Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

Collapsology

Everyone in the futures field knows that most predictions turn out to be wrong, and the optimists for business-as-usual delight in referring to the parable about the boy who cried wolf, forgetting that the point of the story is that the wolf did eventually come and eat the sheep.

The predictions of peak oil, climate change and financial collapse I have paid attention to and articulated over the decades have mostly proved premature. In relation to finance, I thought the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) looked certain to usher in the Second Great Depression, and in writing RetroSuburbia I felt an urgency to get the book out and influencing adaptive responses before the ‘shit hit the fan’ so to speak. As I read the ‘black hat’ commentators analysing the tealeaves of the global bond markets in late 2019, I assumed there was nothing the masters of global finance could do to kick the can of exploding debt further down the road. Then Covid arrived to provide the cover for the largest money fabrication and transfer of wealth to the rich, which dwarfed what was done in the aftermath of the GFC. 

The future promises to be full of surprises, including for those who invest the most in trying to adapt to it ahead of time. It is perhaps not surprising that as the political and economic landscape of Europe become more conflicted, France is where the intellectual focus on future prospects of ‘less’ rather than ‘more’ develops and flourishes. The ‘Degrowth’ concept and movement originated there and it didn’t surprise me when the French translation of Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability went into its second print run. Not only is there a belated but strong movement of rural resettlement and alternative agriculture supporting the practical interest in permaculture, but there is also an intellectual depth of ideas and philosophy, green and otherwise, which has generated interest in my future scenarios work. The exhibition Architecture and Agriculture: Taking the country’s side by architectural historian Sébastien Marot has been particularly significant in recognising permaculture as central to the quest to bring farming and human habitation into a harmonious union. As such, I think it a more significant recognition of the intellectual import of permaculture than anything from the English-speaking world. 

But it was somewhat ironic when my work was referenced in a slightly tongue-in-cheek text describing the field of research which the authors called ‘collapsology’. Despite my best articulation of Energy Descent as having nuanced but strategically important distinctions from Collapse (at the macroscale at least), I am now, apparently, a collapsologist.

And so the prospect of being labelled a Climate Denying Collapsologist is quite cute, given most GHG emission sceptics believe the material and energetic threats to human futures of growth and material abundance are a low risk. Many sceptics see the most serious threats being from the evil intentions of specific groups of elite powerbrokers. While I acknowledge those forces at work, I grant them less in the way of omnipotence and tend to see structural drivers of Descent, if not Collapse, in disaster capitalism (for example), which is an ever-increasing proportion of the global economy. The crossover between simply taking advantage of disasters, and helping to create them, is something I think reflects ecological synergies that can naturally emerge, just as good cop/bad cop complementarities or cops and robbers symbiosis do in society.

War as the final solution

Nevertheless, the darkest and most serious expression of disaster capitalism that I believe is a much greater threat to humanity, and perhaps even nature, than climate change is the threat of nuclear war (and nuclear winter). This could arise as an accidental outcome of the military-industrial complex needing to constantly build and destroy hardware to keep the system growing. The threat of collapse from mounting debt also drives the need to capture new collateral in the form of natural resources to stave off the ‘masters of money’ closing down the whole show, and of course the wild cards of mad materialists and religious psychopaths prepared to smash everything if they can’t win. 

The evidence from history is that when debt has reached unsustainable levels in the past, war is often the strategy of elites to:

• firstly, deflect attention from systemic failures onto an outside enemy that is blamed for causing the problems for the citizens
• secondly, cancel the market economy, including if necessary debts and fiat currency, and replace it with a new command economy, rationing and new financial tools to focus society on the war economy
• and thirdly, hope that through war it will be possible to capture land, resources, infrastructure, and even people, which will contribute to a rebooted post-war economy.

