Do you want ice with that?

Calculating future sea level rises seems to be an inexact science - there are just far too many variables - this however is not a reason for complacency - quite the opposite, when you cannot be sure of the degree to which an effect will manifest then you have to include the conceivable worse case scenario in your planning.

The online version of the journal Science recently published an article titled ‘A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise’ by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. This article suggests that the sea level rise predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their Third Assessment Report (2001) under-estimate the actual likely increases. Using the initial data produced by the computer models of the IPCC and additional empirical information gained through observation, the researchers for this article found that in 2100 sea levels would be 0.5-1.4m above 1990 levels. This contrasts with the 9-88cm forecast made by the IPCC.

The IPCC issue their Fourth Assessment Report in February 2007 and it will be interesting to see how their predictions may have altered.

Meanwhile, why not check out this site which Keith linked me up to, which allows you to see the effect of varying degrees of sea level rise on the geographical location of your choice. And remember this information does not include storm surges, freak storms, hurricane of tsunami effects!

The animation at the top show the predicted decline in Arctic sea ice courtesy of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. The animation below is one of many put together by the National Environment Trust indicating the possible effects of a combined sea level rise and a storm surge on major US cities - this one is everyone's favourite disaster movie target - New York City:

Together in Electric Dreams

If we accept that we face a future of energy descent, and/or that our current profligate use of energy is contributing to global climate change (and I think we accept both right?) then we must use less energy.

Using less - and ideas of reduction can be unappealing and hard ideas to sell. Most of us, even those of us who accept a need to use less energy would prefer to keep as many of the benefits of modern convenience as we can. Therefore we want to find the most efficient ways of doing things while minimising any increase in the intensity of labour. So, given that we already turn everything off at the wall when we’re not using it, never use standby, have replaced our light bulbs with leds - what else might we do to bring our electricity demand down?

Washing your clothes

Rob Hopkins pointed out recently in an entry at Transition Culture the great advantages which the washing machine has brought. The labour of hand washing is certainly a real grind which most people would be pleased to avoid. So what can we do to make things better?

1) If you buy a new washing machine you must go for an A+ energy rated one – and use a full load.

2) Sharing a washing machine can be more efficient, especially using the industrial models found in launderettes – in the future it would be good to see installation of these type of machines in communal areas of housing.

3) You could try using an electricity free model like the Wonder Wash, which depends on your physical labour but increases its efficiency. I have no experience of these yet, but this seems worthy of investigation. In the UK you can buy them from here.

Drying your clothes

Now you’ve washed your clothes – they’re wet and you’ve got to get them dry. Lots of people use a tumble dryer – its easy, its independent of weather conditions, it also uses a lot of energy. So what are the options?

1) A clothes line obviously – but in the cool, wet temperate regions of northern Europe in winter time, this is not always a go-er. I recently read about this clothes line contraption, which if you’ve got the space may provide a solution to getting things dry even when it’s raining.

2) A spin dryer is a good way of extracting a lot of the water from your washing, and use far less energy than a tumble dryer. It uses centrifugal force to extract the water. This is supposed to be a resilient model. As others have pointed out, there should be a way of fixing something like this up to a static bicycle, thus using human generated rather than electrically generated kinetic energy and providing an exercise opportunity to boot.

Keeping food and drink cool

This is obviously more of an issue in warmer climes and the warmer months, but there are plenty of items which will keep longer, keep fresher or just be more appealing if we can keep them cooler.

1) In a climate like the UK, there is much to be said for the traditional larder – on the cool side of the house, allowing air to circulate around the foodstuffs can obviate the need for a fridge for much of the year.

2) There are some “high tech” developments taking place using magnets to create a more energy efficient refrigerator, these are still in development however and I prefer the lowest tech solution we can come up with.

3) Which brings into play the Zeer pot or pot-in-pot ‘fridge’, a beautifully simple use of thermodynamics and basic materials – two terracotta pots, sand, water – to achieve a way of keeping food and drink cool.

Making a cup of tea

Anyone who has looked at the wattage of the average kettle, or watched their electricity meter spin while their kettle boils will know how much energy these use up.

1) One thing I’ve enjoyed the use of recently is the storm kettle; this provides a quick way of boiling water using a small amount of combustible fuel. May mean you have to go outside to boil the kettle – but hey what’s wrong with outside?

OK, so now you can wash and dry your clothes, keep food cool and make a cup of tea all without using electricity. What’s next?

The Great Escape

A Trailer for Escape from Suburbia, Greg Greenes’s sequel/follow-up to The End of Suburbia is now available via YouTube/Google Video/BitTorrent and here! (The trailer can also be downloaded from their website, but this is a dis-preferred option as it increases their bandwidth costs).

Escape from Suburbia is currently due for release in March 2007, you can put your name down to pre-order the DVD on the documentary’s website, they are also accepting voluntary donations to help fund the project.

