Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

Rural Blowback

In general, Australians have been more enthusiastic about the renewable energy transition than governments. In rural Australia, the prospect of well-paid jobs in creating the vast new distributed infrastructure required seemed a great hope for communities previously dependent on the declining employment prospects in industrial agriculture and even mining. However as the downside of the rollout became more evident, and the government’s international commitments to decarbonise hardened, the perceived need to override the participation of local communities in the decision making process was creating bad blood and inevitable resistance. Over time this naturally increased the scepticism about both the viability of the plans and the climate emergency. 

While angst about climate change was perhaps concentrated in our more affluent inner-city Greens voting neighbourhoods, beyond rooftop solar, those communities could contribute little to the scale of distributed energy needed for a fully renewable power grid. In rural and remote communities across the continent, vast new constructions in wind & solar farms, big batteries and enlarged grid networks were underway. These were driven by government policies, incentives, subsidies and penalties to push the acceleration of the renewable energy transition. All this was organised by corporate logistics and funded by the big banks and other financial institutions, although small business contractors provided some of the labour force for the Lego-like assembly processes and regulatory procedures. On our 2019 RetroSuburbia Roadshow tour we saw some of the action, including solar farms covering some of the best black self-mulching cropping soils around Nevertire. 

All of this was a far cry from our hopes during the Global Financial Crisis for community-owned energy infrastructure modelled on what Hepburn Wind had pioneered. Expanding the high voltage grid lines necessary to allow solar and wind farms to connect to the grid and allow redistribution of the power right around the country caused as much resistance as the power sources themselves. 

Locally, the ‘Piss Off Ausnet’ message ploughed into the red dirt of one of the volcanic hills in some of the best cropping country in Victoria is emblematic of the collateral impact of the way we attempt to become carbon neutral by 2050, all the while maintaining economic growth. At least we didn’t yet have pipelines delivering power station CO2 to geological storage structures run across farmland paid for by the taxpayer and profiting the likes of Black Rock and other investment corporations. 

But my attitude to this frenzy of renewable tech rollout has not just been shaped by the adverse collateral damage. Anything we do has downsides, and when done with billions of dollars fabricated by banks and government, it’s bound to, even with the best intentions.

That a renewable-powered society could have less downsides than a fossil fuelled one seemed unlikely even if it might be necessary.

The low net energy returns for renewables compared with fossil fuels shows up in a plethora of downsides. This was my learning in 1985 when critiquing the ethanol from artichoke proposal (See Part 2: Life in the weather). While I believe the net energy returns from solar, and especially wind, are generally better than returns from biofuels, they still fail to match high-quality fossil fuels. Consequently, we should expect lots of downsides to show up as we make the transition. Who gains and who pays, including nature in different ways, is in the end an ethical and political, not a technical, issue.

The all-electric mania

Given the substantial progress in renewable technology that produces and uses electricity, it is not surprising that the technologists and the promoters of a rapid renewable transition have become fixated on the all-electric future. This is in contrast to the dismal progress in finding renewable alternatives to petroleum and gas, especially for mining, heavy industry and transport essential to sustaining globalised trade. The boondoggle of liquid fuels from agricultural crops, especially corn ethanol, turned sour very quickly, although Brazil’s prodigious production of sugar has seen ethanol fuels make some impact in that market with somewhat better GHG emissions and sustainability credentials than corn ethanol from the Midwest of the USA. Canola and other temperate crops for biodiesel have largely been displaced by palm oil from the tropics. Palm oil has higher productivity but worse environmental credentials, due to the clearing of wetlands and rainforest for vast monocultures, in the process giving a bad reputation to one of the world’s great tree crops. These problems were obvious to the critics, and loudly articulated 20 years ago – and for some of us, 40 years ago. 

