Back in 1979 we could see the crash coming. That was when I first got involved in the green movement, and most of us ‘greens’ doubted that our civilisation would make it to the end of the century. The growth in consumerism was gobbling up natural resources and spewing out pollution at such a rate that we felt the limits of the Earth’s tolerance couldn’t be far off. There was even a book, The Limits to Growth, which showed mathematically that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet.
Yet the years passed and the crash didn’t come. The vast majority of the population either ignored us or thought we were cranks. Talking frankly about the ecological situation was called ‘pessimism’, with the connotation that pessimism is a sin. Some of the specific predictions in The Limits to Growth turned out to be wrong. Somehow we stopped talking about the subject. We went on working towards sustainability, but perhaps with the unspoken assumption that a crash wasn’t inevitable. Although there were severe ecological problems all over the world, the system as a whole seemed to be holding up. I think we began to believe that we were going to get away with it.
Bit by bit the information about the true condition of the Earth has slipped into the mainstream consciousness. By the turn of the century only a few diehards and idiots were still denying global warming, and the loss of species had gone so far it was impossible to deny it. Pessimism is no longer a dirty word. But somehow it seems we’ve gone on in a dream, even us greens, a dream that some- how it’s possible to have a relatively painless transition to a sustainable Earth.
OVER THE CLIFF
The wake-up for me was reading The Limits to Growth – The 30 Year Update.1 Rarely in my life has any book had such an effect on me. Like its predecessor, it gives a series of computer projections into the future. Each of these shows future trends in factors such as industrial output, pollution, population, human welfare index etc. for the world under a different set of assumptions. Firstly it shows that if we continue as we are there will be a sudden and catastrophic fall in all measures of welfare. The next set of projections assumes both that the Earth’s reserves of natural resources are twice as great as they really are, and that the whole thrust of technology is directed away from its present course and towards sustainability. The most wildly optimistic of these gives us a very bumpy ride from our present state to a sustainable world. All the others give a crash.
Finally there’s a group of projections which assume the best of the above plus successful control of population growth and limits on consumption of material goods. Of these only one projection gives a fairly pain-free prospect for the future. It assumes that all human effort, both technological and socio/political will be immediately redirected towards sustainability.
So how is it that we’re not already seeing signs of the crash? Well some would say we are, with oil prices doubled in little over a year and an unprecedented hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, to name only two symptoms. But looking around us things seem to be generally OK. There are two reasons for this. In terms of natural resources it’s that we don’t pay a price for scarcity, only for the cost of extraction. The price of a resource will only start to rise enough to hurt at the point when the most accessible deposits are used up; then production starts to fall while demand continues to rise. In the meantime, even if there’s not much of it left, as long as it’s cheap to extract we go on as though the supply was infinite. As for pollution, there’s usually a time lag between creating it and feeling its effects. An example is the time it takes for greenhouse gases to rise to the upper atmosphere where they do their harm.
We’re in a state of overshoot. According to the authors, we overshot the Earth’s capacity to support our lifestyle in the early 80’s. We’re like the cartoon character who drives his car over a cliff and spends several priceless seconds unaware of it, still moving forward with a stupid grin on his face. Except in this case it’s not funny. What we’ve discovered is not that the Earth is indestructible but that we can drive further out over the cliff than we ever expected.
So, how close are we to making the all-out effort we need in order to have a chance of a future without a crash? Remember, we need to do everything on the list to the maximum -and have twice as many resources as we actually have.
Take global warming. We know we need to make an 80% cut in greenhouse gasses to avoid catastrophe. Kyoto aims at a purely token 5%. But the main polluter refuses to try and there’s little sign of the other nations achieving it. So much for the governments, but we the people are no better. When even some people who claim to care about the Earth are still flying in aeroplanes, what chance is there that the Other 95% of the population will change their lifestyle before they’re forced to? Let’s be honest: none at all.
By the time we’re forced to change it will be too late. Changing technology and infrastructure takes time. The average lifetime of a house is 70 years, and we’re stuck with our present energy-guzzling housing stock for decades to come; you can only improve it so much by retrofitting. Our whole way of life, including the food supply system, is dependent at every turn on massive use of motor transport. It will take time to rebuild it, especially in the middle of an economic depression deeper than any the world has known.
