[Scpg] Catch and Store Energy - green wizardry

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

Permaculture's 2nd principle -- Catch and Store Energy -- can be applied  
not only to physical energies from sun, wind and water but also to the 
invisible  life force itself, according to John Michael Greer, author of the 
Archdruid  blog, who now sounds like a permaculturist but doesn't mention  
permaculture...
 
Linda
 
_http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/07/ways-of-force.html_ 
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/07/ways-of-force.html)    
 
The  Ways Of The Force
 
 
By now those of my readers  who have joined me on the current Archdruid 
Report  
project – the creation  of a “green wizardry” using the heritage of the 
appropriate technology movement  of the Seventies – should have downloaded at 
least one of their textbooks and  either have, or be waiting for the 
imminent arrival of, the rest. Now it’s time  to get into the core principles of 
green wizardry, and the best way to do it  involves shifting archetypes a bit. 
Give me a moment to slip on a brown robe,  tuck something less clumsy or 
random than a blaster into my belt, and practice  my best Alec Guinness 
imitation: yes, Padawans, you’re about to start learning  the ways of the Force. 
Well, almost. The concept that George Lucas borrowed from Asian mysticism 
for  his Star Wars movies is an extraordinarily widespread and  ancient one; 
very nearly the only languages on earth that don’t have a commonly  used 
word for an intangible life force connected to the breath are those spoken  
nowadays in the industrial nations of the modern West. I’ll leave it to my  
readers to make up their own minds about what the remarkable durability of this 
 idea might imply, and to historians of ideas to debate whether it was one 
of the  sources that helped shape the modern scientific concept of energy; 
the point  that needs making is that it’s this latter concept that will be 
central to this  week’s post. 
That’s understating things by more than a little. Everything we’ll be  
exploring over the weeks and months to come has to do with energy: where it  
comes from, what it can and can’t do, how it moves through whole systems, and  
where it goes. In the most pragmatic of senses, understand energy and you  
understand the whole art of green wizardry; in the broadest of senses,  
understand energy and you understand the predicament that is looming up like a  
wave in front of the world’s industrial societies, and what we can and can’
t  expect to get done in the relatively short time we have left before that  
predicament crests, breaks, and washes most of the modern world’s 
certainties  away. 
Let’s start with some basic definitions. Energy is the capacity to do work. 
 It cannot be created or destroyed, but the amount and kind of work it can 
do can  change. The more concentrated it is, the more work it can do; the 
more diffuse  it is, the less work it can do. Left to itself, it moves from 
more concentrated  to more diffuse forms over time, and everything you do with 
energy has a price  tag measured in a loss of concentration. These are the 
groundrules of  thermodynamics, and everything a green wizard does comes 
back to them in one way  or another. 
Let’s look at some examples. A garden bed, to begin with, is a device for  
collecting energy from the sun by way of the elegant biochemical dance of  
photosynthesis. Follow a ray of sunlight from the thermonuclear cauldron of 
the  sun, across 93 million miles of hard vacuum and a few dozen miles of 
atmosphere,  until it falls on the garden bed. Around half the sunlight 
reflects off the  plants, which is why the leaves look bright green to you instead 
of flat black;  most of the rest is used by the plants to draw water up from 
the ground into  their stems and leaves, and expel it into the air; a few 
per cent is caught by  chloroplasts – tiny green disks inside the cells of 
every green plant, descended  from blue-green algae that were engulfed but not 
destroyed by some ancestral  single-celled plant maybe two billion years 
ago – and used to turn water and  carbon dioxide into sugars, which are rich 
in chemical energy and power the  complex cascade of processes we call life. 
Most of those sugars are used up keeping the plant alive. The rest are 
stored  up until some animal eats the plant. Most of the energy in the plants 
the animal  eats gets used up keeping the animal alive; the rest get stored 
up, until  another animal eats the first animal, and the process repeats. 
Sooner or later  an animal manages to die without ending up in somebody else’s 
stomach, and its  body becomes a lunch counter for all the creatures – and 
there are a lot of them  – that make their livings by cleaning up dead things. 
By the time they’re  finished with their work, the last of the energy from 
the original beam of  sunlight that fell on the garden bed is gone. 
Where does it go? Diffuse background heat. That’s the elephant’s graveyard 
of  thermodynamics, the place energy goes to die. Most often, when you do 
anything  with energy – concentrate it, move it, change its form – the price 
for that gets  paid in low-grade heat. All along the chain from the 
sunlight first hitting the  leaf to the last bacterium munching on the last scrap 
of dead coyote, what isn’t  passed onward in the form of stored chemical 
energy is turned directly or  indirectly into heat so diffuse that it can’t be 
