earthfamilyalpha: Future Scenarios

David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept has created a new web page called Future Scenarios. The site is arranged as a long essay broken into micro-chapters. Ideally they suggest that you read it in order, navigating via the left hand menu.

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The gallery contains extensive photographs and commentary which illustrate various aspects of the four energy descent scenarios. Please leave your comments in the guestbook.

Here is the opening introduction:

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The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation.

Global oil peak has the potential to shake if not destroy the foundations of global industrial economy and culture. Climate change has the potential to rearrange the biosphere more radically than the last ice age. Each limits the effective options for responses to the other.

The strategies for mitigating the adverse effects and/or adapting to the consequences of Climate Change have mostly been considered and discussed in isolation from those relevant to Peak Oil.

While awareness of Peak Oil, or at least energy crisis, is increasing, understanding of how these two problems might interact to generate quite different futures, is still at an early state.

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FutureScenarios.org presents an integrated approach to understanding the potential interaction between Climate Change and Peak Oil using a scenario planning model. In the process I introduce permaculture as a design system specifically evolved over the last 30 years to creatively respond to futures that involve progressively less and less available energy.

And this comes from the closing:

In nature, disturbance events (such as fire, flood or drought) or eruptive disturbances from within an ecosystem, such as insect plagues or fungal disease, are often understood as examples of system dyfunction. Alternatively they can be understood as either initiating another succession cycle that brings renewed life or a novel force that deflect the ecosystem in different directions determined by the chance arrival of new species or other factors.

The ecosystems that emerge from these periods of disturbance can be quite different from those that preceded them and these changes can be characterised from a systems ecology perspective as either degradation of biophysical resources and productivity and/or ones involving new evolutionary pathways. The lesson from nature is that evolution of life works in strange ways that cannot be fully predicted. (clip)
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Our task is to choose which pieces of these jigsaw puzzle will be useful in creating an energy descent culture, the boundaries, features and colours of which, we can scarcely imagine.

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What is worth saving?

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What are the limits of our capacity?

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We have little time to decide and act. We must commit to concrete actions and projects. We must stake our claim, not for ourselves but for the future. However in commiting to our task we should remember the stories of Pythagoras and the monks of Lindisfarne. It is not the project but the living process that will be the measure of our actions.

Let us act as if we are part of nature's striving for the next evolutionary way to creatively respond to the recurring cycles of energy ascent and descent that characterise human history and the more ancient history of Gaia, the living planet.

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Imagine that our descendants and our ancestors are watching us."

Because you know