The Natural Heritage Society

of Oamaru Inc

Peak Oil and Permaculture

by Nathalie Brown

New Zealand Growing Today

July 2007. Pages 25-27.

Earlier this year permaculture co-founder David Holmgren came to New Zealand to lecture on permaculture design and the permaculture response to peak oil and climate change. He spoke to Nathalie Brown in Oamaru.

To most people familiar with the concept, permaculture is a way of designing your urban section or farm to get the most out of the energy you put in. Others recognize it as a design system that also underpins eco-villages and urban farms.

David Holmgren, who introduced the concept of permaculture alongside Bill Mollison in the mid- 1970s, says it “ is not the landscape, or even the skills of organic gardening, sustainable farming, energy efficient building or eco-village development as such, but it can be used to design, establish, manage and improve these and all other efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future.”

Su Dennett and permaculture co-founder Holmgren

Q. How does permaculture fit into the scenario of an energy descent future?

Permaculture is one of those ideas that grew in response to the first energy crisis in the 1970s, when it became obvious how dependant society had become on cheap energy. A lot of ecological thinking was on how we re-design society to reduce the adverse impacts on natural systems.

Since then permaculture thinking has been around how we live in a way that uses less energy - that makes use of the constant cycling of material within households, farms, local communities and bio-regional economies. And that sort of thinking is deeply relevant to a future of less (readily available) and more expensive energy.

It's interesting that the awareness about peak oil and the imminent and permanent rises in the cost of energy because of the global depletion of oil stocks has led a lot of people to think through the issues quite independently of any environmental focus and say - those funny people growing their own food and riding around on bicycles and doing home exchange and barter - they're part of an adaptation to this world we're facing. And others looking more closely at is realize that permaculture is actually a design framework for integrating all that stuff.

So that's drawing a lot of people to recognize permaculture is not just one solution but a system of organizing all these diverse community and land management solutions. That's a much broader spectrum of what people's perception often has been of permaculture.

But when you look at the permaculture activism around the world over the last 20 years it doesn't fit any basket or field. It's not just about growing food; it's also about passive solar design of houses, natural building materials, community strategies for re-building local economies.

Q. How does the Permaculture system affect people who don't garden and can't ride a bike?

Obviously the ideal is to grow the food and consume it - that's really closing the loop between production and consumption. But the next level out from that is to develop a relationship with someone who does grow food and not just arriving at the supermarket and expecting food to be there on demand.

Connecting with a farmer in your area who produces what you want and agreeing to buy in advance for the season - that's called subscription agriculture or community supported agriculture. Sometimes it's simply a box scheme where you buy a box of vegetables each week. Now that type of solution is actually growing extremely fast in the US, in Australia and I understand those systems are building up here in New Zealand.

The people doing those things may or may not describe what they're doing as permaculture but in terms of Permaculture design solutions, that's a perfect example. It suits people who either don't want to or don’t have the capacity to produce food for themselves.

Q. The peak oil message is very disturbing. Can people, the media and the markets cope with the reality of an energy descent future?

There's a problem with bad news. If bad news is too great there's all sorts of political damage that happened to people who deliver it.

The normal thing is that people will blame the government, and politicians are very astute as to how to avoid being blamed for very bad news. The media and the markets are dependent on the notion of perpetual economic growth.

In fact everyone's real estate values, their stocks and shares - the values of almost everything is driven by financial values that are not necessarily connected to productive values.

Everyone expects that the value of a house or a block of land just keeps rising and rising. Why is this so? It's almost regarded as a law of nature and all of that's based on a faith that at some stage the real economy will grow to a level to justify those values.

If there's a realization that constant economic growth is actually coming to an end and we're moving into an era where there's going to be a contraction in conventional economics that's very threatening.

There's an enormous political incentive to describe the crises that emerge as due to accident or evil intent of some players on the other side of the world, rather than face the issue that we've actually known for 30 years at least, that eventually we would run into those resource limits.

Of course, we are, at the same time, running into climatic limits and so those two crises - one is concerned with the supply of the resource that sustained the whole world more than any other single resource, that's oil - is becoming constrained and shifting from increasing production to declining production. And then the other end is the pollution end of the equation, what we're doing to the atmosphere and the changes in the climate.

So we're getting squeezed from both those ends. And its much easier for people to grasp that as individuals, at a household level and at a community level than it is for government.

Permaculture activism has very much been a bottom-up approach. Get your own house in order, work with people who are interested, don't try to convince people to change the way they think or butt your head against the brick walls of large established interests. Just focus on how you can work with the positive solutions and the positive examples.

Permaculture co-founder Holmgren and Su Dennett

Start with the self and then work out. And that follows the same way that we work on site design and the zoning idea in permaculture is you start at the back door step and move out - get the garden in order, start transforming the farm, move towards the back paddock and that's an energetic efficiency. Start where you have the maximum capacity to influence things and we have the maximum capacity to decide how we choose to live.

We have enormous freedom to decide what we're going to do at that level, and we can do that without having the rest of society having to agree with all the same evidence that we find convincing.

I think the other thing that’s showing up is that we’re now very close to crises where the options for long term planning approaches are actually disappearing. We needed to have started coming up with those solutions 30 years ago. Essentially you could say that we have failed to do that.

Environmentalism, while it's had some successes, hasn't been able to shift society away from this addiction to constant growth and materialism.

So we are now facing those changes full on and I think that gives us an inevitable context of chaotic change.

Some people respond to that by saying we need big powerful decisions from the top. The permaculture response says that almost always will lead to disaster.

But if we have lots and lots of little actions, all slightly different, they’re like a million experiments, and then the experiments that show returns immediately for the local community will spread like wild fire, once the social and environmental conditions change.

Once we have energy prices high, once food prices go up, then everyone will be searching for solutions, you won't have to persuade people. There might be some big solutions dishes out by government but there also, hopefully, will be these small-scale solutions. We can't know exactly what thoe workable solutions are but we just need lots and lots of them - small working models.

Now I know that's a contentious analysis and it does come out of a deeper understanding of why permaculture works at this grass roots approach. Some people would say its just a folksy thing, of not wanting to be in the big league with government and corporations, but I would argue that there's a lot of strength in that bottom up action, but that doesn't mean to say there won't be attempts from both ends to deal with the problem.

The Natural Heritage Society of Oamaru