By Nicholas Chambers

It is now amazingly clear that many assumptions of the past are not adequate to deal with the predicaments of the present.  Burning fossilized biomass (petroleum, coal, and natural gas) is like setting ablaze the very storehouse of natural capital that contemporary society makes a lot of its materials and products.  As the conquistador Cortez burned up all his ships prior to the inland conquest of the Aztec; humanity is also irreparably launching itself into a new era of energy and thus society.  It will have to rely upon decentralized resource diversity, instead of singular bulk distribution; miniaturization/conservation rather than sloppy efficiency and cheap fuel; and closed loop regenerative operating systems in preference to toxic stains of oil and steel:  indeed, something a bit different than what got us to the present.  
 This new “metaindustrial”(1) society is not a new idea, but now a ripened synthesis of intelligent economics, ecology, industry, and social well-being. Indeed, from the longe durre  perspective of humanity’s course on the only planet with a biosphere, symbiotic systems are both the only choice we’re leaving ourselves as well as the only ones that has ever worked.
Right in our backyard, Crestone/Baca’s federal lands are witnessing the threat of mining of natural gas.  As much as we don’t want to see this sort of industrial development on our horizon, we must face the fact that it is a response to an irrefutable demand.  We use the products made from natural gas (fabrics, steel, plastics, paint, and liquid fuels and chemicals) everyday and burn its sister gas, propane (Liquified Petroleum Gas), to heat our water, cook our food, and warm our homes. 
This exploration and development on the Baca Wildlife Refuge is part of the onslaught of the West for the fossil fuel triad.  Let us resist reckless and impersonal development of our “preserved” lands with all our might, but let us also be designing ulterior solutions for our demand.  Part of this design lies within a reinterpretation of consumptive habits, but also a reallocation of societal capital and government subsidies.  If just some of the aforementioned that is put into “wild cat” drilling were put into energy cycles we could witness, we could have the infrastructure to propagate our own emission-less energy supply without end. 
For instance, every house in the Crestone/Baca area uses propane, yet each one has the potential to create its own gas supply.  Every 150 lbs of human creates enough feedstock for a little bacterium, named Methanogenic archea, to create 1.5 cubic feet of biogas every day.  Within this biogas is CH4 or methane: the natural gas them oil/gold people like to find in the Earth and call theirs.  This 1.5 cubic feet of gas contains about 914 BTUs of energy.  Now, a typical American household person is using around 14,301 to 25,000 BTUs per day of gas energy (the highest in the world, mind you).  This little 914 BTUs may seem like a fraction of what an American “needs,” but with a new era of design and redefining value, this inherent energy can be realized.  In fact, with passive solar heating, super-insulated straw bale houses, solar hot water, and other cutting edge design principles that our community is familiar with, we are a lot closer to a balanced equation as far as gas energy consumed with gas energy potential. 
This is not to say we should all have methane digesters in our backyards or in our greenhouses, but why not neighborhood systems incorporating some livestock, organic refuse, and even, say, an algae feedstock grown just for the purpose of putting into the digester.  Then watch our BTU potential skyrocket.  Or why not utilize this energy as a part of the existing sanitation district where the gas could be turned into electricity and easily sent back throughout our community grid.  A community of one thousand people could create roughly 914,000 BTUs of biogas, or a potential of 268,035 kilowatt hours (268 watt-hours per person) of electricity every day.  And that’s without even trying.   Just imagine what could happen if we were actually working towards harnessing the full potential of this inherent energy source.
Here is another scenario.  The forest-byproducts and saw dust from Mountain Valley Lumber in Saguache together with the municipal trash brought to the Saguache county land fill everyday is enough carbon-containing mass to be gasified into 2.1 mega-watts of electricity.  That’s a potential 500 watt hours per person living in Saguache county everyday.  Add more biomass and/or carbon containing mass from around the valley and that’s just more juice, at the tune 4 mega-watts of electricity for every 100 tons of feedstock.   
To provide some reference of scale, San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative’s substation in Moffat provides Moffat, Crestone/Baca, and the surrounding areas with between 1.5-3.9 mega-watts, depending on the season.  Right now its about sixty-five percent coal-fired electricity:  dirty, outdated, and figuring in all the human health problems, habitat destruction, and carbon sequestering issues, is not cheap anymore.  The horrors of coal are beyond the scope of this article, however, there is a positive beacon on the horizon indicating a growing sanity in the energy economy.  Excel will be putting in a massive 8 mega-watt photovoltaic array on 37 acres near Mosca.  As one of the most expensive forms of energy generation, this is a case in point that high cost currently is not impeding renewable energy manifestation.  Conversely, when a fossil fuel is “cheap,” it usually means that somewhere, someplace there are hidden costs, whether ecological, political or social.
The fossil fuel and extractive industries are rich in exploratory capital not because they are run with meticulously sound operating procedures, but because they didn’t have to make their feedstock.  Time and nature did.  They just rolled the dice and when they won, they really won, and when they lost, they changed card tables.  The difference for a renewable energy economy is that there will not be fortunes made on finding billions of cubic feet of valuable feedstock with minimal input.  Rather, we will have to build and maintain the infrastructure to create our own-- and it will be finite, but perpetual.
Over the last 100 years, society’s “innocent” energy demands created an insatiable one-eyed creature of industry.  At its inception, it might have brought our young nation prosperity, convenience, and freedom, yet for this next era of metaindustry its lack of intelligence is no longer acceptable. The task now is to catch up with this creature, harness it, and give it two more eyes so that it may function as the rest of nature does.

Footnote

1)  William Irwin Thompson, founder and senior fellow of the Linsfarne Association/Crestone Mountain Zen Center, first coined the concept of a “metaindustrial village” in 1977 with the publication Darkness and Scattered Light.