[Sustain] Speech: David Holmgren On Permaculture & Peak Oil

[Eric Brooks]

Hi all,

I just found a very important speech by David Holmgren (the co-founder 
of permaculture) which has a lot of very crucial perspective in it on 
the ways that human thinking on how to manage a sustainable future must 
evolve beyond where it is now, and also must re-vision current concepts 
of sustainability. Cal Broomhead if you are reading this, I think it is 
especially important that you pass on to the Department of Env. and 
SFPUC a really vital point that Holmgren makes toward the end of the 
speech that as we restrict water use to counter coming droughts, we 
crucially create strong -exemptions- on those restrictions to allow for 
local food production in home, rooftop, and neighborhood gardens which 
actually -save- water supply in the big picture.

I preface guiding you all to the audio link by saying that I actually 
strongly disagree with some aspects of what Holmgren lays out. His 
described idea of a long gentle decline from peak energy use is made 
from his perspective of working hands on in local oriented permaculture 
and doesn't account for very large and irresistible forces in 
techno-capitalism which will simply not allow this slow energy decline 
to an energy nirvana take place. So when he lays out that part of his 
vision I think we should take it with a grain of salt and realise that 
our actual future will be something more of a yin-yang marriage between 
the growing shift to technological fixes like solar and wind power and 
the very low energy agrarian devolution which he envisions.

Also, I have always strongly disagreed with Holmgren's emphasis on using 
animals in a big way for food and food production. Though it is indeed 
possible to create a beautifully sustainable local living system which 
harmoniously includes the human eating of lots of animals, such tactics 
will be extremely hard to scale to a growing global human population 
that is -far- too large. Even more important, what so many 
permaculturists like Holmgren totally fail to grasp, is that it is the 
mentality that it is ok for humans to enslave, strike, and kill animals 
and even plants and living systems to our -use-, instead of properly 
envisioning ourselves as ethical partners in a dance with the rest of 
our ecosystem, that has repeatedly gotten modern humans stuck in 
horrendous progress traps over at the last 100,000 years of our history. 
When we make the decision to dominate (for example in the moment when we 
decide that it is ok to take a fish and strike its head on a rock to 
make it dead) we are fundamentally changing our own mentality. With 
proper mythical reverence for, and thanks to, the animal, that mentality 
is at first sustainable, but gradually such internalised moments of 
violent dominance evolve into unsustainable behavior and group practices 
because they stealthfully accumulate a mental and physical dominance 
paradigm over the biosphere, eventually crowding the mythical reverence 
out. As we build permacultural living systems within which to live, it 
will be important that we let -predators- do the job of culling animals 
that achieve unbalanced high populations in those systems; not humans 
which are far too drastically clever at over-exploiting tools and 
mentalities of dominance and destruction such that those tools and 
thought processes inevitably spiral over and over again into 
sustainability failure.

Anyway, with all those caveats laid down, Holmgren's core perspectives 
are crucial to re-envisioning ourselves and our civilisation. You can 
hear his speech at:

http://www.radio4all.net/index.php?op=program-info&program_id=26484&nav=&

For a basic explanation of permaculture go to:

http://www.idepfoundation.org/idep_permaculture.html

peace

Eric