Few promoters of rapid renewable energy transition want to focus on those failed aspects of the renewable energy transition, or the massive ecological and ethical collateral damage that would have occurred if society had seriously tried to sustain hypermobility based on biofuels. In this savage dismissal of biofuels, I am not questioning the reuse of waste vegie oil from the fast-food industry. This is a very sensible strategy from those who have chosen that pathway to mobility maintenance while cheap industrially produced vegetable oils and deep-fried food obesity continue to provide the feedstock. Like skipping (dumpster diving), harvesting fryer oil is an example of Obtaining a yield by creatively parasitising the failing system. 

As another caveat on that dismissal, for some broadacre cropping farmers dependent on diesel, the idea of turning some proportion of their existing production of canola or other oilseed crops into biofuel sufficient for farm energy sufficiency as a hedge against diesel shortages or rationing makes sense. The area of arable land required is not much less than that historically required to grow oats to feed the working horses that managed the oats and other crops for human consumers sustained by the farm. This amounts to roughly one quarter of the farm for power, whether via horse or tractor. And given the terrible health impacts of industrially grown and extracted vegetable oils in the human diet, it may be more ethical to burn canola oil in a tractor than feed it to children. 

With so many environmental and other problems around biofuels, and the technological advances in electrics, it is tragic but not surprising that many of the renewable energy transition entrepreneurs, advocates and activists have put all their eggs in the electric basket. This is in breach of the permaculture principle of diversity, the precedents of history, and plain common sense.

On permaculture courses and tours in recent years I have been using two examples to illustrate that beyond the attraction of gee whiz clean tech, where we give up the ‘primitive’ practice of burning anything, there may be more Machiavellian motives driving the all-electric future for consumers. That is, to save the oil and gas for what the powerful decide are more essential uses rather than any plan to give up the systemic addiction to fossil fuel.

Getting off gas

I have long suggested that burning gas from Victoria’s Bass Strait fields to heat air and water was stealing our grandchildren’s high quality transport fuels when we could be using passive solar, active solar, and wood to do the heating. These days, we hear a lot about environmentally conscious folk going all-electric and the government even pushing this in new suburbs, mandating no reticulated gas. An all-electric house may be uninhabitable if the power goes off, and while solar panels backed by battery storage might help keep lights, communications and even essential refrigeration going, in winter, forget about cooking a substantial meal unless it is sunny and the house has a huge system (at great cost to the Earth further afield). Wood as the sensible back up, if not the main way to cook, stay warm and heat water, is these days demonised as destructive, toxic and, of course, primitive.

Could the real reason behind the all-electric push be not to burn less gas, but to save the gas resources for industry? While Australia is one of the gas superpowers of the world, most of it is at the other end of the continent and efforts by the corporations to frack our farmlands in the southeast of the country to compensate for gas field depletion have been stymied by a resistance coalition of traditional farmers, local Indigenous mobs and greenies.

Natural gas is the essential power for industry, including the food processing industries. These  have threatened to close up shop and move overseas if they are forced to pay world price for gas, which would leave Australia without food processing industries. Even our short-sighted policymakers and politicians understand that this is not a good prospect. So if they can get all the householders to switch their domestic gas burning gear for all-electric, they can save the depleting gas for industry, while getting brownie points for having strong climate positive policies. From that perspective, building suburbs without gas infrastructure makes sense. 

As our electricity grid accelerates to 100% intermittent renewables, then blackouts are likely to be more common. For the punters who can’t afford the panels and batteries to give any measure of security, it will mean finding some sticks to burn in the backyard. This is a classic example of how mainstream sustainability has become obsessed with perceived efficiency at the cost of resilience. 

Again I could provide some caveats to counter any perception that I am anti-solar and wind. Apart from being an early adopter, promoter and investor in both, the reduced costs and capacities of renewable technology means that if we were building today, instead of a two-burner gas cooktop for occasional summer use, using about 10kgs of LPG a year, we would have an induction cooktop with extra secondhand solar panels to back up our woodstove. But meanwhile, our 40-year-old gas cooktop is still going strong while I hear lots of complaints about induction cooktops being short-lived and not repairable.  

