2nd Permaculture Design Course The Village Aug 20-29th 2010 February 27, 2010
Posted by Graham in : Courses, Permaculture, Powerdown , 2commentsI have updated the Courses Page for 2010, which includes the 2nd Full Permaculture design Course at The Village, Cloughjordan.
August 20th – 29th 2010 | The Village, Cloughjordan, Tipperary | For bookings and further information contact Davie Philip davie@cultivate.ie
Enjoy a full ‘PDC’ immersed in the thriving and innovative environment of Cloughjordan’s ecovillage. Tutors include: Graham Strouts, Albert Bates of the Farm, Tennessee, and Klaudia Van Gool. Also teaching will be other leading thinkers on various sustainability issues covered on the course.
The Transition Timeline June 29, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Health, Peak Oil, Population, Powerdown, Science and Rationaltiy, Transition Towns, book review, climate change, community , 6comments
Book Review:
The Transition Timeline
for a local, resilient future
Shaun Chamberlin
Forward by Rob Hopkins
190 pp pbk
Chelsea Green 2009
The follow-up to Rob Hopkins’ seminal The Transition Handbook uses the method of “backcasting” from an envisioned future from which we create a timeline of how the transition to a more local, resilient world unfolded.
The first part goes through four different scenarios presented as “cultural stories” roughly along the same lines as the scenarios we are familiar with from Holmgren’s Future Scenarios, this time under the headings:
-Denial
-Hitting the Wall
-The Impossible Dream
-The Transition Vision
The transition approach is to look at these possible futures in terms of the cultural stories that we tell ourselves, the idea being that we have the power to make our own cultural stories and thereby empower ouselves to guide the future to a more desirable outcome:
Human Nature is the ability to choose our own path
The second part of the book takes a deeper look at the Transition Vision in the five areas of population and demographics; Food and Water; Electricity and Energy; travel and transport; Health and Medicine.
Each of these sections presents a thorough and well-researched overview of the current situation, ending with a Timeline of how we reached a more desirable situation by 2027.
At the back of the book Chamberlin states that “This book has not attempted to quantify the energy/emissions footprint of each aspect of the Transition Vision, but this represents a critical avenue for further work.”
Unfortunatley, this lack of analysis seriously compromises the usefulness of the book, as the projected scenarios may be widely implausible or purely aspirational. (more…)
Future Scenarios June 11, 2009
Posted by Graham in : General, Human Ecology, Peak Oil, Permaculture, Powerdown, book review, climate change, collapse , 7commentsBook Review- 
Future Scenarios How Communities Can adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change
David Holmgren
Chelsea Green 2009
When I first saw David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios talk and slide at a permaculture design course in Slovenia in 2005 I was still quite new to the concept of peak oil and listened transfixed at what seemed to be a detailed vision of the future: not precise predictions but an outline of four possible scenarios that may unfold over the next generation and beyond as human societies adapt to the consequences of the peaking and decline of our primary energy sources, peak oil and natural gas.
A couple of years ago David continued his explorations of these issues first examined in detail in his earlier book, Permaculture- Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002) with a new website Future Scenarios.
Now in book form, Future Scenarios provides one of the most succinct and lucid accounts of the possible paths that await us as we start the new era of energy descent.
Holmgren is in agreement with John Michael Greer that while much mainstream discussion about energy futures centres on the first two of his scenarios- “Techno-explosion” and “Techno Stability”, and the doomer/survivalist meme amongst the peak oil community tends to focus on the fourth scenario of “lifeboats” or versions of collapse, the more likely would be the third possibility of “Energy Descent”- a more gradual adaptation to diminishing energy supplies resulting in a contracting economy and reversion to technological simplicity that may play out over many generations.
This pathway of earth Stewardship is assumed by the permaculture agenda- an adaptive approach in which human scale design and general sustainability practices are progressively implemented and are informed by the energy flows through human society and ecology, and the energy base of our economies is clearly understood.
