Gaia Community: Chris' Blog

Hopi Statement

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:06:19 GMT

I don't usually do this, just post the work of others that is, but the following resonated so strongly with me I felt I had very little choice but to pass it on.

Statement by Hopi Elders

You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour.

Here are the things that must be considered:

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know our garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!

There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel like they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off toward the middle of the river,
keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

See who is there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves!
For the moment we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lonely wolf is over.
Gather yourselves!

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

The Elders,
Oraibi, Arizona
Hopi Nation

Tags: Hopi, calling

The news is not the news we need to hear.

http://konsk.gaia.com — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:43:50 GMT

Here in the UK we have been inundated by news of the scandalous expenses claims our honourable elected representatives (members of parliament) have been making. Yes it is utterly disgraceful.

But...

The sums of money involved are dwarfed into insignificance by the huge sums of tax payers money the very same government has poured into the banks and businesses whose unscrupulous lending and borrowing created the financial meltdown in the first place.

But...

While these are both serious issues, though on different scales, my point is that the stories have completely displaced all other news, leading me to consider that the news we hear and see on the media is not the real news or the news we need to hear.

In particular, the real news, which we currently do not get to hear about, relates to the two most serious challenges we humans have ever faced, namely peak energy and climate change which are intimately connected and directly or indirectly are responsible for most of the stresses now becoming really obvious in many countries throughout the world (species extinction, critical materials depletion, water depletion, fragility of the food supply, population pressures, financial instability).

With regard to peak energy (or peak everything) it is becoming clearer that the energy accounting methods used by governments and even scientists have been wholly inadequate in estimating the real worth of energy reserves on Earth (proven, probable and possible) and the possible production rates (how quickly we can get the stuff -oil, coal, gas- out of the ground). This has led to erroneous thinking and decision making that have left countries almost totally unprepared for the challenges to come.

In brief:

1. the possible rates of production have been over estimated; that is, the speed with which we can get energy reserves (oil, gas, coal) out of the ground and into a useable form. This means that even with coal, we will not be able to get it out of the ground and distributed rapidly enough to supply our current energy needs, let alone future demand.

2. the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) has been fudged or even ignored. Tapping the first big oil fields produced EROEI ratios of up to 1:100 (that's 100 barrels of oil out of the ground for just 1 barrel expended doing the work). This has dropped to as low as 1:7 and for Biofuels from corn oil, for example, the ratio becomes pathetically small at 1:1.6.

3. the quality of the energy source has not been given sufficient consideration, if any. The coal tar shales in Canada, for example, are an extremely low quality form of energy which require considerable inputs of energy to extract and refine to a usable quality with huge environmental costs (eg greenhouse gas emissions). Yet the reserves are assessed in barrels of oil as though they were of the same quality. On the financial markets, these "barrels of oil" are considered to be assets, as with other "proven" reserves, even before they are got out of the ground.

4. All current energy sources and projected alternatives come with energy costs (embodied energy costs in infrastructure, training of skilled workforces, production of equipment, distribution etc as well as energy costs through use). These energy costs will initially be oil dependent and will feed back into increased speed of climate change.

What this means is that without an almost magical solution like cheap, efficient, cold fusion we are looking at an energy descent. This has very profound repercussions, not least of which is the fact that in a continuously shrinking (the forbidden word) economy, capitalism, with its requirement for continual growth in order to pay the compound interest on debt, will no longer work.

The level of ignorance among heads of states regarding the situation is almost unbelievable.

Tags: economy, energy, capitalism

Financial crisis versus climate change: Aaaaarrgggh!!!

http://konsk.gaia.com — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:13:37 GMT

Please forgive the vent of frustration at the end of the title there, as the financial turmoil continues and the banking system that led to the whole sorry credit crunch business in the first place is being propped up at huge cost. The money, as with most money, has simply been conjured into being by yet more financial wizards, as more debt. It is us, our children and probably their children, who will have to do the real work to pay it back.

So, thinking money, I did a little web research of how much "we" have spent so far. I usually précis guided tours of my holding with the words "Don't believe a word I say," or rather, "Don't just believe what I say; listen, ideally with an open mind but question everything I say." The same applies equally here.

The BBC web site puts the UK sum poured into the banks and economy at about £964 billion, so far. Here's the link to the article;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7893317.stm

That's a lot of money. It seems to me both tragic and bizarre that we are spending such huge sums of money to support a financial system that is essentially unfair and has demonstrably increased the division between rich and poor, both nationally and globally. Further, the other main beneficiaries of the spending spree have been industries that are key players in generating CO2 emissions, such as the motor industry.

If we look at the estimated costs of dealing with climate change we find various figures. The European Union suggests that Britain will need to spend between £4.4 billion and £6.3 billion per year to achieve its CO2 reduction target of 80% by 2050; Open Europe, an independent think tank, suggest £9 billion per year. Going by the larger figure that gives a total spend of about £369 billion by 2050. Yet we have paid out more than twice that amount in less than six months bailing out banks. That deserves saying again:

Here in the Britain, in the last six months, we have spent more than twice what it would cost us achieve our 2050 CO2 emissions reduction target of 80%, and we've spent it on systems which generate or encourage the generation of CO2 emissions.

If we look at the international response to the financial melt down, its much the same. An article in the Guardian,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/oct/29/greenpolitics.politics

suggests that the price of failing to act now on climate change will be £3.68 trillion. How much have the US and UK spent on shoring up the financial system in the last six months? £6.8 trillion. Aaaaarrggghhh!!

Well, I would not be alone in suggesting that we are probably at a point where we need to carry out a complete system re-design and I don't mean of just the banks or even the economy, I mean of everything we do, our whole involvement with Earth, within whom we live and move and have our being.

Big task? Yes, as permaculture designers are heard to say, I can't do it alone, there probably needs to be at least three of us...and of course, really, there are many, many more of us and people like us and our voices are being heard more and more clearly and more loudly. And the absurdities of the current systems are becoming more and more obvious.

So, rather than prop up discredited systems, we could instead embrace the challenge of climate change. If we spend the money there, on designing and creating genuinely sustainable systems, we will generate millions of jobs and probably have a lot more fun doing it. We may even be able to avert a catastrophic temperature rise.

My strategy of choice for a major system re-design of our interaction with Earth and each other would be permaculture design. Though not necessarily perfect, I think the 72 hour permaculture design course is still about the best, most accessible, empowering introduction to positive, practical eco-social action that I've come across in the last thirty years or so. Let's do it.