While I have long understood this historical framework, I used to think those Machiavellian efforts at ‘creative destruction’ were, in the past, dependent on a rising net energy base, and that in Energy Descent, such tactics would simply result in systems unravelling faster than they otherwise would have. My strategic response to this threat has been to support a greater understanding of ecological history and energy descent futures by the general public, in the hope that this might block the support for war on the pragmatic grounds of likely failure due to declining net energy. I thought this might be more effective than the ethical opposition to war that has been the foundation of the global peace movement for more than a century, 

I always saw the main threat to the world was the American empire that hadn’t experienced war on its territory since the Civil War, but that had gained so handsomely from World War Two, all at very little cost. The American/Western empire has been slow to learn that overseas wars are accelerating its decline, at least since the war in Vietnam. Perhaps my trust in Peak Oil to save us from the climate cooker was paralleled by a trust that it would save us from global war. Apart from any excessive confidence about oil field depletion rates, I think I underestimated the size of the non-essential economy that could, if need be, be redirected to war. In a command economy under more authoritarian control, there would still be plenty of resources that could be reallocated to essential tasks, including military power projection, even if unrestrained warfare quickly depletes accumulated resources.

Peak Oil

One of the consequences of money being lent to corporations at close to zero interest rate in the aftermath of the GFC was to kick the US shale oil boom into high gear. This was also greatly assisted by loosened environmental regulation, and a modicum of technology innovation and efficiency gains. There was also a general ignorance by investors about how rapidly shale oil ‘plays’ deplete and rely on faster and faster drilling in progressively less prospective sites over time. The shale boom renewed faith that the US was still the petroleum superpower, enabling the projection of economic and military power globally, and killing the peak oil meme from ever matching the climate story. 

Well it now looks like Peak Conventional Crude and Condensate is finally in the rear vision mirror as production has not recovered from the 2018 peak. Of course this is variously attributed to the renewable energy rollout and other responses to the climate emergency, Covid, demographic transition, sluggish global growth etc etc, but almost never to the most fundamental issue that depletion never sleeps. Just like the wilful blindness in relation to explanations about excess deaths, disability data and other consequences following the experimental injections globally, the media is well trained to not focus much attention on depletion of oil and other critical non-renewable resources, including those essential to support the massively expanded demands from the renewable energy rollout. 

Climate Change

Unlike the other two of the big three on my agenda to study and understand over the last several decades, climate is the one that has seen the steady rise in its acceptance and emergence as an apparent driver of global, national, state and local governance. So much so that it now has the status of a secular religion. Its status as being true is widely believed to reflect the consensus of scientific evidence. This increasing certainty, which most take as proof of truth, ignores the tendency that any idea that has a multi-generational following and takes on the significance of an existential threat develops its own power to generate consensus. Dissidents increasingly understand their careers are under threat, and feel the lash of professional isolation, cancel culture and eventually censorship and punishment. Just as happened with Covid in a very short time, over several decades the climate sceptics in academia and scientific bodies have retired or more gradually disappeared from public view, giving the impression of an overwhelming agreement by those capable of understanding and critiquing the models. 

I am not suggesting the consensus on climate change in the scientific community is not overwhelming but rather, just like Covid, it is very hard to see how much is as a result of the free and curious exchange of ideas and how much it reflects all the psychosocial inducements to groupthink in the scientific disciplines. I believe that the problem of paradigm shift in science, which Thomas Kuhn identified back in the early 1960s, has got progressively worse over the decades. In increasingly siloed disciplines, reductionist specialists become increasingly vulnerable to manipulation by master generalists who occupy the most informal but elite positions in finance, law, politics, intelligence, and military. And so my faith in the scientific consensus about greenhouse gas induced climate change has withered in spite of the apparent strengthening of that consensus.

Sea level redux

But rather than explore in any depth how groupthink in science may have grown worse, I want to reflect on my own expectations based on the Arctic sea ice melt in 2007 as the early warning sign of rising sea levels. Given the intensification of media focus on climate change, nearly 20 years on, I would have expected to see a lot of hard data about sea level rise around the world, natural disasters and active retreat plans for low lying coastal areas. Instead, we see some about storm surge impacts in vulnerable low-lying coastal real estate, but even the urgent stories about island community abandonment have moderated rather than accelerated.

So to return to one of the sub-scenarios in my Future Scenarios workshops all those years ago, not only is the property bubble still inflated, but the coastal real estate that should have been the ‘canary in the coal mine’, is still worth millions and is being purchased by those who presumably do some due diligence about future risks, including insurance availability. As the climate sceptics point out, the elites most strongly driving the climate agenda are continuing to invest in beachfront mansions. 