Electric vs hybrid electric vehicles

The other example I use to illustrate what I believe is the disingenuous nature of the all-electric push is the focus on all-electric vehicles rather than hybrid electric ones. Most view this as reflecting a strong commitment to decarbonise the transport system, and a growing confidence that advances in battery technology will continue to bring down the costs, and improve reliability and travel distances. While not wanting to get into the details of the pros and cons of different technologies, I note that someone who worked in BMW in Germany for 15 years as an engineer found it baffling that the company threw its future into all-electric vehicles rather than hybrid diesel electric vehicles, at least as a more reliable transition process. 

Of all the products made from oil, diesel is the most strategically important, and potentially already in short supply due to the dynamics of global peak in total liquids as well as geopolitical stress. Diesel comes from heavier grades of crude oil and has higher energy density than other fuels. Consequently, it is the primary fuel used in mining and earthmoving, broad acre industrial agriculture, trains, trucks and, of course, the military. Ships run on a heavier grade of fuel closer to actual crude oil. The recent US boom in shale oil produces lighter fractions, such as petrol, but little in the way of diesel. Much of the world’s remaining heavy oil is ‘sour’ (high sulphur) crudes that require refineries made from stainless steel and other very expensive corrosion resistant metals. Most of that refining capacity has not been built and will require substantially higher fuel prices to be justified economically. The light crudes can be reprocessed to manufacture diesel but this process is very energy expensive and requires specialised refineries. The future of the shale (light) oil supply is very doubtful, undermining any willingness for oil companies to make the vast investments needed, especially as the policy levers have been increasingly punishing rather than rewarding the petroleum industry.

So replacing all the diesel cars, especially in Europe where they are a large proportion of the car fleet, ‘makes sense’ in a command economy where diesel will be reserved for the military and essential industries such as mining, industrial agriculture and continental trucking and trains (for the transport of goods). If the mobility of ordinary people suffers due to fuel shortages, limitations emerging from switching cars to be part of the electricity grid, or any other factors, so be it. And again, the authorities get brownie points for having strong, safe climate policies. 

Please excuse my cynicism, but I believe well-meaning environmentalists are being led down the garden path about decarbonising the economy. When we stand back from the details, it appears, whether by planning (ie conspiracy) or self-organisation of complex systems, industrial society is morphing in response to the peak and depletion of the king resource of oil and more generally to resource depletion. It is doing this via a command economy that allocates resources to what the powerful think is most important. And who could blame them, because to some extent national elites have always survived first and foremost by defending the territory (the military) and feeding the masses (industrial agriculture). 

Again, my opinion should not be construed as being in complete opposition to electric vehicles. For personal and short distance travel, especially by electric bike and small vehicles, electric power supported by either grid connected and/or standalone power makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. I have no expertise to evaluate the claims that electric cars can help stabilise an all-renewable grid with extra storage capacity but in principle it makes sense. The caveat is that it may be necessary to punish, either by price or regulation, car owners for charging and/or driving when their car is needed to support the grid. Oliver Holmgren’s cargo bike, home manufactured using a combination of old bike parts, some fancy tech and a salvaged electric car battery cell has allowed him to radically reduce the miles driven in his petrol-burning Toyota light truck and still carry up to 100 kg of tools or other luggage and/or a passenger with him. This complementarity between electric and other fuel-powered vehicles is a pattern that works for a lot of households, whether that is purchased new and imported from China or remanufactured by local Obtainium engineers.

Oliver is currently researching hybrid wood gas electric truck conversions as an alternative to the trust that rural Australia will have diesel for future mobility or that electric trucks will be viable, affordable and not destroy the Earth to manufacture.

What I saw as problematic was how the climate narrative was being used to shepherd the public into accepting policy decisions based on polishing the climate credentials of corrupt power elites and even worse, getting the public to make personal and household decisions that I believed were the opposite of enlightened self-interest. What I found interesting is that it was primarily the well-educated, with apparently good ethics, who were mostly believing and acting on these narratives, while the ‘uneducated’ battlers were typically more sceptical about these inducements, based on a gut feeling that they were being gamed yet again and the proposals didn’t pass the ‘pub test’. This is following a pattern recently established with Covid, especially the novel injections.

