[PDF]Permaculture: Powerdown and Permaculture

POWERDOWN PERMACULTURE
At the Cusp of Transition

Rob Hopkins asks whether the permaculture movement is capable of
influencing society as a whole when the coming peak oil energy crisis bites.

Or should we just head for the hills.



■ "% ermaculture has achieved many great
I -^things since its inception in the mid-
J- 1970s. It has spread around the
world, and informs the day-to-day decisions
and thinking of millions of people. It has
also often acted as the invisible motivator
behind many sustainability initiatives, which
although not in themselves strictly perma-
cultural, are informed by its principles.

Readers of PM will know the joy of
applying permaculture design to their own
lives and experiencing the benefits of applied
common sense, whether it be in the form
of fresh salad or a co-housing project. We find
ourselves as a movement, however, on the
edge of a global transition of unprecedented



proportions. In this article, I am asking,
"Is the permaculture movement ready for
the scale of changes ahead?"

Peak Oil

- The Great Oversight of Our Times
Peak oil is a term increasingly mentioned
in PM, but what does it actually mean?
In brief, it is the point in world oil pro-
duction at which supply begins to dictate
demand, rather than demand driving
supply, which has been the situation for
the past 150 years. In other words, we go
from having as much oil as we can use, to
using as much oil as we can have.

It is a pivotal point in human history,



and while it does not mean that we are
'running out' of oil, it does mean that the
Age of Cheap Oil, and all that cheap oil
has made possible, is coming to a close.
The price of oil is rising steadily, we only
discover one new barrel of oil for every six
we consume, and many of the oil produc-
ing nations we rely on to power our
lifestyles are either in decline, or are so
secretive about their reserves that we have
no reasons to feel complacent that they
are not also declining.

Above:

Totnes in Devon is the first town in Britain
to have an Energy Descent Action Plan.



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No. SO Permaculture Magazine 3




We live in a Fool's Paradise, surrounded by
iPods, well-stacked supermarket shelves
and Celebrity Love Island, believing it to
be the 'real world'. In reality, it is an
extremely fragile illusion, which, as the
2000 truck drivers' strike exposed when
the supermarket shelves nearly emptied, is
utterly dependent on centralised transport.
The UK has almost no food security,
we no longer make anything, our living
arrangements have made us believe that life
without a car is impossible, and we have
largely forgotten the skills that enabled our
ancestors to see out hard times in the past.
We are dependent for everything on a
globalised economy, which in turn is
utterly dependent on cheap oil.

Experts place the peak in world oil
production some time between 2008 and
2010, and a recent study in the US, known
as the Hirsch Report, concluded that any
'crash programme' of preparation for life
beyond the peak, would need at least 10
years, preferably 20, to have any chance of
success. With no sign of such a 'crash
programme' coming from national govern-
ment, what role might the permaculture
movement have to play in this transition?

Challenging Permaculture
Permaculture, as it has been reframed by
David Holmgren in Permaculture -Principles
& Pathways Beyond Sustainability , x is
nothing less than the design system for a
post-peak society. He writes that "perma-
culture is the wholehearted and positive
acceptance of energy descent, as not only

Above:

Market selling local produce in Totnes.
Right:

Permaculture design course, Kinsale, Eire.



inevitable but as a desired reality". Yet, as
Eric Stewart wrote last year in a piece in
Permaculture Activist called 'A Second
Challenge to the Movement', 2 permaculture,
as it stands on the verge of its 'call to power',
appears to have a built-in flaw.

"It seems to me", he wrote, "that perma-
culture houses two virtually polar impulses:
one involves removal from larger society;
the other involves working for the trans-
formation of society. While the case can be
made that removal from the larger society
represents action that is transformative of
society, I believe that there is an imbalance
within the cultural manifestation of
permaculture that has favoured isolation



over interaction. The cultural shift we
need depends on increasing interaction to
increase the availability of the resources
permaculture offers".

Are we thinking big enough? Are we in
danger of becoming irrelevant just at the
time when permaculture is at its most
relevant? We need to ramp our game up,
so how might we do that?

