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Published Aug 17 2006 by EB, Archived Aug 17 2006

Energy Descent - Aug 17

by Staff

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


Australia Aug 20 to Sep 6: Richard Heinberg & David Holmgren on Peak Oil & Permaculture
Holmgren Design Services
In August-Sept 2006 David Holmgren will be joined by Richard Heinberg, leading environmental educator from California on a public speaking tour explaining the truth and opportunities from the coming end of cheap energy. As well as taking the message to a larger public audiences in big capital city venues, this tour aims to make clear the sustainable alternatives to the "war that will never end in our lifetimes" and the "something will save our unsustainable addictions" stories which are the default reactions to the realities of peak oil.

This tour will provide resources for the sceptical to get up to speed on the coming changes as well as inspiration and empowerment for those already on the path of a more productive and saner way of life. It aims to cement the connections between emerging peak oil activism and 25 years of permaculture inspired activism on creative bottom up solutions to energy crisis.

While the historic peaking and decline in world oil supply is becoming more widely discussed in the media, it is a bad news story to rival climate change. Heinberg and Holmgren make a great team to distill the key understandings behind the avalanche of confusing information and empower people to take Peak Oil as the upheaval which will call us to refocus on opportunities to rebuild personal and household self reliance and relocalise our community and economies using a diverse range of familiar and novel strategies pioneered by the permaculture and related movements over the last 30 years.

Heinberg, author of two best selling books on Peak Oil: The Party's Over and Powerdown, grapples with the geological, ecological, economic political and psycho-social implications of Peak Oil which is holistic and down to earth.

Holmgren, co-originator of the Permaculture concept in the 1970's and author of Permaculture:Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, shows how permaculture is much more than a form of organic gardening; in fact an empowering design system for the energy descent future.

Tour Destinations:

Download Speaking Tour Schedule (Word doc. dated with new info when available)
(2006)
The A4 Tour Poster (PDF) and Sydney brochure (PDF) look professionally written and produced.

UPDATE: Rob Hopkins describes this as The Dream Double Bill

A couple of other Peak Oil events coming up in Melbourne in the same week include:

Chris Skrebowski has other dates around the country also.
-AF + BA


Launching Transition Town Totnes!
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Programme September - December 2006.
We are delighted to announce the programme of events for the first 4 months of the Transition Town Totnes initiative. The project will develop, over the next 12 - 18 months, an Energy Descent Action Plan for Totnes, designing a positive way down from the oil peak, building on the work begun in Kinsale. It will strive to be inclusive, imaginative, practical and fun. We have put together a programme which combines inspirational speakers, many of whom will be visiting Totnes for the first time, film screenings, Open Space think tank days and much more.

A website will soon be launched, we'll let you know more nearer the time. We look forward to seeing you at some of these, and to working with you in putting Totnes on the map as the first town in the UK to really begin to design an abundant future beyond cheap oil. The programme below will be backed up with oral history interviews and surveys. I will keep you posted on developments as the project unfolds here at Transition Culture.
(13 Aug 2006)
Events include nights with Richard Heinberg, David Fleming, Paul Mobbs, 'open space' events and a 10 week evening course called Skilling Up for Powerdown. Looks fantastic. -AF


The Priest and the Prophet
Charles Shaw, Grist Magazine
Can industrial civilization really become sustainable? Should it?
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To be, or not to be -- that is the age-old question, and civilization today faces its own dire version of it. As the negative social and ecological effects of 150 years of industrialization are becoming impossible to ignore, people are asking whether we can maintain our standards of living. But very few are asking if we should.

There are, however, two contemporary thinkers for whom this question is primal: William McDonough, green architect and designer, and Derrick Jensen, neo-tribal environmentalist and philosopher. They epitomize the vanguard of the new green zeitgeist. They are the elemental planners of a future sustainable society.

Both visionaries are mythically Shakespearean in the quirk, richness, and lyrical beauty of their respective evangelizing characters. But one is Establishment, the other Counterculture. One wears a bow tie, the other wears beads. One comes from the corporate aristocracy, educated at Dartmouth and Yale; the other from working-class Spokane and the Colorado School of Mines. One founded three revolutionary companies; the other keeps the company of revolutionaries.
(15 Aug 2006)
From my reading of Jensen, he is not a "planner of a future sustainable society" as author Charles Shaw claims, but rather a fiery prophet of industrial civilization. I'd argue that the permaculturalist and related movements have a counter-culture vision of sustainability that is much more solid and defined. -BA


Social revolution that may well save our planet
Mary Ann Sieghart, UK Times
...Just five or ten years ago, only the most environmentally conscious minority cared about such things. They were the ones who bothered to take their empty bottles to the bottle bank while the rest of us chucked them in the bin. Now, though, almost everybody recycles. Throwing an empty beer can into the general rubbish makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable. It never used to. So what has changed? Global warming was happening five years ago. The packaging of our supermarket food was just as wasteful. Our Kenyan snow peas had just as far to travel then. Lots of us knew that we ought to care, but we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to do so.

The difference, I believe, is the new consensus on the issue. And for that, we can, in part, thank David Cameron. While there was still one main political party that did not indulge in greenery, that prided itself on being the motorist’s friend, it was easier for sceptics to believe that they were in one camp, while the environmentalists were in another. They could even deride the idea that climate change was happening at all. If they did so now, they would be laughed to scorn. The few scientists who still refuse to entertain the notion of global warming sound like those apologists for the tobacco companies who insisted for years that smoking did not cause cancer. We have truly reached a tipping point.

People are really starting to wonder now how they can lead a more environmentally friendly life - people who had never questioned the way they lived. They are buying reusable carrier bags, using the car less, spurning supermarkets for street and farmers’ markets, using low-energy lightbulbs.

Some countries are already well ahead of us. Interestingly, even in the US, sales of 4x4s have fallen by 28 per cent in a year. The Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians are horrified when they see our supermarkets spewing out free plastic bags or our households failing to recycle. To them it has become an article of faith. Just as I wouldn’t dream of dropping a Coke can in the street, they wouldn’t dream of dropping it in a non-recyclable rubbish bin. And moral habits, once acquired, are hard to break. Which means that it is unlikely Britain will ever again be as casually environmentally unfriendly as over the past few decades.

Younger people are even more environmentally conscious than their elders. They will bring up their children with precepts that, to an older generation, are still novel. As consumers, they will demand higher standards from the businesses that serve them. I bet, for instance, that excessive packaging will have disappeared from supermarket shelves within a decade or so. And food miles will have shrunk dramatically.

These 21-year-olds will not just avoid drinking and driving. They will avoid polluting too. It is a powerful social revolution, and one that is badly needed by the planet. At last, climate change has led to a sea change - and I’m not talking about the temperature of the ocean.
(17 Aug 2006)