Well, you were suggesting, if I understood you correctly that your proposed solution to oil-related sustainability problems was nothing to do with corporations or governments, but was entirely the responsibility of concerned citizens. I then did a quick review of the way that an individual contributes to fossil fuel consumption and sketched out some ideas for how to reduce it in line with sustainability.
Let's take point 1) and I'll sort of touch on the bits of points 2) & 3) which you're asking about in the process. Let me know if you want more on those.
I certainly don't want to become a subsistence farmer, but one of the places that a great deal of that oil goes is into our food systems. So if you want to make a big difference as an individual to that process, there is only so far you can go without changing the underlying process. For example, you can make a choice to only eat organic-certified food. That means that the oil used to make the pesticide and fertiliser is removed. It doesn't do much about farm machinery, but that's relatively minor compared to the industrial costs of fertiliser/pesticide production and all the stuff that happens between the food leaving the farm gate and ending up on the table. Right now though, organic food is sold at a large premium, so that choice is only available to those who can afford it, not to the general mass of the population, although concerns about food safety are widespread here and many more people probably would switch to organic if they could afford to. You can also decide to consume only locally produced food purchased from farm shops or farmer's markets. That cuts out a big chunk of oil use between the farm gate and the supermarket shelf. Again that requires that you live somewhere where this choice is feasible. For it to be a choice everybody can make, that requires some kind of change in agriculture or in settlement patterns or in both, that results in sufficient food being grown within walking distance of everybody, for everybody to have that choice.
You can also, as many UK citizens choose to do, get an allotment. That's about 300 sq yrds, available for a rent of around £20 per annum from most local authorities, that you can use to grow some of your food. Again though, while where I live an allotment is fairly easy to come by, if you live in Central London say there is (or so I understand) a waiting several list years long for one. Of course if you've got enough money (say half a million or so) and spare time, you can have a kitchen garden even in Central London. Again though it's a matter of where you live and/or how much money you have.
There is also a further issue regarding imported foods. They generally have very high energy costs. E.g. a Kenyan mango requires 1000 units of oil energy to deliver one unit of food energy (I may have missed out a zero or two) This leads to the question of land use. The UK has a population of 60 million and about 60 million acres of land total, with something like 25% or so being arable land. This raises some interesting questions about how one reduces food imports. Taking the
limit case of no imports of food or energy and working backwards, assuming standard organic farming and EU levels of energy use supported by a mix of technologies that includes biomass and other land-intensive sustainable energy sources, you'd need about, 7.45 acres each (based on figures derived from Pimentel "Food, Energy and Society") That clearly isn't workable, but you can improve the yield per acre considerably by moving to labour intensive market gardening methods, rather than standard organic agriculture methods. Similarly you can probably reduce that biomass energy use significantly by other methods, such as the ones I was describing above. So big improvements are at least possible in principle, assuming you can find political and/or economic ways to make them happen. All an individual household can really do though, is move to a smallholding and that's only really an option for people with a few hundred thousand pounds of capital and some way of earning a living beyond basic subsistence farming.
Your point about the labour cost of food production is quite correct, under present market conditions. However, depending on overall trends in oil prices that might start to change. If we are discussing trying to remove oil as far as possible from our food systems, a reasonable thought-experiment is to take a look at Cuba during the Special Period (ie after the collapse of the Soviet Union created a situation where they suddenly stopped getting heavily subsidised oil and fertiliser/pesticides) see e.g.
this this and
this The Cubans had no choice but to find ways of doing without these things (at least in the quantities they'd previously used) or starve, the stuff they came up with is extremely interesting, combining state action (providing land, seeds, tools, scientists, education and publicity), urban horticulture and local market principles in some very ingenious ways. Now, anyone who has been there can tell you that the Cubans didn't enjoy this a bit, and nobody would want to go through that experience by choice. It still provides a very interesting study in where the impacts of radically reduced oil consumption fall and how a people who
had to come to terms with it managed to.
There are some aspects of this kind of stuff that are not immediately obvious, because they involve second order effects. That's where the thing about source-separating toilets comes in. If you want to maintain production levels, while removing industrial fertilisers from the picture, then our current sewage systems might have to change, because we'd want to locally recycle every bit of nutrient we could, rather than spending a lot of oil energy industrially producing fertiliser, then flushing most of the nutrients out to sea as we do now. If you want the nutrient recycling to be efficient then you can remove the energy cost of separating sterile urine from non-sterile feces by not mixing them in the first place, then recycling both locally along with animal manures and plant residues, to use the results to grow food locally, hence the stuff about settlement patterns and source-separating toilets.
It's also not just about oil. Other second order effects of industrial agriculture relevant to sustainability include soil erosion and the loss of ecosystem services that goes along with the loss of biodiversity. e.g. pollinating insects.
Now, I'm not proposing that one has to immediately do *all* of the stuff on the lists of actions that I suggested above. What I was up to was illustrating the kind of stuff that one might be talking about, in order to make sustainable choices available to majority of the population in someplace like the UK. In part because I think it's always useful to discuss that stuff as widely as possible and in part to show how anything beyond gestures by a few middle-class hippies, certainly anything that would make a significant overall impact, is likely to require substantial changes in the way our society works. Interestingly there are some indications of a trend in this direction, see e.g.
Who's organic in the UK? but at present that trend, in line with the emphasis on consumer choice, is mostly driven by members of the middle-classes who can afford to make sustainable choices about certain aspects of their lifestyle.
Imagine the expense and energy such an endeavor would need. The rest of point 2 is strange, I'm not sure what to think about it.