The End of Suburbia (2004) quickly seemed to become a major consciousness raising tool for Peak Oil awareness, and is still worth seeing if you haven’t encountered yet. If that documentary was the ‘problem’ film, Escape from Suburbia promises to be the ‘solution’ film. Well the title promises that anyway, details of this film’s contents are sketchy right now – the trailer doesn’t give too much away (other than the fact they’ve been raiding Rick Prelinger’s stash at the Internet Archive again). Text on the website tells us:

“In ESCAPE From SUBURBIA director Greg Greene once again takes us “through the looking glass” on a journey of discovery – a sobering yet vital and ultimately positive exploration of what the second half of the Oil Age has in store for us.

Through personal stories and interviews we examine how declining world oil production has already begun to affect modern life in North America. Expert scientific opinion is balanced with “on the street” portraits from an emerging global movement of citizen’s groups who are confronting the challenges of Peak Oil in extraordinary ways.

The clock is ticking. ESCAPE From SUBURBIA asks the tough questions: Are we approaching Peak Oil now? What are the controversies surrounding our future energy options? Why are a growing number of specialists and citizens skeptical of these options? What are ordinary people across North America doing in their own communities to prepare for Peak Oil? And what will YOU do as energy prices skyrocket and the Oil Age draws to a close?”

That one line “What are ordinary people across North America doing in their own communities to prepare for Peak Oil?” seems to contain the best indication of a solution based approach. The general vibe I pick up however is that this film will relate to the previous one much as Richard Heinberg’s Powerdown related to his previous The Party’s Over. i.e. it will cover a lot of the same ground, be more up to date factually and have a greater degree of focus on solutions, without being a solution focussed work. Heinberg is again one of those featured in this film alongside: James Howard Kunstler; Amory Lovins; Jeremy Rifkin; Matthew Simmons; Representative Roscoe Bartlett; Dianne Leaf Christian; James Woolsey; Julian Darley; Richard Heinberg; Thomas Homer-Dixon; Faith Murphy; Guy Dauncey; Jeffrey Rubin; Pat Foody; Hon. Ed Schreyer; Hon. Michael Meacher; Hon. Yves Cochet; Mike Ruppert; and Colin Campbell.

The presence of Michael Meacher and Yves Cochet in that list provides some hope of a European angle on these issues – but really I still think the UK needs its own film looking at these issues from a more local perspective. Hopefully the UK Soil Association’s annual conference (January 26-27, 2007) which is focussing on ‘One Planet Agriculture - Preparing for a post-peak oil food and farming future’ will provide some more impetus towards communicating these issues to a UK audience through a UK lens. I shan’t be going to the conference, as it’s to bloody expensive!

Grizzly Men

I’ve been a fan of Werner Herzog since some point in the 1980s when I saw Aguirre, Wrath of God on TV. I think it was during the great reign of Alex Cox on Moviedrome, when a stuck at home teenager could depend on a regular stream of the coolest, weirdest cult films coming out of the television (although on researching this it appears that Moviedrome never featured Aguirre!). Nowadays, the dvd bonanza of reissues, and bit-torrented div-x’d whatever’d video files shared online provide a very different route in. Maybe there’s more access now, but there is a lack of the personal curatorship that a Cox would bring to your viewing.

I’m not sure what the next Herzog film I saw was, but the next revelation for me was starting to catch his documentary work. Amazingly inspiring films, and it was amazingly inspiring also that he worked in both fiction and non-fiction modes. It created in me a new sense of what a modern film maker could be, what a film maker could achieve.

This weekend I finally got around to watching Grizzly Man his recent documentary, after picking a used copy up cheap at the local video store. What a pleasure it was to sit down again and hear the warm, pleasant tones of Werner’s voice as he brought another story to life.

By now you probably know something of the story behind the film, even if you haven’t seen it: Timothy Treadwell a minor actor with an alcohol problem finds himself in an environmental crusade to save the grizzly bear, which over a span of 13 years sees him living in ridiculously, dangerous proximity to bears every summer. He captures amazing footage of the animals, gets to know them, the local ecosystem and their patterns of behaviour – until he and his girlfriend are killed and eaten by one of the bears.

The legacy of Treadwell’s video recordings provide an archival record from which Herzog weaves his own telling of Treadwell’s story, adding interviews with other players in the events to find out more about what made Treadwell who he was. In this story Herzog returns to familiar themes of obsession and wild nature, and again we can sense his continuance of a strand of German Romanticism. Never sentimental, Herzog defines his separation from Treadwell in his own sense of the awe-ful, his perception of the neutral chaos in nature where Treadwell sensed some more beneficent order.

Yet the story of Treadwell is both tragic and inspiring – some of the footage of Treadwell with the bears, with the family of foxes he befriends, snowy mountains in the background is like the chocolate box Eden of the Watchtower and other Jehovah’s Witness propaganda. It is easy to confuse an appreciation of nature’s beauty with an over simplified vision of universal harmony. In many of the clips in which Treadwell is shown speaking, he refers to the possibility of his own death, and some viewers have sensed some kind of Thanatos – death wish in him, despite his otherwise carefree behaviour. Some of the most telling parts psychologically come from where Herzog show Treadwell’s rushes in extended form, so we see him moving from the educator persona he has created for his schools audience and the obsessed auteur, swearing egomaniacal force he can also manifest (the connections here between Treadwell and an archetype – which both Herzog and Klaus Kinski often channelled appears clear).