Reflection

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the US election where the working-class have rallied to Trump’s transformation of the Republican party into a national populous political party while the Democrats have morphed into representing a strange coalition of higher educated woke beneficiaries of globalisation. This coalition includes the vast majority of academia and mainstream media combined with the extreme neo-cons risking nuclear war to maintain the tottering West-dominated ‘rules based international order’ which includes the climate consensus and foundations for global governance. 

Pollution of the airways

Another downside of technology that is little discussed is the escalating energetic pollution of the airways. This is not just with industrial noise, including off-shore wind farm foundation pile driving, which is apparently implicated in rising whale beachings and deaths. More fundamental, but subtle, is the massive field of electromagnetic radiation from communications equipment which is expanding exponentially on Earth, in the sea and mostly in and above the atmosphere. Most of these fields of energy are non-ionising; that is, they are low enough in power that they pass through living tissues without damage to the delicate cellular structures and thus are regarded as harmless. As in most things, for many years I accepted this science, even though we have always been cautious in our more intermittent exposure to devices, especially mobile phones. In recent years, I have become more aware of a large body of evidence indicating that the fringe people in the alternative health field might be right after all. 

Insect decline and EMRs

Since the turn of the millennium, the anecdotal evidence about the ‘windshield phenomenon’ has highlighted a concern by both entomologists and lay observers of decline in the quantity and diversity of insects. Apart from bees, insects and other invertebrates don’t attract the attention that large furry mammals do, despite being essential not only for pollination, but also as the basis of the food chain that feeds frogs, reptiles and, especially, birds. As small hot-blooded high-energy fliers, most birds depend on the concentrated energy and protein from insects to survive. Insect decline world-wide is now well recognised as something that has been serious for decades, if not centuries, but the cause remains a mystery, with attribution to habitat loss, drainage of wetlands, toxic chemicals, introduced species and even light pollution. However the primary current candidate, increasingly cited, at least in the media, is climate change. 

I remember when I first heard about the ‘windshield phenomenon’ it reminded me of having to clean the flywire screen my father put over the car radiator twice on our 300 mile summer holiday trip through the wheatbelt to Denmark on the Western Australia south coast. The concept certainly struck a chord with me and made me wonder about whether insect decline was a contributing factor to the frog decline, and even more so, to our less-than-great numbers of insectivorous birds. Most disturbing was the fact that swallows, the ultimate aerial feeders, have never returned to the nest they built in the porch eave following the construction of the house and dams (a great source of aerial insects) in the late 1980s. Over the years I have seen some improvement in numbers and diversity of small birds, despite us resorting to a resident cat for rodent control nearly a decade ago. Our efforts constructing boxes to attract insectivorous bats over the years has not been very successful. The great number of emperor gum moths that used to crowd our windows with the first autumn break rains are also a memory from the early years. Certainly, cleaning windshields, let alone radiators, had been a minor issue for a long time.

Meanwhile, our beehives have mostly done well, give or take variable seasons and consistency of management, as we await the arrival of Varroa mite courtesy of globalised free trade and the migration of the almond monocultures from the Central Valley of California to the Murray Valley. And the annual flight of millions of termites (the ones that dwell in living trees) on the first warm night in late spring is still an annual event. 

When thinking about the possible explanations in the early years, before climate change became the reflex explanation, the idea that habitat destruction and toxins were the major causes did not seem credible in our local context. In 1994, on our European tour, I noted the grainfields were almost completely free of weeds (i.e. biodiversity) due to the intensive use of herbicides. In Australia, without the subsidies that allow and encourage European farmers to maintain such clean cropping landscapes, weeds used to be more common. Conversely, on our 2005 European tour, it was quite common to see strips of planted wildflowers (subsidised by the EU to support insect diversity), while Australian field crops these days are ‘clean’. Given Landcare and other biodiversity programs are exclusively focused on native trees and shrubs, the biodiversity benefit from field weeds isn’t acknowledged here (other than by organic growers who, despite their best efforts, never have ‘clean’ fields). 