And despite the sequence of extreme weather impacts over the last few years in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, foretold in Linda Woodrow’s cli-fi novel 470 that we published, our best efforts at publicity failed to get a critical mass of regional readers to turn this ripping yarn into a community-wide discussion about climate change adaptation.

The usual explanation of such failures in collective notice and action is to point to cognitive dissonance where we deny what is right in front of our noses. Nevertheless the nature of markets prone to panic should at some point trigger an exodus from coastal real estate, unless climate belief amongst well-off and well-informed prospective investors is declining rather than growing. This in itself would be an interesting marker for peak climate change belief. 

Desiccating Landscapes

It is now thirty years since I designed Fryers Forest with a drying climate in mind, and I believe that design has paid off. The stored water has provided for needs, despite a series of dam leakage issues from the highly dispersible soils, while the spillway systems and roads have coped with the downpours and flood flows. The growth rates in our thinned forest have certainly been modest, but the fluctuations in tree health mostly reflect the seasons and the variation in herbivorous insect populations, more than they show any clear trend to a desiccating landscape. After a few years of above average rainfall, I am probably feeling less challenged by climate than I will be after the next long drought, whenever that comes. At present, I feel sanguine, more than desperate, about what nature might throw our way over the next three decades. More generally, my expectation about the drying climate having proportionally greater impact on water flows into regional reservoirs has been born out to a much greater extent than my expectations of reductions in rainfall, but not as much as some of the more extreme predictions.

For example the water allocation in the Harcourt horticultural irrigation system has made some savings by piping water to replace the old and leaking concrete channel system, along with the transfer of water rights from marginal to more successful enterprises. One of those small enterprises that has survived has done so by becoming a co-operative of complimentary organic enterprises using shared infrastructure, including sharing the water right. Sellar Dairy, one of those enterprises in the Harcourt Farming Co-op, is an innovative 10 cow dairy providing fresh milk and yoghurt to subscription retail customers and the local Farmers Market. I remember looking around the land and being blunt with Tess Sellar about it being more suitable for dairy goats than cows. I was only expressing what Tess was more qualified than me to judge, but I was probing how her commitment to her beloved cows, the co-op model and her local community in Castlemaine overrode her options and expertise in goat dairy, or alternatively, an area with more rainfall closer to the Great Divide more suited to cow dairy pasture. 

I thought it interesting that someone who was by all signs convinced of the existential threat of climate change was committed to land at the margin of climatic viability, at least for a decade or so. In telling this story, I am in no way diminishing my incredible admiration for what Tess has achieved with her cows, the land, the Co-op and her customers, or even making the slightest suggestion that she has had the progressive loss of faith about climate change forecasts that I am expressing here. Instead, I provide it as an example that reflects permaculture ethics and design principles in some cognitive disconnect from the implications of climate change forecasts. I provide it to contrast and connect to my example about the value of low lying coastal real estate by people I haven’t met but that I might consider short sighted or ignorant. 

I can’t say I feel as confident about the climate Tess and younger generations will be facing three decades in the future on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, but I think the social, economic and geopolitical climate will be more challenging than what nature serves up. 

The missing water element in the climate models

The influence of the ‘rehydrate the landscape’ strategy on my thinking predates concerns about GHG emission climate change and is foundational to permaculture and other approaches in regenerative agriculture. That the mainstream climate models have taken less than adequate consideration of fluxes in water vapour, which is by far the most powerful and abundant greenhouse gas, is disturbing to say the least. Given that water is unique in its ability to buffer the heat, wind and other variables in the bioregional climate, and thus collectively in the global climate, should make understanding it the foundation of all the models. Maybe this idea is more spanners in the works by ‘climate deniers’ but if those defending the assumptions behind the models can’t or don’t see the need to explain this in ways that can be communicated in the language of high school level science, then this is problematic. 

Appealing to the idea that it’s too complex for the ordinary motivated layperson to understand places the models outside of valid discourse in a democracy. If we are already in a state where technocracy is essential to displace the debate of ideas amongst peers, then those proposing to use climate models to make existential choices about future generations need to upfront about it.

