Read part one of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece:

‘Mitigation’ is the technical term used for actions that reduce emissions of CO2 and other atmospheric gases that are believed to contribute to anthropogenic driven climate change. Apart from reductions in burning fossil fuels and fugitive emissions from gas fields, there are many land management strategies and processes that can reduce the loss of carbon and methane from forests, crops, soil humus, wetland storages and animal enteric emissions. Similarly, reaforestation, regenerative agriculture and rehydration of landscapes can all enhance the capacity to take excess carbon from the atmosphere, especially because past human activity has so depleted the storages that are possible in any given climate and biome. 

‘Adaptation’ is the strategy that comes into focus as the likelihood of climate change appears more certain. Adaptations can range from benign, no regrets processes of personal behaviour change to the armouring of urban infrastructure at great cost and increased emissions of CO2. Thus adaptation can be part of the solution, or simply create a positive feedback loop making the problem worse. Greater use of air conditioning in response to rising temperatures is a simple example of how the response creates demands for more equipment, infrastructure and energy. While the renewable energy evangelists insist this is all ok so long as it is all powered by renewable energy, real world experience shows otherwise. 

Personal Mitigation

The reasons to reduce consumption of fossil fuels long predate the CO2 global warming theory. Some relate to equity: is it possible for everyone to live the way affluent westerners take for granted? The answer, endlessly documented by Ted Trainer and others over many decades, is an emphatic ‘No!’ Calculations using the ecological footprint metric suggest we would need multiple Earths to do so.

Some are more aesthetic, even romantic: that it is better for health and wellbeing to ride a bicycle, grow one’s own food, practise yoga and meditation etc etc as alternatives to being on the hedonic treadmill of mindless consumption. That psychology and sociology have confirmed what the spiritual traditions have been telling us for millennia may be news to some, but continues to be ignored in the halls of power and production.

The mathematics of depletion and the need, sooner or later, for humanity to kick the addiction to depleting stocks of concentrated energy is a story that has been around since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. 

That our system is built on the burning of non-renewable natural capital contradicts any economic principles founded in observable reality. 

For many, the air pollution impacts and environmental damage, the geopolitical distortions, and the societal damage of fossil fuel dependence were all reasons for reducing their use of, and indirect dependence on, the burning of fossil fuels. Thus the mitigation of CO2 driven climate change was built into ethical and environmental thinking.

If the new sources of energy have lower net energy return, then a contraction of the material economy is unavoidable. Without a method for measuring net energy that all scientists and engineers can agree on, society remains in the grip of the voodoo science of economics to tell us what might work. 

Like moths to a light, humanity pigging out on fossil fuels can be understood as just a narrowly-focused human manifestation of the maximum power principle. Unfortunately the drive to maximum power in life is only sustained if all hierarchical levels, from microbes to the whole Earth benefit from the power up. Greenhouse gas emission driven climate change is simply one expression of a much larger problem of limits to growth.

Permaculture has been my effort to deal with these realities, and from very early on, in opportunities that came my way, I chose the path that later became associated with climate change mitigation. In Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability I recalled:

An early realisation of the banality of our fossil fuel use occurred to me on a sunny Sunday in Hobart back in 1974. A friend who was an abalone fisherman had invited me out for a jaunt in his powerboat. As we sped down the Derwent estuary chasing seagulls, powered by twin 80-horsepower outboards, I remember thinking that our consumption of energy was far greater than that of the ancient kings. While the actions of the ancient kings had immediate consequences for people and nature, ours appeared to be of no consequence beyond momentary exhilaration (and incremental resource depletion).(2nd Ed, p. 78)

Forty years after that jaunt down the Derwent, I explained the history of my approach to long distance travel, especially air travel in ‘Why I haven’t been flying (much)’. I saw the increasing environmental odour around long-distance short-stay flying, because of greenhouse gas emissions, as an opportunity to explore the larger systemic context for how I think and act in these matters. It was also an opportunity to enlarge on the aesthetics of mitigating the adverse impacts of modernity including, but not just, greenhouse gas emissions:

One essential pre condition for a benign energy descent future for humanity is the process by which those of us with privilege and endless opportunities choose not to swill at the pig trough that corporate capitalism is making of the world. But this restraint from endless indulgence will not spread if it is driven only by puritanical atonement. It must also be because we find the experience degrading or even disgusting. I see it as little different to the way I have (since a young adolescent) felt an aesthetic disgust for mixed household rubbish, or the extremely rare experience of needing to visit a supermarket or shopping mall.

The extremity of distaste and alienation comes from airports; everything from the shopping mall temples to consumption, to the ridiculous airport security, I experience as an assault to my values and my person. Whether by conspiracy or perverse accident I view the ritual of airport security as a process by which the travelling (middle) class get a regular dose of propaganda about the so called “war on terror”. And of course if you respond to this earnest process with the ridicule it deserves you are likely to be detained if not tortured, that still being reserved for demonised groups and nationalities.

