6 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
6 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
evidence is strong and increasing that it is the most likely in some form or other.
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Rather than gathering together all of the evidence to support the claim for the energy-descent future, I build on thirty years of permaculture thinking and activism to further develop the thinking tools that can help us all adapt to energy descent as it unfolds, irrespective of whether we believe it to be humanity's fate. Energy descent is likely to give birth to a new culture, one more different from our current globalized culture than post-Englightenment capitalism and industrial culture was from its percursors in europe. The energetic contraction will force a relocalization of economies, simplified technology, a ruraliaztion of populations away from very large cities, and a reduction of total population. Over time there will be a redevelopment of localized cultures and even new languages, although these developments may be outside the time frame of the peak-oil and climate-change scenarios described here. I focus on four plausible scenarios by which peak oil and climate change could generate the early stages, over the next ten to thirty years of the energy-descent future.
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Permaculture is a design system for sustainable land use and living that was proposed by Bill Mollison and me during the 1970s when evidence for the energy-descent future was growing strongly. Exploitation of new oil and natural gas resources in the 1980s and 1990s allowed resurgent economc growth. In the process our hopes for a graceful energy descent supported by ecological design, appropriate technology, and relocalized economies were dashed. Nevertheless permaculture has spread around the world. This spread has reflected both mounting disaffection with consumer culture in affluent countries and increasingly desperate needs of those left behind by development in poor countries. As energy and food costs now rise around the world disaffection
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