While I see the breakdown of what goes by the shorthand ‘democracy’ in Energy Descent is likely, I think its rebirth in new, more localised, less easily corruptible forms is made less likely by a shift to technocratic authoritarian systems.

I believe technocracy will make decisions that are worse for both humanity and nature, and in any case will be at best short lived before being replaced by more localised power structures. So can anyone provide a cogent explanation for how the water cycle is included in the climate models and be prepared to engage in respectful debate by hydrologists and other heterodox scientists who challenge the validity of the models? 

Maybe we are already past the point where debate in climate science is in any way possible. In any case, the ‘climate emergency’ framing implies any debate is like debating strategy on a sinking ship, rather than following the captain’s orders.

Astrometeorology 

While astrometeorology is described by Wikipedia, that august arbiter of the truth, as a pseudoscience, I know of lots of successful organic farmers, critically dependent on the seasons, who rely on weather forecasters using astrometeorological data, especially solar flux data in their long-range weather forecasts. While I have never investigated these fringe weather forecasting methods in any depth, I have always been open minded about them, especially if people whose livelihoods depend on the weather make use of them, at least as second opinion to the Bureau of Meteorology. In the same way, I have never made active use or investigation of dousing for divining underground water sources, but I have noted that BHP, Australia’s iconic global mining giant, used to employ dousers alongside their top geologists in their mineral exploration teams. 

My understanding is that the field of Astrometeorology has advanced greatly in recent decades and perhaps, like continental drift, will move from the scientific fringe to the centre over time. Certainly within climate sceptic circles, it is normal to be dismissive of the way fluxes in the solar wind and radiation are accounted for in the climate models. My understanding is that the IPCC has, after much lobbying from those in this rapidly advancing field, agreed to one relatively minor inclusion in the next iteration of models and forecasts. 

My limited understanding is that all the climate models currently include the minor changes in radiant heat from the sun and suggest this is negligible in explaining the rise in Earth’s temperatures. However the vast majority of the flux in energy from the sun is in other forms of electromagnetic energy which are funnelled by the Earth’s magnetic fields into the near polar regions where the effects on global climate are far more complex and substantial than simply heating. That the Earth’s magnetic field is also going through a process of weakening compounds this complexity. Some solar physicists suggest the warming of the climate follows these astrometeorological factors more closely than changes in GHG emissions and that their models of solar activity have reached a peak and that the Earth will face a cooling cycle beginning soon. 

Unlike the global sequestration strategies in soil, trees and seaweed, which all have other benefits including landscape rehydration that could change bioregional climate for the better, it’s hard to see what humanity can do about changes in the sun or even the Earth’s magnetic field. One might hope that the money spent on secret military research in the arctic over many decades, such as the HAARP system, would at least have given the scientific community more of a heads-up on these factors that could be existential for civilisation, humanity and life at large.

I refuse to get into the weeds of attempting to fully research, let alone present, the evidence around these technical matters for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, I have done that in a number of fields directly relevant to permaculture so will leave it to others in this case. 
• Secondly, my observation with many issues, including Covid and its Discontents, is that massive lists of peer reviewed scientific research and assessments of leaders in any field can be countered by similar vast lists and it seems to make not much difference to opinions, let alone actions.
• Thirdly, the process of mass formation in development of secular religious belief is so advanced in the climate story that any undermining of that science could lead to psychosocial crises, depression and even insanity on the part of many. Perhaps it is better on balance for some to feel sad, smug or even angry that Holmgren has turned into a climate denier who can’t even muster any evidence to support his dangerous assertions.

In recent tours and talks, I have been suggesting a decision-making framework to survive and thrive in challenging times. In relation to any issue that has real, especially existential consequence for you, your family and loved ones, follow the following principles:

1. Where possible do your own due diligence using as many diverse and original sources as possible, especially ones that don’t have large-scale financial or political motivations to obscure the truth and project a particular narrative.
2. In the absence of the intellectual, time or other resources to do your own due diligence, listen to someone you personally know and trust who has done that work and is acting accordingly rather than just trying to tell everyone about what they think.
3. Surf social media platforms that profess not to manage free speech (such as X) to get a sense of the discussion and debate around the issue in question outside of mainstream narratives.

