In my post yesterday I referenced progressive agriculture models that I’ve been learning about. Chief among those in my mind is permaculture. Permaculture was developed and coined as a term by David Holmgren, then a graduate student, and his professor Bill Mollison in Australia in 1978. Permaculture uses a holistic systems thinking model which seeks to understand and mimic nature while working to create a ‘permanent agriculture’. A way of living with the land and growing food which is not only sustainable but regenerates damaged land, captures carbon and renews the environment, while taking care of humans and animals. It’s a beautiful concept and people have been successfully putting it into action around the world for the past forty years. When I first started to learn about it I was freaking out about peak oil. I remember one night before dawn taking a taxi back from my job editing video of baseball games in New York City. I was driving up the West Side Highway in Manhattan and looking at the blazingly lit, empty buildings of the New York City and New Jersey skylines. Those iconic images we love to look at of cities at night with their twinkling lights, when we look at it from an energy perspective are sort of shocking. The people are all asleep! Why is the city lit up like this? This momentary insight got me into thinking about energy and the concept of ‘peak oil’ was surfing the zeitgeist at the time. Websites with terms like ‘die off’ and ‘collapse’ in their title were capturing peoples attention and sowing a narrative of the collapse of western society.
Being a new father gave me a new perspective on the idea of societal collapse. I might die, but my descendants would have to survive in this degraded environment. I started studying homesteading, survivalism and various threads of people retreating from society and living off the land. My first impulse was that I needed to get a bunch of guns and dogs and go build a fort. My family were horrified. Interestingly, in the Venn diagram of people who think the world is going to end there is a large degree of overlap between people with what we’d consider ‘left wing’ politics, (mostly people with hippie back to the land view) and right wing survivalists, or ‘preppers’ as they call themselves (people who are preparing for the collapse). One thing that both sides agreed upon was this Australian style of farming and living called permaculture. It came up again and again in the various podcasts I was listening to and I became interested, and studied it. I never did move to the forest and build a fort, farm, or really take any specific action about any of it. Life continued, being a young parent (a musician at the time) was incredibly busy and distracting and my focus shifted back to daily urban capitalist survival.
Lately, for reasons I’d be hard pressed to articulate (the general apocalyptic climate?) I’ve been thinking about these things again. Nowadays YouTube is absolutely filled with people around the world doing these kinds of things and making videos about them and I find it very relaxing after working on abstract computer marketing problems to sit back on the couch and watch some guy in California explain how he built his chicken coop out of salvaged materials. Last night I watched a video that I feel compelled to share, and offer some commentary on. It’s a long one (~90 mins) so I recognize most people won’t watch it, so I’ll try to offer a few thoughts and summarize a bit.
The video is an interview with David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture. In it, he talks about a few very important concepts in my opinion. The first is the concept of “energy descent”. The idea here is that the era that we have been living in for the past few hundred years was massively accelerated by access to ‘free’ energy in the form of fossil fuels. In a sense, contemporary post-Enlightment western civilization has been built on a kind of energy bubble. Access to free energy has enabled this incredibly rapid acceleration and expansion of human activity, technological development and overall complexity. As many of us are aware, fossil fuels are finite and this bubble era may well be coming to a close. The fact that it is becoming economically viable to go after increasingly difficult to access sources of energy like tar sands tells us that the fossil fuel industry may be beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel. As this process of declining returns in the excavation and exploitation of fossil fuels continues, we will see a contraction in available energy which will trigger a contraction in economic growth. Since our economic system is essentially predicated on the idea of endless and unlimited growth, ignoring externalized costs to anything that can’t be measured economically, this will trigger an economic contraction as well. How extreme and how sudden this contraction will be is a big question to which we don’t know the answer.
In previous posts I’ve talked about the techno-optimist green tech utopian view that the progress of technology will continue to accelerate and outpace our dependence on fossil fuels. Holmgren address this view in the interview pointing out that for solar panels, for example, to go exponential as the tech people predict, we will need to arrive at a point where the infrastructure used to create them is not subsidized by fossil fuels. Currently we are not there. So the current acceleration in solar and green tech is still operating on a fossil fuel energy subsidy. If that subsidy is removed, the economic cost of those things will become much higher, which will stunt the current curve that they are on. In an earlier post I referenced Moore’s law about increasing semiconductor capacity. This is a law that has been established during the fossil fuel bubble, whether it will hold true in an era of more scarce energy without fossil fuels remains to be seen. The question becomes then whether we have enough of a fossil fuel runway to accelerate the progress of renewable energy enough to launch them into an independent and self-propelling state. Time will tell.
The energy descent that Holmgren predicts is a future in which global society begins to reduce it’s energy consumption as energy supplies decrease. Those decreases may either be a gradual drift downward to a less energy consumptive future or a more step wise process of rapid declines in the form of crises, followed by periods of stabilization. This process will occur in parallel with the ongoing process of climate change, which will also be disruptive to an unknown extent. Holmgren goes through multiple potential scenarios which consider both our progress in reducing energy consumption and the severity and rapidity of climate change. Each scenario is a mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes, for example in one scenario we may see energy descent trigger an economic crisis, which stops a great deal of economic activity and thereby slows carbon emissions, a kind of self regulating situation. There is also the possibility that climate change will not at this point be slowed by a reduction in carbon emissions and has already entered an irreversible feedback loop. As he points out, the point of scenario planning is to discover useful opportunities for action. Holmgren advocates a process of withdrawal from the global economy into a more localized and non-monetary economy in which individuals specialize in certain areas and develop useful skills, although to a lesser extent than the total specialization capitalism demands, while developing skills like growing food, repairing their own homes and generally becoming more self-sufficient. For me Holmgren’s thinking is probably some of the most sane and reasonable response to our contemporary apocalyptic storm clouds. If any of these are things which you think about late at night like me, I strongly encourage you to check out the interview and learn more.
