Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Interview with David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture. Holmgren traces the path of permaculture from its roots in the 1970s to its potential, in the future, to reshape how humans interact with the planet. He explains how its premise—working with nature rather than against it—will help us adapt to and survive in a resource-scarce world.
Ever since the beginning of man’s oral history, our cultures have taught lessons, stored memories, and guided group values through stories. Stories are a safety valve, and the linchpin of civilization, according to Bradbury…I’ve recently encountered stories with an Alaskan theme of opposing sides–environmentalist vs. resource extractor–told at three different scales of global, national, and local scales. These stories serve as excellent reflections on how we relate as people within nature and what we need to relocate in terms of connecting with nature and with our community. I will share them below in my own crude attempts at storytelling.
Maybe there will be a peak in the coming years, but cement is a form of “persistent pollution.” Reducing its production – or even stopping it – won’t automatically return built environment to fertile soil. But we can’t eat concrete. Will we ever get our land back?
According to the United Nations, access to reliable and sufficient sources of energy will be critical to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing poverty and hunger by 2015. Many of the world’s poorest people are rural farmers with no connections to power grids or large-scale energy sources. Most of their day-to-day energy currently comes from the burning of wood and charcoal, practices that contribute to air pollution, deforestation, and the loss of precious time and energy collecting firewood.
Today, Nourishing the Planet introduces five sources of renewable energy that are meeting the demands of poor farmers and allowing them to improve their harvests and their lives.
I have tried to write this article many times in the past three to four years. I have changed dramatically in that time, from a full-on, full-time city activist to a rural — well, I don’t know what to call myself now but whatever I am becoming, I feel way more grounded and as if I’m making a real difference, finally, without running away to the hills. In considering the mess of the world, I find it easiest to write about my personal journey, not because I want to talk about myself but because I find the personal easier for people to relate to and because it gives context to my points of view.
In his book Together, Richard Sennett traces the nature and evolution of cooperation in society. He examines the reasons for the lack of cooperation in current society, and how we can reclaim it. As I read, wearing my spectacles made with energy lenses, I saw the give and take of mutualism throughout history as a function in part of societies with surplus energies (high gain) and less surplus energies (low gain).
Obviously the world is so broken, in so many ways, that there is endless patching, mending, fixing to do and no one person can make much progress. Yet, as I have reflected over the years I’ve noticed that there is room to be human and an acceptance of the imperfect in this way of thinking and acting. There is, as in the Japanese concept of shibumi, a virtue in simplicity, modesty, and everydayness.
The increasingly self-conscious pursuit of fun has reshaped the ethos of what life was all about. As early as 1958, the psychoanalyst and writer Martha Wolfenstein suggested that society was seeing the rise of a new “fun morality”: an explicit social imperative to have fun all the time, in all areas of life. However, far from being positive, Wolfenstein saw this fun morality as problematic. It created a source of anxiety in which one felt “ashamed” and “secretly worried” that one wasn’t having as much fun as one ought to be.
In September 2010 I joined a team of latter-day explorers in the Netherlands on a quest to discover what American communities can learn from the Dutch about transforming bicycling in the United States from a largely recreational pastime to an integral part of our transportation system. We were in search of the “27 percent solution”—the health, environmental, economic, and community benefits gained in a nation where more than a quarter of all daily trips are made on bicycle, according to Patrick Seidler, vice-chairman of the Bikes Belong Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to getting more people on bikes more often.
Lloyd’s of London, the world’s biggest insurance market, has become the first major business organisation to raise its voice about huge potential environmental damage from oil drilling in the Arctic.
The City institution estimates that $100bn (£63bn) of new investment is heading for the far north over the next decade, but believes cleaning up any oil spill in the Arctic, particularly in ice-covered areas, would present “multiple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk”.
“Leaves are easy,” Josiah tells me. “It’s the staples we need to look at.” I’m putting together a story on the Urban Food Landscape for the upcoming Transition Free Press. There are all manner of innovative veg growing enterprises in the cities: inner city and peri-urban farms (including Norwich FarmShare which he has helped set up), Abundance projects, collectives like Growing Communities in Hackney, Transition allotments and school gardens. We’re growing chard and lettuce in cracks and crevices, burying potatoes in barrrels, filling salvaged basins and gutters with seedlings in our back yards. But what about the big stuff? Our daily bread.
Atamai Village is an attempt to respond intelligently to the risks and opportunities outlined in other chapters of this book. Atamai villagers hope that the evolving responses in their settlement, in whole or in part, will be useful for many others, including those in urban areas. The response needs to take into account the need to mitigate climate change and adapt to low or zero fossil fuel use, the constraints of sea-level rise over the next century, the need to step outside, as much as possible, the mainstream financial system and the importance of a local steady-state economy within the biophysical limits of the region.