If you don’t have anyone you personally trust, and are more afraid of being misled by misinformation on uncensored social media, then you are more or less back with having to trust the claimed consensus of expert science as delivered to us by mainstream media and the government.

And if none of that floats your boat, consulting the I Ching or flipping a coin can be a valid mechanism for at least exposing one’s own deepest intuitive response to what the yarrow sticks or coin delivers. 

Good luck with all that; we are in a world of deep uncertainty… 

In following the logic of questioning the climate change narrative, there are two possibilities that I have not addressed, but it would be negligent to ignore as possible factors in extreme weather events and future prospects, one natural, the other human in origin.

Earth disaster cycle

Some commentators are reviewing the substantial sources of data from NASA and other space agencies, relevant peer reviewed scientific studies, and collations of mythological stories from around the world. They suggest that the weakening of the magnetic field and the accelerating magnetic pole shift is all part of a once in 12,000-year stellar cycle that triggers a micronova in the sun, which in turn results in a short-lived 104-degree rotational pole shift with resultant oceanic flooding of the continents and volcanic activity on massive scale. While previous theories about long term flip of the poles have been well discredited by the geomagnetic record in rocks, the more recent theory suggesting flip and return has not (in my limited understanding) been proven to be incompatible with the geomagnetic record. 

The 12,000-year cycle correlates with the rarely publicly discussed, but scientifically well accepted, interglacial timeline but suggests an intensity of impact far greater than the assumed mechanisms for ice age onset. These Earth disaster cycles represent a more frequent reset for nature and humanity than the somewhat longer ice ages (of approximately 100,000 years). This pole flip and reset theory as explained by influencers on the internet trumps any other catastrophist theories in its near-term implications and, if true, suggests nature and even Homo sapiens have proven far more robust than most modern catastrophists credit (including those warning of climate Armageddon). This theory would also be a massive step change in the more general shift in Earth science from Gradualist to Catastrophist theory. I also note that it would make mincemeat of any prospect for Energy Descent futures. It would also provide a scientific context for reinterpreting Christian and other mythological stories about black suns, oceanic floods, fire and brimstone earth ruptures as well as the Ark and underground survival strategies. Perhaps this is the grandest of rabbit holes, leading to monitoring of astrometeorological signals and prepper responses or, alternatively, quiet spiritual acceptance of fate. 

Weather and climate warfare

While the scale and detailed evidence about the Earth Disaster Cycle requires a major revision of our understanding of myths from ancestral peoples, any mention of the possibility of weather modification with evil intent is to bring on accusations of being a conspiracy theorist. This is the modern equivalent of the accusation of witchcraft in closing minds to any discussion, let alone debate, even if it hasn’t led to anyone being burnt at the stake. 

Few people understand the modern origin of the term ‘conspiracy theory’. It was created by the CIA and their cyphers in the media through Project Mockingbird in 1964 to discredit the alternative theories circulating about the JFK assassination. Since then, it has been effective down the decades in closing down any challenge or even questioning of official explanations of problematic events that might represent a threat to those same official systems of authority. 

Amongst the very large numbers of people who don’t believe in GHG emission caused climate change, many, if not most, explain the apparent increase in extreme weather events as at least in part being due to weather modification, especially storm enhancement (along with the other factors already discussed beyond meteorological ones such as increased vulnerability, reporting and disaster dysfunction). 

Weather modification research (and strategic speculation) has a long and checked history. Mostly it is understood as efforts to increase rainfall by cloud seeding, which continues despite the erratic and sometimes devastating impacts of civilian efforts to increase rainfall. Most notably in recent history is cloud seeding by Hydro Tasmania that contributed to severe flood damage to farms downstream.

What this demonstrates is that in the case of weather, like most things in life, it can be easier to break something than create it. 

