ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Australian permaculturist David Holmgren has launched a new global scenario planning website, Future Scenarios.

The introduction begins by acknowledging the reality that simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilization.

“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 website uses a scenario planning model (“stories”) to explore the potential interaction between climate change and peak oil.

Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures, each  a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Scenarios range from the relatively benign Green Tech to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

“[A]s we stand on the verge of the monumental changes that peak oil and climate change will impose, to have confrontational activism as the principal tool in our toolbox is profoundly unskillful.”

So says Rob Hopkins in a review of The Rocky Road to a Real Transition: the transition towns movement and what it means for social change by Paul Chatterton & Alice Cutler. It’s really not a review at all, but rather a concise exposition of his concept of the transition movement.

He argues that if we are to make a successful transition through peak oil and climate change, we need to move beyond assigning blame for the predicament we are in. We will need to bring together of individuals and organizations, rather than continue a politics of fracturing and antagonizing. We will need to seek common ground rather than find differences. We will need to realize that people who run businesses and people who make decisions are all bewildered by the new reality. We will all be forced by these new and challenging times we are beginning to enter to rethink the basic assumptions that have heretofore guided our lives.

He explains that he sees the transition movement is about personalizing rather than demonizing. People, even our “enemies”, are on the whole not wicked. Rather they are as lost and enmeshed in the way the world works, as we are. They have families they return to at night. We are all in this together.

“What we try and do in the Transition movement is to design in an acceptance of the fact that information about peak oil and climate change can be very distressing, and that it can lead to an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. An approach based on information exchange, allowing people to discuss with others how peak oil and climate change ‘feel’, and to enable them to feel part of a wider community of people exploring this, is very empowering and much more healthy.”

Hopkins thinks the shift in focus from the global to the local will not be a choice. It won’t be something we have to campaign and protest for. It is utterly inevitable. Without cheap oil business as usual becomes unfeasible – and we are already starting to see this. The transition model is trying to design a process for rebuilding resilience and cutting carbon in something “more like a party than a protest march” – something which is inclusive and feels positive and historic.

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging reminds us:

“if we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to not only do things differently, we need to do different things.”

Drive a Prius instead of a Hummer, living in an EcoMansion instead of a McMansion, and shopping at Gaiam rather than the Gap won’t cut it.  It’s  the systems that support and enable those choices that are unsustainable.

“Highways are destructive, even when full of hybrids; sprawl is unsustainable, even when the individual houses are green; we don’t even know what sustainable clothing would look like, much less how to make conventional retail green.”

Steffen reminds us that to change those systems, we’ll have to re-learn how to be good neighbors, how to build friendships, how to share, how to our enlightened self-interest in public goods, how to be a good citizen.

Richard Heinberg gave a talk at a recent conference sponsored by the Findhorn Foundation titled “Resilient Communities – Paths for Powering Down, An Exercise in Strategic Thinking.”

He laid out eight “assumptions” – although “conclusions” seems like a better word, as they are not unfounded assumptions but are firmly grounded in inescapable reality.

1. Global oil production is nearing an all time maximum and will begin to decline within the next 18-24 months, with gas and coal peaks not far behind.
2. The consequences, as identified in the Hirsch Report, will be severe (A Wikipedia article about the Hirsch Report is available here).
3. There will be no technofix, no silver bullet that will enable business as usual to continue.
4. Therefore we will have to power down.
5. In the meantime, climate change poses thorny policy challenges, but enormous economic interests stand in the way.
6. Climate change makes global powerdown necessary, whereas peak oil means it is not only possible but unavoidable.
7. The powering-down process will be complex, lengthy, and perilous.
8. These are not the only looming crises –or even necessarily the most imminent. It may well be that a financial crash, already beginning, will affect us first.

Heinberg talked about emerging responses, including both bottom up approaches such as transition initiatives, relocalization efforts, and so on; and top down responses such as Post Carbon cities and local government efforts such as peak oil task forces. But Heinberg thinks these kinds of responses may not be adequate to cope with a crisis. He suggests we work to make our communities more resilient by developing a disaster response plan to deal with peak oil and economic or environmental collapse that draws on the skills and knowledge of the alternatives movements.

Which leads me to Dmitry Orlov, who has written extensively about the collapse of the Soviet Union and who has been warning us that the U.S. is far less resilient than Russia ever was. He’s written a new book – Reinventing Collapse – that argues the entire country should embrace the notion that collapse is inevitable and that it must prepare for it. Of course, he recognizes that won’t happen – but it’s possible for “small groups of capable and motivated individuals to succeed where governments fear to tread.”