The film is assisted massively by an excellent soundtrack performed by a group of musicians centred on Richard Thompson. The DVD includes a bonus documentary on the session which produced the music score, which is an added delight where you can watch Thompson, Jim O’Rourke, Henry Kaiser and others in action.

The Whole of our Efforts

I got into an interesting debate this week in the comments section of Transition Culture. Rob posted a short entry on Wednesday titled “The Idiocy of Renewing Trident” where he reflects on how the £20 billion being pledged for renewal of the Trident nuclear missile system could be better spent on energy descent preparations.

Jason Cole writing in response to Rob’s piece presents his belief that altering the UK’s policy in regards to nuclear weapons would be extremely difficult if not impossible. In the subsequent exchange between Jason and myself, he indicates that the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change are where we should be directing the “whole of our efforts”, and that campaigning simultaneously for issues like nuclear disarmament is “pointless” and a “distraction”. I believe Jason means that these other issues will distract people from focussing on the most important issues, he also says: “speeches made about Nuclear Weapons during a Climate Change march only serves to dilute the message”.

In the course of the exchange between Jason and myself I argued both that these issues were intertwined and that it was worthwhile campaigning for nuclear disarmament, that we could effect change in this area.

I do believe that Jason’s position is one that we must consider however. Should we just focus on the most important issues to the exclusion of all others, however worthy? We have limited amounts of personal energy – how can we best use that to effect change? Should we be using some kind of personal EROEI equation, where we consider the ‘energy return’ as positive change effected in the system? – on this basis we only would only campaign on the issues where we could effect most change.

This could be related to the idea I first encountered in Permaculture of your personal ‘circle of influence’ and your ‘circle of concern’ (I believe that this idea originates from Stephen R. Covey’s book 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People'). Covey writes:

"In looking at ways to influence and change our surroundings it is helpful to notice where we focus our time and energy. We each have a wide range of concerns--our health, our family, problems at work, the national debt, etc., and it is these things in our lives that make up our Circle of Concern.”

“As we look at those things within our Circle of Concern, it becomes apparent that there are some things over which we have no real control and others that we can do something about. We could identify those concerns in the latter group by circumscribing them in a smaller Circle of Influence.”

Covey continues that effective people focus on their Circle of Influence because they “are smart, they are value driven, they read reality, and they know what's needed” and because “[t]hey work on the things they can do something about”. By focusing their energies in this way “The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging, and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.”

When we consider these big issues which concern us like Peak Oil, Climate Change, Nuclear Weapons we are liable initially to feel dwarfed by their enormity. However, when we consider what we can influence and act on that we empower ourselves. It may be easier to see how our circle of influence could include elements related to Peak Oil and Climate Change – we can reduce our personal energy use in a number of ways, we can inform ourselves about the issues, we can shop locally, we can learn how to live more sustainable lives. It may be harder to see how our circle of influence extends to nuclear disarmament, and many like Jason might suggest it does not. Here however are some examples of what you might do:

1) Sign the E-Petition at the 10 Downing Street website:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to champion the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, by not replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system.”

This is one of the most popular e-petitions on the site and has 5,300 signatories to date.

2) Join the Big Trident Debate pressing the government for a full debate on the issue of replacing the Trident system by adding your name to the Big Trident Debate Statement.

3) Contact your MP and express your opinion on the issue, ask them to support the Alternative White Paper ‘Safer Britain, Safer World: The decision not to replace Trident’.

4) Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

5) If you feeling active join the blockade of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston next Monday (11^th December).

Animating the Earth

One of the advantages of moving back to London this year has been the proximity and frequency of interesting events one could attend. In fact it can be overpowering at times and in fact lead to a profound inertia. Also it can be quite expensive, so it’s always good to find events that one is both interested in and which are free. All of which is a preamble to saying that after the Pugwash event on Tuesday, I went to a Gaia Foundation event last night – 2 things in 2 days!

The Gaia Foundation is another organisation which is new to me, but probably not to all of you as it has been working for over 20 years “to protect and enhance biological and cultural diversity”. Amongst its activities are regular Gaia Evenings with visiting speakers, which last night featured Dr Stephan Harding.

Dr Stephan Harding is the resident ecologist at Schumacher College and the coordinator there of the MSc in Holistic Science. Earlier in the year he published the book Animate Earth, which I greatly enjoyed – so it was a great pleasure to be able to slip up the road from Golders Green to Hampstead and hear him speak.

And what a speaker! He is extremely funny, a great communicator and carries the bearing of a man who really know his subject. He was also a wonderful palliative to the doom of the Pugwash event the day before. He did not avoid the darkside though and began his talk with a look at the “bad news” showing a large series of graphs indicating the enormous growth in various undesirable factors between 1750 and 2000. I tried to note all these down in some autistic flurry of fact gathering: population; damming of wild rivers; water usage; artificial fertilizer usage; decline in ocean ecosystems; loss of biodiversity; incursion of farmland into wild nature; paper usage; number of McDonalds “restaurants” (this one has really taken off since 1750); CO2 in the atmosphere; CH4 in the atmosphere; ozone depletion; motor vehicles…. That’s not all of them either. He continued the “bad news” section with the IPCC’s infamous hockey stick graph; a chart showing declines in the Living Planet Index between 1970 and 2000; and the News Economics Foundation’s national eco footprints (For the global population to reach UK levels of consumption would require 3.1 Earths, US levels 5.3 Earths).