The real problem is that this more likely future is currently still marginalised as the mainstream culture refuses to abandon its faith in the myth of progress- a belief that rests on the mistaken assumption that gains in human welfare over the past few hundred years have been as a result of some teleological process propelling us forwards, or of a general increasing application of our genious for technological improvements and innovation, while ignoring the underlying reosurce base that has made all this possible: technology is merely different ways of using energy that is usually dug out of holes in the ground.
The likelihood that this transition will be to one of less energy is such an anathema to the psychological foundations and power elites of modern societies that it is constantly misinterpreted, ignored, covered up, or derided. Instead we see geopolitical maneuvering around energy resources, including proxy and real wars to control dwindling reserves and policy gymnastics to somehow make reducing carbon emissions the new engine of economic growth.
Holmgren categorises the scenarios according to the varying potential severity of peak oil and climate change and how these tow factors interplay:
- Brown Tech- slow oil decline, fast climate change;
- Green Tech- slow oil decline, slow climate change;
- Earth Steward- fast oil decline, slow climate change;
- Lifeboats- fast oil decline, fast climate change
These typologies may necessarily be too simplistic- so many other factors may also come into play, such as financial collapse which, while no doubt linked to both peak oil and climate change, may impact in ways as yet unforeseen. However, Holmgren provides a deeper analyses by showing how the scenarios may be “nested” one within the other- each acting on the different scales of the household, local, national and international economies; or may take a stepped form over time- attempts by governments to keep the system going a little longer by following a Brown Tech path may hasten an eventual collapse; equally, an attempt to switch to green tech may result in the adoption of Earth Stewardship further down the line as renewables fail to fill the gap left by oil. The scenarios may also play out differently in different parts of the world.
Throughout Holmgren’s analysis is informed by ecological systems, the foundation for his permaculture principles, as he sees how energy dynamics in nature may be mirrored in human socieites:
Natural ecosytems tend to maintain homeostasis under stress through the allocation of stored resources. if the conditions continue to deteriorate, then further stress can fracture the homeostasis. If the stress involves a reduction in energy availability, the system may collapse. But total collapse and system disintegration are rare, at least in the short term. More typically a restabalization occurs at a lower level of energy processing and organisational complexity. The new homeostasis will typically be stable for some time before declining energy availability precipitates another crisis. This may also be a model for how human societies respond to the crisis of resource and energy decline.
Holmgren is keen to paint a more positive vision of the future in the earth Stewardship scenario- “conditions for ordinary people may actually improve when resources devoted to maintaining societal complexity are freed for meeting more basic needs”- a reference to the diminishing returns provided by endless growth.
There is a desperate need to recast energy descent as a positive process that can free people from the strictures and dysfunctions of growth economics and consumer culture. This is now apparent to many people around the world and is far more fundamental than a public relations campaign to paint a black sky blue. It is a necessary [process to provide a sense of hope and connection to fundamental human values expressed by every traditional culture throughout human history, among them, that the prusuit of materialism is a false god.
No doubt materialism without bounds, as expressed in modern society in unending growth and the development of consumer culture, is a false god; however, I am not sure that an awareness of this has always been present in every traditional culture. Holmgren here seems to betray a romantic view of the past, at odds with the ecological basis for his work, which is itself of course fundamentally materialistic. What seems more likely is the insights of anthropology and evolutionary psychology: that we have as a species a fundamental propensity towards getting more stuff, as is evidenced by the ready emergence in traditional societies of cargo cults after contact with the west.
This weakness is apparent in his assessment of the corresponding ideologies and belief systems that accompany the scenarios: he seems to equate secular humanism with the materialistic ideology of “Brown Tech” and suggests that these beliefs systems are inherently negative, giving rise to dysfunctional behaviours;
While the elites continue to be driven by a commitment to superrationalist beliefs, a sense of hollowness and lack of purpose characterizes the shrinking middle class, while fundamentalist religions and cults play a stronger role in the lives of the working and unemployed classes, partly through genuine reaction to the failures of modern humanism and partly manipulated by the elites to deflect anger and disenchantment.