Unlike most of us, Orlov has seen a collapse first hand and has described to process of collapse in detail in The Five Stages of Collapse. As Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies and William Kötke in The Final Empire argue, collapse can actually result in ordinary folks being better off, if not the ruling elites.

Jeffvail at The Oil Drum attacks our enshrinement of “growth” from a novel direction.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”: Read the rest of this entry »

John Michael Greer at his site The Archdruid Report (also available at Energy Bulletin) has a thoughtful piece titled “Pieces of the Puzzle,” pondering the uncertainties in our future. He begins by thinking about agriculture, then wanders into energy. He quite reasonably concludes that we’ll feel our way to the future through a process of trial and error.

“. . . nobody alive today has the least idea how an ecotechnic civilization – a society that can maintain relatively advanced technology on the basis of sustainable resources – might best be constructed. All the experience of the last three centuries has focused on the opposite end of the possible spectrum of technic societies, where you’ll find the civilizations that burn through nonrenewable resources at the fastest pace they can manage. We’ve followed that road just about as far as it can go, far enough that the dead end at its terminus should be visible to anyone who is willing to notice it. . .

“In energy, just as in agriculture and in many other fields, all we have are pieces of the puzzle. It will likely take ruthless sorting and a great deal of trial and error to make those pieces fit together in any sort of meaningful way.”

His advice that we not be “fixating on a single response” is both modest and wise. Achieving it will require that we rediscover within ourselves the ancient and universal spiritual practice of letting go of attachment.

Carolyn Baker at Speaking Truth to Power has posted a deeply provocative review of Mike Byron’s The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide To Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation In A World Gone Mad.

It’s pretty lengthy, so I’m just going to quote a bit. I urge you to visit her site and read the whole thing.

“It is now far too late,” he says, “to prevent our looming petro-collapse and all of its environmental consequences. Like the Titanic approaching the iceberg, collision with our attractor is now both inevitable and imminent. The difference is that, unlike the Titanic, we are actually speeding up as we approach our ‘iceberg’.” (34)

“This paragraph is so momentous, so poignant that the reader must ponder it carefully. Please let it sink in: We cannot prevent catastrophe, the pace with which we are plummeting toward it is accelerating. When the impact of these two statements sinks in, how can anyone reading these words assume that his/her own or the planet’s “business as usual” can continue?

“But the author does not leave us there because he quickly adds:

“However, it is possible for many of us to survive the catastrophe and to sow the seeds for civilization to be renewed with all of the learning of past ages relatively intact. This is because at the very center of it all are the ordered patterns of memes from which our minds emerge and interact with the minds of others. We can ensure that the lessons learned from this impending collapse are firmly incorporated into the minds and culture of our successor civilization’s citizens and into their institutions and laws.”

Richard Heinberg makes the case that there is an overwhelming need for non-technological responses to our global environmental crisis.

Heinberg calls the view that climate change is caused by technology and therefore must have a technical solution “blindingly superficial.” It’s not just climate change that threatens us, but depletion of resources including oil, natural gas, coal, fresh water, fish, topsoil, and minerals (ranging from antimony to zinc, and including, significantly, uranium); as well as destruction of habitat and accelerating biodiversity loss – which is exacerbated by climate change, but is also happening for other anthropogenic reasons.

He sums up the problem thusly:

“In essence, there are just too many of us using too much too fast.”

I think his expansion of this theme is worth quoting at length:

“Thus the problem is not merely technological; it is cultural in the deepest sense. Starting a couple of centuries ago, our species embarked on a path of unprecedented growth, founded on a temporary subsidy of cheap hydrocarbon energy. Climate change is a side effect of fossil fuel consumption, and has emerged as the most critical symptom of our growth binge. But unless we address the core of the problem, other symptoms will soon overwhelm us even if we manage technically to resolve the dilemma of carbon emissions.

“Addressing the core of the problem means letting go of growth; in fact, it means engaging in a period of controlled societal contraction characterized by a stable or declining population consuming at a per-capita level far lower than is currently taken for granted in the industrialized world.

“For anyone who understands the basics of ecology—having to do with relationships between population, resources, and carrying capacity—nothing could be clearer. But for those who insist on seeing only technical problems with technical solutions, the forest remains lost from sight behind a single tree. . .