Tags: permaculture, design, systems, earth

Corporate A.I.s, bankers and the bird of paradise.

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:37:58 GMT

I've spoken previously here (29-12-07 blog number 16) about the idea that large organisations can be seen as A.I.'s (Artificial Intelligences, although, as I said before, I'm tempted to refer to them as A.S.'s, as in Artificial Stupids). A recent documentary I watched, "The Corporation", (more info at www.thecorporation.com) confirmed some aspects of this idea and raised further interesting possibilities.

According to the documentary, a Corporation is classed in law as an individual, having much the same rights as human beings in that they (it) can buy and sell property and goods, sue and be sued, buy other corporations and such like.

During the documentary, the behaviour of corporations was compared to the behaviour of psychopaths, using criteria developed by respected bodies, such as the UN. These criteria included the following points; callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning of others for profit, incapacity to experience guilt and failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviour. It was not difficult to demonstrate that corporations fulfilled all these major criteria for psychopathy.

Before I pursue this idea further, I want to draw in a few more strands.

The economic turbulence of the past few months has raised a lot of questions about how such a thing could occur when we apparently have rules and regulations to govern the behaviour of financial institutions. I'm reminded here of the ant colony where individual ants follow a very limited set of rules that govern their behaviour and, lo, the ant heap arises as an emergent property of the combination of the myriad individual behaviours. No individual ant is aware of this process; there is no ant king or queen directing the individual ants. It is simply (!) a consequence of individuals carrying out their individual actions according to a set of rules.

Is a similar process applicable in our economic system? The primary goal of corporations, as defined in laws (rules) governing their existence, is to pay dividends to shareholders. This primary goal takes precedence over any other limiting factor, whether social, environmental or personal. Similarly, rules govern the behaviour of bankers, and no one, apparently, has really broken the rules.

It is important to realise that most of the people who are employed by corporations probably live decent enough lives outside of their work; with family and friends they may well be loving and generous. But within the corporate workspace, their individual, well intended actions can combine to produce extraordinarily ruthless behaviour.

There are several points here, "I'm just doing my job" being the obvious one but its also worth noting the infamous behaviourist experiment where volunteers were encouraged to give apparently increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual at the request of an authority figure. This they did, even when they thought the other individual was suffering extreme pain. So it is ok to do something because it is my job, I was told to do it by someone important (my boss, the government etc), I had no choice, everyone else does it, its not against the rules.

A further strand to add in here is the bird of paradise evolving its hugely ornate tail. A longer, more elaborate tail was more successful at attracting a mate, thus the birds with longer more elaborate tails passed on their genes, leading to the evolution of longer and longer and more and more elaborate tails.

If we apply this to what seems to have happened in the financial system, we can see how the gradual tweaking of the limits of rules led, for example, to the steady increase in bonuses for bankers as multiples of their salaries (up to ten times a salary of £150,000 to £300,000 per year) or the increasingly risky loans that were being handed out. In the case of the bird of paradise, the limit to the maximum length and elaboracy of their tails is governed by the ability to still feed, fly, reproduce and so pass on their genes. So If an individual bird's tail is so ridiculously long and elaborate it is a physical encumbrance, they die and the genes are not passed on.

In regards to the economic system, we can see that there is a clear correspondence between the rules that govern individuals (human or corporate AI) and the behaviour of the whole system. The rules we have currently been operating by have led to the emergent property we can loosely call global capitalist consumerism. Currently governments, such as the UK and US, are looking at re-writing some of the rules governing financial institutions in an attempt to limit the bird of paradise effect (so its ok to get rich but not stupidly rich).

But it is important to remember that the economic system, human beings, human communities and the environment are all classed as complex systems and there are various characteristics that are common to all complex systems. Any changes in the rules (or starting conditions) of the system, will alter the emergent properties of the system. Very small changes can have very profound effects. Complex systems are, at some level, inherently unpredictable (think about the weather). Another way to put this rather baldly is that "we don't really know what we are doing". So be careful; we have already seen how rushing into things can actually make things worse, despite our best intentions (see my blog 18-05-07 Biofuels, the disaster, for example).

To finally return to corporations and pathology, it might be worth us thinking of corporations as artificial intelligences which are currently insane. One interesting possibility arising from this is that a keen legal eagle could take a corporation to court on the grounds of insanity, have it sectioned as criminally insane and committed to a mental institution, though what form that institution would take is another matter. A further, perhaps more positive approach may be to consider what form of therapy might be suitable for a mad corporate AI.

Tags: systems, complex, AI, corporation, evolution

Ways to wellbeing

http://konsk.gaia.com — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:59:19 GMT

Over the years I have come across various utterances and exhortations as to what we should do in order to be healthy, happy, fulfilled, enlightened or whatever. Its interesting to see a number of common elements appearing and have these affirmed through my own life experience. Given that one of permaculture design's three main components is the use of principles based on the observation of nature, I now feel ready to present the following exhortations of my own except, though they are not really exhortations, only musings.

To kick off, a few years ago a Sunday newspaper here in the UK did some basic research into various countries or areas of the world where people generally seemed to live longer than average lifespans. The researchers were expecting to find something common about their diets but the eventual conclusions were quite different. The common elements were not particular foods but rather certain shared attitudes and practices, as outlined in the following list.

Cultivate life-long friendships
Lead an active life
Never stop learning

More recently I read an article in Resurgence by Brian Eno where he pointed out that there was considerable evidence that the following practices helped promote healthy, fulfilling lives;

Singing
Dancing
Camping

And even more recently I found the New Economics Foundation presenting five ways to wellbeing that struck similar chords. The whole article can be found here:

http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/neffiveadaytowellbeing221008.aspx

The gist of it is as follows with quotes from the full article by way of explanation;

1. Connect

"With the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. Building these connections will support and enrich you every day."

2. Be active

"Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy; one that suits your level of mobility and fitness."

3. Take notice

"Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you."

4. Keep learning

"Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident, as well as being fun to do."

5. Give

"Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out, as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and will create connections with the people around you."

Given the Economy's demonstration of its own fallibility I am reminded that the simple things are often the most beneficial.

Tags: principles, well-being

Return to the wilderness

http://konsk.gaia.com — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:33:53 GMT

Here at Penrhos I started the wilderness regeneration project back in 1986, fencing off about two thirds of an acre from grazing animals and just letting it go. Back then I'd been unable to find any examples of anyone who had done it in Britain, though I'm sure people had, somewhere. The root of the word "wild" is "willed", as in, having a will of its own; wild is not bad, it is the will of nature.

