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SOLUTIONS: What Can I Do Now

Perception
There is a perception that society as a whole needs to get over with and throw out. That is the view that people who are "environmental types" are just a bunch of tree-hugging, sandle-wearing, long-haired hippies, who smell of patchouli incense.

OK, granted, there are some (on our staff) who fit that description perfectly...but what was it about the 1960s and '70s that also created an "earth-awareness" and ecological mind-set that has not quit?

Some say it had to do with antiestablishmentarianism (now, how often does one get to use THAT word?). Some say that in the push to seek a "greater connection with one's self and 'God'" that a realization occurred that there was also an undeniable connection between all things: people, nature, and the universe itself.

Regardless of where the ideas came from, a tremendous amount of research and WORKABLE SOLUTIONS came from that era.

Workable Solutions...that means: "things I can do that have a beneficial result across a wide range of areas (self, family, groups, society, humankind, nature, earth, etc.)."

The idea is that if an idea is WORKABLE then it is WORKABLE, regardless of where the idea originated. Understand?

One of the concepts that was born of the period was Sustainability.
What does that really mean?

On doing the research for this area, we found a better explanation than one we could have put together.

It was written by David Holmgren, who also co-developed another concept called Permaculture...a very workable solution indeed.

So sit back and read the following article.
In order to know "What Can I Do Now" one must first understand the playing field...

What Is Sustainability?
from Sustainability Network Update 31E, 9 Sep 2003, CSIRO Sustainability Network
http://www.bml.csiro.au/susnetnl/netwl31Eb.pdf

It seems that my role in discussions of sustainability is to be the iconoclast ñ a kicker of sacred cows. This is a role I enjoy, but most especially when it involves breaking icons that I myself have helped create. The title of my new book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability deliberately implies a serious problem with mainstream concepts of Sustainability. I hope the substance behind the title will now stir up the sustainability debate in positive ways.

Third Wave Environmentalism
A resurgence of environmentalism has occurred in recent years, despite the diversionary politics of fear and hatred, which presently dominate political discourse. This environmentalism has involved both 'oppositional' and 'developmental' activism.

By oppositional activism, I mean activism that aims to stop, ameliorate or mitigate adverse environmental impacts, especially those caused by the actions of corporations and governments. The anti-(corporate)-globalisation movement brings together the experience of oppositional activists on both the environmental and social fronts.

By developmental activism, I mean the process of constructing systems that produce positive environmental outcomes. These most typically operate at the personal and household levels, but also as community and entrepreneurial processes. This side of environmental activism I characterise as the 'third wave of environmental solutions'.⁶

The first wave of environmental solutions of the post World War II era emerged in the late 1970's. The concept of permaculture and initiation of the Permaculture Movement were milestones of this first wave, but permaculture action increased dramatically both nationally and internationally during a second wave in the late 1980's and early 1990's. What will happen to permaculture during the third wave is hard to predict but, in continuing to call the ideas in my new book "permaculture", I obviously want to build on, rather than break that heritage. Although I am vigilant against the development of any "Permaculture dogma", I still believe the concept itself and its very positive influence over the last 25 years are a good foundation for further influence and action.

Sustainability as 'virtue'
The word "sustainability" is broadly used to mean the collection of ideas, processes and elements in society that are currently seen as progressive, enlightened or even simply good. Sustainability has become a virtue by its perceived scarcity. But what is this virtue beyond a set of socially progressive current ideas and fashions, and what is its relationship to Permaculture?