Research on weather modification as a weapon of war is less understood and, like research on chemical and biological warfare, has had to run the gauntlet of international treaties and a lack of public acceptance, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Back in the early 2000s, my brother’s research on 9/11 led him down the rabbit hole of trying to understand the functions of the massive HAARP ionosphere research facility maintained by the US Navy in Alaska, beyond the very superficial cover story that the enormous cost and power of the facility is for pure science. Why would the US Navy  spend this money if they didn’t see some prospect for strategic or at least tactical advantage in war? 

One possible more benign answer to this question is that the US Navy is studying the astrometeorological signals to understand the previously discussed Earth Disaster Cycle and inform preparations, mostly underground, to allow some systemic survival in the catastrophe. 

Again, I don’t want to even start getting into the details of that project, but I do want to dismiss outright the false assumption that ethical and legal constraints can have reliably prevented military and other parties within power elites from secretly developing and testing weather warfare weapons.

One of the arguments against any such long-running conspiracy is the belief that the truth will always leak out, and generally sooner rather than later. If a second Trump administration does release the final secret files on the JFK assassination after more than 60 years, we might see just how long a conspiracy can remain hidden, or at least have any official acknowledgement of it being real. More likely, we will get what in the spooks’ trade is called ‘a limited hangout’ where some shocking facts are exposed that distract the public from more serious evidence that is withheld (or has been destroyed long ago). Beyond the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, how about the intercepted Japanese navy communications that remain secret more than eight decades after Pearl Harbour because they might still have ‘national security’ implications!?

I have no doubt that the military/intelligence deep state could have prevented whistle-blowers from exposing weather warfare research using HAARP and similar facilities through every tool imaginable, ranging from discrediting to death threats and, if necessary, murder. I understand the great reluctance to accept that such crimes by the system could be characteristic rather than aberrations, and that our leaders could be complicit in withholding evidence of past, let alone current, crimes. However when we consider the closely related phenomenon of ‘false flag’ terrorist attacks, of which around 100 have been confirmed by historians over the last century (not counting 9/11 or even the bombing of the Reichstag that led to Hitler being given dictatorial powers), it is rational to consider if weather modification could at least be being used to nudge the population into accepting more draconian responses to the developing climate emergency along with any number of other important changes to the advantage of at least some power elites. 

Perhaps the top-secret Manhattan Project developing the nuclear bomb during WWII provides the best proof of how so many can participate in a plan/conspiracy without knowing. Estimates of those involved in Manhattan range from 130,000 to 500,000. Most only understood the nature and purpose of their work after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

For me, the crossover between the long history of psyops by the CIA and weapons of terror is important in any big picture understanding of the potential of weather modification, especially storm enhancement. Back when the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ lies were successful in getting us into the destruction of Iraq, I saw the very term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) as misleading, and deliberately so. Since the other class of WMDs, nuclear weapons, are strategic, in that they have given the countries with them enormous power and leverage, the term WMD implied that chemical and biological weapons were also strategic (and so we needed to invade Iraq to deprive them of that power). 

Through my study of oil and the Middle East, I knew that the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s had already been the perfect experiment proving that chemical and biological weapons were only weapons of terror, with no strategic value and limited tactical value. The Iraqi Ba’athist regime under Saddam Hussain had access to the most advanced weapons (courtesy of the USA), and real-world experience using them as weapons of terror against their own Kurdish population. Despite this expertise, those weapons proved of little use in winning the eight-year war against the Iranians who had only Allah to protect them from the effects. That Iraq had this one great advantage and yet that did not allow it to defeat the invaders was proof enough for me. The following First Gulf War provided further proof that chemical and biological weapons were not useful for winning wars but I don’t need to go into the details of that saga, which brought ‘Gulf War syndrome’ back for the veterans and their families.

My big picture overview guess is that the great efforts put into weather warfare are probably similar. That is, those with the technology don’t become masters of the universe against other powers, but they can use it to terrorise populations, especially their own, into compliance with whatever narrative is being sold. In the aftermath of 9/11, just posting some chemical weapons to a few wavering senators was enough to tip the balance in favour of regime change and draconian domestic anti-terror legislation. The evidence that the chemical weapons had the signature of an American chemical weapons research lab rather than from Osama bin Laden hiding in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan came later, after the intended result was lost in the rear vision mirror of history as we moved on to the next fake reality designed to mislead. 

