Powerdown Tookit #8 Energy Descent Pathways April 26, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil, Powerdown, Transition Towns, collapse , 1 comment so farEnergy Descent Pathways – Post Carbon Cities, Transition Towns and Eco Villages
This is the introduction to week 8 of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV
Subject
The concept of “energy descent” was first proposed by Howard Odum who recognized that the human economy is governed by the Laws of thermodynamics and energy and resource availability.
Odum believed that if we were guided by geologists and ecologists as much as by economists, we would be able to safely navigate our way across the inevitable peaking of world oil production and find “a prosperous way down”.
David Holmgren drew on Odum’s thesis in creating the permaculture concept in the 1970s, and more recently proposed a set of “Energy Future Scenarios” to allow us to peak into the future and gain an image of where we may be heading.
“I use the term ‘descent’ as the least loaded word that honestly conveys the inevitable, radical reduction of material consumption and/or human numbers that will characterise the declining decades and centuries of fossil fuel abundance and availability.” -Davie Holmgren
The ‘industrial ascent’ of Hubert’s curve over the past 150 years has given us a one-time energy bonanza allowing the industrialisation of almost every aspect of our life and the globalisation of our economies. Continual economic growth has required an assumption of continuing increase of energy availability, a myth we can now see as we sink into a post oil-peak world and the commencement of global recession.
Powerdown Toolkit #7: Shelter April 16, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Green Building, Peak Oil, Powerdown, community , add a commentShelter- Future Proofing Our Homes and Buildings
This is the introduction to week seven of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
Energy and the Household
Recent increases in energy costs have spawned a huge increase in interest in “sustainable” housing with considerable improvements in some aspects of house design and construction. With a plethora of new building products and systems emerging from the industry on one hand and a burgeoning interest in natural building materials such as cob and strawbale, housing has been one of the most intensely scrutinised areas in terms of energy conservation and use. The industrial revolution that downgraded the household to the edge of economic life; the time has come now for it to reclaim its place. David Holmgren has described how this might occur for many over the first years of energy descent in his paper Retrofitting the Suburbs.
In the future, the great challenge will be to retrofit the existing housing stock to be more energy efficient. New builds will decline to a fraction of what they have been during the years and decades of industrial growth. (more…)
Book Review: When Technology Fails April 5, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, Peak Oil, Permaculture, Science and Rationaltiy, book review, collapse, survivalism , add a commentWhen Technology Fails- A Manual for Self- Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency
Matthew Stein
Chelsea Green 2000, 2008
494 pp
Matthew Stein’s massive survival manual When Technology Fails packs into one volume everything you need to survive “The long Emergency”- (a phrase later used by Kunstler in his 2005 book of that name on peak oil and its consequences) from fire making and hunting, gardening and wild food gathering, technology and power, metal working and constructing simple shelters.
There is a detailed discussion at the start of the book on the environmental crisis, pollution and resource depletion, as well as climate change and peak oil- and the consequent need to learn many new skills to survive; perhaps this section isnt srictly necessary for such a book.
More of an encyclopaedia than a handy book to throw in your grab-and-run bag, it probably suffers from trying to do too much; nevertheless, there is a serious amount of information here to help survive emergencies, powerdowns, social collapses and energy descent transitions- most of it useful and well laid out, while some of it smacks of New Age-ism and gives advice which would be more of a hazard than a help in a survival situation.
The “When Hi-Tech Medicine Fails” chapter in particular should come with a severe health warning: a credulous mish-mash of a range of Quackeries from homeopathy and acupuncture through naturopathy, “energy healing” and even the Power of Prayer. Anecdotal “evidence” is offered about miraculous cures achieved through the services of members of the whacky Christian Science cult. He quotes Larry Dossey’s Healing Words as providing “numerous scientific studies ” which “now confirm that p[rayer does, in fact, have a positive effect on healing” when in fact it does nothing of the kind.
Futile of course to suggest that if you believed in the Power of Prayer you wouldn’t need a survival manual, but even worse is the section promoting the use of colloidial silver for a range of illnesses including some serious conditions.
Quackwatch surveys the evidence forand the dangers of use of colloidal silver here. Stein presumably thinks that if uncritical self-medication with such stuff lead to argyria, you always have the Power of Prayer as a Back-up.
The early section on Survivor Personality Traits is also tainted with pseudo-scientific nonsense. While stories of survivors of disasters are interesting and may provide useful insights, Stein seems to make he contradictory claim that your intuition is more useful than your rational mind- at least in emergency situations.
Now, there may well be situations where intuition is simply all you have to go on- and clearly we have evolved instinctive responses to danger which have allowed our species to survive as well as it has. This doesnt mean that intuition is superior to rational thought- after all, this is an emergency preparedness manual, the whole point is to use your rational ability to prepare for emergencies ahead of time. I dont see any scientific evidence tha shows people with New Age beliefs such as those promoted by Sein are more likely to survive an emergency.
These reactionary and dangerous ideas are enough to put me off he book entirely, and it is certainly a matter of concern that Peak Oil luminaries Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler would endorse it.
Nevertheless, there is much to offer in the other chapters, which are oddly rational and practical in their approach(!)
Each section begins with a view of the global situation vis-a-vis current use of resources and environmental impact. There is then a survey of different techniques with a brief description, and a wealth of resources and further reading to conclude.
The section on food is wide-ranging, with good information on both gardening and wild-food gathering. Stein advocates Jeavons’ Bio-Intensive method; the section on permaculture is only a few paragraphs, with no mention of perrenial food crops or edible forest gardens, nor permaculture principles.
The sections on natural building, off-grid electricity and traditional methods of home-crafts such as soap-making, clothes-making, pottery etc provide useful introductions, though perhaps not much more than that.
In short, there are probably other survival manuals which are more useful as pocket-sized books for emergency situations; and specific permaculture books and building manuals would be more useful for long-term survival/powerdown scenarios.
Most worrying is the apparent unquestioning acceptance of the reactionary ideologies promoted here by at least some of the wider peak oil/permaculture community.