While this may be very true, he compares this to a shift in values in “Green Tech”:
Civic culture strengthens where further transition toward nonmaterialistic society combines with the maturation of feminism and environmentalism, and a resurgence in indigenous and traditional cultural values.
It seems to me that there is a contradiction between “traditional values” -many of which may be parochial and overly conservative or reactionary – with post-modern feminist and environmental values; it is far from clear that they would be the same or even compatible.
Similarly, under “Earth Steward” Holmgren suggests that a “simplification in the material domain is seen as the opportunity for growth in the spiritual domain. There is a resurgence in leadership by women and a celebration of the feminine in nature and people”.
But what is the “spiritual” domain? This needs to be defined here becasue there is a vast range of possible interpretations. For the same reasons I have always had some difficulty with Holmgren’s domain of “Health and Spritual well-being” in the Permaculture Flower. I interpret it to mean “Health and Psychological/emotional well-being”. However, it is abundantly apparent that permaculture has become almost synonymous with New Age religion in many quarters, a reactionary and delusional trend that all permaculturalists should challenge strongly. Holmgren’s loose use of the word “spiritual” in this context, and his “celebration of the feminine” will inevitably be seen by many to sanctify pseudo-science and the worship of spirits and nebulous “energies”.
(Again “the feminine” and “feminine values” really needs to be defined: we are presumably not talking about the feminine values of Sex in the City; too often “the feminine” is associated with “the spiritual” in a quite meaningless way which I feel is rather patronizing to women.)
Here, Holmgren looses an opportunity to call for a celebration of secular humanism and rationalism- the most important legacy of the modern world, which will need to be protected less we fall back into a new dark age of superstition and delusion with energy descent.
Nor is it necessary to embody any kind of “earth spirituality” in order to foster more sustainable lifestyles- these should come of their own accord, naturally emerging from a scientific understanding of ecology and our place within it, combined with a simple sense of beauty and wonder at the natural world, unfettered by ideological presumptions.
There is a great danger within the environmental movement as a whole to replace the delusion of unending growth with the delusion of narcissistic spirituality, part of a wider failure to acknowledge the real gains of modernity through science.
For all this, Holmgren remains one of the most significant of contemporary thinkers, and Future Scenarios is an important contribution to peak oil literature, and one of the clearest assessments of the kind of world that awaits us.
Permaculture at The Village June 10, 2009
Posted by Graham in : General, Permaculture, Powerdown, community , add a commentLast weekend saw 17 participants attend a 2-day Introduction to permaculture course I gave at The Village in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary.
Workshop participants practice forest garden design…
…now they are planting and mulching for real…
It was a great weekend, despite the truly wintry weather on the Saturday, and a great opportunity to see how the Village project is progressing, with three houses currently under construction.
The next permaculture course here will be a Full 10-day Permaculture Certificate Design Course August 21st-30th. Please see “courses for 2009” page for details.
This course will also include a complete Powerdown Toolkit Training.
Tutors include: Graham Strouts, Davie Philip of the Irish Transition Network, Albert Bates of the Farm, Tenessee.
many thanks to Davie Philip for organising the event, and for all the great participants for taking part and making it possible, and most of all for staying awake through a whole day of classroom activities on the wet Saturday despite a very late campfire session Friday night!!
Powerdown Toolkit #10: Communicating Transition May 29, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Powerdown, Transition Towns, community , add a commentWhere do we go from here? Communicating Transition
by Graham Strouts and Davie Philip
This is the introduction to the 10th and final episode 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.
On sale Now! The Powerdown TV show featuring the 10 TV shows to accompany the introductions serialized here on zone5 over the past few weeks, with interviews with Rob Hopkins, Richard Douthwaite, Megan Quinn, Peader Kirby and many others.