All of this reflects a crisis in out world view, as we have effectively made “A War on Nature”, with destruction apparently an emergent property of our culture. The war analogy reminded me of part of Lovelock’s talk in which he compared the current global situation to the situation of the UK in 1940 awaiting the invasion of the enemy. Now, Lovelock said, we are at “war with the Earth”. Harding suggested that there were a number of points in time which we might focus on as the beginning of the crisis moment. In passing he mentioned the idea that the agricultural revolution could be that moment (the movement from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic which Anti-Civ thinkers dwell on), but instead chose to talk about the 400 year old mistake kicked off by the scientific revolution.

Harding sees the mistake of the scientific revolution to be the privileging of the quantitative over the qualitative. He characterised this viewpoint with three quotes:

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” – Galileo Galilei

“I have described the Earth and the whole visible Universe in the manner of a machine” – Rene Descartes

“[We must] endeavour to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe” – Francis Bacon

Harding spoke of how this reduction of what is real down to mathematics, the mechanistic, and the quantitative - denied the value of appearance, of feelings. The scientific method demanded that qualitative reactions be ignored, that in fact scientists – like biologists performing live dissections - were under pressure to overcome their revulsion to their actions in order to “join the tribe”. Harding views this schism to have produced a kind of global schizophrenia – the opposition of quantitative and qualitative; facts and values; culture and nature. In order to heal this schism, we need to reassess our relationship with nature and to expand our mechanistic world view.

In order to do this, Harding suggest we look back to an old idea from Western culture that of Anima Mundi or Psyche Cosmu. Harding sees the tradition of animism or pan-psychism that has continued in Western though through Leibniz, Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead to offer an opportunity to bring a new sensibility to culture and science. Here the archetype of Gaia has an important role to play.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Gaia, the ever-sure foundations of all” Hesiod, Theogony

The re-emergence of Gaia as an archetypal image in western culture after thousands of years of exile through the scientific work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis – has provided a way of understanding the world which can re-associate ourselves with a healthy holistic view of life and the Earth.

Harding went on to present how the Gaia hypothesis turned over the conventional view of the relationship between Earth’s biota and its abiotic environment. He presented some of the science that demonstrates how life on the planet modifies the atmosphere and uses positive and negative feedback loops to keep a balance. However rather than sticking to a dry scientific presentation, he presented the material in the form of a story – applying characteristics to the elements. So Oxygen was the passionate Italian of the period table, Carbon the placid Swede, Calcium the entrepreneur – and in his story Carbon was a prince, Calcium a Princess and the chemical reaction that brought them together was officiated by priestly water, that allowed their previous bonds to be broken and a new union to occur. So in this story carbon was removed from the atmosphere and locked into chalk. The story was an action in practice of applying animistic principles to science – revealing its value in altering our perception of the world; of developing understanding; and as a pedagogical device.

Harding finished with what he believed was the challenge facing our culture, the move from the conventional viewpoint which made the biosphere beholden to the “economy”, to an ecological viewpoint which makes the economy beholden to the biosphere. All this was a pleasant change from the business as usual paradigm I sensed at the Pugwash event. On reflection I don't suppose any of the speakers at the Pugwash event could really believe that we could continue with our current globalised capitalist economics - but didn't they have a duty to make that explicit? I understand from conversation with Stephan Harding after that talk that Lovelock uses the term "sustainable retreat" in favour of "sustainable development" which he considers impossible. The other great factor of Harding's talk in comparison with the Pugwash event, was how it showed science could serve a more integrated purpose, its radicalism was its greatest feature.

In the questions period after the presentation there was conversation about the absolute importance of localisation and community building, and also about the kind of global economics/politics that could best effect useful change - this quickly got into a conversation about TEQs (tradeable energy quotas), cap and trade, contraction and convergence and I have to admit useful as these schemes may be I always see these as more "market" solutions - and I'm not sure the market can truly solve this mess.

All the global economic tinkering -that's the 'big' stuff, the 'little' stuff is what we need to be getting on with - building those local networks, those communities - so shop local, get to know your neighbours start particpating in the future you want.

Climate Breakdown

Yesterday I went to an event to a public discussion ‘Climate Breakdown: Can it Be Controlled? Can We Prevent it?” arranged by the Pugwash Group. Pugwash is an international movement of scientists and others with a professional concern about the social impact of science and seeking ways to prevent its misuse (They are named after the site of their first meeting the village of Pugwash in Nova Scotia, and sadly have no connection to Captain Pugwash).

There were three speakers: Sir Crispin Tickell; Professor Peter Cox; and, (the big draw for me as well as other celeb spotters of the science world I suspect) Dr James Lovelock.

