Permaculture has been steadily evolving across the world for over 30 years and I have been involved with it for over half of this time.
There have been a number of recent developments within the movement, perhaps the most significant being the publication of David Holmgren’s book, Permaculture Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. In this book Holmgren explores the issue of energy descent; a subject he returns to in a later paper, in which he describes permaculture as: “the wholehearted and positive acceptance of energy descent, as not only inevitable but as a desired reality.”
The Transition Movement aims to engender just such an acceptance. Rob Hopkins has just written a book, The Transition Handbook, which explores the peak oil issue in great depth and comes up with practical community based solutions to it. Rob and his team have developed a whole raft of courses to skill people up in this respect. To catch up with the latest developments regarding communities from village up to city size see their WIKI site.
I also recommend watching The End of Surburbia and the sequel, Escape from Surburbia both of which are frank assessments of the energy descent/peak oil challenge.
Tags: energy descent, Escape From Surburbia, peak oil, The End of Surburbia
March 29, 2008 at 3:00 pm |
Love the picture, where was it taken?
March 31, 2008 at 3:53 pm |
It was taken in Brittany. Carina, me and Peter were cycling along a country lane near La Trinite and came across this amazing wild cornfield full of the kind of plants that used to flourish along with a grain crop such as wheat. If you look carefully you will see that there is no crop as such so I think it must have been a seed mix planted by the owner of the field – unless the crop was harvested the previous year and this is what came up. The point is that such a display is shortlived – we visited the same place almost exactly a year later and the flowers had all gone due to the process of “succession”.
April 1, 2008 at 5:31 pm |
nice to see you online Ed! I’ve watched a couple of good DVDs recently, The Power of Community-how cuba survived peak oil, and An Inconvenient Truth-while Al Gore does his trick of sending you to sleep I did learn some things. as ‘glossy’ as some of these things are they are at least accessible.