Over the next several decades the scrap of previously battered, rough grazing I called Argel (sanctuary in Cymraeg or Welsh) has been allowed to express its own will with boggling results. In permaculture design we talk about natural systems, like forests, being our universities and certainly Argel has been one of my greatest teachers during my almost daily visits over that first five year period before we got the temporary permission to live here.

I wander down from our dwelling less frequently now but every time is a combination of lesson, retreat, pleasure, recuperation, inspiration, amongst many other things. I wandered in the wilderness last week and was once again amazed at the transformations that continue to occur. Argel's expression of the will of nature has moved through distinct stages of development or phase transitions, from the initial formation of gorse clumps into thickets with clearings to tree canopy and forest floor, to name a few. (You can find more details here www.konsk.co.uk//design/regen.htm)

Lately more grass has been appearing under the trees and I realised another phase transition has occurred. The tree canopy that formed above the gorse and bramble tangles, denying them light and effectively finishing off their stage of the development, created new, open spaces in which to walk. I assumed that this was the approach of a climax cover and marked some sort of peak. As is often the case here, my assumption has been proved wrong.

This first tree canopy was made up of mainly pioneer species, predominantly birch and willow. As they have grown up higher, they've tended to race each other for the light and the canopy has actually opened out between their nodding crowns, allowing light to once more penetrate to the forest floor. This fresh flash of light has triggered a whole new range of growth, including grasses but also encouraging slower growing oak and hazel to burst into renewed vigour.

So the gorse and thicket stage has conditioned the soil and initially suppressed grasses, allowing the pioneer trees to dart upwards. This explosion of young tree growth eventually ended the dominance of gorse and thickets but gives way in turn to the longer term, more permanent species, likely to be oak and ash as the high canopy with hazel and elder as an understory.

As always, I am inclined to transfer these environmental and ecologic patterns to the social and personal spheres. Pioneers (people and ideas) are crucial at a certain stage of development but they will inevitably give way to settlers at some point and this is only right.

I find this replicated in our current actions here, converting our barn to a dwelling that will lead at some point to the dismantling of our pioneering home of caravan and "attached timber annex" (as described by the Snowdonia national Park). Similarly, my wild, pioneering ideas are stabilising into coherent thoughts that are easy to present to others.

I am reassured that all seems to be progressing as an expression of will, as in the return of true wilderness, to person, people and place.

Tags: wilderness, regeneration, permaculture, forest, ecology

The Appalling Face Of Capitalism

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sat, 10 May 2008 08:31:00 GMT

Here's a quote from President Obasanjo of Nigeria after the 2000 G8 summit in Okinawa:

"All we borrowed up to 1985 or 1986 was about $5 billion. So far we have paid back about $16 billion. Yet we're being told that we still owe about $28 billion...because of foreign creditors' interest rates...If you ask me what is the worst thing in the world, I will say it is compound interest rates."

President Obasanjo is qoted in an article "Enlightened Economics" by Colin Tudge in Resurgence, May/June 2008. He goes on to point out that in 2000, the developing world was spending thirteen dollars on debt repayment for every one dollar it received in aid and grants.

He also describes how in Germany in 2004, 80% of people who work for their living pay out about twice as much in interest as they receive from their various investments, while about 10% pay out about the same amount as they receive. The remaining 10% receive all the interest paid out by the 80% which in 2004 was about a billion euros every day. The equivalent rate of transfer in the UK is likely to be even higher.

Its an excellent article and clearly points out the utter absurdity of the Governments of rich nations declaring a "war on poverty" whilst presiding over an economic system in which the rich are bound to grow richer while the poor grow poorer. Basically, the current economic structure is systematic theft.

How do you feel about that, oh compassionate capitalists?

Tags: capitalism, debt, compount interest

The gardeners shall inherit the earth

http://konsk.gaia.com — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:20:14 GMT

Its becoming clearer to people that mechanised, chemical farming comes with a very high energy cost. Organic farming is an improvement as there is no use of chemical fertilisers which themselves require significant amounts of energy to produce. However, the mechanised aspect largely remains and in fact, organic farming can mean an increase in the use of machinery to keep crops weed free. Then of course as the food is usually grown a considerable distance from where it is eaten, there's the energy costs of transportation and often additional costs through processing.

On a square metre by square metre comparison, gardening is far more productive, energy efficient and ultimately profitable than both conventional, mechanised, chemical agriculture and organic farming. For a start, even in a temperate climate, a gardener can usually get two (and sometimes three) different crops in the same square metre during the course of a year (stacking in time, in terms of permaculture principles), whereas conventional mechanised agriculture will tend towards just one, leaving the ground bare for part of the year.

A gardener can also grow two (or more) different types of crop in the same square metre at the same time (companion planting, or stacking in space). The individual yields from each species may be lower than growing them by themselves but the sum of the yields is greater. If the companions are carefully chosen to be mutually beneficial, the individual yields may actually be higher. My great friend and gardener, Mistress Lou, grows runner beans with sweetcorn and squash in the same space, for example.

And why stop at just two or three when more complex polycultures can be even more productive? If we enlarge our square metre to say five, then we gardeners can squeeze in a food tree as well and develop food forest gardens that begin to mimic the complexity of natural systems; self watering, self mulching, self fertilising. Yet all this is far too complex for mechanised agriculture to manage and harvest, so management and yield of complex food systems is intimately related to scale.

One of the mistakes made during the (so called) green revolution in our thinking on world food production was to measure only in terms of single yield systems, any comparisons always being made against mechanised, chemical, agriculture. Thus when conventional agriculturalists measured yields in “poor” countries, they measured, for example, the total yield of wheat per acre. This involved discounting the other crops that the “poor” farmers grew with their wheat; anything that wasn’t wheat was seen as a "weed", a problem.

So two or more other crops that were in there with the wheat, often other types of grain, were discounted. The resulting yield for the wheat that was left could then be declared low in comparison to mechanised, chemical agriculture. The result was that the “poor” farmers were encouraged to use chemical fertilisers to boost their wheat yield and herbicides to knock out the “weeds”.

Thus we repeated our historic simplification of polycultures, of complex systems, reducing them to monocultural, single species deserts that made the majority of people redundant and sent them off to cities looking for work while binding the remainder to chemical inputs. Bah!

I recently saw "Power in Community" as part of a local transition town initiative. The film documents Cuba's experience of the near total collapse in its oil supply that occurred as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US trade embargo. Once cheap oil is removed from the equation, everything has to change. Food becomes local and organic, more people become involved in growing (in Cuba, up from less than 5% of the population to 24%), obesity disappears, the population becomes fitter, the status of small scale farmers (gardeners) becomes much enhanced and they become relatively wealthy.