Lovelock spoke first on the theme ‘Global Heating: a hazard comparable to, or greater than, nuclear warfare’. I am pretty aware of Lovelock’s recent doomy prognostications despite not having read The Revenge of Gaia, nevertheless it was still quite sobering to hear what he openly described as his “apocalyptic view”.

He predicts that global warming (or global heating, as he pointedly referred to it throughout) will cause droughts, storms and floods that will make most of the world uninhabitable for humans. The resulting planet will “support only a remnant of current population” and they will be “driven to the Arctic”, “island refuges like the UK, New Zealand and Japan” and a “few continental oases” while the rest of the world becomes a “hot and barren desert”.

Lovelock believes that we must accept our limitations and realise that we are not qualified to become “climate regulators”, that it is “hubris” to think we can act as stewards or sustainable developers. International Agencies are not up to the task of dealing with the issue of global climate change and we must make efforts to “save ourselves” and make a proper managed retreat to the Arctic basin, island refuges and continental oases or else face the inevitable rout.

The other two speakers did not challenge Lovelock’s opinion, and one gathered that while he is at the extreme of current thinking – he is within current thinking. He may be using the most extreme modelling, but he is using modelling coming out of serious climate science.

Professor Peter Cox spoke on the theme ‘Climate change science: knowns and unknowns’ and provided a useful round-up of the certainties of contemporary climate science, the basis on which we make further extrapolations into the unknown. This was also pretty sobering stuff in itself, even when you’ve heard much of it before:

• Global mean temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees C since the late 19^th century. Most of this rise has occurred since 1980.
• The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1990. 6 of the 7 warmest have occurred since 2000.
• No natural factors can explain the post 1980 warming. The warming is however consistent with anthropogenic effects.
• Tropical cyclones have increased in destructiveness over the last 30 years.
• A global rise in temperature of around 1.5 degrees C by 2030-2040 is now inevitable. Nothing we do now can stop that, decisions we make now will however decide the amount of temperature rise faced by future generations.
• Future modelling scenarios show that by 2100 warming will be between 2 degrees C and 5 degrees C.
• Realisation of many of the models, up to and including the one indicating a 5 degree C rise, would result in the total melt of the Greenland ice shelf and the concomitant sea level rise.
• The change in climate we are looking at is on the scale of the change between a glacial and interglacial period, but will happen 10 to 100 times faster.

The third speaker Sir Crispin Tickell spoke on ‘The Political and diplomatic hazards’, I have to admit I was a little tired by this point, but he did seem a bit dull and to spend a lot of time name dropping all the famous politicians he’d spoken with and foreign places he’d been. The most interesting parts were his description of Mrs Thatcher as an “eco hero”, and his musings on discussions between China and India regarding glacial ice melt in the Himalayas, changes in monsoon pattern, and sea level rise – all of which will impact both countries massively. In order for real change to occur, Tickell suggested we needed 3 things:

• Leadership from above.
• Pressure from below.
• A ‘benign’ catastrophe, which would prove cause and effect.

He hoped that those in the room would not be affected by the ‘benign’ catastrophe (I wonder how ‘benign’ a catastrophe he was considering). I used to think that a US based climate related catastrophe was the necessary tipping point in global consciousness, but how much has Katrina changed in the States?

I couldn’t stay for the discussion/question session unfortunately so I can’t report on that. I imagine that Lovelock’s support for nuclear would have come up. He did mention nuclear in his presentation, in a slightly contradictory sequence in which he suggested that the USA would respond to climate change with attempts at “techno-fixes” to buy time like sun shades in space or stratospheric particles. These, he said, would be attempts to carry on a business as usual model and wouldn't really be much help. He went straight on from this to promote the role of science and engineering in buying time for the habitability of the Earth and allowing civilization to continue – presenting nuclear energy as a techno-fix.

One thing I hope would have come up is the whole question of economic growth. There did seem to be an underlying belief amongst the speakers that “economic growth” should continue but within a low-carbon society. I think that this unspoken paradigm needed to be brought out in the open and discussed. Tickell did mention in passing that established models of GDP and GNP were misleading, that ‘externalities’ were ignored, and that we needed to think differently about economics, that the teaching of economics should be altered to reflect the global reality. He stopped short of saying what should take the place of what he thought should be removed however – hopefully this came up at question time.

So, all in all, a slightly depressing if informative experience. The solution part of the discussion was limited to Lovelock’s nuclear buy-time techno-fix, Cox’s get business on board with a 30 year business case model, and Tickell’s asides about a low-carbon society. Lovelock’s attitude regarding the ‘hubris’ of trying to act as stewards of the Earth, seemed to tar techno-fixers (Brown Tech and Green Tech in David Holmgren’s terms) and techniques for Earth recovery like Permaculture (Earth Steward-ship in Holmgren’s terms) with the same brush. To the questions the discussion title posed – can climate breakdown be controlled, and can we prevent it? I think the answers to both were “not really, but we may be able to slow things down”.

Never has the need for action been so pressing as now. Do what you can.

Playing the Margins

"If the economy, and your place within it, is really important to you, you will be really hurt when it goes away. You can cultivate an attitude of studied indifference, but it has to be more than just a conceit. You have to develop the lifestyle and the habits and the physical stamina to back it up. It takes a lot of creativity and effort to put together a fulfilling existence on the margins of society. After the collapse, these margins may turn out to be some of the best places to live."

