years, as family farms are replaced by industrial farms. Add to that our single-minded dependence on petroleum, now controlled by a few industrial giants, and the greatest mistake of industrialism is clear: we have placed our fate in the hands of a few corporations.

Many believe that the renewable energy revolution will automatically restore the resilience we seek, but it’s not true that it happens automatically. The giants of industrial food have moved into organics and into biofuels, creating a confused call for sustainability on an industrial scale.

A revolution is a time to re-take power and control from the few, and return it to the many. We can accept that the industrial models for food and for fuel served a purpose, in their own place and time, and we can also accept their time has come and gone, and move forward to a new time of local food, and local fuels.