permaculture

["keller" <ak.and.ak@on-line.de>]

> Old minds think : "How do we solve these problems."
> New Minds think : " How do we make happen what we want to happen"
>
> As you discuss the ideas found in this book with your friends, you'll be
> able to spot the old minds easily. They're the ones who are always playing
> "devil's advocate", always proposing and concentrating on difficulties,
> always nailing the progress of your dialogue down to problems. Focus
instead
> on what you want to happen and how to make it happen, rather than on all
the
> things that might keep it from happening."

Excelent.

> What I want to see happen is for our culture to develop an ecological
> mindset. Damned if I know how to get there though....

Claude, I am not sure that this ia achievable.

I am not sure we can transform our civilisation as quickly as we would like
to.

It is not sustainable, so either it will collapse sooner or later or
transform into something better.

If it does not reform itself, it will just collapse when the oil and other
resources are finished, and all we can do might be to see that some things
(knowledge, species) survive this. The economies we have now only work well
when they grow, but the amount of energy that is available sustainably puts
an upper limit to the complexity of any economic system or ecosystem. This
is a consequence of the laws of termodynamics. The capacity of the solar
energy to carry away the entropy created by those dissipative systems is
limited. A system that creates more entropy than it can get rid of destroys
itself.

The initial stage of that self destruction is the destruction of the oil
reserves (if you look at them as part of the system)). It is like a starving
person. First the fat reserves go.

Our civilisation has taped into very large, but finite resources. The
systems (companies, states, economies...) that controll these are very
powerfull, and the ones that grow fastest will overgrow the ones that don't
grow so fast. So it is inevitable that systems arrise that work only well by
growing quickly and using up those resources faster and faster. In a way
these systems are "created by the oil". As long as the oil is there, it can
be transformed into energy, into money and ultimately into power. These
powerful organisations will use their power to survive as long as they can.
The oil etc. provides a reservoir of low entropy energy and this will find a
way to be used up in a dissipative system. The organisation that arrise are
the ones that grow fastest, which means the presence of non renewable
resources creates organizations that are necessarily unsustainable, work
well only when they grow and are powerful which means they will defend
themselves (as long as they can).

What we can do is try develop something that would work after the collapse
(or transformation - if we are lucky) and try to let it survive and to save
as much as possible into the era after the non renewable resources have been
used up. So the task is to create something (comunities, organisations,
"spores") that can survive the presence of these unsustainable organisations
(e.g survive the economic preasure of globalisation) and also their final
collapse (which they can because they do not depend on the non renewable
resources).

As long as energy is cheap we will never reach the majority of people (when
it becomes very expensive, they might come out of economic preasure, and
then we most have our "spores" ready to germinate). So let us try to find
the people who want to be reached.

(Hm, don't know if I managed to express these thoughts understandibly. Sorry
if it sounds like gibberish.).

Andreas

Andreas