Chad Hellwinckel, Knoxville Permaculture Guild

How did you get interested in permaculture and why did you think it was important to introduce it to Knoxville?

This isn’t like a gardening club, it comes out of my work, I examine a lot of energy-related issues around switchgrass, forestation and agriculture and we’re coming up on peak oil right now — some of the first signs of the energy crunch are the higher prices and in the future, we’re going to be in a lot more of an energy-scarce world so it’s something that is really necessary, these good ideas.

Our livelihoods can be maintained and even improved in an energy-scarce world, and now’s the time to get the ideas out there, propagate them in the neighborhoods and get people to see them working so they can understand them before the next five to 10 years when the energy crunch really starts to hit and the quantity of oil coming out of the ground starts to decline by 4 percent each year every year. It’s going to be a big human challenge so that’s the serious answer to why I’m doing it, but also it’s fun working with people, networking and getting a group of people together.

Up until now, energy has been so incredibly cheap we can get our food from California, ship it in, use nitrogen from natural gas to grow our food, and get our water from electric plants pumping it to our house and all our sewage can go to the sewage treatment plant to be processed and released back into the river. All these vital parts to our living can be done separately because of the cheap energy, but if we found another cheap source of energy tomorrow that was energy-dense where you get a return on your investment — like with oil where you put one calorie into the whole system and you get 40 calories out, it’s incredibly efficient. Bioenergy, for example switchgrass, you put 1 calorie in, you get 1.8 out. It’s not as dense — but if we did find some sort of coal fusion or something tomorrow, permaculture would become a hobby for me and it wouldn’t be necessary.

Since it does seem to be connected to the peak oil theory, can you explain that a little bit? And are we seeing some of the symptoms of it already?

The total quantity of oil has been increasing every year since oil has been discovered — the discoveries of oil peaked about 40 years ago. If you look at every individual oil well, if you puncture the ground and start pumping the oil from it, the oil from that well increases every year for 40 years and then after that it starts decreasing every year. But it takes a while to ramp up and then go down, so we’re really reaping the benefits of that peak in discovery 40 years ago, and since then discoveries have really fallen off.

So we know no matter how high that price gets — they may be able to find big discoveries, even though I don’t think so — but if they did find big discoveries, it would take at least 10, 20, 30 years to get these things ramped up, so we’re reaping the benefits of those discoveries 40 years ago and that’s peaking right now.

It’s kind of a geological fact that no matter how high the prices of oil, there will be less and less quantities of oil coming out of the ground every year. And some people think it actually did peak in 2006, it’s something we won’t really know until it’s already passed and we’ve examined the records, but others think it’s going to peak in the next five years. It might have a plateau for a while and then possibly a 4 percent decline per year. The demand for it is so inelastic, which means we need it so much we can’t really substitute for it, it’s going to affect everything, the way we live, the way we get food.

From the theory that the discoveries peaked 40 years ago, how long can we go on with supplies we have right now?

When you have a resource that’s scarce and increasing in value… oil will probably always be with us because the value will go up to $300, $400 a barrel and so people will ration it and it will always be with us, but right now we’re halfway through all the oil in the ground, we’ve burned half of it. You also have to realize that a lot of that oil burned over a longer period of time when we weren’t using it so intensively. So if we continue to burn it as fast as we are right now, we’ve never burned it faster than we are right now, it would go pretty quickly.