Permaculture and Sustainability
Permaculture is a design system for sustainable land-use and living that emerged out of a brief working relationship between Bill Mollison and myself in the mid 1970's⁷. (We used the term 'permanent' rather than 'sustainable'.) It predates most mainstream sustainability literature, which came to the fore as part of the 'second wave'. Permaculture was, in part, a response to the evidence for, and the implications of, continuing extraction and unsustainable use of non-renewable and biological resources. The Club of Rome's seminal report, The Limits To Growth⁸, and the first and second oil shocks of 1973 & 1975, were obvious influences. Less well know to this day is the systems ecology language and energy accounting work of Howard Odum first described in his difficult but pivotal book, Environment Power and Society⁹. It was the first reference listed in our foundation work, Permaculture One, and his work since has continued to inform my development of the concept over the decades since ¹⁰. Permaculture, like a number of other sustainability concepts, has focused on positive, creative actions, which are practical and appropriate without necessarily attempting to understand how it all adds up in the long term. This is, in part, a reasonable response to rapid change and uncertainty about the future. However, it is also a response to the difficulty of discussing the future in terms other than a 'good and evil' polarity between growth and development on the one hand and decay and destruction on the other.

Energy descent
In addressing the question: What is sustainability? I want to emphasise how an understanding of the global energy peak and resultant energy descent defines and reshapes both environmental concepts and strategies. 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. I believe the third wave of environmental solutions will be seen as a response to both the realisation of the limits to consumption (first wave) and the limits to pollution and global warming (second wave). Permaculture is the whole-hearted engagement with energy descent as the opportunity for a better world where less is better.

Sustainability: A Systems View
Beginning with "sustain" as provision of the necessities of life, sustainability could be defined as the 'ability to continually provide the necessities of life'. A systems perspective is useful for taking this definition further. Self-organising systems (such as those found in nature and society) all collect net energy from their surrounding environment. As well as nourishing their constituent parts, sustainable systems maintain and renew themselves over time without exponential growth, major collapse, or massive internal restructuring.

Times scales for assessing sustainability
Time scales for assessing sustainability are proportional to the physical scale or territory of influence of the system in question. Thus the sustainability of a household, business or community might be considered over years or decades while that of a nation state or culture might be considered over centuries or even millennia.

These abstract systemic principles were once understood as common sense. For example large powerful institutions such as the Catholic Church are long-lived while small and local ones come and go more quickly. Corporations have never been long lived, averaging less than a human lifetime, but as they have become more global and powerful, their average life expectancy has actually shrunk to a few decades. This suggests that global capitalism is heading for radical change rather than a long-lived golden age.

Maintenance of larger-scale support systems
As well as nurturing its constituent parts and self-regulating growth, a sustainable system also contributes to maintenance of larger-scale environmental support systems. Thus, for households and businesses, there must be contributions to the larger systems of community, government and economy. In nature, local ecosystems contribute to maintenance of climate and landscapes. In indigenous societies, use and respect for resources helped maintain the whole surrounding natural system; and throughout history, large-scale human empire systems have declined when they failed to make that contribution or 'tithe' to back to nature. Thus the concept of ecological sustainability is based on this expectation that modern human systems must contribute rather than simply take from nature.

Are biological support systems really necessary?
Despite the evidence, and despite several decades of propaganda from scientists and environmentalists about the importance of biological support systems, the view persists that nature is an optional appendage to modern industrial societies rather than the foundation. Why does such a view persist? One of the reasons, is that there is not much direct evidence that the health of biological systems has determined the recent course of human affairs, especially in the richer nations. For example, without wanting to underestimate the problems, the parlous state of the Murray River has hardly brought the city of Adelaide to its knees. There is much greater concern about Adelaide's "viability" in relation to a decline in manufacturing and the ageing of its population.

Two important factors have contributed to ameliorating the impact of environmental degradation:

1. Bypassing of local negative feedback controls; and
2. The fossil and non-renewable resource base.

1. Bypassing of local negative feedback controls
In small, relatively autonomous economies and societies dependant on surrounding nature, failure in local ecosystem function leads to unavoidable economic, social and even cultural impacts, or even societal collapse. Over the last 6,000 years, warfare, slavery, and the resultant power of city-states and empires allowed the capture of foreign resources mostly as capital assets to be mined. These densely settled pre-industrial societies also staved off the impacts of local ecological failure by migration of surplus population and, to some extent, by export of pollution. For example, the great rivers on which most ancient cities were located not only delivered fertility but took away and purified pollution.