made to do any work other than  jiggling molecules a little. The metabolism 
of the plant generates a trickle of  heat; the friction of the beetle’s legs 
on the leaf generates a tiny pulse of  heat; the mouse, the snake, and the 
coyote all turn most of the energy they take  in into heat, and all that heat 
radiates out into the great outdoors, warming  the atmosphere by a tiny 
fraction of a degree, and slowly spreading up and out  into the ultimate heat 
sink of deep space. 
That’s the first example. For the second, let’s take a solar water heater, 
 the simple kind that’s basically a tank in a glassed-in enclosure set on 
top of  somebody’s roof. Once again we start with a ray of sunlight crossing 
deep space  and Earth’s murky atmosphere to get to its unintended target. 
The sun passes  through the glass and slams into the black metal of the water 
tank, giving up  much of its energy to the metal in the form of heat. Inside 
the metal is water,  maybe fifty gallons of it; it takes a fair amount of 
heat to bring fifty gallons  of water to the temperature of a good hot bath, 
but the steady pounding of  photons from the sun against the black metal 
tank will do the trick in a few  hours. 
Most of what makes building a solar water heater complex is a matter of  
keeping that heat in the water where it belongs, instead of letting it leak 
out  as – you guessed it – diffuse background heat. The glass in front of the 
tank is  there to keep moving air from carrying heat away, and it also 
helps hold heat in  by way of a clever bit of physics: most of the energy that 
matter absorbs from  visible light downshifts to infrared light as it tries 
to escape, and glass lets  visible light pass through it but reflects 
infrared back the way it came. (This  is known as the greenhouse effect, by the 
way, and we’ll be using it over and  over again, not least in greenhouses.) All 
surfaces of the tank that aren’t  facing the sun are surrounded by 
insulation, which also helps keep heat from  sneaking away. If the system’s a good 
one, the pipes that carry hot water down  from the heater to the bathtub and 
other uses are wrapped with insulation. Even  so, some of the energy slips 
out from the tank, some of it makes a break for it  through the insulation 
around the pipes, and the rest of it starts becoming  background heat the 
moment it leaves the faucet for the bathtub or any other  use. 
Here’s a third example: a house on a cold winter day. The furnace keeping 
it  warm, let’s say, is fueled by natural gas; that means the ray of sunlight 
that  ultimately powers the process came to Earth millions of years ago and 
was  absorbed by a prehistoric plant. The plant died without being munched 
by a  passing dinosaur, and got buried under sediment with some of its 
stored energy  intact. Millions of years of heat and pressure underground turned 
that stored  energy into very simple hydrocarbons such as methane and 
ethane. Fast forward to  2010, when the hydrocarbons found their way through pores 
in the rock to a  natural gas well and got shipped by pipeline, possibly 
over thousands of miles,  to the house where it gets burnt. 
The furnace turns the energy of that ancient sunlight to relatively  
concentrated heat, which flows out through the house, keeping it warm. Now the  
fun begins, because that concentrated energy – to put things in 
anthropomorphic  terms – wants nothing in the world half as much as to fling itself 
ecstatically  into dissolution as diffuse background heat. The more quickly it can 
do that,  though, the more natural gas has to be burnt to keep the house at 
a comfortable  temperature. If you’re the green wizard in charge, your goal 
is to slow down the  dionysiac rush of seeking its bliss, and make it hang 
around long enough to warm  the house. 
How do you do that? First, you have to know the ways that heat moves from a 
 warm body to a cold one. There are three of them: conduction, which is the 
 movement of heat through solid matter; convection, which is the movement 
of heat  carried on currents of air (or any other fluid); and radiation, 
which is the  movement of heat in the form of infrared light (mostly) through 
any medium  transparent to those wavelengths. You slow down conduction to a 
crawl by putting  insulation in the way; you slow down convection by sealing 
up cracks through  which air can move, and doing a variety of things to stop 
convective currents  from forming; you slow down radiation by putting 
reflective barriers in the way  of its escape. If you don’t do any of these 
things, your house leaks heat, and  your checking account leaks money ; if you do 
all of these things – and they can  be done fairly easily and cheaply – the 
prehistoric sunlight in the natural gas  you burn has to take its time 
wandering out of your house, keeps you comfortable  on the way, and you don’t 
have to spend anything like so much on more natural  gas to replace it. 
There are four points I’d like you to take home from these examples. The  
first is that they’re all talking about the same process – the movement of  
energy from the sun to the background radiation of outer space that passes  
through systems here on earth en route, and accomplishes certain kinds of 
work  on the way. At this point, in fact, the most useful thing you can take 
away from  this entire discussion is the habit of looking everything that 
goes on around  you as an energy flow that starts from a concentrated source – 