Here in central Victoria we do have some of those clean fields about 20 kilometres to the west, but the vast majority of Dja Dja Warrung Country is rough self-established grazing pastures of great diversity with minimal use of toxic chemicals beyond occasional herbicide on specific plants. The area under native forest has increased, and most wetlands are protected, while the total area affected by urbanisation, mining and road construction is still small. Urban and rural plantings have increased the diversity for nectar feeding insects compared to that from native species alone. Consequently, habitat decline and toxic chemicals seemed an inadequate explanation for insect decline.

I was also sceptical about the climate change explanation because, in my understanding, insects generally have a much greater ability to migrate with changing conditions and variable seasons than longer-lived lifeforms. Australian insects, beyond perhaps those of lowland tropical rainforests, are mostly well-adapted to radically variable seasons, and move in response. In Hepburn we are starting to see some evidence of ground-dwelling termites, perhaps in response to a warming climate, and fruit flies blow in now but so far don’t appear to overwinter. Birds are also moving, possibly in response to climate change, like the arrival of lorikeets from warmer parts in the last decade.

What I find really disturbing is the almost complete ignorance amongst most ecologists, and certainly the general public, about the massive body of evidence that EMRs (non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation) can affect human health and has a very strong correlation with declines of migratory birds as well as insects. It seems plausible to me that the hard exoskeleton of insects could make them stronger resonating bodies with EMRs than soft-bodied animals. I also find it plausible that this resonation and inducement of subtle electromagnetic signals, rather than any hard changes in cellular chemistry, could have profound effects on insect communication and breeding, as well as migrating birds. In any case, as the grids of non-ionizing radiation from communication devices, towers, power systems and of course the thousands of satellites being launched for the ever-expanding flood of global communications, we should expect this novel form of pollution to have some effects on the biological world and be devoting serious research funding to the subject. 

If burning fossil fuels has been a difficult problem to find a workaround for, industrial modernity, the electrification solution and the addiction to ever-expanding communication and information capacity could be the nails in the coffin for our civilisation, far more serious than lead waterpipes were for the Romans. I remain agnostic on the whole EMR question and note that I still spend a lot of time in front of a computer but remain a phone luddite. I am complemented in communications by Su Dennett’s use of her phone to organise not just business but our lives more generally.

At the time of the Snowden revelations of massive systematic surveillance of the population in the US and Five Eyes security partners including Australia, I noted how it barely raised a reaction from the device-addicted population, despite it being illegal and classic authoritarian behaviour. I wonder, if it was proved and promoted that EMRs were doing more to damage to nature than climate change, whether environmentalists would give up their phones. Most environmentalists not living in public transport-saturated inner cities, only began to give up their personal fossil fuel burning chariots when Elon Musk provided an apparently carbon emissions-free car of equal or better quality than standard cars, ahead of the established car manufacturers. While the mainstream media, Wikipedia and now ChatGPT don’t reference evidence of EMR adverse impacts, everyone will continue to assume they are harmless to us and nature. 

I may have become a cynical old man, but I am certainly not bitter about the unravelling of industrial modernity. It is on track to follow a bumpy downslope of energy descent that is likely to include some dramatic crises and mini-collapses followed by periods of stability and reorganisation before another crisis pulls apart more of the complexity sustaining the failing systems.

Do I think EMRs will be the end of humans or nature? No, but I think many of the dramatic declines in biodiversity attributed increasingly to climate change may prove to be due to the escalating saturation of the planet with EMRs. Will EMRs lead to runaway mass extinctions? I have no idea, but I am more inclined to maintain faith in nature’s ability to adapt to novel factors (as observed in the ecosynthesis of novel ecosystems), which may be stronger than most ecologists credit. However, in the same way that I have long argued that resource depletion could be the spanner in the works of industrial modernity before we cook the planet through carbon emissions, I think the enormously complex global communication networks that are responsible for vast expansion of EMR pollution could be some of the first systems to fail as energy descent takes hold. Whatever the mechanism to trigger the failure (such as the Kessler syndrome where satellite collisions trigger a space junk explosion that wipes out satellites generally), it would reflect the principles of complex system change where the most recently developed elements are generally the first to fail, while longer co-evolved parts tend to be more robust under stress.