Dimitri Orlov, Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for peak oil than the US

I just read Dimitri Orlov's latest piece, which I've quoted from above, on Energy Bulletin and found many interesting and amusing elements to it. I must say that Rob Hopkin's excellent recent entry on peak oil and scared men 'Is Peak Oil Pessimism a Generation of Men Coming to Realise How Useless They Are?' came to mind fairly often. The paragraph above however sparked off some more thoughts about margins.

One of the interesting applications of ecology in permaculture is the phenomena known as the “edge effect”. The "edge effect" is found at the boundaries of two ecological systems where there is more synergism, biological activity, and variations in the microenvironment and which can be used to increase yields in designed systems.

Basically where two (or more) ecosystems meet, say where a field meets a forest you find an increase in biodiversity. There are flora and fauna which inhabit from both of the meeting ecosystems and also unique flora and fauna which prefer that graduated space between. The meeting edges of ecosystems (sometimes called the ecotone) are therefore often highly productive.

Permaculturists will try to increase the amount of edge in a designed system in order to benefit from this boosted productivity in the ecotone. Techniques for achieving this include making boundaries between areas wavy rather than straight (increasing surface edge), making ponds in irregular shapes or using chinampas.

An interesting extension of the idea of the edge effect has been to lift it out of the physical space in which it is usually discussed into a metaphorical usage. For example some people suggest that it also points to permaculture ideas as being “at the edge" of a change in the push towards a sustainable future. Graham Burnett in Permaculture a Beginners Guide also refers to the importance of marginal or marginalised people, “alternatives” of all persuasion and people

neglected, disenfranchised, discriminated against because of race, religion, sexuality, poverty etc. because they’re single mothers, old, teenagers etc.

Rob Hopkin's comments on the lack of women represented in discussions about peak oil and energy descent, and recent comments by others highlighting the lack of non-white voices in these debates indicate that there is still much work to be done in valuing the "marginal". Gender and race are the most simple examples of how 'difference' can be marginalised. All of this seems to me, to point towards the importance of 'people care' in Permaculture and of social engagement - of recognising what's going on in our local area socially as well as environmentally, and seeing how we might best serve that situation.

IMAGES: Slide 27 from Dimitri Orlov's 'Closing the Collapse Gap', J.Doe (1988) and Lesbian Couple (1988) by Len Steckler.

Naturewise Permaculture Introduction Courses

I know I posted only the other day about Naturewise Permaculture courses, but Nicole has just forwarded the Flyer for the Intro courses in an electronic form, so it seemed worthwhile to post again.

Dates and Venues: Introductory weekends: Holland Park, 27/28 January; Hornsey Rise 31 March/1April, 28/29 April, 26/27 May, 30 June/1 July, 25/26 August.

Full accredited Permaculture Design Course;

7 alternate weekends, starting 1/2 September 2007.

Fees: Negotiable and flexible, depending on income. Minimum fee £20/weekend, full fee £100/weekend

Contact: for more information, contact Nicole

on 08454582871 or samsara1964@hotmail.com

or visit our website; www.naturewise.org.uk

Polycultures, Rockets Stoves and Plot 21

I went down the Naturewise Allotment - Plot 21, @ Alexandra Palace on Sunday. Thankfully despite predictions it was a clear day, unlike the rainy mudfest of my previous visit.

Niels Corfield was visiting Plot 21 to talk about polycultures, and he also did a bit of practical tree pruning tuition for those of us there. Niels has a yahoo group Polyculture People for sharing and spreading knowledge about polyculture, his de.licio.us page entrailer has further links to polyculture sites and a whole bunch of other interesting pages for those interested in Permaculture. Toby Hemmenway’s book Gaia’s Garden has some good home scale examples of polyculture planting.

In the evening Niels talked about rocket stoves and other wood burning variants. He had a couple of video clips from Aprovecho Research Center an Oregon, USA based organisation that are engaged in research into appropriate technologies. On their site you can view/download their films on Charcoal Burning Rocket Stoves and building a VITA stove. Unfortunately the wonderfully camp video on making a stove in an old olive oil can Niels showed us is not yet available, although apparently will make it on to Google video soon. Niels also had a copy of Ianto Evans et al.’s book Rocket Mass Heaters: Superefficient Woodstoves YOU Can Build, which had more glorious pictures of Cob Building in it (the book has its own website from which you can download a pdf copy for the very reasonable $10 (especially if you are outside the USA and benefiting from the falling dollar).

End of Suburbia

Many of you will probably have already picked up that the documentary End of Suburbia is now available free to view on YouTube. I'm sure you'd rather watch it there, so the above is just a promo trailer.

I personally am now rather looking forward to the sequel Escape from Suburbia. But I'd much rather see a UK based documentary looking at these issues and possible solutions. If we're going to take thinking locally and bottom-up action seriously, local media is also essential.


The Ecovillage film being made by Undercurrents which I mentioned a couple of posts back is one example of this (a promo extract of this is viewable above), but I think we need a mixed ecology, offering many different options and ideas.

