| We are so bombarded by political spin and energy
is so central to permaculture that I thought it worthwhile to share my
understanding of where we currently are with respect to energy, greenhouse
and a future for humans on earth.
I believe that the path to a liveable future is
still very much a permaculture one but what I have always regarded as an
‘energy sideshow’, compared to the long-term need for a sustainably designed
future is moving rapidly to centre-stage.
Having watched the cherry crop in the Adelaide
Hills and our own crop of pistachio nuts on the Adelaide Plain fail due
to global warming this year the greenhouse issue presented itself as a
very present threat. It is tempting to suggest that the fact that humans
have used up most of the readily available oil and gas reserves of the
planet would be ‘good’ if it meant that they had to reduce their use of
fossil fuels, but in a fabulous trick on ourselves we are moving towards
the production of biofuels that essentially use as much non-renewable
energy to produce as they make available and take up land that could have
been used for biodiversity or food production purposes. We are also bent
on convincing ourselves that the tiny world reserves of Uranium and possibly
Thorium will solve the greenhouse problem. Alas it is only the (even rarer)
high grade Uranium deposits that will give a positive EROEI (Net Energy
Ratio) [of about 10:1]. The lower grade deposits require more energy to
dig-up, transport, refine etc than we can extract from them. Taking the
full life cycle of a nuclear reactor into consideration it is now not worth
building one, for using Uranium at current world levels we will run out
of high grade ore in under 20 years (before a reactor has paid itself
off in energy terms - in 35 years) (Van Leeuwin and Smith 2005, Diesendorf
2005). Optimistic pronouncements have been made by the Chinese who hope
to commission a ‘fast breeder reactor’ by 2010, which they say will produce
60 times the energy a normal reactor would from a kilogram of Uranium oxide;
however fast breeders use liquid sodium as a coolant and are more dangerous
than ordinary nuclear reactors. So far, fast breeders have all been technical
and economic failures. The largest was the French 1200 MW Superphénix,
which commenced operation in 1985 as a commercial industrial prototype.
It operated only intermittently and was shut down in1998 after costing
some A$15 billion.
Even if the fast breeder technology was mastered
and the general and long term hazards of radioactivity and uranium’s specific
use in acts of aggression were ignored, humanity would still only buy itself
decades of relatively greenhouse emission-free power. Back to dirty old
coal we would go…still without having effectively harnessed the proven
sources of renewable energy or reformed the way we run our society….. and
now feeling the full impact of greenhouse in an overall environment which
is due to ultimately warm up as the earth’s wobble in orbit around the
sun increases world temperatures in the centuries to come (as per the Milankovitch
Cycles model).
Having weaved and dodged our way around the main
issues by expending critical time and effort on spinning out non-renewable
energy, we will eventually have to confront our essential challenges as
a species and decide whether we can respond logically to our intellectual
understanding of the world’s limitations and thus overcome flaws in our
ancient DNA or whether the primitive urges towards procreation, tribalism
and power will prevail and we will behave like other plague species and
suffer a truly catastrophic situation because we have no control over our
exponential population growth or urge to consume. World population more
than trebled last century from 1.8 billion to 6 billion in 2000 and has
added a population of consumers the equivalent to that of North America
since 1998; we are currently adding 3 humans per second. It is ironical
that we should be agonizing over this issue in Australia, the continent
where wildlife species had adapted their breeding cycles to respond to
resource availability long ago and where the indigenous human population
had more or less reached a steady state with the environment over a period
of some 60000 years.
As an educator I believe that humans can be trained
to step back from the abyss, but it will require a level of self discipline
and regulation that takes people to the edge of their genetic capabilities.
Dominant religious, economic and political frameworks
today fail to take account of man’s capacity to destroy the earth’s life
support systems and the concept of divine power excuses believers from
taking absolute responsibility for management of themselves and their earth,
leaving an urgent need for an overarching set of global ethics and principles
through which wise decisions can be made. Permaculture needs to part of
such a global agreement on the way forward.
Now that some leaders have accepted concepts of
climate change and that oil is a finite resource it is time for the ‘population
reduction issue’ to be addressed in public. Limiting the right of humans
to reproduce has been a ‘no-go’ area even for most permaculturists but
it is clearly the core issue. Our education, legal and medical systems
must seriously address the matters of bioregional and national ‘carrying
capacities’, school and tertiary curricula, family planning, euthanasia,
sterilisation and abortion in a philosophical, humane and scientific manner;
every hour that we delay in developing a workable approach to population
11000 extra people arrive on this overstretched planet. Without offending
our increasingly mainstream students we need to introduce this issue in
our courses. I’d be very interested in any notes that permaculture teachers
have developed on this matter. Incidentally Lloyd Evans (ex chief of Plant
Industry in the CSIRO), in his book 'Feeding the Ten Billion' put a figure
of about 3 billion on a world population sustainable without non-renewable
fuels).
Meanwhile it is increasingly important for permaculture
proponents to master their design skills and demonstrate robust systems
that can cope with global warming and offer sustainable living. Particular
aspects of design need attention – design for catastrophe and design for
succession. I truly thought the pistachio nut trees on our farm (our main
crop) would be a resilient and relatively ‘permanent’ key component of
our property design however the warming of Australian autumn and winter
temperatures last year caused a failure of the trees to accumulate
sufficient winter chill to set their physiological clocks for normal flowering
in spring. This reduced our ’06 crop to 20% of the predicted yield. Cherry
growers were similarly affected. Maybe next year will be better but the
overall trend will be steadily downhill.
So at The Food Forest we will be identifying and
planting species with lower chill-requirements for the inevitable global
warming ahead over the next half century or more, but we encourage designers
to include representatives of species that become uneconomic because of
global warming in their systems; ultimately the planet will cool and those
species will become valuable (possibly life-savers) again. A chill requirement
should be mentioned when describing plant varieties in permaculture resources
and we should be reporting maximum temperatures that varieties can tolerate.
The calculation of chill hours for sites should be taught in design courses.
Permaculture designs should aim to minimize greenhouse
emissions, maximise the capture of energy and enable as much self reliance
as feasible. Limiting the size of our families and our consumption and
investing in renewable energy systems are some of the many practical ways
of demonstrating a low energy future that we can then expect others (particularly
politicians) to acknowledge, emulate and build into education and legislation.
There is much to do.
Graham Brookman
May '06
|