In the future, the bulk of the food grown on the planet will be grown not on farms but in gardens and market gardens; I look forward to the time when the gardeners shall inherit the earth.

Tags: polyculture, permaculture, gardening

discussion and dialogue

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:06:15 GMT

In contrast to previous entries, this is short and to the point (!).

A relatively new permaculture designer's wiki has come to my attention and I found an excellent piece on discussion and dialogue. It relates to the ideas of one of my favourite physicists (Master Bohm) and applies to pods, forums and the like as well as "real world" interactions. Makes interesting reading and is quite short so here's the link:

http://passionatedialogue.pbwiki.com/#Articles

Tags: permaculture design, discussion, dialogue, communication

Druids and hard decisions

http://konsk.gaia.com — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:37:26 GMT

In 1989 I attended an advanced permaculture design course led by Bill Mollison (co-founder, with David Holmgren, of permaculture design) at Ragman's Lane Farm in Gloucestershire. It was an opportune moment and an inspiring course.

Among other things, Bill spoke about a tribal role that has no parallel in modern times that he tentatively referred to as the crop master/mistress. It fell to this person to oversee and manage tribal and environmental resources by observing and interpreting correspondences in the whole system (environment and tribe). This role was fundamental to the continued existence and well being of the tribe and the environment and involved decisions that we might see as hard in the extreme.

As an example he mentioned the Koori, the Australian aborigines, where the crop master/mistress might relate specific observations (the flowering of a particular plant, the song of a certain bird, the patterns of cloud) to longer term occurrences, such as the possibility of an extended drought. By relating the observations to the information contained in the oral tradition, various steps might need to be taken.

The crop master/mistress may then decide to remove, say, red kangaroo from the tribal menu; it was no longer to be hunted until further observations and correspondences were made that allowed hunting of the red kangaroo to begin again, even if this meant starvation for some members of the tribe. The crux being that if the red kangaroo was hunted now, population levels would fall below a certain point, or other effects would accrue through the hunting that would mean that the whole tribe would be threatened by starvation. That is, crop master/mistress would lay down rules for the benefit of the whole tribe and the environment, even if this meant that individuals might suffer unto death.

Thinking about this role has both inspired and terrified me over the years.

I have a great interest in the ancient world and being a resident of Cymru (Wales) a particular interest in the Celts and in turn, the druidic traditions. From my studies of pre-history and archaeology, it seems likely that the people who came to be known as the Celts in Europe formed from a blending of two cultures. One, a war like horse culture moved west across Europe from about 1000BC onwards, bringing masculine sky gods with them. However, in western Europe it seems they did not just conquer the mother goddess peoples who were already there but instead assimilated, or were assimilated themselves, by the existing culture. Hence the Celtic mythologies contain both the masculine sky gods and the mother goddesses and the society was notable (and unusual) for its treatment of women who could be "kings", divorce their husbands, own property, train as warriors and the like (as an aside, it was only with the growth of the Celtic church that the status of women was gradually eroded).

Like the Koori, the Celts relied on an aural tradition to pass knowledge down through time and, also like the Koori, that aural tradition was founded in song and verse, which is the easiest way to remember large amounts of information. To progress through the order of druids one was required to learn literally tens of thousands of verses; indeed, one of the three orders of the druids was the bardic order itself. Thus, knowledge of astronomy, navigation, natural history, law, geneology, prediction of future events from current observation etc.etc was all contained in verse.

It seems to me that druidic tradition relates to the role of crop master/mistress and may well have grown from that tribal role in the original mother goddess peoples of western Europe. While the Celts were strongly independent as distinct clans/families/tribes, the druids provided an overall "glue" that held the larger society together, mediating stresses that arose between the independent groups; mention is made in historical sources of druids separating fighting armies and bringing an end to conflicts that threatened the larger whole.

It is interesting in our current cultural context to consider the lack of this role. While many people are well aware of the enormous environmental and social challenges we face, many are waiting for our "leaders" to do something, to get tough and set the rules, restrict our activities (take fossil fuels "off the menu", for example).

However, our current cultural context is radically different. In tribal times, protection of the (whole) tribe and the environment was paramount and the main focus of tribal law was concerned with this. The individual was, to an extent, expendable. For us in "westernised" cultures however, the emphasis of law moved to the protection of the individual and the individuals property and it is only relatively recently that environmental laws have appeared.

From an integral perspective it seems to me that we need to accept this role in ourselves and for ourselves. It is for us as individuals to make the hard decisions to safeguard our communities and environments. In so doing we may find that it is not so hard after all, especially if we find supportive sisters and brothers to aid us in our choices.

Tags: druids, sustainable development, tribal, self

Indeed, are the A.I.s not already here?

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 11:32:37 GMT

An organisation, such as a corporation or government, can be seen as a complex system made up of a variety of elements, relationships etc and engaged in various processes. There are generally physical things that will depend upon the nature of the organisation and may include buildings, offices, furniture, computers, documents, vehicles, filing cabinets, telephones, waste paper bins, pens and the like. It will also include more insubstantial stuff that may be recorded in some way and relates to the stability of the organisation such as policies, procedures, rules, codes of practice, protocols and ethics.

There will also generally be human beings involved at various levels within the organisation. Each individual will have their function within the organisation defined by something like a documented job description, although they may have their own personal, internal description of their job that does not necessarily match the external one. They will also have a sense of their relationship with other elements within the organisation, human or otherwise and their will be some sort of corporate, cultural sense of a "we" or "us".

There will be inputs and outputs of various types such as movements of raw materials, goods, energy, information or the provision of services that connects the organisation to other organisation or the "outside world" generally.

All this will be bound together in a complex web of relationships and networks that might be represented in part by organisational maps, flowcharts and the like but is ultimately too complex to be fully represented in the material world (as in the end, everything connects up). In complexity theory, making small changes to any complex system can profound and often unexpected results. That is, the consequences of even very small changes may not be entirely predictable.

It is easy to fall into the pattern of thinking that an organisation has a specific, simple task or purpose, such as the provision of a particular service or manufactured item and this leads to the concept of ultimate goals such as providing a service to customers, maximising profits or paying dividends to shareholders. Yet, as a complex system, the organisation has no interest in these matters; the ultimate aim being simply to continue to operate and perpetuate itself, ideally growing (that is, increasing the flow of energy and resources as inputs and outputs), absorbing or negating other competing systems, possibly budding, dividing or otherwise reproducing itself.

