[Pil-pc-oceania] Deb Guildner: Backyards are disappearing

[RussGrayson]

Hi Terry...

On 7/9/07 4:41 PM, "Terry Leahy" <Terry.Leahy at newcastle.edu.au> wrote:

> Dear Russ, Some interesting points.  As always I seem to make various
> assumptions that are not transparent to other readers.  A typical
> problem with emails.  See below for detail.
> 
>>>> RussGrayson <info at pacific-edge.info> Thursday, 6 September 2007
> 9:38 pm >>>
> On 6/9/07 5:10 PM, "Terry Leahy" <Terry.Leahy at newcastle.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>> From an environmentalist point of view, high density living makes sense if
>> everyone is commuting in fossil fuelled vehicles.
> 
> It also makes sense if we want compact cities rather than sprawl. Public
> transport is only economical where there is a fairly high population density
> and most of them make use of it.
> 
> Not sure about this.  Most models I have seen assume a train line
> moving between suburban centres with high density close into the station
> and more sprawl and agricultural land a bit further from these hubs (see
> e.g. Diesendorf; Trainer).

Without the ag land, this seems like the existing model of urban
consolidation. To implement this requires the construction of yet more
settlements on unbuilt land and I am not sure we can afford this.

In theory, you could always reconstruct the suburbs but this is extremely
unlikely given the type of land ownership we have at present. A totalitarian
regime could do it but we are more likely to end up with Cambodia Year One.
In these circumstances, I think David Holmgren's model of suburban post-peak
oil reconstruction is more realistic though it faces more than a few
barriers before it could be implemented. It would take a big shove from
outside to see them overcome.

> What is economic in today's world is about the economic competition between
> public transport and heavily subsidized private cars.

Any society - capitalist, socialist, anarchist or post-industrial - would
have to have a way of funding public transport, simply because it needs
investment in maintenance of the system, the production of new stock to
replace the worn out and paying staff. Unless you computerise the thing, but
then you still have to pay the computer minders and you still have
maintenance and replacement.

Not only private cars are massively subsidised. So is public transport, but
the question of affordability and public utility comes into the question
here. Not only is subsidised public transport a subsidy for people going to
work, it is indirectly a subsidy for the organisations that employ them and,
thus, to the economy as a whole.

> Whether it is environmentally feasible to power commuter public transport over
> longish distances is another matter.  I am not assuming huge distances, merely
> that city centres might be accessible by train for some commuting.

Rather than try to run a (very slow) rail system by solar electricity, you
would surely be better off establishing fuelwood plantations on a large
scale and feeding the logs into high efficiency furnaces established where
today's coal fired power stations are sited (my assumption is that the
region around the stations could supply the fuelwood). This would turn steam
turbines and feed the energy into the existing power grid from which the
electric train system currently draws power.
 
VISIONARY WRITING
The thing about some writing on these issues is that it tends towards the
visionary utopian and is then of little practical value, though still good
reading. 

When I taught for Ted Trainer at UNSW some years ago, students could
comprehend his big picture stuff but they found no model by which society
could reach the state he described. Such models, I imagine, can only be
developed at the time of need because society is in a state of more or less
constant change. But given that Ted's ideal society was a fairly utopian and
imaginary entity, that would lead the way open to answer the 'but how do we
get there?' question through similar imagiings.

The starting conditions of any social reconstruction following some
threshhold event that pushes it through are the conditions prevailing at the
time. If oil drawdown precipitates global recession, as it may well do,
especially if the decline does not follow a linear path and goes into the
sudden lurches that are part of a nonlinear decline, then permaculture and
similar ideas are likely to have a hard time getting heard, as the
population will look to government for crisis management.

My guess is that permaculture has greater chance of working in a state of
linear energy drawdown simply because the decline would be more regular and
steady. Permaculture relies more on having a protracted period to carry out
one of its main means of operation - education - and this is not present in
a crisis. Whether it has potential as a crisis tool, when things require
immediate action towards solutions to be put in place, remains unknown.

As I said in my earlier email, I think permaculture could find a niche in
making societies more resilient in the face of change. The relocalisation
agenda seems to offer a structure within which this could be approached by
permaculture educators, advocates and commentators. I see that Permaforest's
Tim Winton is already moving in this direction by reformatting his APT
training towards the training of 'post-carbon professionals'.

I haven't thought this through, but now and then it comes into my mind that
it may be time to go beyond the PDC - now over 25 years old and largely
unchanged for educators using the Permaculture Institute model (others,
including myself, have modified it to local circumstances) - and invent some
new formulation of permaculture to suit contemporary conditions. The ethics
and principles could be retained because, I think, they remain valid for our
circumstances. 

Just what a revamped PDC would look like would need discussion, but would
the relcoalisation process devised for Kinsdale and the UK form an
appropriate framework to build from? The beauty of this model is that it is
adaptable to local situations; in fact, it has to be to work.

This would represent a somewhat radical departure from the way education has
been done in permaculutre and would, of course, meet resistance. But,
perhaps, it could exist as an alternative model of PDC (or whatever it would
be called) and the traditional PDC could continue in use. As I said, PDC's
have been adapted in the past. Our Sydney-based PDC we reformatted for the
conditions found in a major metropolitan city. With no disrespect to Bill's
long-established model, a reformatted PDC might be found even more
attractive to a younger demographic.

This afternoon, in the brief periods of sunlight between the showers
sweeping over Manly and beside a grey green sea with quite supurb sets
rolling in, I spoke with someone who suggested that permaculture may be on a
cusp. What they meant was that they have detected a demand for permaculture
education among people out there in the city, a demand that was not there
even a couple years ago.

If this is more widespread than just here, then how do permaculture
practitioners cater to it? How do they frame the education they offer so
that it strikes a resonance with what these people are feeling that makes
them hungry to do something? My guess is that offering permaculture as has
been done will certainly attract many, but my question is about how we frame
our communication to capture the imaginations of these others? Do we need
more than the traditional permaculture model to make that initial, all so
important contact with those that the traditional approach would fail to
hook?

Just a few random thoughts.

...Russ