You are a systems ecologist, what is that?
Systems ecologists study the physiology of the eco-system, how the parts are connected and depend on each other. You could say they study the eco-system as an organism. My specialty is the study of how human settlements could adapt to eco-systems’ function instead of working against them.
This raises the question of how fossil fuels impact the settlement – eco system balance.
My initial research in the beginning of the 90s was into how human settlements could be suited to the eco-system. During these investigations I realized the problem of fossil fuel reliance.
I also saw how adaptation of settlements eco-systems fit exactly to the concept of diminishing settlement vulnerability to problems like fossil fuel depletion. Doing things that work well in the eco-system decreases the amount of fossil fuel needed to support the settlement.
Eco systems develop towards self-sufficiency and maximum solar exergy consumption. Let's take the example of an immature system like a lawn or field of wheat. These support few species, and export a large amount of products. If you let them be, they will, by themselves, develop a large amount of internal cycling through high diversity, co-operation between different species, efficient water use, and the like. These systems will develop to consume what is produced on the spot instead of exporting it.
If you construct a human settlement that acts as part of a mature ecological system, you will have set up a settlement that is so well adapted it needs less fossil fuel. In effect, producing a standard of living with less energy intensity.
And then you started to investigate how to put this into practice?
First I described how a local farm, or several small farms could support a settlement. These local farms should be balanced. That is to say the animals are fed on what is produced from the fields fertilized with manure. 'Balanced agriculture' is defined as agriculture where the animals are fed from plants that get their nutrients from the manure of the animals. This sounds like a perfect recipe for a sustainable nutrient circulation.
However, since food (normally) is exported from the farm, the farm loses about 4 kg phosphorus per hectare. This is unsustainable in the long run.
If the nutrients lost in this way are returned to the farm as humanure, the only losses are the leakage from farmland to drainage water. These losses can be recovered by different wetpark methods, thereby attaining almost 100% circulation. This is not typical of today’s farms, but was the case if you go 50 to 100 years back.
In this scenario, all nutrients are recycled back to land instead of importing, say, artificial fertilizer and having nutrients leak out in the surface water. It also includes a system of water purification, which now is quite well developed. Now, if the farm is feeding a small population they will not just want wheat they will want a variety of food. So you get a large diversity of crops which helps create a mature eco-system.
The economical effect of cooperating with the farmer is quite good. Inhabitants set up a list of items they want to eat and subscribe to these from the farmer. You remove the middle-man and get much cheaper food. The farmer gets paid more for her produce.
You mentioned a community of 200 persons, can you tell me how you reached that figure?
This comes from several sources. I looked what area of land would be needed per person, based on Swedish conditions. I started with 200 persons, and found you would need 40 -50 hectares.
I interviewed people living in eco-villages what the ideal size village would be. They said they would choose 50 -100 families, not more.
Next, I investigated what the most energy efficient size of a farm would be.
There is point where if you add, say more cows or tractors, the equivalent gains in efficiency will be reduced. I drew this out on a curve. At the inflexion point the most energy efficient farm is one with 20 cows, 40 hectares, equivalent to feeding about 200 persons.
The Yanomamö people in Brazil’s tropical rain forest split when they go over 200 persons. I discussed this with some psychologists, and we concluded about 200 persons is the number you can have a personal relationship with.
The small prehistoric tribes were probably not more than 200 persons, and they lived in that way for about 99% of the existence of the human species. (This number is approximate.)
Your eco unit concept is then a kind of blueprint for reducing energy intensity in society?
Yes. If you are energy constrained, in the worst case you can, in this system, recycle nutrients by going with a wheelbarrow within the area that is 1 by 2 kilometers wide.
Heating and electricity is included in the blueprint. I added 10 more hectares for biomass on the edges of the ditches, which a much more suitable place to produce biomass. You should not cover an entire field with biomass; the field should be for food. The plants can remove nutrients from the ditch water at the same time as they produce biomass. This reduces nutrient leakage.
Is phosphorous a problem in the nutrient cycle?
Yes, when you take fossil fuel out of the settlement it is phosphorous that becomes a problem for self –sufficiency.
The first animals and plants that evolved onto land encountered this problem too. In the sea, phosphorus is dissolved and plants and animals can absorb it wherever they are.
In the sea, phosphorous is evenly distributed as nitrogen is for us. When they came onto land phosphorus was lacking as it has no gaseous phases and exists only as solids and is not evenly distributed.
Phosphorus is needed in about a 10 times higher concentrations in our bodies than its average abundance in the Earth crust.
In the sea, the lack can be mitigated by continuous pumping of large volumes in order to make up for the weak solution in the sea water (although recycling is a solution often used even here).
But on land, because of the constant washing out of nutrients from land to sea with fresh water, there is in effect a constant threat of phosphorus deficiency. For life on land, therefore, recycling of phosphorus is utterly important.
In an ecosystem, the regenerative cycle is easiest to understand if the phosphorus cycle is followed.
Simple compounds, such as phosphates, CO2 and nitrogen compounds, are taken up by the plants leaves or roots, paid for with sugar from the plants. The compounds are put together using photosynthesis, with sunlight as exergy source. Most of the production is used up by the plants and micro-organisms by themselves, but the remaining substances are used by heterotrophic organisms (insects, squirrels, humans and the like).
The end products (faeces, urine, dead plants and animals) are utilized by the recyclers (a term that better describes ther function than the term earlier used 'destruent'), such as bacteria and fungi and given back to the plant roots in return for sugar (with high exergy content, there is a lack of such things down under).
