Eating Fossil Fuels

Dale Allen Pfeiffer

Despite what some respected researchers are saying, Peak Oil will be more than just a liquid fuel crisis. Oil is important to so many facets of our socioeconomic system that the impacts of production decline will be felt everywhere and in everything. Peak Oil will impact the plastics industry, the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the metal industry, and agriculture, to name just a few key enterprises that are dependent upon abundant, cheap oil. The Peak Oil crisis will not be solved simply by substituting a different source of liquid fuel.

In Eating Fossil Fuels, I look at just one of these industries: agriculture, examining how dependent modern agriculture is upon fossil fuels, and the potential impact of energy depletion. The book holds a very grim assessment of industrialized, globalized agriculture and the society that has grown dependent upon it.

In this book, I explain how traditional agriculture had reached the limits of possible expansion in the twentieth century. In the second half of the last century, the Green Revolution was able to push back these limits, largely through the use of fossil fuels, fossil fuel based fertilizers, and fossil fuel based pesticides. Yet modern, industrialized agriculture extracted a toll.

That toll was paid through the depletion and degradation of soil and water supplies, through the disruption of the natural cycles that govern life on this planet and the introduction of hazardous chemicals into the food chain, and through the loss of biodiversity and nutritional content. As a result, modern agriculture is approaching a collapse, and the only way to maintain the current level of output, much less an expansion, is through increasing dependency upon fossil fuels and fossil fuel products.

Unfortunately, the human population has expanded at a pace with the bounty of the Green Revolution, and is now well above the carrying capacity of the planet without fossil fuel based agriculture. This book holds some very chilling statistics concerning the number of people that the earth can sustainably support versus our current population.

The book supports its conclusions by looking at case histories of two countries that lost their fossil fuel input in recent times. The author contrasts North Korea, where the loss of fossil fuel input resulted in massive starvation, with Cuba, where the embrace of organic agriculture and permaculture was able to stave off disaster. It is left for the reader to conclude which of these two extremes the United States is currently trending towards.

The book calls for grass roots action to resurrect local, organic agriculture. It is to be noted that, in the history of the United States, major social changes are never initiated by government or corporations, but must begin as a social movement that is reflected in politics and economics only after popular support has grown too big to ignore. Such was the case with labor rights, civil rights and every other major social change that has taken place in this country. Furthermore, changes spearheaded by governments and corporations are not to be trusted. It is by human nature that they are predisposed to be concerned about what is of the most benefit for them, not necessarily to the greater good of society.

Perhaps the most important section of the book is the large listing of resources in the back of the book, which will help the reader to find his or her own solution to the problem. This resource list contains everything from seed companies specializing in organic and heirloom seeds, to organizations which will help the reader locate and get involved in local farmers markets, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture – Wikipedia, Soil Association), community gardening and ecovillages (Wikipedia, Global Ecovillage Network).

Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

New Society Publishers

125 pages. $11.95US/$13.95Can

ISBN: 978-0-86571-565-3

Can be purchased wherever books are sold, or online at:

New Society Publishers: http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/3933

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