“Once one accepts this larger framing of the problem and its solutions, a whole world of possibilities opens up—a world I intend to explore in future columns. Far from being a world of utter hopelessness, it is one that engages human responsibility, creativity, and community. It is one characterized by cultural maturity, rather than the advertising-fueled teenage—even infantile—attitude that assumes that the world exists only to supply an ever-expanding list of human wants. It is the world of post-carbon living toward which tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of citizens worldwide are beginning deliberately to transition.”

There’s a great interview with Dan Armstrong, writer, activist, and owner of Mud City Press, at Carolyn Baker’s website Speaking Truth to Power.

Looking for a way to effectively come to grips with the realities of peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation – and with the loss of faith in the ability or will of a corrupt national government to address these realities – Armstrong turned to the relocalization movement.

“If you apply energy to local politics, whether in the city council or at neighborhood meetings, you have some modest chance of effecting change. Add that Peak Oil is a market issue and is changing the economic gradient of everything in the direction of relocalization.”

Relocalization may not bring salvation or change the world overnight, but it’s a place to begin.

“Nowhere else in all my involvement have I felt or seen the kind of community building that I’ve seen in the food relocalization movement. While emotional Peak Oil or climate change presentations, sadly, have done little to change business as usual, food discussions do. If you want to get involved, I suggest food security as a good place to start, not because it will change the world today, not because it will bring salvation, but because you can see incremental positive response. And if you’re fighting your state of mind, this helps.”

Over the last few days I’ve listened to an impassioned discussion about reaching out to or engaging in a dialogue with “faux environmentalists” or those who engage in “greenwashing.” I share dismay at measures to “mitigate” the damage from environmentally destructive projects. I share disdain for programs such as carbon credits and cap-and-trade schemes, which have proved nothing more than means to postpone or avoid effective action, than ways to continue business as usual while feeling or appearing to be virtuous. I share wholehearted contempt for international agreements such as Kyoto or Bali that are known to be inadequate even if they were to be taken seriously by all of the world’s governments and were to be successfully implemented.

Yet, on the other hand, I fear we’re much harder on those with whom we share at least some common ground than we are on our avowed opponents.

I think we need to step back and take a broad look at the situation that confronts us. It’s no longer good enough to work to save an endangered species, a stand of old-growth forest, a breeding ground for fish. The entirety of Earth’s ecosystem is now at risk. Uncounted myriads of species are threatened with destruction, including humans and human civilization as we know it.

Averting catastrophic climate change will require massive, rapid, and global action. Is the required response even conceivable?

James Hansen has said that it’s too late – we’ve already gone too far:

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.”

The reticence of scientists and of the IPCC itself has become part of the problem, as today’s widely advocated 2ºC warming cap is demonstrably too high and would be a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species as positive feedbacks work through the climate system.

The report Climate Code Red finds that hitting a target of 350 ppm wouldn’t be nearly enough climate catastrophe. The report argues that a crash program to implement policies needed decarbonize our economy and achieve the necessary reductions in atmospheric CO2 levels, over a time period of a few years, is not a choice but a necessity for life.

Yet carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, not even a significant downtrend, in fossil fuel consumption.

What would it take, now and everywhere, to reduce atmospheric CO2 to safe levels? As Sally Erickson says at Speaking Truth to Power, it would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. Forget hybrid cars – they take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels.

When Bill McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization. Who really thinks that’s going to happen, voluntarily or involuntarily, by political compulsion?

The stark reality is we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore. It is too late.

We’re not going to save the world, so we need to stop trying to fix a dying system. We should rather focus on new growth, on healing.

We won’t get anywhere or achieve anything by accusing those who don’t yet share our vision of lack of integrity. People have the capacity for a good heart, even if we may see them as ignorant or even corrupt. As Gandhi said, if we are to change the world we first need to purify our own thoughts, to aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. And as Buddha said, kindness is key. When words are both true and kind can they change our world.

It’s time to move beyond the traditional rivalries which are based on our attachment to the world as it was. We need to open our hearts to compassion, as it is only through compassion that a new community can emerge from the wreckage of the old.

Local permaculturist Jan Spencer will be sharing his experiences with his  Eugene suburban reinvention project at the upcoming Eco City World Summit 2008 to be held throughout Earth Day Week, April 22-26, 2008 in San Francisco, California.

Spencer’s presentation is titled “Converting a Suburban Property into a Model of Eco Logical Culture Change.” It describes the impressive range of benefits gained from his re-visioning of his ¼-acre suburban property in Eugene.

