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

[Terry Leahy]

Dear Russ,  Thanks for these comments.  Yes, you are right about the
difficulty of getting from here to there.  At present it seems very
difficult to get anything major done.  Even putting in bike paths seems
like a very big ask in most Australian towns and cities.  Clearly some
kind of relocalisation is the long term answer and that means that we
have a fairly good idea of the kinds of things that we might do to start
moving on that path now, even if we do not have any good idea of how to
get things moving quickly enough.  I have been finding some signs of
interest in permaculture (in its usual backyard sense) in my classes
with quite a lot being involved in some food gardening, with others
wanting a permaculture design for their yard and how to get someone to
do it for them (not necessarily the best option but still it is a
definite sign of interest), and others wanting to know about local
community gardens that they can become involved with.  Had two really
good field sites to visit this year; on is a nun at Marylands ( a friend
of Jill Finnane - Lawns into Lunch) who has a good permaculture backyard
on a smallish block and an amazing water system and the other is a big
community garden in Belmont ( both these in Newcastle, NSW).  Students
were very enthusiastic about both these sites which was encouraging. 
Quite a few are quite effective gardeners themselves and so on,

Cheers,

Terry

>>> RussGrayson <info at pacific-edge.info> Friday, 7 September 2007 6:09
pm >>>
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




_______________________________________________
Pil-pc-oceania mailing list
Pil-pc-oceania at lists.permacultureinternational.org 
http://jasper.cmsarchitects.com/mailman/listinfo/pil-pc-oceania