Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In these days of increased concern over food security, resource scarcity and deteriorating ecosystems, the system of design known as permaculture is an important part of finding sustainable solutions.
Assuming the inevitability of a lower energy civilization, How low will it go? What will civilization look like? While accurate prediction is impossible, there are ways to look at the question that provide insights, and can even dispel some visions of ‘gloom and doom’. We know a lot about the way the world looked before the advent of fossil fuels, so we can look at how societies used the available energy late in that period, say 1800 in European civilization and its extensions as a point of departure, and ask, how will the post-petroleum age differ?
The whole story, of course, made more sense when it was gaining popularity in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most children were familiar with sleighs or lumps of coal, and hung their stockings by the chimney anyway, to dry. The oranges we received in our stockings were meaningless to us in the 1970s but precious to our forebears; they were from exotic lands. In “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” Mama was in her kerchief and I in my cap because the houses were cold. Children a century ago would not have found such details cryptic, any more than they would stables and mangers.
There’s plenty of understanding that efficiency measures can sometimes (often) fail if they fall victim to Jevon’s Paradox. The common response is that we need to couple efficiency measures with a carbon tax or similar policy that give people both the means and the incentive to decrease energy consumption. But let’s look at the underlying goal of a carbon tax: to change behavior. How does it change behavior? By penalizing undesirable behavior (financially). The downside to a carbon tax is that it requires overcoming many political hurdles that don’t seem likely to be overcome anytime soon. What are the alternatives?
“The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer for Union of Concerned Scientists, who only a day earlier had been forecasting a likely failure. “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”
Vampires were quick to point out that climate legislation would be good for humans. “Of course we care about the environment,” said eight-hundred year old vampire Neills Carson. “But mainly, we care about humans – they’re our primary food source. And if you guys are all crowded up around Siberia and Canada, fighting for space and getting drowned in tsunamis and dying of malaria and famines in fifty years or so, well, let’s just say that things are going to get ugly. I sure as hell don’t want to live through another century of the Black Death – do you?”
– The empathy of rats, and their urge to liberate companions
– Localization v. Globalization: A False Dichotomy
– Food for Thought: Food Sovereignty in Europe
– The Water, Energy and Food Nexus
– Dan Ariely on Defying Logic (new)
The power of the Transition to Unsustainability relies on the threat of physical force backed up by the story that there is no alternative: that there is no way of belonging. Here in Scotland (as I am sure elsewhere) that story has been given the lie over the last 15 years as communities on the west coast have taken back their land into community ownership.
One of the perennial themes of peak oil discussion over the last decade or so has been what the world will look like once the age of cheap abundant energy comes to a close. While the arguments are ongoing, the answer may already have arrived. With a tip of the hat to green economist Herman Daly, the Archdruid explains.
We, the Indigenous Peoples of the world, united in the face of the climate crisis and the lack of political will of the States, especially the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, demand the immediate adoption of legally binding agreements with shared but differentiated responsibilities, to halt global warming and to define alternative models of development in harmony with Mother Earth.
For the rural Maya, the community being considered was not merely a single group of humans denoted by geography and culture, but rather the ecological community of all life forms, and generations still to come. What sane economic system would even consider forgetting these, a Mayan might ask. An economist might call what the Mayans are acquiring social, cultural, and ecological capital. To these people, and many others in the intentionally pre-industrial world, they are just good sense.
Since the start of Occupy Wall Street, a recurring question in the media and among the Occupiers has been: precisely who among the 99% is taking to streets around the world to protest economic inequality? The simple answer–that it’s a wide array of citizens from different backgrounds who are disenfranchised from the political and economic systems that benefit a very small elite–isn’t particularly useful for a burgeoning social movement. Many journalists and academics have attempted to paint a more definitive picture of the Occupiers, scouring tweets and hashtags, aggregating data from their armchairs. But this approach is in opposition to Occupy’s intentionally horizontal organizational structure, which prizes consensus among large groups of Occupiers and aims to let no voice go unrepresented.