In modern, migratory, large-scale and globally connected human systems, local degradation of nature may not lead to collapse or even dramatic impacts. Without this negative feedback at the economic, social and personal levels, ecological impacts tend to accumulate up the geographic hierarchy to global scale, where they are remote from any direct cause. Acid rain, global warming, and biodiversity loss, for example, are all processes with large-scale impacts often remote from the place and time of their cause.

Thus, our global industrial systems are still underpinned by global ecological processes but the connection between the ecological sustainability of households, communities, businesses or nations and the condition of global nature is abstract, complex and remote.

2. The fossil and mineral resource base
Renewable biological resources, responsive to direct feedback, have not, however, been the primary driving force behind modern societies, at least since the depression of the 1930's. Mineral resources, most notably oil and increasingly gas have become the prevalent forms of energy sustaining humanity. The extent of this dependence is consistently underestimated, by economists and decision makers, and even by scientists and environmentalists. The greatest mistake is to consider these resources as simply 'commodities', rather than looking at their net contribution of energy to supporting all other human systems and processes. In pre-industrial settled societies, agriculture was the primary process for obtaining net energy from the environment. Now, at the end of the industrial era, even agriculture has become a major net energy consumer, highlighting the degree to which we live from the oil well.

During a visit to Israel in the mid 1990's, after seeing the feeding of broad-acre irrigated crops to shed-housed dairy cows, I remarked that the Israeli glass of milk must be 80% oil. For comparison I suggested Australian milk from cows grazing rain-fed (albeit fertilised pastures) might be 20% oil, and European milk from shed-housed cows eating rain-fed crops might be 50% oil. This use of technology and innovation based on resource depletion to expand agricultural productivity (at least temporarily), reinforces the idea that agriculture is an appendage, rather than the foundation of the economy. Although these facts have been understood for thirty years, the situation has got far worse over that time.

More shocking is the realisation that most environmental policies, strategies and actions for protecting and maintaining local biological systems, both the in countryside and in the city, are generally at a cost of depleting non renewable resources elsewhere. For example, the financial savings from living in an energy efficient, passive solar house are quite likely to be spent on a more resource expensive and greenhouse gas intensive overseas trip. Such use of technology and innovation to reduce local environmental degradation simply moves problems elsewhere and, in so doing, reinforces the idea that nature is an appendage of society. This rebound effect has been noted by both systems theorists and permaculture practitioners.

Global Energy Peak and Cultures of Change
These and other factors reduce the usefulness of many mainstream sustainability concepts in explaining and addressing real-world processes. Without a serious attempt to understand the energy basis of nature and society, and the key issue of society's global energy peak, sustainability concepts and the actions they inform may well be counterproductive.

Although the oil crisis of the 1970's triggered the first wave of modern environmental solutions (including Permaculture), the response and adjustments by global elites have had the effect of inoculating affluent society against the Limits to Growth argument. That is, a small dose made us resistant to the influence of more powerful doses. In similar vein, I have long argued¹¹ that over-promotion of permaculture in the early 1980's "inoculated" people against a more serious consideration of the concept because of a perceived failure to catalyse powerful changes in land-use and society in the short term.

With a global oil peak now unfolding all around us, the failure to recognise and understand its signs and symptoms pervades not only the anti-environmental reactionaries, but also much of the vanguard of sustainability. Discussions, workshops and other learning activities are needed to enable environmentalists to get up to speed on the evidence for the global energy peak, and to debate the implications.

Sustainability of Change Cultures
One of the consequences of our growing understanding of the larger-scale dynamics of the energy peak is that, within a single human lifetime, we are witnessing simultaneous transformative change in systems at many scales. In these conditions, steady-state models of sustainability are of limited use, other than to acknowledge that the bulk of human history is well described by such models. Unless the pathway back to a low energy future is particularly catastrophic and abrupt, the future will deliver continuous change and novelty for hundreds of years.