A free preview of Episode 8: Energy Descent Pathways can be viewed here.
When we try to communicate the ideas being explored in the Powerdown Toolkit we run into what might be called “the environmentalists dilemma”- we are trying to get over a message few people want to hear- if they did, the world would be a very different place- it would already be in transition!
In thinking about this issue let us consider the spectrum of responses, from the “cornucopians” who believe the markets will resolve everything as price spikes send a signal to put more investment into renewables; to the “doomers” who see Peak oil as heralding in a collapse of civilisation.
Somehow we need to bridge the gap between the two: the “cornucopians” need to be challenged because the evidence we have looked at does not support their case: the flow of cheap energy will surely decline and with it the “business as usual” scenarios we have become accustomed to over the past couple of generations, with its implicit faith in technological progress and ever-increasing prosperity.
The “doomer” stance on the other hand, while providing a valuable balance to the complacency of doing nothing, may lead to paralysis and fear that “there is nothing we can do”.
Somewhere in between we have Transition: (more…)
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…)
Powerdown Toolkit #4: Rethinking Energy March 2, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil, Powerdown, Renewable Energy, community , 1 comment so farThis is the introduction to week four of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre 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.
Rethinking Energy: Conservation, Curtailment, Efficiency and Appropriate Technology
by David Fleming and Graham Strouts
Energy is first and foremost a demand issue- how much do we need and for what ?- and yet the majority of public debate on the issue is to do with finding new sources of supply so as to allow industrial growth to continue.
Community Powerdown is concerned with redesigning our living arrangements as far as possible so as to reduce demand. We need to reduce drastically both per capita energy consumption as well as total world energy use.
This is an essential point to understand because simply making energy use more efficient, or even reducing per capita consumption, will not be sufficient if total demand is still increasing- for example, driven by rising population.
This means that we will sometimes have to make hard decisions about what we use energy for. Energy is fundamental but one of the challenges of understanding energy in today’s’ world is that we are so unaware of how much we use or what the impacts of its use are. Taking more responsibility for how we use energy is the starting point.
In order to understand better our use of energy it is useful to consider the laws of thermodynamics, and how they impose absolute limits on energy consumption in society. By understanding this we will be able to make better choices about the use of energy in society. (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit #3: It’s All Connected February 16, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Permaculture, Powerdown, community , 1 comment so farThis is the introduction to the third week of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre 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.
It’s All Connected: Whole Systems Thinking and Permaculture
Systems theory is an interdisciplinary theory of how we can understand the world in terms of the dynamics of a system: a network of interrelating parts which themselves can also be seen as parts.
This idea of “parts within parts” has been referred to as a “holarchy”- a nested series of systems, one within the other like Russian dolls.
Thus, an atom is part of a molecule which is part of a cell which is part of an organ which is part of a body. As a formal branch of science, systems theory emerged first within the ecological sciences, but has been perhaps most influential in the development of computers. Since the 1960s, its use in the understanding of humans interconnectedness with the rest of nature in the “web of life” has been a compelling and powerful motivation for the sustainability movement. (more…)
Powerdown Toolkit # 2: The Power of Community- Social Capital, Resilience and the Local Community February 5, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil, Powerdown, Transition Towns, community , add a commentThis is the introduction to the second week of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre 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: “Community powerdown”.
“Community” is often dismissed as a romantic notion, “harking back a golden age that never existed”. Traditional rural communities tended to be held together by the absence of choice: you were your mother’s daughter or your father’s son, and the range of possible futures – opportunities for travel, education, and employment- were limited.
From an ecological perspective, such opportunities were limited essentially by the availability of energy. This may have lead to a sense of being stifled by the conservative norms of the community, and their parochial and sometimes oppressive nature. The community became something to escape from once the opportunity arose. (more…)