Weather terror

It makes perfect sense that if power elites have come to the conclusion that the climate emergency (real or manufactured; it doesn’t matter in this case) is important, then weather modification could be a handy tool for forcing populations to accept losing privileges, rights and options that they have previously taken for granted. Even if weather weapons are very poor in being targeted for this purpose, it may not matter. According to my larger framework of Energy Descent, it is perfectly logical for power elites to make use of such tools and, in certain elevated circles, ethical arguments about necessary evils for some larger good could be discussed. Not that such discussions are even necessary to the systemic self-organisation that arises from mutual reinforcing, but unarticulated, relationships within the globally connected ecosystem of power elites that few of us understand to any degree.

I see a lot of people on the ‘far right’ trying to convince people of ‘the truth’ in the belief that the truth is a lion, which once set free will defend itself. And despite the constant media beat up about potential far right terrorism, there is surprising little of it, despite many being gun owners. Instead, I see these people mostly having considerable faith that Law and/or God will correct the wrongs. Most less receptive or motivated folk simply find these ideas about evil elites as inconvenient as the ideas about what the climate emergency will mean for them and their families before too long.

Thus while the Woke Green Left retain a trust in ‘The Science’, as at least relatively uncontaminated by money and power, the Righteous Right seem obsessed with how ‘The Truth’ will find the light of day and that Law will correct past injustices.

Finding the balance

However, my big picture Energy Descent perspective suggests both of these beliefs may be deluded, even if there is a spark of value in both. Formal science, including peer review, when not driven by money and power, may be useful in some circumstances, but most often about curiosities rather than existential issues. Similarly, understanding some possible nasty truths can help some people avoid bad outcomes and make better decisions, but I think the idea that the Law at the large scale can be based on a shared understanding of reality and deliver anything in the way of restitution or even just punishment, is naïve. Even the idea that exposure to and belief in ‘The Truth’ will lead people to act accordingly is perhaps wishful thinking. 

My recent essay about the LA wildfires, written at the same time that this larger climate story was finished, shows how I tried to provide a balance between the increasingly divided views of reality. Despite my caution about naïve interpretations of wildfires being so weird in their effects that they must be the result of Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs), it is equally unwise for anyone living in fire vulnerable landscapes to completely dismiss the possibility that technology has supercharged that ancient and pedestrian potential for arson by parties with the motivation and capacity. 

I know by explaining my half-century journey leading to abandoning the GHG emission climate change narrative, I will be accused of using the magic power of doubt that is supposedly influential in stopping society making the necessary U-turn away from the path of climate Armageddon. I think I can stand on my record in suggesting society needs a radical transformation, but that those seeing that need should be the guinea pigs of their own ideas. Pioneering organic, biodynamic, and regenerative farmers have done so in our food supply systems, battling the rigors of both markets and regulations, and exposing themselves and families to risk. More broadly, permaculture activists have done the same in retrofitting their ways of life as adaptive to frugal futures. I believe anyone calling for radical change in society needs to provide the models to inspire and adapt, if not follow to the letter. From that history in regenerative agriculture, we hear stories of how neighbours, consultants and government officials steadfastly ignore the evidence across the fence line. This cultivated ignorance may be frustrating, but I am convinced that any mandate from above to force industrial farmers to do a cold turkey shift to sustainable methods would inevitably be a disaster and lead to food shortages if not famines. The same is true for any large-scale revolutionary change enforced on society, no matter how well intended.

So I reject the very idea that the climate story requires an end to debate and a following of whatever plan emerges from the power elites to save us and nature. If there is anything I am certain of, it is the application of permaculture principles, especially valuing ideas that come from the margins of society, as a more likely source of necessary experimentation and innovation than the central certainties held by ageing institutions that may be well past their use-by date. And if reform rather than dissolution is still a possible adaptive pathway, then those reform processes will still require a diversity of small and slow solutions that integrate rather than segregate participants and species, catch and store energy, water and nutrients, obtain yields for immediate needs, respond to negative feedback, use and value nature’s abundance and are frugal and efficient in use of resources, evolve from patterns to details and creatively respond to change from above while not being afraid to break eggs to make an omelette.