A rain forest is typical of an ecosystem that does not leach phosphorus at all. (Until you cut it down.) This is how eco-systems cope.
In our society, we have a developed linear flow of phosphorus from mines to seas. That is not good. When phosphorus reaches the sea it will not come back to land for another ten million years or so.
The challenge is to set up a society that recycles phosphorus so it remains on land longer. And we need to find a way to do that with a low energy intensity. This is not new; it is exactly what was done in pre-industrial societies. Look at meadow -field agricultural. The meadow was depleted by removing food and giving it to the animals. The animal manure was put on the field so they could grow things that were more nutrient demanding. The nutrients leaked back to the meadows. It worked very well until people started to go move to urban areas.
They needed food too, so they started sending food to the urban areas from the meadow field system. The nutrients were depleted from the meadow fields system in this way and so people started to starve and move to America and wherever. I believe the emigration to America could be explained in some ways by this.
Then they invented fertilizers. Phosphorus now comes from the mines onto the meadow field system so they could produce even more food for the cities.
But then you get this linear flow from the mines to the cities to the seas and the nutrients never flow back.
Could someone take your material from the web and set up their own Eco-unit?
I help people who want to start such a community. The solutions are always individual. Right now, I am working with off-grid systems, that is to say systems that do not need support of municipal waste water systems or electricity. I am concentrating on water.
So this is both producing fresh water and handling wastewater?
The system produces no wastewater at all. Source separating toilets are part of a solution that creates waste so clean it is cleaner than the output from municipal waste water plants today. You can release it directly into the natural flows. The system municipalities use today I call MIX FIRST SEPARATE LATER or MIFSLA.
It seems your concept uses a range of solutions. Is all the technology available today?
Absolutely… Separation toilets are available and grey water in a humid climate uses a wetpark. For a dry climate we have a concept called living walls, where the grey water is used to irrigate walls of plants. Low technology is all that is needed.
The eco-unit concept provides a community with clean water, food and shelter. The members can then go on to develop various services and specialties, depending on their skills, inclination and local conditions.
To address the challenge of fossil fuel depletion we will probably have to change the balance between the number of people living in the cities and numbers living in rural areas. Could you explain how the eco unit concept addresses this?
Ruralisation is the opposite of urbanization. I worked with many urban planners and believe I have found a strategy to implement eco-units.
A normal city is changing all the time - buildings grow old and are replaced. Just look at a picture of your city fifty or a hundred years ago. If the average building life is 60 years, then the city changes at the rate of 1.6% per year.
I took as the basis for this scenario the average size of an average Swedish municipality - 36,000 inhabitants. I assumed that instead of building the houses on that same plot as the one demolished you build eco units on the periphery of the city, along the roads preferably. Then you start to ruralise at the same pace as the normal replacement rate. After 50 years, only ten percent of the city is left.
Instead of taking one eco unit I put four together. That gives 800 persons, and is enough for shared services like schools, etc. I suggest you start right outside the city. So the city grows into the agricultural land.
People started criticizing the scenario, saying it was a waste of agricultural land. But it is not. First, from an economical point of view, farmers are better off in a ruralised area because they are just raw material produces in an urbanized system. In the ruralised system they are full service providers providing a value added service needing no middle man. The re-ruralised areas have much better biodiversity and nutrient retention capacity than the urbanized areas.
Another criticism is that people say they do not want to live in such a lonely area. It is not. You can put four eco-units together, which means you have 800 close neighbors around you. You have 5,000 in walking distance. In cycling distance of 3km you have 17,000 people. There are enough people around you to support a football team or a choir in walking distance.
One key ingredient is a local economical system like LETS. I have seen situations where they work well with about 2-300 persons, but not well with 10,000 without adaptation. Suppose each of these villages has its own LETS system, but you admit into the system the neighboring villages as one member. You can sell and buy things between villages.
As each village joins the others’ systems they get connected to each other in a network. This creates an economic system with a market economy without the problems of today’s global system where you need exponential growth in order just to keep it going.
A market economy is one thing, capitalism is another. We tend to lump these two together.
LETS is a typical example of a market economy without capitalism. In the LETS system you can buy from people you know, you have a good idea of how much they have had to work for that item, so you know what it is worth.
Besides that, the farmer will need a lot of help at certain times of the year. She can pay people with LETS.
And people can buy food with the LETS money, so you see we get a system that can work quite well.
It all sounds very possible. If you could wish for anything just now, what would you want to happen to make it real?
I look forward to oil depletion. (Laughter). The need will be much more obvious in that situation. It is more complicated to ask people to think of another system and plan for it when the need is not obvious.. For example, it was complicated to get lifeboats put on the Titanic. People were saying; “This ship cannot sink so we need lifeboats mostly as decoration”.
We see agriculture the same way, as a decoration.
Maybe I would wish for the good examples around to become better known. One is in the village of HULTA south east of Linköping in central Sweden. An organic farmer was on the look-out for ways to improve the nutrient flow to his fields without buying them, which is not allowed under the organics farming licence (KRAV). He found these nutrients in the septic tanks of his neighbors. They created an association, the HULTA kretsloppsförening, and he took what was in the tanks and put it onto the land and started to sell the produce to the same neighbors. They in turn started to get interested in his fields as they realized their bread was coming from them.
They became more interested in the local system and started to install source separation toilets. As they saw what could be done they started to form other local groups and built, for example, meeting rooms.
One of the best places to start is the periphery of a city where you have the interface to agriculture. I do not place much hope on our so-called enlightened decision makers in central government. People should start working locally. Let’s face it – all you need is one hundred friends and a farmer!
You may contact Folke Günther at Folke @ holon.se
