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