While the ‘Why I haven’t been flying (much)’ essay strongly reflected my own real sense of the need to model more radical behavioural changes by the global middle class to substantially cut GHG emissions it also marks a renewed commitment to pointing out the problems of reductionist focus on GHG emissions metric in measuring the value of human behaviour, institutional structures, energy technologies and infrastructures and of course land use systems, the original and still central focus for permaculture.

Land use change to match climate change

Just as I found the mainstream discussion of climate mitigation strategies back-to-front, the slow rise of discussion of climate change adaptation was just as wrongheaded. Initially, most of the discussion in agriculture networks was relatively superficial, such as focusing on selecting strains of this or that crop to be more heat tolerant, but little strategic thinking or consideration of changes more difficult to consider. That territory was left to the climate emergency activists talking about a cooked planet with minimal remaining biodiversity. I regarded most of those more extreme warnings as from people largely ignorant of paleoclimatic history where life was adapted to radically different climates, including substantially hotter ones, as well as changes that come on very fast such as ice ages. 

In Future Scenarios I highlighted the land use systems that might be more resilient in energy descent, with specific reference to more unreliable climates. 

For many years before this, teaching on PDCs, I had posed the question, that if erratic climate represents a limit to agriculture and that GHG emission driven climate change leads to more erratic climates, will farmers in other parts of the world have to learn from Australian farmers how to adapt, while our own prospects are pushed back to grazing livestock, hunting and wild harvesting, beekeeping and some limited scale permaculture-designed garden farming?

In the slide introducing my most severe Lifeboat scenario I used a photo of kangaroo hunting as the background image to capture an aspect of the scenario where a combination of unreliable and drying climate, insecure and/or non-existent land tenure could make hunting an effective land use. This would involve harvesting a range of wild animals in good seasons and preserving, mostly as dried jerky, for consumption and trade in bad seasons. I saw the harsh and erratic climates of inland Australia, with their abundance of both native and wild animals in need of harvesting, as providing a model for what we might face in currently more benign regions. 

In the essay ‘Bee keeping for the energy descent future’ (2011) I discussed the challenges for sustainable broadacre cropping to show how climate and energy could interact in energy descent futures:

Extreme weather events and chaotic seasons, without clear patterns, are a greater challenge, than simply a shift to a warmer or even drier climate. Australia’s unreliable climatic patterns combined with chronically infertile soils made agriculture a marginal project, before the arrival of Europeans with several continents worth of cultivated plants and domesticated livestock. The sustainability of this on-going experiment in agriculture remains a moot point, even without climate change. The progressive (or rapid) breakdown of the globalised markets for agriculture and more chaotic seasons adds to the doubts. In general we should expect broadacre crop agriculture to become an increasingly marginal activity. 

But to counter any assumption that tree crop agriculture might be immune from unreliable climates I went on to counter any tendency to permaculture dogma in this regard:

This thought might make some permie purists feel a little smug as they grind and leach acorns for their daily bread, but the resilience of many of our cherished tree crops to climate chaos is not much better than annual crops, a point made (through gritted teeth) by my good mate Graham Brookman at the Food Forest. (Lack of winter chill and extreme heat waves are having increasing impact on the yield from mainstay tree crops at the Food Forest.) 

Compared with annual crops, one disadvantage of tree crops is vulnerability due to specific seasonal conditions for fruit set and ripening. Long lead times and resources involved in planting and establishment of tree crop species and varieties adapted to emerging climates are also problematic. 

Diversity gives us a “hedge” against climate (and market) chaos, with some winners and some losers each season, but this value from diversity is most useful in small scale systems supplying a household rather than market systems where some degree of commitment to scale and specialisation is inevitable (even in a more localised world).

Microclimate buffering of extreme weather conditions is another advantage of food forests but much of that buffering of heat scorch, frost, wind damage etc is restricted to the understorey. It is the tree canopy, especially in temperate climate systems, exposed to full sun that provides the greatest yields.

I also made a distinction between food forests and timber forests in regard to variable climates, which is missing in much permaculture teaching. This tends to gloss over the fact that most forests in regions with poorer soils and climates produce little in the way of food while generating great quantities of woody biomass in those less than ideal growing conditions:

Timber forests are more capable of dealing with the extreme weather and seasonal chaos than food forests. They grow fast when moisture and temperature allow but continue to slowly gain (dense) wood in all but the most extreme seasons. 

In my habit of kicking permaculture sacred trees (rather than cows), I added a comment about the power and flexibility of animal husbandry in less than ideal and unreliable climates.