Spencer reinvented his property applying Permaculture principles. Initial goals were to make much better use of on site resources – sun, soil and rain – to produce useful amounts of food and energy. The project includes vegetable gardens and fruit trees, a rain water catchment and distribution system, removal of a concrete driveway, solar heating for water and interior space and increasing the residential density of the property.

Spencer’s project has been widely covered in the media and has become a favorite site for workshops on property conversion and culture change. He has shown what can be done with non-professional skills and modest finances.

The re-inventing of suburbia will be an important part of the solution to the energy, climate, and ecological crises that have resulted from our out-of-control global economic system.

University of California scientists are reporting that biofuels are worse than oil because they remove carbon from our soils.

Land is being lost to development, pollution and changing weather patterns. But mostly, global soil loss is a crisis mostly rooted in agriculture. Topsoil is being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated.

For the last several months I’ve been thinking about how we might go about revitalizing our local land use activist organization (Friends of Linn County), and around the issues that are most important for our future – global warming and peak oil. Land use is a primary driver of fossil fuel consumption and resultant emissions – so the connection between land use, climate change and energy is or should be readily apparent.

We used Oregon’s land use planning program as a proxy to get at what we really cared about – maintaining an ethical relationship with the land and all of its inhabitants, keeping “development” from devouring it bit by inexorable bit. It was really a pretty lousy tool for that job, but it’s all we had. Now after the passage of first Measure 37 and now Measure 49, the air is completely out of that balloon.

Focusing on land use as a tool had one benefit: we could use law to challenge and sometimes overturn or thwart bad local decision-making. But the connection between our means and our objective was tenuous at best, and difficult to explain. In the absence of a direct and obvious ethical and emotional chord, it’s proved hard to expand beyond a core group into the larger community.

We don’t care about and do land use just for the sake of land use. We do it because it furthers a moral and ethical vision of what it means to live in this world – and because using land badly (as we do now) will have catastrophic and irreparable consequences for this country, for humanity, and for all of creation.

So the first step is to bring the moral and ethical basis for good land use to the forefront. This means laying out the consequences of continuing our bad land use practices – which are becoming more evident with each passing day.

The second step is to move the movement beyond the historic land use community into the broader community.

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book has written a provocative piece about what it will take to move the “peak oil” and “climate change” groups from their present role – as thinly spread “special interest” groups and towards becoming a larger, and more powerful network. Her observations seem particularly relevant to our experience throughout rural Oregon. Read the rest of this entry »

What we need to satisfactorily address our energy and climate dilemma is a thorough-going inventory and analysis of the services we seek and new ways to obtain them with a lot less energy.

Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights reminds us of what economists tell us: it’s not goods that people seek, but rather the services which goods provide. For example, we would have scant use for cars if they didn’t provide transportation.

All we’ve really done is swap the cheap, easy, low-energy mobility of walking, cycling and public transportation, for the privatized, high-energy, high-maintenance mobility of the car. This thing called the car which was supposed to liberate us ends up only isolating us and degrading our social and physical health as well as the health of the planet.

It may be difficult to convince people that a different way of doing something will provide satisfactory results. But as long as the emphasis remains on an energy transition that, for example, simply replaces one kind of car with another, the real work of creating a low-energy society will be impossible.

Kobb concludes:

“The task is to introduce the “services” way of thinking into peak oil discourse so that 1) we are not inadvertently promoting the idea that gadgets and products that are “greener” are always the best route to adaptation and 2) people can have confidence that there are, in fact, ways – perhaps many good ways- to get the everyday services we seek.”

As readers this blog and the Goal One Coalition news are aware, one of the priorities for Goal One over the last couple of years has been to raise awareness of the energy and climate crises that confront us. Land use – where and how we live within the landscape – has played a dominant role in creating the problem, and land use will have to play an important role in forging a solution.

Goal One is now ready to move beyond talk to action. The Goal One Institute, a project of the Goal One Coalition, will work with citizen groups and community leaders to devise and implement ground-up, local community-based strategies to reducing fossil fuel based energy usage and resultant greenhouse gas emissions.

As I argued in a couple of recent posts, Oregon’s planning program actually prevents us from doing good things while failing to prevent sprawl. It’s time for a fresh look at what we’re doing, and why.

The Goal One Institute will continue to advocate for a big picture strategy to address our energy and climate challenges while at the same time working identify specific actions that can be taken on a local or statewide level to eliminate the roadblocks to good land use and to craft ordinances and legislative proposals that take energy and climate considerations into account in our decision making. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the realities that has become more clear over the last year is that we can’t rely on our leaders and politicians to “save” us from  the unprecedented threats that confront us, the consequences of which are largely speculative and uncertain.