Both our cultural inheritance, and any legacy we might leave for future generations, can be thought of as cultures of continuous change. How can we resolve the apparent contradictions inherent in stable, permanent and sustainable cultures versus those involving continuous change? Many sustainability thinkers have recognised the need to encompass continuous change, but few have acknowledged the key issue of directionality of change at the largest scales. While our cultural inheritance and our legacy could both be characterised as change cultures, the difference is in the directionality of the supporting energy base (energy ascent versus energy descent), as graphically illustrated in Figure 1.¹²

Although only conceptual, the rough time scale shows continuity of the energy ascent culture for hundreds if not thousands of years. Similarly, it suggests continuity of the coming descent culture over many generations.

Most sustainability concepts and advocates imply some type of plateau model for transition beyond the fossil fuel peak. The ecological and historical models for establishment of this steady-state energy base are dubious, but generally little discussed as most arguments focus on the potential of this or that technology in isolation from the systems top down perspective.

Permaculture could be seen, somewhat cynically, as just my (and now many other people's) version of the enlightened ideas and actions that others gather under the 'sustainability' rubric. While there is some truth in this view, I would characterise those enlightened ideas and actions as all informed by ethical values and reflecting a set of system design principles that will be of enduring value over the long run of energy descent. This does not mean that those ideas and actions (strategies and techniques) which are useful in one context or at one point in time will necessarily have enduring value, but that the underlying principles will.

Further, Permaculture is the wholehearted and positive acceptance of energy descent, as not only inevitable but as a desirable reality. Energy descent delivered by a continuous global 'recession' has the potential to bring to fruition many environmental solutions and processes that have languished during the delusional decades since the evidence about global resource depletion became available. These positive aspects will exist side-by-side with negative expressions of energy descent, such as a 'techno-fascism' which is evolving through largerscale economic and political processes.

Permaculture can be thought of as a hopeful 'orienteering map' for the pathways down from the energy mountain. Reflecting the multiple-function concept, this map is designed to generate new pathways as we move down and even to work as an emergency parachute for rapid energy descent.

The positive view of our cultural inheritance
The European enlightenment, industrialisation and modernity are all aspects of the culture of energy ascent that have persisted over the several hundred years of net energy growth. Despite the novel technological, economic and social conditions that have developed over this period, the underlying concepts and design principles of our human culture have actually changed little. That a consistent set of design principles can generate such diverse phenomena, is normal to the systems thinker, even if counter-intuitive to many. If we can see the underlying unity, strength and continuity of our shared culture, despite the novel outcomes in each generation, then we have part of the answer on which to base a new model of cultural sustainability.

In the same way that we might consider the culture of growth to have been sustainable for hundreds of years, any designed and evolved culture adapted to energy descent might similarly be "sustainable" if its underlying values and design principles were to remain intact over a similar period of human history.

Part of the positive message about energy descent relates to how we can best cope with a future where we have to map out and follow the pathways, backtrack when needed, and continuously reshape our activity and culture as we descend the energy mountain over not one or two, but a dozen or more generations. While we will have to discard most of the cultural baggage of our continuous energy ascent culture, the greatest asset we can take with us is our intimate familiarity with continuous change and our capacity for creative response.

Thus the apparent contradiction between stability and change at the core of sustainability concepts, including permaculture, can be understood and used a tool in designing and creating a positive future.

A summary of the basic principles on which Permaculture is based is shown below. For more detail, I thoroughly recommend David Holmgren's book, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. (Footnote 5.)

5 David Holmgren (2002); published by Holmgren Design Services. ISBN 0 646 41844 0

6 See: Permaculture and the Third Wave of Environmental Solutions at: www.holmgren.com.au

7 Mollison, W & D Holmgren (1978) Permaculture One. Corgi.

8 See D. Meadows et al., (1972) The Limits to Growth.

9 Odum, HT (1971) Environment, Power & Society. John Wiley.

10 See various articles in David Holmgren Collected Writings 1978-2000, Holmgren Design Services 2000

11 See The Development of The Permaculture Concept (1991) in: David Holmgren Collected Writings 1978-2000, Holmgren Design Services 2001.

12 From: Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability 2002: Permaculture as design for energy descent.

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[to be continued...]

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