Ironically it is grasslands with grazing animals that might be one of the most resilient systems of land use in the face of climate chaos; these opportunistic systems mostly developed through the pulsing of ice age and interglacial over the last few million years. Animals represent storages that dampen the pulse while predators act to further moderate and protect the whole system. Hunter/gatherer and nomadic pastoralist cultures (at their best) incorporated this wisdom of nature to survive and thrive harsh climatic transitions of the past. This interpretation might be a bitter pill to swallow for vegetarian and vegan idealists wedded to the idea that the keeping of livestock represents the most destructive and unethical of our land uses. 

Some of the historical advantages of pastoral farming and even nomadic pastoralism could also be important in the energy descent future. Animals (rather than machines and fossil fuel) do most of the work converting plant biomass into condensed and self-transporting storages of value to people. At the same time, they provide environmental services, such as vegetation management, fertility cycling, transport, companionship and even security. 

This shift from crops to livestock is something that I have observed in farmers responding to current climate and market forces. Many broadacre regenerative farmers have shifted from cropping staple grains and legumes to livestock pastoralism because it is easier to manage the climate and market variables and inputs required, with less financial risk and more success in regenerating the land to enhance future options. In many ways, livestock grazing done well is a caretaker land use that keeps options open for future cropping but currently organic, biodynamic and regenerative croppers are as rare as proverbial hens’ teeth in Australia. 

Between the difficulties of climate and weeds and the squeeze of the commodity markets dominated by global corporations, the pathways to success are very narrow. It has always amazed me how consumers concerned about the ethics and vitality of their sources of sustenance pay so little (money and attention) to secure their supply of staple grains and legumes now and into the future. 

But the prime focus of that essay was extolling the virtues of bee keeping in energy descent futures:

Firstly, bees are livestock that free range up to 2km from home across all boundaries and barriers, harvesting nectar and pollen sources using their own amazing intelligence and communication. Although we think of insects as being living machines controlled by hard-wired instincts, bees (and other social insects) show a higher form of collective intelligence that far exceeds the modest intelligence of individual bees. This “hive mind” has even been used as a model in understanding the emergence of higher human intelligence (via collective global consciousness) that might yet help save humanity from extinction. 

They work when the weather suits and hold large stores to tide them over shortages. It is the very unreliability of nectar flows on top of the unreliability of flowering that has driven the evolution of social bees to “catch and store” large flows of nectar in condensed self preserving honey.

They thrive with a diversity of floral sources typical of wild and minimally managed landscapes that will quickly develop in rural areas as soon as fuel and herbicide become expensive and/or climate chaos accelerates and/or lack of security and markets make farming activities difficult. 

The arrival of varroa mite in Australia and its spread on the backs of some of the billions of bee slaves that work to keep the rapidly expanding almond monocultures pollinated, has placed a dampener on current prospects for bees and beekeepers. However I think the resilience of apiculture in unstable climates still stands even if it may be more sedentary rather than migratory in energy descent futures.

Reflection

I think the whole beekeeping essay encapsulates a lot of my thinking at the time, explaining what I saw as the real world impacts of climate change and the prospects for creative adaptation. Its upbeat tone was my attempt to put a more positive spin on the very challenging scenarios I was presenting. In the process, I was pushing back on the end-of-the-world fear about the climate emergency coming from many well-meaning climate activists desperate to trigger a mass movement demanding fast, top-down implementation of mainstream mitigation solutions. I remember thinking that much of the discourse avoided talking about adaptation because it was seen as giving up on reversing climate change through the renewable energy crusade, which appeared to be gathering a head of steam despite the failures of global governance to deliver meaningful results.

John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer was another thinker who was independently articulating energy descent as a result of peak oil and climate change, amongst myriad other physical and psychosocial forces that led to the demise of empires in the past. A prolific blogger whose work came to prominence through interest in peak oil, Greer was actually an erudite, if fringe, thinker and practitioner of a Druidic spirituality from our pre-Christian Celtic ancestors that has survived and evolved in response to modernity in various subcultural forms and expressions. Of course in some circles, this very characterisation of Greer’s wider work is enough to dismiss his energetic and ecological realism about energy descent. His prolific writing made his articulation of energy descent more influential than my own, even with the benefit of the global permaculture movement as a platform for my articulation of this now much more widespread idea.

I found it very useful to reference one of the main themes of Greer’s work in this regard: his critique of millennialism within the Western tradition. Built on the Christian stories about sin in the world leading to Armageddon, and the true believers being saved from the fiery end of the material world, millennialism is a recurring theme in thoughts about human futures in Western (and now global) civilisation. This has been in dark contrast to the prevailing ideology of endless material progress which has accelerated with the industrial revolution but has roots even longer ago with the European ‘discovery’ and colonisation of the Americas 500 years ago. While enthusiasm for more ‘progress and power’ over nature’s limits (such as Elon Musk’s vision, plans and real action in that direction) still galvanises the collective consciousness around the world, the proliferation of counter narratives about the end of civilisation, even humanity, and almost casually, life on Earth, have been gaining strength for many decades. 