While as activists we work to change the system from the top down, as human beings and citizens we at the same time have to work to change our lives and our communities from the ground up.

This year I want to spend more time thinking about and working on and building resilience into the everyday life that we lead.

We didn’t grow a garden last year – I was just too busy with my job and with  transforming our 1977 Homette to make it suitable for Irina’s mother (and incidentally my office). Managing the vineyard and the sheep were all we could handle. We did manage to plant a small apple orchard and a few pear trees.  This year we’d like to grow more of our own food, especially food that will store for winter consumption. That implies some kind of a root cellar type structure – which we’ve been needing for the wine, anyway.

The big problem I’d like to solve is water. Our well is 180 feet deep – when the power goes out, we’re out of water. That’s not so much of a problem in the winter – keeping the rain barrels full is not a problem in this climate. But summer is a different story. No power and we’re dry.

It’s hard to remember that electricity is so new. Just a hundred years ago people got along without it. That’s a skill we ought to re-learn, just in case.

How to live with less oil, with less or less reliable electricity. How to survive with fewer trips to the supermarket.

So that’s my resolution. Build a little more resiliency into our life, little by little. Just in case. And we’ll be happier for it, whatever comes down the pike.

An article by Eric Reese in the Louisville Courier-Journal provides evidence that awareness of the unsatisfactory nature and unsustainability of our profligate way of life is becoming ever more widespread around the country.  Reese writes that 2007 will be remembered as the year when Americans finally realized we can no longer doubt or delay action on our global environmental crisis:

“There are three things that keep me up nights: the threat of climate change, peak oil and the mountaintop removal strip mining that is destroying Appalachia. And I have reached the conclusion that, here in the United States, there are three major causes of these problems: Our homes are too big, our food travels too far, and our entire economy is built around the automobile. American homes are twice as big as they were 30 years ago, though fewer people actually live in them. The average item on a supermarket shelf has logged 1,500 miles to get there. And the homogenous suburb has ensured that we must drive everywhere, destroying at once the traditional, walkable city and the surrounding rural landscapes. Thus we have created a consumer culture that much of the developing world – most ominously, China – wants to emulate. But the problem is that this culture is based entirely on carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and it is therefore a culture that has no future.

He’s optimistic because he doesn’t believe our current culture embodies the future we want.

“Social scientists have found that today’s Americans are no happier than they were 30 years ago, though we consume twice as many resources. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. We feel increasingly anxious and isolated, depressed and over-worked. Thus I think an alternative to this consumer culture would not only decrease the damage we are inflicting on the natural world, I think it would make us a happier people.”

Reese invokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal manifesto, The Living City, written 50 years ago. The book is a renunciation of cities shaped by “sordid, ugly commercialism” and a call to rebuild communities on a human scale, based on “organic” principles whereby nature and culture reclaim a more symbiotic relationship. “Decentralize and reintegrate!” Wright exhorted.

Reese laments the extreme centralization that has come to dominate American life, and calls for decentralization as the key to a better way life: Read the rest of this entry »

This rosy, pro-business welcome is found on the Cape Coral Economic Development Office website.

“The City of Cape Coral’s Economic Development Office works to create a pro-business climate that helps businesses to succeed and grow in an explosive market. INC Magazine ranked Cape Coral-Fort Myers area #1 city for doing business among cities over 100,000. Milken Institute lists Cape Coral-Fort Myers 2nd in its top performing cities for job creation in its 2005 index. The MSA has ranking no lower than third over the past 4 years.”

An article titled “This Is the Sound of a Bubble Bursting” in the Business section of the Sunday, Dec. 23 New York Times tells a different story.

Kudos to the Times article. It was very nicely done, a fine piece of human interest story telling and journalism.

Cape Coral didn’t even exist until 1958 when the swampy, semitropical marshes and tidal flats were seen as a site for big real estate development. Canals were built, wetlands drained, some streets put in, a few bridges built – and now it is a semitropical suburban bedroom community to Fort Meyers and a major population center in a metro area of close to half a million.

The article starts out describing how the new mayor of Cape Coral was looking forward to cutting ribbons for a constant parade of business openings, highways, subdivisions, parks, and schools. Instead, he is overseeing a local way of life in sharp contraction. A constant parade of statistics shows that this once-explosive market is derailing. There are thousands of stories of bummed-out people being caught up in the unwinding of a make-believe economy. Read the rest of this entry »