Design for sustainable Living - Now!

This weekend I completed my Permaculture Design Course, a fantastic experience. I met some really great people – those teaching on the course, people we met on various visits (including OrganicLea, Growing Communities, Wholewoods, Soteriologic) and those fellow travellers attending. I’d like to send out a big thank you to everybody, many new friendships have been formed over the last few weeks, and long may they continue.

I did the course with Naturewise in North London, and I highly recommend them. They are running more courses in 2007:


Introductory Weekends:

"provide a taste of what permaculture has to offer you and others both in theory and practice"

Holland Park 27/28 January

Hornsey Rise 31 March/1 April

Hornsey Rise 28/29 April

Hornsey Rise 26/27 May

Hornsey Rise 30 June/1 July

Hornsey Rise 25/26 August

Full Accredited Permaculture Design Course:

7 alternate weekends starting 1/2 September 2007

I feel that the alternate weekend approach is much more successful than the "2 weeks away" approach which is how many other PDC courses run. It is certainly easier to fit into working life, but it also provides time for reflection and for ideas to bed down, for new queries and confusions to be raised and answered.

For more information and to book places you should contact the wonderful Nicole:

08454582871 or samsara1964 [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Also you can check the Naturewise site to get a better sense of activities and the Naturewise vision.

Climate Change March

Just had my pictures from the Climate Change March processed. Above is the American Embassy, where it all began with speeches by George Monbiot, Caroline Lucas, Zach Goldsmith et al.


Here are the marchers leaving Grosvenor Square, through the tiny corner exit.


A bubble rising over Picadilly Circus.

Watched from the sky, by the ever vigilant authorities!

Life in the Round

Hot on the heels of my talk about “inhabited geometry” it was great to see these pictures of Tony Wrench’s roundhouse at Brithdir Mawr, which the ever alert Keith alerted me to. They are part of a series on housing and ways of life in the UK, so make a synchronous follow on from my recent musings.

Keith, Helen and I are were privileged to meet Tony and visit his roundhouse early this year during our Permaculture Introductory Course with Angie Polkey. I didn’t notice it until we were about 6 feet away, so take it from me – it blends in with its surroundings!

The photos on the BBC site are great and really communicate something of the magic of the place, they certainly bring back good memories.

Tony is involved with the Lammas project which intends to create a safe, low-impact settlement in West Wales. The alternative media outlet Undercurrents have been following developments at Lammas, and you can see video coverage of how things are going with the Ecovillage on their site. The footage is planned to reappear in a DVD launched next year called Living in the Future, about self builders and eco-villagers.

My attempt to engage with Web 2.0

The 5 Questions

I’ve been reading a fair bit of Derrick Jensen’s work recently (as have my compadres Mark and Keith). It has been an interesting mind bath, that’s taken off some dirty thinking I’d missed earlier and revealed some sores that are sensitive to the hot water of his thought.

Keith has had some interesting thoughts on Jensen and his attitudes towards religion (is his tarring of all faiths with one brush a weakness in his usual incisive analysis?), and of course the question of violence is an ever present one. Jeff Vail’s “Derrick Jensen vs. the Dalai Lama” is a good starting point for that discussion.

A comment from Keith on the availability or no of video showing Jensen (we feel the need to see someone, to hear them) sent me off to find the above clip on YouTube/GooTube, and this and this on it’s daddy Google Video. The GooTube clip has Jensen asking you 5 questions and is part of the series put out by Dropping Knowledge.

Also some audio of Jensen available here.

SPAN, Lovely SPAN!

Last Thursday lunchtime, Rebecca and I visited the new exhibition at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects).

The small exhibition is on the work of the architect Eric Lyons and his SPAN housing. Lyons wanted to integrate the natural environment, housing and communal spaces - in a vision of what we would now call 'sustainability'.

According to a news item on the exhibition from the BBC website:

"He placed three basic principles at the heart of the Span projects:

• community as the goal

• shared landscape as the means, and

• modern, controlled design as the expression. "

That said, he was heavily influenced by Walter Gropius and modernist design - so this is not a cob or strawbale vision of the future - and many elements of his work are not particularly sustainable (though no less than the base level of most modern buildings I'd wager).

There was a symposium at RIBA on Saturday: 'Developing Span: Models for Arcadian futures?' – unfortunately I could not attend.

I personally quite like Lyons’s work, and aesthetically it appeals to the modernist end of my taste. Rebecca and I both noted that there was probably also a nostalgic element to this, as the building style reminded us of our youth in the 1970s ( I have a penchant for the colour orange for similiar reasons). The exhibition is totally gratis, so if you're in London, and at a loose end, as I frequently am, I recommend easing your ennui with a visit (it's on until xmas).

For those outside London, or too weary to venture in to the city (I don’t blame you) - there's a website on the village built to his design in Kent, New Ash Green.

I find that there is a human quality to this building style which is missing from most of our contemporary housing – and this despite the fact that they remain a series of boxes – not the more curvaceous shapes that appeal to my imagination.