This has little to do with human beings. The organisation as an A.I. employs human beings as, among other things, wet-ware front ends (spokes-persons) to deal with you and me. With a human being as the front end presented on the media, it is easy for us as viewers or observers (consumers) to think that their obvious humanity is relevant, that the organisation is essentially human, both because of and despite what they may say. Yet the A.I. cares not a jot for what they say or what we might think. And the wet ware is replaceable.

Tags: AI, organisation

I've been tagged...

http://konsk.gaia.com — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:26:41 GMT

Xia tagged me (Thank You!) so here are 7 random things about me:

1. I used to ride a Velocette Venom, a 500cc single cylinder British motorcycle.

2. I prefer cats to dogs but do like them both.

3. One of my early "careers" was in theatre where I trained as a carpenter/stage technician.

4. When I was 14 I had some weird dreams and asked my Dad if they meant anything. He thought for a minute then said he would buy me a book about it so I could decide. He did; Carl Jung's "Man And His Symbols". An amazing read.

5. I did a short course on computer programming in 1972 at Huddersfield Polytechnic but had to wait ten years before I saw my first computer- a Sinclair ZX81 that a friend had borrowed.

6. In 2000 I took a group of performing arts students to Barcelona by bus, my first time abroad in 25 years. It was fantastic!

7. According to a National Health Service consultant, I have "suspected multiple sclerosis".

--------------------------------------------------

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person's blog who tagged you.

http://newculture.zaadz.com/blog

2. Post these rules on your blog.

3. List 7 random/and or weird facts about yourself.

4. Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog (oops, I mailed some instead of making comments. Also linked to some photos rather than just blogs. There's wild for you...).

http://sacredsong.zaadz.com/blog

http://visionaryventures.zaadz.com/photos

http://lisaopenshaw.zaadz.com/photos

http://christiana.zaadz.com/blog

http://maypop.zaadz.com/blog

http://geodowser.zaadz.com/blog

http://senvara.zaadz.com/blog

Tags:

Pups dog the WAG

http://konsk.gaia.com — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:21:50 GMT

In my capacity as youth support worker for the Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development, I recently had the privilege of accompanying four young members down to Cardiff for a meeting with representatives of the Welsh Assembly Government (the WAG).

The not so recent elections resulted in a period of instability during which the various parties attempted to from alliances and coalitions to secure an overall majority. As is often the case, the first actions of the new ruling powers was a reorganisation of departments and ministers.

I'm reminded of the quote often attributed to Petronius Arbiter, probably erroneously, "We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganisation; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." Nice quote, even if apocryphal.

Suffice to say that the WAG have now put climate change in with water management along with microgeneration, domestic energy, access to the countryside, fuel poverty and lifestyle; an interesting if rather obscure mix. I can't remember offhand what has happened to sustainable development.

Anyway, the civil servants temporarily attached to climate change explained that they knew very little about it. The members of the Youth Forum, on the other hand, were by contrast positively erudite, speaking with great clarity on the subject. It was encouraging, if a little frightening, to observe the WAG reps making copious notes whenever the Forum members said anything; encouraging in that they clearly took what these intelligent, informed young people had to say very seriously; frightening in that they were responsible to reporting to the minister responsible for action on climate change.

It seems that in matters relating to sustainable development there is a continual cycle of people who know nothing about it starting again from scratch. After a few years when they may be getting up to speed on the subject there's another change round and it all starts again.

The challenge is made even more difficult by the fact that genuinely sustainable solutions, being integral in nature (I mean, requiring an integration of a whole range of subjects- all of them in fact) are unlikely to arise from a government that is divided up along rigid, departmental lines. The challenge is exactly the same in education where the fragmentation of learning makes it extremely difficult to recognise the connections that need to be made. The Education on Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship information, for example, is usually sent to geography teachers who undoubtedly already have full plates. I feel very sorry for them. And us.

No matter, I was inspired, as usual, by the youth, who were not hooded are already well aware that genuine sustainable solutions to the environmental, social and personal challenges we face will require more (a lot more) than just turning the light off when we leave a room or having a shower rather than a bath.

Tags: youth, government, sustainable development, climate change

Blogs, pods and community.

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:52:46 GMT

Having upgraded my expensive and slow dial up connection earlier this year, I've only recently been able to experience the relative novelty of a flat fee broadband link. This has allowed me to spend more time on line and, after having heard so much about social networking, I entered and began exploring various on line communities.

I signed up to Zaadz in March this year after an invite from dandodec, a young friend in the Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development. I then joined Mycelium (http://grahambell.org/home/10), a network rooted in sustainable development/permaculture design. Lately I signed up with Be Bo after I heard a rumour that a past college student of mine had done a cut and paste job with my image (most entertaining- I responded in kind).

After reading and posting on various forums on the networks and running this blog on Zaadz I began to look around more carefully, browsing blogs and forums and looking at replies and dates. It seems clear that members who are active in terms of their interactions (pods, blogs, forum posts etc.) are in a small minority and that by far the greater number of members merely browse or simply fill in their profiles and leave it at that.

Obviously there's nothing necessarily wrong with just trawling pods and taking in information, experiences, opinions and the like. This in itself can be very useful, allowing a broadening of perspectives, a feeling of not being alone in one's thinking, gathering specific information etc. However, genuine interaction can feel quite thin on the ground with many pods not being posted to for months. Brief "conversations" seem to flare up and die out quite quickly. I place "conversation" in inverted commas deliberately as often posts close abruptly following a simple exchange of views or positions, without any real discussion. I realise that I am generalising a lot here and there are probably many examples that do not fit this perspective (could someone let me know where they are, please?).

On this blog, for example, its clear that several hundred people have looked at my stuff (or maybe fewer people looking at entries more than once...) but so far only two people have made any comments. This leads me to wonder what people actually think of what I'm saying and, to an extent, what is the point of continuing to make entries if I don't know?

I think that on Zaadz, which is layered with explicit, positive support, there is a tendency not to challenge another person's perspective because that might appear to be out of keeping with the loving embrace of the site.

As a practising permaculture designer for some 18 years I actively encourage challenges. When I show people round my site I want to be challenged; it is the challenges that allow me to remain focused on the choices I continually make and adjust them according to appropriate feedback- the challenge.

There are obviously various ways we can present challenges and some forums on other sites seem to actively encourage vociferous, insulting, abusive responses. This is obviously not appropriate, tending to polarise perspectives rather than allowing for mutual enlargement of viewpoints, towards more integral positions.

