Lasse Nordlund - Foundations of Our Life

exarh79 · Jan 23, 2010

Esteem, it will be pleasant to you: Lasse Nordlund - Foundations of Our Life

Also translate please with help (translate.google.com) from Russian into English here this article if who can: http://design.antigov.org/txt/Game_rules_of_the_free_person.htm
Also throw to me it on email: jon@ya.ru

Only a poor farmer buys products he can produce himself. This is an old Roman proverb I found in a farmer's manual from the 50's.
After the mid-1980s I became interested in self-sufficient way of living. Self-sufficiency┬аprovided the solution when I was finishing my schooling and unable to find myself a place in the dominant society. A strong desire to take part in building the society clashed with gnawing issues of conscience: could I participate in developing a society, if I felt it was built on nothing? The country at that time was Germany, where our family migrated from Finland in 1972. For me, self- sufficiency became synonymous with liberty of conscience. Producing everything I need by myself meant an opportunity to choose from the bottom of my heart what to put my labour into. In 1990 I settled down again in Finland.

After a few initial years of endeavour, I got a confirmation that the myth of the superiority of technical development is severely distorted. Farming by hand, collecting┬аfirewood without machines, and handicraft using "primitive techniques" showed me the actual┬аrelationship between a labour input and its product. The use of resources changes dramatically,┬аwhen you must acquire them by hand. I started theorizing my early experiences, and the result was┬аa lecture in 1991, the summary of which was published in several papers in the Spring of 2007. For┬аseveral years, I lectured around Finland in the wintertime, but then I wanted to become thoroughly┬аself-sufficient and test my theory in practise. I was surprised by how little money one can get by┬аwith: my dependency on money would drop to 30-50 Euros a year. There weren't many corrections I would have to make to the conclusions in my lecture. Since then I've spent my years farming,┬аand I've also found time for hobbies and societal participation. At the moment my studies have┬аshifted in a more communal direction. At the outset, the project was an individual's project, and a┬аrather stringent one. Currently, I'm interested in how far it can be applied communally and with a family.

In this essay, which is divided in five parts I deal with a society that is environmentally┬аsustainable. I begin by looking at human and machine labour in terms of energy. From this I┬аcontinue to investigate the peculiar link between energy and money. In the third part I assess the┬аrelationship between human communities and energy. There I reach conclusions which would make it very important that we stop thinking solely in terms of nations when we think of human┬аcommunities. A state is only one way how humans ca┬аgroup. In the following two parts we're┬аlooking for possibilities of change. Actually I'm dealing mostly with obstacles on a way towards┬аsustainable lifestyle, than with promising attempts making this world a better one.We owe ourselves an explanation why nothing seems to offer us more liberty than the prevailing society. This series on the Foundations of Our Life closes with ideas on what an individual can do without being insignificant in his actions.

Lasse Nordlund, 2008

Foundations of Our Life

Part 1

I.) Human labour, machines and energy

In the past, working meant performing manual labour in gathering, hunting and farming economies.┬аIt meant using labour energy (or work in a physical sense) to get food, and food energy was collected from the nature. The lives of the people who came before us were founded on this balanced exchange of energy, and this balance made them self-sufficient. Our use of resources was based on the work we could do by ourselves, and was not augmented by outside energy inputs. A relationship formed between a human and his use of resources and it helped him to live┬аsustainably. To preserve the nature, we should still strive to work this way. It is the only way of┬аworking and living we know by extensive historical evidence to be sustainable.

Even today, everyone is dependent on energy that is collected in primary production. In Western┬аcountries, only a minority of their respective populations тАУ 4.5% in Finland i┬а2003 тАУ works in┬аagriculture, fishing and game husbandry, and even this minority does not acquire the energy it needs for food, heating and clothing by manual labour and directly from the nature. Food is harvested indirectly, using machines and additional energy. What is the relationship between this used energy and the energy that is collected using it? Why half of imported (i.e. primary) energy is used in agriculture and forestry тАУ areas that were supposed to feed us with energy?
The balanced relationship between our work and collected energy collapsed critically with industrialization. Currently, we are constantly using energy we have not collected from the nature by manual labour, where the sun keeps storing it in plants. As we are not acquiring our livelihood directly from the nature, we must feed into the system the missing amount of energy for example in the form of┬аfossil fuels. This way energy and matter that are foreign to the system's ecological balance are funnelled into the biosphere.

Unlike it's generally presumed, we did not manage to make energy collection in primary┬аproduction more efficient by the use of technology, or by a sophisticated division of labour. A tractor pulling a seven-bladed plough may look efficient, but it collects food energy a lot less efficiently than a person working by hand in a garden тАУ when we take into account the energy and working time inputs more broadly than just for the individual farmer. To figure this out, we must assess how much energy it takes to collect primary energy indirectly, in a mechanized way. The results must be compared to the energy input that would have been necessary if had we collected the same amount of energy manually, using only simple tools.

During their lifespans, machines use energy as fuels and through maintenance, but also during the manufacturing process and eventually when they are disposed of. When a machine is manufactured, the more technologically advanced the machine is, the more energy will go into making it. This is because the energy needed to make a particular machine includes the energy it took to build all the machinery used to make it, and the energy used to build the machines that built that machinery as well.

In practice, we can trace the energy inputs in a manufacturing pyramid only to a limited extent, so the sum of energy inputs we get will always be less than what has really been used in the making of a machine. Even though, say a computer's dimensions are small, to manufacture one requires a large, energy consuming infrastructure from a network of roads to information networks.
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