Greer strongly critiqued interpretations of peak oil leading to ‘the end of the world’ as a form of scientific millennialism. He further argues the vast weight of history suggests most civilisations that reach their use by date break down progressively over generations, if not centuries, rather than collapsing precipitously. Humanity goes through a process of painful readjustment to declining material circumstances and the ongoing efforts of whatever power elites that survive or emerge to game whatever opportunities remain from the progressive unravelling. Greer, at least in his writings around the time I was working on Future Scenarios, appeared as convinced as I was that anthropogenic induced global warming was one important factor that would contribute significantly to that energy descent process, but without the global life-threatening cooking of the planet narrative that was increasingly coming from those warning of, and fearing, tipping points in the global climatic system. 

I found Greer’s reference to the psychosocial and deeper historical cultural factors driving millennialism a useful balance to my own tendency to interpret the risks of near-term energy descent driven crises as the start of a larger ongoing unravelling of industrial civilisation over one or two lifetimes. 

However history suggests most systemic crises are, by their nature, short lived, and lead to new steady states even if that new normal is itself short lived. 

This staircase model of energy descent clarified my explanation and workshopping of my energy descent scenarios as near-term steady states that might themselves last for many decades before some additional crisis triggered the next scenario. In this way, I linked the less extreme Green Tech and Brown Tech scenarios as possible precursors to the more extreme Earth Steward and Lifeboat scenarios which I later used as the basis for my backcast story from 2086 of our own region of central Victoria, ‘A history from the future’. 

Reflection

That story, ‘A history from the future’, was written in 2016, and is a nuanced record of how I was feeling at the time about the near-term prospects for our home region, Australia and the wider world, including region-wide bushfires contributing to a land use and governance reset. Written well after a run of good seasons following the millennial drought and Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, and well before the dry season and local fires of 2019 or the massive east coast fires of 2020, it partly reflects my own preoccupation with permaculture design against bushfire and my following, with only moderate scepticism, of what the prevailing models were predicting for our region’s climate and the relationship to global atmospheric CO2 levels in parts per million. 

In the story it is the stabilisation of the climate, due to radical declines in globalised economic activity and its replacement with more modest and localised regenerative economies, which creates a culture of sustainable wellbeing as the climate gradually returns to something akin to the stable interglacial norms of the last 12,000 years.

This pattern of crisis, slow restructuring and regeneration is of course meant to provide a realistic sense of hopeful transition, even if the journey to get there is a tough and multi-generational one. The bare bones narrative structure of ‘A history from the future’ allowed me to paint a picture of how permaculture could help shape better futures than what might otherwise befall us. It was also written to promote both my Future Scenarios work and RetroSuburbia as one strategic response to energy descent driven by both peak oil and climate change. 

Resilience

In the second decade of the new millennium, I saw ‘resilience’ take over from ‘sustainability’ as the buzz word for describing progressive environmentalism, especially responses to climate change. 

In crafting the title Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability in 2002, I took a direct swipe at the environmental mainstream attempts to sustain industrial modernity with a shift to renewable energy. Stuart Hill, in his foreword to the book, took a more positive slant on the title, meaning the shift from conserving what is, to regeneration of natural and human wellbeing beyond what currently exists. While that second interpretation runs deep in permaculture and the more recent discourse of regenerative agriculture, a key part of my message in the book, and in these essays, is the need to rebuild our own resilience to shocks, small and large, that our forebears handled with grace but that modern people and economies have become hypersensitive to.

I believe this change in the discourse from sustainability to resilience was in tacit recognition that mitigation to prevent climate change was not going to happen enough to allow prevailing systems to be sustained, and at least some degree of adaptation would be necessary. Consequently, the long-standing environmental focus on efficiency in production and consumption was gradually overtaken by a begrudging acceptance that resilience was the most critical system, and personal, characteristic we needed to foster. It was perhaps a bit of a turn around after decades of focus on efficiency as one of the best ways to increase resilience. Redundancy to provide back-up systems when primary systems fail is fundamental to engineering design. In permaculture, the focus on diversity, design against disaster and the importance of self-reliance and household-level production all provide buffers against the failure of primary systems. As we said ‘each element performs many functions and each important function is supported by many elements’… and alternative pathways.  

As the climate crisis discourse in academia, activist and policy networks began crafting narratives projecting a two-track approach of mitigation and adaptation, I was frustrated by the apparent lack of any truly holistic response to anthropogenic driven climate change, let alone the wider ‘limits to growth’ conundrum. It was about this time that Paul Hawken was putting together his Drawdown project (which I will discuss further in Part 9 of this series) but my focus was increasingly on more immediate concerns closer to home.