Green political degeneration

Unlike my parents I have never belonged to a political party, but if I was to acknowledge political home territory, it would have to be the Greens. The German Greens, the most influential and powerful in the world, long ago acknowledged the United Tasmania Group as the first modern Green party in the world, a decade before Bob Brown and the Tasmanian Greens rose on the back of the Franklin Dam issue. My permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison was a candidate for the United Tasmania Group in the 1972 federal election. One of my Tasmanian back-to-the-land neighbours and friends became a green entrepreneur, and later a member of the Tasmanian Greens coalition government. One of my high school mates, Dee Margetts, became a Greens senator. Bob Brown, when leader of the Greens, launched Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability in Canberra, and several of my close local friends and colleagues in central Victoria were influential in the rural Greens over decades. 

Many permaculture colleagues, activists, designers, and teachers have been active in Green party politics and even apolitical Su Dennett handed out ‘how to vote cards’ for the Greens at local polling booths for many years, although her main interest was the useful community connections and discussions with those handing out for the other parties.

Over the decades I used to note how I voted for the Greens, even though in my area of passion and expertise, sustainable land use, I disagreed with Greens policies, especially on forestry. Even in the area of agriculture, where the Greens notionally supported organic and regenerative farming methods, their urban-centric leadership and constituency seem to regard farming as a fringe issue, rather than central to their concerns. In health, their support for alternative and complementary health modalities was even more muted than any support for organics. 

In a lot of ways, my support for the Greens was more for their social justice commitment to Indigenous issues, asylum seekers, the disadvantaged and, most importantly, their opposition to military alliances and resistance to overseas wars, all issues that reflected the radical left lineage.

Back in the nineties, with the first rise of Pauline Hanson and others representing the alienated socially conservative right, I can remember suggesting to Green colleagues that they should start discussions with these groups about common ground, especially around anti-big banks, and more generally anti-globalist policies, rather than getting too caught up in the mainstream demonisation of them as racist and xenophobic. 

Over the decades the increasing alignment of Greens as the advocates for the renewable energy industry shifted from support for public research and development, innovative start-ups, small business, and energy co-ops to wholehearted backing of global corporations installing Chinese manufactured hardware across our rural landscapes. I accepted this as a natural consequence of the growth and success of the renewable energy industries, and that the Greens were just growing up politically with the realisation that any ‘Pro’ rather than ‘Anti’ policies will require compromise of cherished values and will have some adverse consequences that must be accepted in a context of a greater good.

However this commitment to tech contrasted to, at best, a lacklustre support for regenerative agriculture and upfront hostility to forestry and wood energy. Support for trees in general was largely confined to indigenous biodiversity, carbon credit plantations and natural regeneration as a result of ‘benign neglect’ or ‘rewilding’. Given that wood waste and forest thinnings could provide dispatchable energy to balance intermittent renewables on the grid, it did stick in my throat that this was totally rejected in favour of raping the Earth for minerals to create giant batteries. I suppose for the predominantly urban green constituents stuck in the technospheric bubble, big batteries are cool and familiar tech, a big version of one’s own mobile phone, while cutting down trees is the essence of environmental destruction after generations of propaganda responding to the adverse impacts of industrial forestry. 

Reflection

But it was the total alignment and support for the official responses to Covid, including the demonising of those maintaining the principles of bodily autonomy, that really opened my eyes to just how much the Greens had become open advocates for the worst expressions of globalist policies, even if most activists and representatives were motivated by good intentions.

And so, in the aftermath of Covid, I began to see how the Greens’ advocacy for a serious whole of society and government response to the climate emergency was a setup, intentionally or not, for eco-fascist solutions such as those proposed by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum through the Great Reset.