In permaculture design we use a very simple approach which is first to say something we like about the other's perspective and then to say what "I" would do differently. This allows for the recognition of the valuable but partial truths presented by the other, while offering constructive, creative feedback. By saying what "I" would do differently I am not telling the other what I think they should do, merely offering them an additional perspective. There's no reason why this shouldn't be carried out lightly, in a loving, fun and creative way.

Why don't you have a go here?

Tags: permaculture design, challenge, community, conversation

Food for thought for food

http://konsk.gaia.com — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:31:19 GMT

I cooked my meal and sat down to eat. The first mouthful almost overwhelmed me- a complex rush of thought and emotion that literally brought tears to my eyes. I had to pause, place my hands together and give heartfelt thanks, all the way up and all the way down, for what lay before me on my plate.

I had gone into the garden and harvested broad and runner beans, Swiss chard, kale (ragged Jack), an onion, tomatoes and courgette from the poly-tunnel and a few of this year's spuds, already lifted and stored. I prepared the vegetables, stringing the runners, podding the broad beans, tearing up chard and kale, cutting courgette into chunks, halving the toms and steamed the lot over boiling spuds. When done I stuck them on a plate with a smoked mackerel, the only shop bought item.

Sounds simple and it was, yet it overwhelmed me. Here's why.

The tastes and textures were fantastically varied; earthy, soft, crunchy, moist, dry, light, rich, sweet, bitter; a delight to my physical experience of the world. The action of gardening itself, which I see as including harvesting, among many other things, is a simple physical exercise that, done well, becomes a discipline along the lines of T'ai Chi. In fact, many of the moves and postures of the martial arts arose from gardening and farming.

My emotional response was a rich combination of pure joy at the simple beauty of the action, a great sadness that this simplicity is invisible to so many of the dwellers in the modern age. A huge frustration at the ignorance that sees food growing as somehow mundane and lowly, not suited to intellectual life, rather than one of the most profound actions we can make in the transformation of life into an integrated, sustainable future.

Intellectually, I knew this food to be the best possible food that I could eat; the fact that it had been grown, harvested and prepared by my own hand means my body absorbs more of the nutrients and trace elements than if I had merely bought it in a shop (a fact that I have long felt to be true that has recently been demonstrated scientifically).

As I podded the beans I was aware that the time taken to prepare the vegetables (about fifteen minutes) would be seen as "long" by many- "much quicker to just whack something into the microwave". Yet it was far less than the time I would have expended to go down town shopping, especially if I also included the time taken to earn the money if I had had to pay cash for the food.

The energy required was minimal; no food miles, no chemical fertilisers or pesticides with their high energy costs, no large scale ploughing with the exposure of humus to burn in the presence of oxygen releasing yet more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Some of the seeds I had bought but others, such as the bean family I has saved from last years crop. The food that I harvested was made up of seeds and leaves; the plants are still there, still laden.

I was reminded of Thomas Hardy's "Jude The Obscure", where at one point Jude says, in despair at his failure to achieve the changes he so desires, something like "it will probably require two or three generations to carry out what we have sought to achieve in one". The novel is, after all, a tragedy, as is life for many who suffer as a consequence of the modern, mechanised gardening of the world.

To realise that in the sustainable societies and environments of the future, the production of food will fall not to farmers but to gardeners, is a revelation of considerable power. According to Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese natural farmer (check out "The Road Back To Nature"), the cultivation of healthy, wholesome food is one of the two essential requirements of a sane society, the other being the nurture and cultivation of young people. Without these any society is on the way out. It is pertinent to consider that culture and cultivation are words that arise from the same root.

So I gave thanks for my food, all the way up and all the way down; to the thriving micro-organisms of healthy, fertile soil whose complex and dynamic interactions are still not fully understood by science, to the plants as solar powered matter transformers, to the genius loci of my garden (who occasionally let the hens in through the side gate when I am not looking), to the functional deities of the land (like the Celtic god of farming, Amaethon), to the supreme being who presides over all, to my atheistic self as the physical gardener and to the undivided whole of the universe in all time, space, energy and consciousness. Then I ate and enjoyed my meal.

And I look forward to the time when the Gardeners shall inherit the earth.

Tags: food, gardening, culture

What's in a name?

http://konsk.gaia.com — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:19:04 GMT

Sustainability and the dirty word.

First some history. At the close of the second world war the US and UK found themselves running war economies with subsidised agriculture and heavy industries and a workforce geared up to producing military equipment. Despite the end of the war in Europe and Japan, the US decided to maintain their war economy and shortly after the UK followed suit.

Among other things this meant that agricultural subsidies were continued and the heavy industries that had been mass producing tanks and other military hardware were shifted into manufacturing tractors, ploughs, combines and the like. The factories that had researched and developed poison gases moved into other bio-cides such as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. In effect, having defeated the human enemy, the war effort was turned upon nature. It still continues today.

By the end of the 1950s the term “development” had become attached to the roll-out across the world of mechanised, chemical agriculture (the first green revolution, so called), large scale projects in poorer countries (like the Aswan dam) along with infrastructures of roads, rail networks and electricity distribution all funded and generally built or designed and overseen by representatives of the richer western countries, thus making them even richer. The term gave rise to the concept of developed, developing and undeveloped countries and became the model for western interaction in the world. This was seen as a “good thing” and worth pursuing.

By the end of the 1960s many people thought there was enough evidence of environmental degradation, failed projects, social disintegration etc to suggest that this development was not such a good thing anymore and that a change of tack might be in order. The response from the developed world was the concept of sustainable development.

This was seen by many as an attempt to clean up a fundamentally dirty word and so in 1976 when Bill Mollison and David Holmgren formalised an integrated design system as a general strategy to reduce the impact of human beings on the planet, they called it permaculture design, avoiding the words sustainable and development entirely, although that is the intended result of the application of permaculture design.

Even then it was realised that the term "permaculture design" would itself be misunderstood and hijacked, as "sustainable development" has been hijacked and applied to many endeavours that are clearly not sustainable at all (see my blogs on bio-fuels as an example). So the term "permaculture", stripped off its essential design framework is often thought to mean something to do with organic farming and dismissed off hand.

My final point relates to the so-called "three pillars of sustainable development", as employed by British and European governments, namely the environment, community and the economy. Wilberites and permies should immediately recognise that this is not an integral framework but is in fact just another limited perspective offering valuable but partial truths as it arises from a rational/techno perspective that is skewed heavily by the current emphasis on personal monetary wealth. By elevating the economy to such a position, businesses have been able to promote unsustainable solutions as valid.