My Own Experience
To illustrate this, I'd like to tell you my own
story. Since I did my Permaculture Design
Course in 1992, I have tried to dedicate
my life to implementing its principles. I was
driven by Mollison's assertion that the best
thing we can do in the face of ecological crisis
is to buy some land with like minded friends,
build a house, grow your food, harvest your
timber and so on. This vision of 'fetching
wood, carrying water' and living by example
was very powerful for me.

I moved to rural Ireland, taught perma-
culture, did consultancy for people, developed
an ecovillage project, raised financing, spent
four years trying to get planning permission
which eventually we did, grew my food,
kept a cow, planted trees and composted my
family's waste. I built my family's home, a
very energy efficient cob house using local
subsoil, local timber, straw, stone, gravel and
so on. I was making steps towards the rural
self-reliant version of permaculture living.

Then everything was tipped on its head.
I saw a film called 'The End of Suburbia' 3
which set out in the starkest terms the reality
of peak oil and our societal dependence on
oil, something which, extraordinarily, I
hadn't ever thought of until then. I also met
Dr. Colin Campbell, the world authority
on the subject, who lived near to me




4 Permaculture Magazine No. SO



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in West Cork. Peak oil arrived in my
life with a bang, and led me to deeply
question everything.

I came to see that although I lived in
rural Ireland, I too was living in the
suburbia that the film had so ruthlessly
deconstructed. I relied on the car to drive
to work at the college where I taught
permaculture, to take my kids to school,
to visit friends, to get to the shops. If I had
no car, would I actually want to live there?
It was an unsettling question.

Then, about a month later, an unknown
arsonist burnt my nearly-finished cob
house to the ground. A deeply traumatic
experience, which left us in a position of
being able to completely rethink where we
lived and what we were doing. I came to
question the notion of living in isolation
from society, and to see in myself the polar
impulses that Stewart referred to. I came
to feel that peak oil and the 'wartime
mobilisation' scale of response that writers
such as Lester Brown call for requires us
to be where people are, to be speaking their
language. I began to feel that what we
might call The Great Turning had begun,
and that I wanted to be a part of it. In short,
we need to be where people are, rather
than expecting them to come to us. People
out there are desperately hungry for this
stuff, but we can be seen as 'holier than
thou', as separate and aloof (or so I am
reliably informed by eco-sceptic friends).
A plan began to emerge.

Above:

A vision of the future? Car used as a stall
to sell garlic.

Right: 1
Participants at an energy descent planning £
meeting in Kins ale. £



Energy Descent Planning
I observed that although I had taught the
permaculture course at Kinsale Further
Education College in Ireland for four years
to nearly 150 students, there were only
perhaps two food gardens in the town of
Kinsale that weren't there before the course
had begun, not a great post-peak resource
to fall back on. I began to think about how
we might begin to apply permaculture on a
town scale, how we might pull in the various
elements of the community in a process of
mutual design and visioning. Together
with second year students from Kinsale
FEC, I developed the Kinsale Energy
Descent Action Plan (detailed in PM45).



The approach we developed to relocalise
Kinsale's economy in response to peak oil
was endorsed by Kinsale Town Council.
It has since has been downloaded many
thousands of times from my website and has
been used by communities all around the
world. The basic idea is that life with less oil
could, if properly planned for and designed,
be far preferable to the present. It is a simple
idea, yet hugely powerful, and seems to have
really engaged peoples' imaginations.

It could be argued that one of the reasons
for the environmental movement's failure to
mobilize more than a small section of society
is that it has failed to offer a cohesive and
tangible vision of a sustainable society in such
a way that people can smell it, feel it, touch it.
Creating such a vision is extremely powerful,
and allows us then to design step-by-step
pathways to it. Energy Descent Planning
allows us to do this. It provides, I would
argue, a way by which permaculture can
ramp up its game and its perceived relevance
in this hour of profound need.

Transition Town Totnes
Last September I moved to Totnes in Devon,
and began planning a larger initiative, based
on the lessons learned in Kinsale. This
planning work and research has resulted
in Transition Town Totnes, which will aim,
over the next 18 months, to produce an
exemplary Energy Descent Action Plan for
Totnes, setting out the practical steps to a
lower energy, more localized Totnes. It will
aim to develop an approach and a set of
principles that can be applied in other
settlements. This will make it the first town
taking practical steps to look at how it
responds to peak oil.