I think that it is something to do with proportionality, the rooms feel ‘right’, in that they all appear to have a pleasing ratio of height, length and width (which may well have more to do the Fibonacci series than Feng Shui) that allow them to override the industrial nature of right-angled construction.

The curvaceous shapes of my imagination however, as manifest in cob housing or Roger Dean’s ‘Home for Life’ manifest instead the non-Cartesian architecture that Gaston Bachelard proselytised for in The Poetics of Space. Cob houses especially, in my experience, have what Bachelard called “inhabited geometry” allowing the “tonalization of being”.

Which of these styles, if either, represents the best future for building in the UK, or indeed the world? Corporate, business as usual construction, will –when placed under pressure for greater sustainability - no doubt prefer what David Holmgren calls the “green tech stability” route. This will mean, remaining in the established paradigm as long as possible, bending it in order to accommodate statutory or socially necessitated ecological requirements. At this point some modelling based along SPAN lines may appeal – but this will probably both: not address the problems inherent in SPAN buildings; nor, make the effort to reflect the human spatialization of SPAN proportions, instead following a scarcity model, maximising financial return on a site. As has so frequently been the case, the dreams of modernism will easily dissipate in the morning of quotidian drudgery, leaving a fractured trauma for the populace.

IMAGES: Magazine spread on New Ash Green from Ideal Home (October 1967), Cover of Ideal Home (October 1967), SPAN publicity brochure (1967), Interior of prototype ‘Home for Life’ designed by Roger Dean, Rainbow Ranch, Buda Texas – cob house built by the Cob Cottage Company, (1998).

Our Daily Bread

Another one of those stories that makes a paragraph on page 12 of your newspaper maybe and is written as a casual news piece with no bigger picture contextualisation: the price of bread.

The price of bread, cereals, pasta, pastry and flour in the UK is rising as a result of a 10 year high in the cost of wheat ‘partly due to a drought in Australia’. Other causes pointed out here are ‘soaring demand for food from fast-growing economies such as China and India and the switch of large amounts of land in Brazil from agriculture to bio-fuel production’. This increase in the cost of wheat has exacerbated pressures on bakers already dealing with the knock on effect of increased oil prices. The cost of Eggs, cheese and dairy products ware also likely to rise as farmers have to spend more for feed.

In other words – food is getting more expensive because of global climate change and the peaking of global energy supply.

Castles Made of Sand

As a long term fan of the airship, for their beauty and grace, their engagement with the ‘cruising’ element of travel – slow travel – if you will, I’m always pleased to hear about new developments promising their return to the skies.

While I’m waiting for a Hindenburg scale helium dirigible, with restaurants, state rooms, ballrooms etc. built using the best of modern knowledge and materials (see previous entry) – the flight of the more modest Spirit of Dubai over London this week is still inspiring.

The BBC Online story doesn’t shy away from energy descent future either, with Dick Chadburn, chairman of the Airship Association, and a former engineer manager at Shell quoted saying:

"In a world with very limited fossil fuels or restricted use of fossil fuels you have got to go back to the technology of your great grandfather - no cars, but bicycles. The airships could form part of that."

In light of this it’s intriguing that the Spirit of Dubai is travelling across Europe, Egypt and the Middle East (largely following the “all red air route” Alan Cobham mapped out for the 1930s British airships before the R101 disaster - and thence used by Imperial Airways) to Dubai.

It's advertising, en route, the “Palm Jumeirah”, Dubai's enormous development in the shape of a palm on land reclaimed from the sea. Dubai’s massive development of new skyscrapers, shopping malls, luxury hotels and villas has been motivated by the Kingdom’s realisation that it’s oil wealth is about to go into decline in the face of peaking fossil fuels. Dubai figures it can turn itself into a luxury tourist resort, site of second homes on fantasy islands and become a major city of the 21^st Century getting new wealth from super-rich visitors (see Mike Davis' excellent article 'Fear and Money in Dubai' in the New Left Review on how Dubai is "Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby").

What I’ve always wondered is – in this peak oil future of energy descent – how anyone is supposed to get to Dubai to enjoy this set-up(certainly in the numbers required to make it financially add up), let alone how they are going to run the a/c, elevators etc. Perhaps airships are part of the plan – but I can’t see that their thinking is that advanced (Emirate Airlines recently placed a $37 billion order for new airplanes from Boeing and Airbus). Anyway, international transport is going to be the last of their worries when there’s no artificial cooling of 120 degree Fahrenheit heat, and the desalination plants have no power to produce drinking water…

I imagine the whole place as castles in the sand, ruins of the (near) future being built now. Grander follies than the 6 storey towers the Anasazi nation abandoned, or even the empty buildings of Detroit photographed and discussed by Camilo Jose Vergara in American Ruins.

It’s a JG Ballard style urban dystopia in the making, and when I think about all those glass fronted tall buildings waiting for airborne travellers to descend and spend and save the place - then it reminds me of Jimi Hendrix too, singing:

"Look, a golden winged ship is passing my way"
And it really didn't have to stop...it just kept on going.
And so castles made of sand slips into the sea,
Eventually.

IMAGES: Spirit of Dubai over London, Dubai skyscrapers, abandoned Anasazi city, the abandoned Michigan Station in Detroit.