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The Converging Crisis: Ecology, Energy and Economics
Paul Chefurka (“GliderGuider”), The Oil Drum
I’ll be giving a general-audience lecture in Ottawa tonight entitled “The Converging Crisis: Ecology, Energy and Economics”. It will cover the background (i.e. the litany of doom) that we’re all too familiar with. However, the second half of the talk is dedicated to community responses — a potpourri of ideas for community action with a decidedly adaptive/protective orientation. The topics of hope will include Kerala, “Gaia’s antibodies”, Permaculture, Terra Preta, Transition Towns, local currencies and co-housing.
I don’t breath a word about die-off.
A PDF of the slides and speakers notes is available on my web site: The Converging Crisis (2.5 Mb PDF).
… It’s at 7:00 at the McNabb Community Center, 180 Percy St., free admission. Please let anyone who might be interested know about it.
(30 January 2008)
A Prosperous Way Down (PDF)
Elisabeth C. Odum, Unicamp (Brazil)
ABSTRACT
The first premise of the Prosperous Way Down is that fossil fuels are being used faster than the earth is making them and that there are (and will be) no new energy sources with as much power as fossil fuels.
The second idea is that human civilization can be prosperous as it goes down to a lower energy world. To explain these hypotheses there is a review of the principles of emergy, its calculation and its use in evaluations and predictions.
Tables of emergy per person and emergy per dollar of many countries are the bases for evaluations of international relationships. Examples are given of the use of emergy in possible solutions of problems like unequal migration, production, war, terrorism, and international trade. Scientists can use these methods to show how civilization can decline thoughtfully rather than collapse miserably.
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper is based on one of H. T. Odum’s special projects: the future of human civilization. He put together facts, explanations and predictions in many papers and the book we wrote together, A Prosperous Way Down (Odum and Odum, 2001). Instead of anticipating a crash, a possible, hopeful, view of the future is predicted. These discussions and conclusions are based on two hypotheses. The first, with which most scientists agree, is that we (the world and our economy) are going down (there will be fewer resources to live on). The second, less considered, is that the lower energy future can be prosperous and happy – depending on our human actions. Our plans and activities must include the world environment as well as the economy…
Elisabeth C. Odum – Professor Emeritus Santa Fe Community College, Gainesville, Florida
(June 2004)
Elisabeth Odum is the widow and co-author with ecologist Howard T. Odum of the book “A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies” published in 2003. (Excerpt and links at EB). A paperback version of the book will issued this June, according to Ann Wendland of the University Press of Colorado. She adds: “The book is also currently available for backorders at 800.627.7377 or 405.325.2000-our distributor, the University of Oklahoma Press.”
H.T. Odum’s books and articles sometime seem like manuscripts from an advanced civilization that were published in our era by mistake — Odum does not think as other people do. Consequently one doesn’t gulp down Odum’s ideas, the way one does with most other thinkers, nor can one make easy generalizations.
David Holmgren has acknowledged H.T. Odum as one of the sources of his ideas about permaculture. Odum’s thinking about embodied energy (“emergy”), ecology and energy analysis are influential in the sustainability and peak oil movements. Yet there is much more. This paper by Elisabeth Odum begins to apply energy analysis to areas as diverse as immigration, globalization, and an international “minimum emerge wage.” My head begins to spin when the talk turns to energy, shared information and religions. Hopefully the book will make this all clear. The writings that she co-authored with her husband seem to be less technical and more understandable than the ones he wrote alone.
-BA
A Global View of Peopled Nature
Chad Monfreda, WorldChanging
The maps we make of the world say a lot about how we think of ourselves in it. Most world maps put people in one box and nature in another. However, many of the ideas we talk about at Worldchanging-personal planets, planetary gardening, colonizing Earth, ecosystem services, ecological handprints-challenge that kind of thinking. Fortunately, a new world map re-imagines people and the planet in a brilliantly compelling way that may help overcome the bad rap old-school environmentalism as gotten for pitting people against nature.
In an article titled ‘Putting People in the Map’ published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Erle Ellis at the University of Maryland and Navin Ramankutty at McGill University have come up with the idea of anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes for short. Anthromes are a play on biomes, the large-scale vegetation patterns ecologists use to map the planet. Open any introductory ecology textbook and you will see vivid colors mapping the planet’s tropical and boreal forests, tundra, shrubland and other biomes derived from climate, geography, and terrain. The problem with biomes, however, is that they hardly exist any more as large tracks of undisturbed landscape.
…Anthromes, by contrast, combine human settlements and land-use with natural vegetation. Instead of the either/or maps between, say, tropical forests or human agriculture, anthromes map a continuum of 15 landscape classes ranging from dense settlements, through irrigated villages, remote croplands, residential rangelands, and, ultimately, to wildlands. (You can download a large image or view the map in Google Earth, Google Maps, or Virtual Earth here.)
The world seen through anthromes is quite different from earlier maps and makes existing measures of the human footprint seem quaint. Estimates that humans consume 25% of the Earth’s photosynthesis are striking enough. Seen through anthromes, however, 90% of the planet’s photosynthesis is on human-dominated lands. Not only that, but 25% of global tree cover does not occur in forests at all but in croplands-more than the 20% of tree cover found in remote forests.
(29 January 2008)
