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David Holmgren and FutureScenarios.org (Part 2) (audio)
Jason Bradford, Reality Report via Global Public Media
The Reality Report interviews David Holmgren. David co-invented permaculture over 30 years ago and has been a practitioner and teacher ever since, both at his home in Australia and as a consultant around world. In 2002 he published the book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability that reviewed permaculture in the context of peak energy. More recently, David created a web site called Future Scenarios, see www.futurescenarios.org. This interview is based on that web site and was recorded on July 14, 2008.
The complete interview is nearly two hours long and is therefore broken into two segments. The first installment (link) discussed a broad view of history as related to ecology, energy and societal complexity. The development of permaculture in the context of 1970s economic woes was reviewed. David explains why he created FutureScenarios.org as an alternative to the predominant beliefs in either business as usual or a smooth steady state transition towards “sustainability,” as well as the simplistic notion of a “Mad Max” type collapse.
This second installment covers four “energy descent” scenario groups that correspond to potential variation in the severity of both peak oil and climate change. Scenarios are also viewed as choices, with certain factors, such as social scale and resource availability, influencing the descent path.
[Please note: due to a problem with encoding, this file is larger than it ought to be. A smaller file will be posted within the next day.]
(14 July 2008, but just posted at GPM)
The first part of the interview was posted on GPM about 10 days ago: Holmgren interview (part 1).
The audio is audible, but there are strange patches in Jason’s introduction and in a few other spots (using Windows Media Player). Hopefully, the audio file that will be posted soon will fix the problems. -BA
Energy Bulletin founder Adam Grubb has been working with David Holmgren on his new website discussed in the interview (Future Scenarios). Adam writes:
New content includes thoughts on the relevance of the mainstream sustainability movement in an energy descent world, and the relevance of permaculture to the various energy descent scenarios, plus several other new pages.
David has also recently signed a contract with Chelsea Green for a book version of Future Scenarios to be published in the US early in 2009.
David Holmgren: Relevance of Mainstream Sustainability to Energy Descent
David Holmgren, Future Scenarios
Mainstream approaches to sustainability tend to assume stability if not expansion in the energy flows available to humanity even if there are major transitions in the nature of the energy sources. Consequently, continuity of many of the structures underpinning current social and economic systems is assumed.
For example, modern affluent urban life in a society dominated by service economies may be transformed by revolutions in efficiency but will remain the norm for future sustainable society. Further, it is widely assumed that food production and management of biological resources to provide for human needs will remain a minor part of future economies, and that geopolitical stability will allow globalised trade and other global governance regimes to become increasingly effective as instruments to establish sustainable systems.
These are not so different from the business as usual assumptions about constant growth, but they require not only herculean efforts to build a new energy infrastructure before energy becomes too expensive and unreliable, but also massively reducing our greenhouse gas emissions today, if not yesterday.
There is also the small problem of reforming the monetary system away from dependence on perpetual growth without inducing financial collapse. I say “small problem” with irony of course because growth in economic activity is essential to support the debt based currency which is the very foundation of our money and banking system stretching back to the beginnings of capitalism and its economic precursors.
For these reasons I feel the Techno Stability long-term future has even less prospects than the default future of Techno explosion. Maybe this also helps explain the deep resistance and antagonism in the centres of political and economic power to questioning of the logic of growth.
(August 2008)
A recently posted addition to the voluminous site developed by permaculture co-originator David Holmgren of Australia. According to Adam Grub, the material from the website will be the basis of a book to be published by Chelsea Green in 2009.
The Delusion Revolution: We’re on the Road to Extinction and in Denial
Robert Jensen, AlterNet
Our current way of life is unsustainable. We are the first species that will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive.
“The old future’s gone,” John Gorka sings. “We can’t get to there from here.”
That insight from Gorka, one of my favorite singer/songwriters chronicling the complexity of our times, deserves serious reflection. Tonight I want to argue that the way in which we humans have long imagined the future must be rethought, as the scope and depth of the cascading crises we face become painfully clearer day by day.
Put simply: We’re in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles — if such a road is possible — but I doubt it’s going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going.
Whatever our individual conception of the future, we all should re-evaluate the assumptions on which those conceptions have been based. This is a moment in which we should abandon any political certainties to which we may want to cling.
A version of this essay was delivered to the Interfaith Summer Institute for Justice, Peace, and Social Movements at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on Aug. 11, 2008. Audio files of the talk and discussion are available online from the Radio Ecoshock Show.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of, most recently, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights Books).
(15 August 2008)
Jimmy Carter’s speech is remembered for something he never said—we should recall what he did say
Kevin Mattson, US News and World Report
Past and Present: ‘Malaise’ and the Energy Crisis
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… As with so many other things from the Carter years, the speech has been misremembered, mocked on The Simpsons, or glossed in college textbooks. But with energy prices again reaching record highs, the speech is worth recalling today not simply for what Carter proposed but also for how he did so.
What Carter really did in the speech was profound. He warned Americans that the 1979 energy crisis—both a shortage of gas and higher prices—stemmed from the country’s way of life. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns,” the president said. Consumerism provided people with false happiness, he suggested, but it also prevented Americans from re-examining their lives in order to confront the profound challenge the energy crisis elicited.
“We’ve always believed in something called progress,” Carter explained. The simple version of this big idea was the faith that “piling up of material” goods would ensure a better life. Carter condemned the idea’s naiveté and warned his fellow Americans that they could not live in a world without limits. Selfish individualism (what he once called “me-ism”) wouldn’t pull us through the crisis.
As Americans, Carter explained, we had to stop daydreaming and realize that our reliance on foreign oil made us vulnerable. Here he used a war analogy for his solution—though sometimes a faltering metaphor, it made sense.
Kevin Mattson teaches history at Ohio University and is author most recently of Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America. He’s writing a book about Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech.
(13 August 2008)