For me, confirmation of this alignment at the international scale came from the coalition German government where the Greens foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has been one of the strongest advocates for German weapons for Ukraine to reconquer the ethnic Russian breakaway regions after the Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014, and the Russian Special Military Operation of 2022. While the anti-Russian rhetoric coming from the neo-cons in Washington over the last quarter century was to be expected, the idea that the German Greens could become wholehearted supporters of military maintenance of Western power was a genuine shock. 

Meanwhile, the sabotage of the Nord Stream Two gas pipeline from Russia leading to the collapse of the German industrial economy, is an illustration of what the Greens had wanted to achieve by politics: the cold turkey switch-off from dependence on natural gas. That the US president (Biden) had threatened to ensure Nord Stream never started, and the US gas exporters have been the main beneficiaries, makes it fairly clear the sabotage was coordinated by the US. In any case, it shows the strange symbiosis between Green climate emergency ideology, American gas corporations seeking to sell much more expensive and GHG intensive shipped liquified natural gas to German industry, and the neo con Atlanticist geopolitical strategy to isolate and defeat Russia through NATO’s relentless expansion eastward over the last three decades. These forces have combined to sever the supply of cheap, reliable and relatively low GHG emission Russian natural gas, which was the foundation for German industrial products to remain competitive while paying high wages. For German Greens who are capable of grasping these emergent realities, it must produce a cognitive dissonance that is hard to digest. But the logic of supporting West-backed all-out war to resist ‘Russian aggression’ rather than negotiation, may go down in history as the key turning point in the demise of Green politics, not just in Germany, but perhaps in the whole world given the German Greens conceptual and practical leadership of this global political movement. 

Recent German elections suggest that the endlessly forecast rise and rise of Green politics, there and around the world, may be not just failing to materialise, but go into reverse as the degeneration of circumstances for young Germans pushes them more toward the so-called ‘far right’ Alternative for Germany (AfD). I see all the same signs here in Australia, even if the degeneration of circumstances for the young, who have been the mainstay of Green political growth, is not so advanced as in the countries at the frontline of the Western world war to destroy Russia while simultaneously leading the push to decarbonise the economy as fast as possible. 

Without deep reflection and a return to the roots of Green politics in nature and community, I see little hope for its constructive contribution on the climate question, or any other issue facing society, if it cannot break the perception by a growing number of younger voters that the Greens are woke green branding for globalist bankers and warmongers.

Whatever the disputed moral and legal merits of the Ukrainian and Russian perspectives on the origins and outcomes of the conflict, at what point will Greens leaders understand that the West has been defeated in this war? Defeat in this proxy war against Russia demands negotiation before most of the young people of western Europe are funnelled into the meatgrinder that Ukraine has become and the West bankrupts itself in the process or, alternatively, the world is engulfed in nuclear war, nuclear winter and hundreds of years of radiation contamination.

The German Greens apparent unswerving advocacy of the ongoing waste of equipment and lives, releasing GHG emissions at unprecedented rates and accumulating massive debts for reconstruction and rehabilitation, which in turn will require massive additional resources (and consequent GHG emissions), undermines their long-standing message that our GHG emissions represent an existential threat to humanity and nature greater than any previously traditional existential threats such as war and tyranny. Clearly Green ideological priorities are in tatters as the old politics of the rights and wrongs of war now hold sway over Greens leaders. Maybe, like the Chinese nationalists defeated by the Communists retreating to Taiwan in the hope of one day returning, the remnants of Green ideological elites in Western Liberal culture will abandon Europe and retreat to New Zealand or Tasmania in the vain hope of one day being recognised as the true leaders of global civilisation. 

Despite this savage analysis, which for me has been brewing over the decades, I have been surprised by the degree to which I held on to the social connection to Green politics as providing more mainstream affirmation of permaculture. Permaculture was a continuing inspiration, even a pole star for Green philosophy, at least in Australia and especially in the networks of rural greens I was most connected to. After Covid, being freed from those bonds has given a renewed sense of open inquiry and curiosity to diverse explanations and interpretations of the tumultuous events of our times, and a reason to review and reflect on some of my own certainties that proved, at least so far, to be premature if not misguided.