almost always the  sun – and ends in diffuse heat radiating out into space. 
If you pick up the  habit of doing this, you’ll find that a great deal of 
the material that will be  covered in posts to come will suddenly seem like 
common sense, and a great many  of the habits that have are treated as normal 
behavior in our society will  suddenly reveal themselves as stark staring 
lunacy. 
An exercise, which I’d like to ask those readers studying this material to 
do  several times over the next week, will help get this habit in place. 
Draw a  rough flow chart for one or more versions of this process. Take a piece 
of  paper, draw a picture of the sun at the top, and draw a trash can at 
the bottom;  label the trash can “Background Heat.” Now draw the important 
components in any  system you want to understand, and draw arrows connecting 
them to show how the  energy moves from one component to another. If you’re 
sketching a natural  system, draw in the plants, the herbivores, the 
carnivores, and the decomposers,  and sketch in how energy passes from one to 
another, and from each of them to  the trash can; if you’re sketching a human 
system, the energy source, the  machine that turns the energy into a useful 
form, and the places where the  energy goes all need to be marked in and 
connected. Do this with a variety of  different systems. It doesn’t matter at this 
stage if you get all the details  right; the important thing is to start 
thinking in terms of energy flow. 
The second point to take home is that natural systems, having had much more 
 time to work the bugs out, are much better at containing and using energy 
than  most human systems are. The solar water heater and the house with its 
natural  gas furnace take concentrated energy, put it to one use, and then 
lose it to  diffuse heat. A natural ecosystem, by contrast, can play hot 
potato with its own  input of concentrated energy for a much more extended 
period, tossing it from  hand to hand (or, rather, leaf to paw to bacterial 
pseudopod) for quite a while  before all of the energy finally follows its bliss. 
The lesson here is simple:  by paying attention to the ways that natural 
systems do this, green wizards can  get hints that can be incorporated into 
human systems to make them less wasteful  and more resilient. 
The third point is that energy does not move in circles. Next week we’ll be 
 talking about material substances, which do follow circular paths – in 
fact,  they do this whether we want them to do so or not, which is why the 
toxic waste  we dump into the environment, for example, ends up circling back 
around into our  food and water supply. Energy, though, moves along a 
trajectory with a beginning  and an end. The beginning is always a concentrated 
source, which again is almost  always the sun; the end is diffuse heat. 
Conceptually, you can think of energy  as moving in straight lines, cutting across 
the circles of matter and the far  more complex patterns of information gain 
and loss. Once a given amount of  energy has followed its trajectory to the 
endpoint, for all practical purposes,  it’s gone; it still exists, but the 
only work it’s capable of doing is making  molecules vibrate at whatever the 
ambient temperature happens to be. 
The fourth and final point, which follows from the third, is that for all  
practical purposes, energy is finite. It’s become tolerably common for 
believers  in perpetual technological progress and economic growth to insist that 
energy is  infinite, with the implication that human beings can up and walk 
off with as  much of it as they wish. It’s an appealing fantasy, flattering 
to our collective  ego, and it makes use of a particular kind of mental 
trap that Garrett Hardin  anatomized quite a while ago. In his useful 
bookFilters Against Folly,  Hardin pointed out that the word “infinite” – along with 
such synonyms as  “limitless” and “boundless” – are thoughtstoppers 
rather than meaningful  concepts, because the human mind can’t actually think 
about infinity in any  meaningful sense. When somebody says “X is infinite,” 
in other words, what he is  actually saying is “I refuse to think about X.” 
Still, there’s a more specific sense in which talk about infinite energy is 
 nonsense by definition. At any given place and time, the amount of energy 
that  is available in a concentration and a form capable of doing any 
particular kind  of work is finite, often distressingly so. Every ecosystem on 
earth has evolved  to make the most of whatever energy is available to do the 
work of keeping  living things alive, whether that energy takes the form of 
equatorial sunlight  shining down on the Amazon rain forest, chemical energy 
in sulfur-laden water  surging up from hot springs at the bottom of the sea, 
or fat stored up during  the brief Arctic warm season in the bodies of the 
caribou that attract the  attention of a hungry wolf pack. 
Thus it’s crucial to recognize that available energy is always limited, and 
 usually needs to be carefully coaxed into doing as much work as you want 
to get  done before the energy turns into diffuse background heat. This is as 
true of  any whole system, a garden as much as a solar hot water system, a 
well-insulated  house, or any other project belonging to the field of 
appropriate tech. Learn to  think in these terms and you’re well on your way to 
becoming a green  wizard.

 
 
 




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20100715/8cc1243d/attachment.html>