I know The Limits to Growth is just one book and the authors are not infallible. But the discrepancy between what needs to be done and what is being done is so vast that there can be no doubt that the crash is coming. The only question is when. In fact you don’t need the complex computer projections from the book in order to see the: truth. All you need is three simple facts. One, you can’t have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Two, overshoot happens. Three, you have to start to change before you’re forced to.
HEAD FOR THE HILLS?
This is all very depressing, but it’s the truth. In as much as we can know anything about the future we know that the crash is coming. Denying it may make us feel happier in the short term but it won’t make the future go away. But paradoxically the fact that the crash is coming may be a source of empowerment.
Being a permaculturist in the first decade of the twenty-first century is frankly disempowering. Although people are more willing to accept that the Earth’ s in a bad way now than they were twenty years ago, they’re still not prepared to do anything about it. We’re not called cranks any more: we’re ignored. We do our best, but what we’re able to achieve looks puny beside the onward march of the consumer society, which hasn’t deviated a hair’s breadth from its devastating course. If our aim is to transform the consumer society into a sustainable society, we’re quite plainly going to fail. Our only consolation is the knowledge that we’re doing what in our hearts we know to be right.
This feeling of disempowerment is based on the assumption that our task is to prevent the crash from happening. Well suppose we turn that around and take it as given that the Crash is going to happen – which it clearly is – and it’s not our task to try and prevent the inevitable. Firstly, we don’t have to feel a sense of failure. Secondly, we can focus on what happens when the crash does come. One thing we can be pretty sure of is that permaculture will be very much in demand after the crash, when the industrial economy is in ruins. We’ll change from being marginalised and ignored to being some of the few people who have any idea of what to do in the new situation.
Permaculture systems for growing food, building, supplying and treating water and so on all aim to be autonomous. Although they’re linked into neighbouring systems wherever appropriate, they don’t depend on a sophisticated infrastructure and lashings of fossil fuel for their operation. They’re exactly what will be needed in the future when the infrastructure is down and oil is too expensive to use for common or garden transport.
Now at this point I know I could be criticised for being smug, for glorying in the suffering of billions of people as long as it puts me and my friends centre stage. Well I’m not glorying in the coming crash. It will be horrible and we’ll all suffer, including me. The Earth will be reduced to a smouldering shadow of her former self. I would far, far rather it didn’t happen. I’m just taking it as a given -which seems to me no more than common sense -and looking at the resulting situation from the point of view of permaculture.
So much for the future, but what are the implications for permaculture in the present? Should we all head for the hills, buy a little plot of land and start planting it up so we’ll be self-sufficient in food when the crash comes? Well no. If the economy has collapsed and food is in short supply, someone with a gun will come along and take the food away. Whether this is a criminal or a government official will depend on the degree to which society collapses along with the economy, but the result will be the same.
We’ll have both a better chance for survival and be able to do more good as an integral part of society. Anyone who can teach others how to grow food will be valued in whatever kind of communities exist after the crash. Those of us who have some idea of how to design autonomous systems will be even more useful.
What are the implications for the permaculture projects we dedicate our- selves to in the present, and the contents of our permaculture courses? Does it mean that our projects are a waste of time, or that the contents of our courses are largely irrelevant? Not at all. Obviously there are some differences between what’s relevant now and what will be relevant in the future. But any differences are far less than the similarities. What’s more, if we try to guess what the differences might be we’ll quite likely get it wrong.
Perhaps the most important implication for the present is that we should try to make permaculture as visible and as well-known as possible, so that when the time comes people will know where to turn. I don’t just mean permaculture per se, but all sustainable practices including organic growing, alternative technology, green building and so on. We need to become much more part of the main- stream if we possibly can.
This sounds very much like what we’re doing already: working away at permaculture and trying to spread the word as widely as we can. The big difference is that we can do it with confidence that one day it really will be used, rather than the nagging feeling, however well suppressed, that it’s all a waste of time.
Patrick Whitefield is a permaculture teacher and author. His most recent and most celebrated book The Earth Care Manual: A Permaculture Handbook For Britain & Other Temperate Climates, is now available in a fully revised second edition, price £39.95 + p&p.
Copyright: Patrick Whitefield, Permaculture Magazine No.47, pp. 51-2, www.permaculture.co.uk
1 The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update by Donella H Meadows et al price £14.99 + p&p.
Patrick Whitefield is a permaculture teacher and author: His most recent and most celebrated book The Earth Care Manual: A Permaculture Handbook For Britain & Other Temperate Climates, is now available in a fully revised second edition, price £39.95 + p&p.