Permaculture Design places the economy back where it belongs, as a property of the community, which is formed of individuals, in relation to the environment, giving three pillars of environment, community and the individual, or as I like to use, place, people and person.

I'm still keen for feedback from Wilberites on permaculture design's triadic system. Can it be used as an integral framework or is it just a play on words? I note that Gaia University, the latest evolution of education in permaculture design, has adopted a quadratic approach but I still find it easier to use the triadic for practical work. Any clues as to what is going on here, please?

Tags: permaculture, sustainable, development, AQAL

More bio-fuel maddness and drastic investment loss

http://konsk.gaia.com — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 09:33:21 GMT

Good to see wider recognition of the potential problems with the developing biofuels market as I mentioned in my entry on May 23rd, 2007. Check out the BBC website for more details:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6949861.stm

Here's an extract that gives the gist of the story regarding biofuel crops;

"A team of UK-based scientists suggested that reforestation and habitat protection was a better option. Writing in Science, they said forests could absorb up to nine times more CO2 than the production of biofuels could achieve on the same area of land. The growth of biofuels was also leading to more deforestation, they added.

However, [Dr Righelato, chairman of the World Land Trust] said that so-called second generation biofuels, which used feedstocks such as straw, grasses and wood (lignocellulosic material) rather than grains or palm oil, offered a much better opportunity.

'If you can extract lignocellulosic materials sustainably from forests without destroying the soil and maintain a way that forests can rapidly regrow, it is quite possible you can have your cake and eat it, as it were.' "

Here at Penrhos we call it coppicing and pollarding, two very ancient techniques for harvesting timber sustainably. We cut some of the trees that we planted or encouraged to regenerate every three to twelve years (or more), depending on the species. Cutting at ground level is coppicing, cutting higher up the trunk is pollarding. Suitable trees are mainly deciduous like oak, ash, lime, willow, polplar and the cutting tends to increase their life span. Pollarding allows for the growth of a longer term crop as well in that the trunk can get big and be harvested in maybe fifty or a hundred years time for high value timber. It also keeps the new growth that sprouts from below the cut up out of reach of grazing animals.

As usual, being permies, we look for multiple yields so any pruning that we do while the trees are in leaf goes to the livestock first who strip the leaves, small branches and bark leaving us with the firewood, the simplest form of bio-fuel. Much of our fuel this year comes from management of our northern shelter belt of trees that needs to be regularly cut at a variety of heights in order to maintain a thickety appearance and slow the wind. Coppice trees can also be interspaced with standards, that is, trees that are high pruned and allowed to grow tall for a long term crop of high quality timber. Coppice produces a mosaic landscape with a rich variety of ecological niches and, therefore, many opportunities for multiplre yields.

To finish off I just want to refer back to my previous entry and John's useful comments. I should really title this bit "Terrible losses strike bitter blow to investor!". After blowing my own trumpet regarding massive returns on small investments, a fierce predator or predators literally decimated my ducks, taking six off the pool in less than a week followed by two ducklings leaving just one mature female and her single remaining offspring. This hurt me far more than an equivalent monetary loss, being as they were all second or third generation Penrhos ducks that I had nurtured and loved.

The initial attack we judged to be a fox by the carcasses. This was follwed by a weasel that gained entry to the duck house through a really small hole, now patched with tin; we saw the beast making a run for it when I made the repair. But the final loss may well have been a mink; we caught a glimpse of what could have been one and Eric, who lives a mile further up in the woods, reckons he's seen one. This is serious news indeed as they are voracious non native predators, often released from fur farms by well meaning animal rights activists who are ignorant of the dire consequences to native wildlife of their actions.

Its a great shame to lose so many ducks and if mink have arrived in our area it may not be possible to continue raising water fowl. The challenge will be to apply the permaculture principle, "the problem is the solution" and try to find a postive way forward involving mink. Meanwhile, the potatoes (trees and everything else) just keep on growing.

Tags: permaculture, global warming, climate change

Massive returns on investment!

http://konsk.gaia.com — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:21:06 GMT

I recently cashed in on various investments I made in the past. Here are the results:

1. >10,000% return after five months.

2. >200,000% return after 15 years.

3. In excess of >1,000,000% after 21 years.

Here are the details.

1. A single Brettonian dwarf bean (courtesy of Steve Read, Yogic/Aikido permaculture designer from Brittany: http://www.permaculture.be/), planted at the beginning of April 2006 produced over 100 beans by the end of August in the same year. Of course I planted more than one, ate loads and still had dozens to plant again this year. This is not unusual for beans of various types. Runner beans can give even greater returns.

2. A larch tree I grew from seed in 1992 and felled this spring at age 15 years. By weight, the return is in the region of 0.1 gram (overestimated) to 1000 Kg (underestimated). Of course we need to factor in some of my time, say five minutes to sow the seed, fifteen minutes to plant and mulch the sapling and maybe three maintenance periods of about ten minutes each over the first few years until it was big enough to start shading out the grass by itself. The figure of 200,000% is a rough underestimate after taking these factors into account. Again, I planted more than one.

3. This refers to natural regeneration begun in 1986. The investment was one of time as I simply repositioned an existing fence to exclude grazing animals from a two thirds acre patch of rough grazing and then stood back. This equated to so say one day's work (overestimated). The figure given here cannot hope to convey the vastness and huge complexity of the annual returns:

(see www.konsk.co.uk/web/penrhos/design/argelacs.htm for yields after five years)

This site now absorbs something like three tons of CO2 per year, measured as tree growth, stores thousands of litres of additional water in the increased humus as well as providing me with a perfect classroom for teaching the ecological principles of permaculture design. If we accept the premise of carbon offsetting (which I think is debatable) it also makes me better than carbon neutral.

The point here is that investment in nature provides huge opportunities that dwarf anything a bank or the financial industry can offer. Get those seeds in now peeps and prepare to reap rewards in five months, five years or annually for life.

Tags: permaculture, food, regeneration

Flood Warning!

http://konsk.gaia.com — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:56:35 GMT

After worrying about drought here on the Mawddach estuary during April, since June we've once more been living in temperate rainforest, to the great benefit and relief of our many species of lichens, liverworts and mosses and me. Phew.

However, the regularity of rainfall, every two or three days, combined with sudden intense downpours has resulted in massive flooding in other parts of Britain. Again, the lack of an integrated land management policy lies at the root of it all.

