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| <back | home David Holmgren on Energy Descent An interview with Adam Fenderson Excerpts: David Holmgren speaks with Adam Fenderson from www.energybulletin.net about permaculture and its role in an energy constrained world. What kind of role does your vision of permaculture play in peak oil? DH: Well, permaculture, as I’ve said in the book - in a world of constantly rising energy and resultant affluence, permaculture is always going to be restricted to a small number of people who are committed to those ideals which have some sort of ethical or moral pursuit. It’s always going to be a fringe thing. Whereas in a world of decreasing energy, permaculture provides, I believe, the best available framework for redesigning the whole way we think, the way we act, and the way we design new strategies. It doesn’t mean to say that everyone’s going to have a vegetable garden or some other permaculture technique. But the thinking behind permaculture is really based on this idea of reducing that energy availability and how you work with that in a creative way. That requires a complete overturning of a lot of our inherited culture. Did this awareness of energy peak leave the permaculture movement for a while? DH: A lot of the experience of permaculture activism in Third World countries actually makes a lot of sense. Permaculture has spread around the world and is already dealing with energy descent type situations in other countries. One of the places, for example, where people interested in permaculture go to study that, as much as to help, is Cuba. There you have a society that was quite industrialized that went into an artificial energy descent because of collapse of the Soviet Union, and they’ve actually adapted to that in quite a creative way. I’m drawing those links in the permaculture movement to say these are general lessons that will need to be applied everywhere, rather than just First World versus Third World type situations. Do you expect those Third World type situations to apply for us in the near term future? DH: Yeah, in a broad sense. It’s interesting that Mollison’s off the cuff comment in ‘The Global Gardener’ TV program produced in 1989 [available for loan at HopeDance] had him traipsing around the world looking at various permaculture projects. In that he said “we need to get these competent gardeners of the Third World to rich countries to teach people how to grow food.” That reversed that whole idea of aid, and effectively, that is part of what’s needed, conceptually, at least, if not literally. How will the energy peak affect those people and environments? DH: A lot of the limits to affluence that can be best understood are not actually the energetic or external limits. They are the internal or social limits. Clive Hamilton’s book ‘Growth Fetish’ talks very well about this. People are driven mad by the total continuous drive to consume and the hollowness of this sort of existence, the lack of community and identity. In an energy descent world a lot of those destructive behaviours are just set aside, because there are more important things to do. So, at the extreme it’s a bit like what happens in a society where there’s a natural disaster. Community is re-discovered, people set aside their differences and get working on fundamental things. A lot of the angst about alienation and all sorts of seemingly intractable problems almost evaporate. For a lot of people I think this would be an enormous relief. Most people can’t get off the treadmill because of peer pressure and individual and collective addiction in society. Sometimes people recognize a problem, want to change, but they need a crisis, something that affects their peers, so they can all change together. The full interview appears at http://energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=524 David Holmgren, co-originator with Bill Mollison of the Permaculture concept, is an innovative environmental design consultant based in Hepburn Springs in Central Victoria, Australia. where he maintains one of Australia’s best-known permaculture sites. His latest book, Permaculture Principles& Pathways Beyond Sustainability is a distillation of life lived by the principles of Permaculture. To see his writings and designs visited www.holmgren.com.au Link with video for broadband users: www.globalpublicmedia.com/INTERVIEWS/DAVID.HOLMGREN/ For details about his workshops throughout the State and beyond, please see the section following this excerpt. An excerpt from: Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability by David Holmgren (Published on 31 Mar 2005 by CSIRO Sustainability Network. Archived on 6 Apr 2005. www.holmgren.com.au) While permaculture strategies mesh nicely with many of those directed towards this generally accepted desirable future, permaculture in fact defines a creative response to a fourth scenario that I call “Earth Stewardship” - a “creative descent” in which we progressively reduce our energy demands to return eventually to living within the natural energy and production budget of the land we occupy. Elements of all these scenarios can be found in the wide-ranging viewpoints and arguments of today’s “sustainability” debates. In the Earth Stewardship “creative descent” scenario, which I consider to represent the only truly sustainable future, human society creatively descends the energy demand slope essentially as a ‘mirror image’ of the creative energy ascent that occurred between the onset of the industrial revolution and the present day. The actual sustainable plateau is a long way down from current energy demands, but also a long way ahead in time. If we begin our journey now, there is time to use our familiarity with continuous change and creative innovation to avoid bringing on “Atlantis”. So, in an energy-descent future, what are the prospects close to home - here where we live in suburbia? Will it be the end of suburbia? What if we can no longer afford to commute to work by car? What if we are dependent on food and energy supplies that are transported long distances at increasing expense? What if the services and functionality of our communities decline further so that there is ever-diminishing support from local councils and police, for example? There is a real and viable alternative to this seemingly alarming scenario - a retrofit of suburbia - a remodelling of local neighbourhoods and communities for the energy-descent future. The “refit manual” will bring together and integrate features such as: • Home-based work, telecommuting, and cottage industries serving a local clientele; • Extended families, lodgers and shared households; • Recycling of storm water, waste water, and human waste; • Soils of improved fertility, and the water supply and infrastructure for urban agriculture; • City farms, cooperative gardening, Farmers’ Markets, and Community Supported Agriculture schemes (CSAs) Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a scheme in which customers undertake to buy a regular box of in-season fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc. from one or more local producers, thus providing the latter with a secure income and the ability to diversify the types of produce they provide. The bottom line here is that we do not need to wait for policies to change. We can choose today to do this - to create our own small neighbourhoods. ‘Suburban sprawl’ in fact give us an advantage. Detached houses are easy to retrofit, and the space around them allows for solar access and space for food production. A water supply is already in place, our pampered, unproductive ornamental gardens have fertile soils and ready access to nutrients, and we live in ideal areas with mild climates, access to the sea, the city and inland country. So what do we have to do to make it work? Basically, the answer is “Just do it!” Use whatever space is available and get producing. Involve the kids - and their friends. Make contact with neighbours and start to barter. Review your material needs and reduce consumption. Share your home - by bringing a family member back or taking in a lodger, for example. Creatively and positively work around regulatory impediments, aiming to help change them in the longer term. Pay off your debts. Work from home. And above all, retrofit your home for your own sustainable future, not for speculative monetary gain. In an energy-descent world, self-reliance represents real opportunities for early adopters of a permaculture life style: • Rises in oil prices will flow through to all natural products (food, timber, etc); • Higher commodity prices will be a stimulus for self-reliance and organic farming; • Local products will be more competitive than imports; • Repair, retrofitting, and recycling will all be more competitive than new replacement; • There will be rising demand for permaculture as life-skills eduction; and • There will be a resurgence of community life, ethics and values. There are, however, some real hazards for the greater community in the energy-descent scenario. For example, perverse subsidies and “head-in-the-sand” policies could distort necessary market adjustments (e.g., the end of fuel tax combined with production subsidies to agribusiness). There is a real danger that fascist-style politics could see minorities and those providing for themselves as being to blame for declining social conditions. Sudden economic and environmental shocks could conceivably lead to social collapse, removing even the security necessary for local food production. We need to understand the energy-descent pathway ahead, act to ensure our own longer-term resource security, and keep ourselves informed about the viewpoints and approaches of the greater national and global communities around us. <back | top^ |