By David Sheen
8 July 2011 The neo-liberal global economic system is on its deathbed, and Israel may soon have to provide for all of its own food and fuel needs, instead of trading for them with other countries, says a senior Israel agronomist. Dr. Elaine Soloway of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura says that the main cause for the collapse of international markets and subsequent retooling of Israeli industry to produce almost all necessities locally will be the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels. “The idea that everybody’s going to produce specialties, and them fly them around all over the world, that’s going to be history,” Soloway insists. “Raising vegetables and shipping them to places that are up to their eyeballs in water doesn’t make any sense. We are selling our water cheaply to the Dutch, who are drowning,” she says, referring to the large amounts of water necessary to grow vegetables, which are then exported. “The Dutch have to put up greenhouses, and we have to stop selling them peppers.” “That means that our production has to be geared up to be able to do the things that we can do for ourselves,” she says. Soloway’s scientific work is intended to prepare Israeli agriculture for this scenario. She researches and develops uses for indigenous perennials that require very little in the way of water; in other words, plants that survive and thrive in Israel’s semi-arid environment, without industrial irrigation, chemical fertilizers, or other intense forms of human intervention. Soloway is part of a small but growing number of Israelis who are preparing for what energy experts call ‘peak oil’: the point at which global demand for petroleum permanently outstrips global supply. While most modern citizens assume that scientists will soon discover or develop other alternative sources of energy to replace the planet’s rapidly-depleting supply of fossil fuels, ‘peakers’ are firmly convinced that it’s highly unlikely they’ll do so in time. Many peakers also believe that the end of the oil era will trigger significant declines, not only in global trade, but in technological levels of operation across whole societies. “What’s going to happen is a general unwinding of the progress of man during the industrial revolution,” says David Schutt, another Anglo-Israeli who edited Soloway’s most recent book, ‘Growing Bread on Trees’, and is also concerned with preparing for the post-peak oil era. “We’re not going to go back to the way life was in 1869, before oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania, and Baku, Azerbaijan in that same year. Were not going to go back to that time, because none of us know how to live that way anymore!” […]
Preparing for the end of the world as we know it