Heavy rainfall on the sheep grazed Welsh hills results in huge quantities of run off filling major rivers such as the Don, Dee and Severn. Flood barriers serve only to concentrate and accelerate the flow and just pass the problem further down stream, hence the devastating flooding in parts of Herefordshire and Worcestershire, to name a few places. The denuded uplands of Wales are replicated in the Pennines and elsewhere, laying the foundation for future catastrophic flood events throughout lowland Britain.

So how do we manage landscapes to cope with both drought and flooding? The best place to store water is as high up in the landscape as possible. Further, most water storage takes place in the soil, not in reservoirs etc. Of the total water available on the planet, 11% is stored in soils as opposed to less than 0.5% in dams, lakes, reservoirs and rivers. Generally within a few hours of the cessation of rain, run-off ceases and reservoirs and streams are fed by water from soil storage. Thus by paying attention to strategies for creating and building soil we can increase the water storage capacity of the landscape.

Enter permaculture design as an integrated strategy with environmental, social and personal benefits. As permaculture designers we've been working on this world-wide for thirty years. Check out my web site for some of the things I've been doing:

www.konsk.co.uk/resource/techniques/water/water.htm

and keep an eye out for work in progress, resilient landscape design. If we switched agricultural subsidies to natural regeneration projects, blanket bog restoration and contoured access routes that double as swales (to infiltrate water into soils) we would not only reduce flooding and drought but also rejuvenate our ravished rural communities, providing useful employment and resources such as bio mass for bio fuels, among many other products. Perhaps our political leaders will at last start taking notice.

One final point is that the price of food is set to rocket as large scale industrial, mechanised farming is simply unable to cope with unpredictable weather. As I write the BBC is informing me that up to 40% of the pea crop has been lost due to flooding and even the Archers have been unable to get their big combine out due to waterlogged fields; serious stuff indeed. Make way for local food initiatives, market gardens, veggie box schemes and of course, permaculture design as the integrating strategy.

Tags: flood, drought, permaculture design

Biodiesel- The Disaster

http://konsk.gaia.com — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:20:43 GMT

Biodiesel sounds great but when the UK government announced their plans for biofuel targets, they claimed that 5% of biofuel used in road transport fuel means 5% less greenhouse gas emissions, yet there is no scientific basis for such a claim. Indeed, it seems more likely that if the biofuel market is allowed to grow without constraints, this will almost certainly lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

How has this happened? It seems that in the interests of economics (and making a fast buck) much of the scientific evidence has been ignored and certain crucial factors have been left out of the figures used to calculate the merits of biofuels.

So what got left out? Firstly, the release of CO2 as a direct result of ploughing prior to planting annual crops (like oilseed rape). As the soil is turned (by plough or with a spade in your garden) soil humus is exposed to oxygen and breaks down (burns) giving off CO2. Also, many of the billions of micro organisms (creatures of the dark side) are killed by the light and break down with similar consequences. Plough agriculture has been estimated to produce 3 tons of CO2 per hectare in temperate soils.

Secondly, the use of nitrogen fertilisers was removed from the equation. Nitrogen fertilisers produce CO2 both during manufacture and also in use. In particular, high emissions of the potent and long-lasting greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, which is released by microbes when nitrogen fertilisers are applied to soils.

The International Panel on Climate Change stated in their Third Assessment Report that increasing nitrogen in the soil through fertiliser use increases the emission of N2O from the soils. They pointed to evidence of a faster-than-linear feedback in such soil emissions as more fertiliser is applied. N2O is 310 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 and remains in the atmosphere for 110-120 years. If those figures are taken into account, greenhouse gas savings for biofuels drop from 53% to just 7%. If fertiliser is applied to tropical soils, N2O emissions are 10-100 times higher. This is crucial as many biofuel crops that will end up as fuels for Europe and the US are already being grown in the tropics, displacing tropical rainforest that can absorb more CO2 that the fuels will save.

Thirdly, the figures arrived at and now used by various governments to develop policy (including the US and UK) assume that all by-products of biofuels would be used for animal feed and would displace an equivalent amount of existing animal fodder production, such as soy meal. There is no guarantee that this is happening.

A further extremely worrying trend is already noticeable in the US, as farmers who had previously grown grain and corn switch to biofuel crops, mainly because they can get a higher return. This has the effect of reducing the amount of staple foods grown in the world and that is likely to push up world prices for staple foods and destabilise the global economy, as well as threatening with starvation many people who are already living borderline existences.

Lastlyas an example of how much land is required for biofuels, if all 5.6 million hectares of set-asides in the 15 ‘long-standing’ EU nations were intensively farmed for biofuel crops, we could save 1.3-1.5% of road transport emissions, or around 0.3% of total emissions from those 15 countries. Not a lot really and certainly not enough.

So what's to be done? Well, in my humble(ish) opinion, what is required is a general purpose strategy to develop sustainable lifestyles, societies and environments. That is to say, an integral solution rather than a piecemeal approach that gives inappropriate weighting to economic interests. My first choice here at the moment (and for the last twenty years, as nothing better has yet evolved) is permaculture design.

Permaculture design offers a holistic or integral perspective to sustainable development/evolution using three axis, namely environment, community and self. Master Wilbur's four axis AQAL perspective offers greater precision but (at the moment) I still find permaculture design a much more practical, hands on system for actively creating solutions at a grass roots level. Its notable that the UK (and European) model of sustainable development replaces the self with the economy, hence the gross imbalances and failures that arise at present.

I'm not going to go into the permaculture design strategy in detail here (see my web site www.konsk.co.uk or the UK national charity www.permaculture.org.uk for more details and links) but will just make a few points to close this chunk off.

One study found that a hectare of land in Brazil grows enough sugar cane to make ethanol which saves 13 tonnes of CO2 every year, by replacing petrol or diesel. If, however, natural forests were allowed to regenerate on the same hectare of land, the trees would absorb 20 tonnes of CO2 every year. Tropical rainforest can absorb up to 26 tonnes per hectare annually and even in the UK, natural regeneration is guesstimated to absorb upwards of 3 tonnes per hectare per year.

It seems to me that if we paid attention to our lifestyles, developing a "stay at home" culture that minimises our use of transport, those 5.6 million acres of set aside could be allowed to regenerate as natural forest systems. If we manage these according to permaculture ethics and principles we would find them to be both stuffed full of resources for us and a haven for bio diversity. They'd also be pretty cool places to live, especially if we took yet more carbon out of the cycle by building all the millions of new homes we apparently need out of timber.

[Sorry about the long entry but the subject merits it. Many of the facts and figures used here came form the excellent web site here http://www.greenfuels.org/biodiesel/]

Tags: permaculture, biofuel, climate change