It was launched on 6th September 2006




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No. SO Permaculture Magazine 5



in the Civic Hall in Totnes, on an evening
billed as 'The Official Unleashing of
Transition Town Totnes', which was
attended by over 350 people. The evening
was introduced by the Mayor of Totnes, and
featured talks by Dr. Chris Johnstone,
author of Find Your Power, 4 and myself. The
enthusiasm for the process was amazing,
boding very well for the next few months.

The programme for TTT includes visits
by speakers such as Richard Heinberg,
David Fleming and Paul Mobbs, and Open
Space think tank days on topics such as
housing, energy and food, evening talks,
film screenings and an evening class called
'SkillingUp for Powerdown'. A website has
been set up which will act as a public face
and also has a Wiki aspect, allowing people
to collaboratively build ideas online. I am
also doing oral history interviews with old
people about their memories of life before
cheap oil, how the local economy func-
tioned, and what skills they have.

Working groups focusing on each of the
areas to be covered in the plan will be set
up, and will invite people with knowledge
on those areas to come and talk with them.
Local artists will be involved, to explore the
role the arts have to play. One of the groups
set up will explore the Psychology of Change,
how insights from eco-psychology and related
disciplines can inform this process. How can
a community be helped through the various
emotions and unconscious obstacles that are
thrown in the way of such a transition?

Transitionary Times
David Holmgren, in Permaculture -Principles
& Pathways Beyond Sustainability , writes
about the 'Four-Phase Model of Ecological
Change', which is observed in ecosystems
when change occurs. The four stages are
conservation, the steady state prior to the
change; release, which is the pulse of
disturbance (usually very short in duration);
reorganization, which is essentially when
everything is up for grabs and the outcome
is uncertain; and exploitation, where the
pioneers colonise the ground and start
building towards a new conservation phase.

My sense is that we are so near to the peak
that its effects are being widely felt, and this is
having knock on effects on all our institutions.
By my reading, we are now entering the
reorganization phase, where everything is
up for grabs. The ideas generated by the
permaculture/energy descent movement have
as much chance as anyone else's of becoming
reality. While governments may propose
nuclear power, tar sands and coal to liquids as
solutions, these 'solutions' are unworkable and
unfeasible. The energy descent approach of
relocalisation and self reliance has the edge over
the competition in that it actually works and
answers the challenge raised.

Right:

Secondhand furniture for sale in Totnes.



Permaculture For The 21 st Century
Permaculture, especially in David Holmgren's
reworked principles developed from an
energy descent perspective, is the most
important tool we have as we enter the
uncertain times of energy descent. It allows
us to design new systems to replace the soon-
to-be obsolete oil dependent ones. It enables
us to apply common sense and ingenuity, and
to bring beauty and diversity back into our
impoverished lives. Energy Descent Action
Planning offers a way of pulling in those
in our area with the hands-on expertise in
building, energy, food growing and so on,
while using what we do best, our design
and networking skills, our assembling of
random elements.




It allows us to more coherently and
effectively rise to the opportunity of peak
oil and climate change. It puts us back at
the forefront of creative thinking on
sustainability. I for one find it tremendously
exciting that permaculture could be at the
driving edge of this shift. We need to move
up a few gears and by doing so we will
find more resourcefulness and brilliance
in each other and in our work than we
ever dreamt possible. Do we as a move-
ment have what it takes to step up to the
challenge before us and accept our pivotal
role in this historic transition?

When Nelson Mandela left prison he
quoted Marianne Williamson, "Our deepest
fear is not that we are inadequate. Our
deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond
measure. It is our light not our darkness
that most frightens us". These extraordinary
times require an extraordinary response,
and it is my hope that Energy Descent
Action Plans offer a mechanism for this
response. I hope it is a tool that perma-
culturists will find useful for taking their
work to a new level ^

Rob Hopkins is a permaculture teacher
and designer based in Totnes. He runs
www.TransitionCulture.org, an evolving
exploration of the head, heart and hands
of energy descent. He created the full time
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