permaculture

[Russ Grayson <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 12:53  AM, Anne Schwarz wrote:
> > John Schinnerer wrote: For a while there may be a choice...and then, when we wake up with a
> > *really* nasty hangover from guzzling the *last* jug of our fossil fuel
> > mega-binge, there won't.  We'll eat regionally sustainable diets or cease
> > to inhabit our region.

> The problem is, where do those people go?  There are so many densly populated places that are not self sustainable.  California provides much of the agriculture for the world, but a good portion of the southern part of it would have to be depopulated.  What would we do with almost everybody in Los Angeles trying to transplant themselves for example?  The central valley is already packed enough.  In terms of food, it can probably support...

Interesting subject, and one familiar from this country. Here, more some years ago than recently, the subject as heard from some permaculture people took the form of keeping people out of rural areas and in the cities. My thought on encountering this sentiment was 'how elitist!'. It was a case of permaculture solutions for those reinhabiting select rural areas and the urban majority being kept in their cities. The cities were regarded as irredeamable. Reminded me of Pol Pot and Year 0 Cambodia, only in reverse. The sentiment, as expressed, was that city people could 'flood' the select rural areas and overpopulate them, so they were best kept where they were. 

Perhaps the most extreme form of this sentiment, not from a permaculture person but from a rural reinhabitant of the upper Tweed Valley in northern NSW, was her proposal that people moving into the area should first have to demonstrate that they had employment. This would have engendered a situation akin to the need for an 'internal passport', more what you would have found in the Soviet Union. It would, of course, would have been totally unacceptable to a people with the freedom to travel more or less where they like.

Permaculture has moved on since the sentiment of rural exclusivity had currency, thankfully, and the issue of sustainable urban living is being addressed, but not always by permaculture people, though there is a tradition of permaculture people who chose to remain in the cities tackling it right back to permaculture's early days. Because of the structure of our economy, the city is where many people of a permaculture-like mindset must stay to make a living, whether they would prefer to be in the country or not.

HYDROGEN ECONOMY?
As to the link between where people live and the reduction in the fossil fuel supply, won't the conversion from a fossil-fuel economy to a hydrogen economy mean that life can continue much as it is? 

GOING HOME
> The problem is, where do those people go?

Someone suggested they 'go home'. Maybe they can in the US. 

Here, though, if recent reinhabitants were to 'go home', then that would depopulate regions of virtually their entire permaculture presence. This presence in some areas stems back to the 'back-to-the-land' or 'new settler' social movement of the 1970s, an era and ideology that Bill Mollison admits influenced the early development of permaculture. More recent arrivals, including some ecovillage residents, have come across permaculture as part of the great Australian drift to the coasts (ref: "The Big Shift - Welcome to the Third Australian Culture"; Salt B, 2001; Hardie Grant, Melbourne + 2001 Census; Australian Bureau of Statistics). These, too, would have to return to the cities. 

In fact, a large part of the Australian coast would have to be depopulated and cities already stressed in providing space and services for a growing population, such as Sydney with its four million hemmed in by national parks to the north, south and west (Blue Mountains) - Pacific Ocean to the east - would have to spread even faster into the agricultural lands that make the city more or less self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit (85% of the states' fresh food is grown here, according to NSW Agriculture). 

This would make the city less-sustainable and negate and depopulation of the coasts (forget the inland west of the Great Dividing Range, it's already undergoing depopulation as a result of economic change, with people drifting into the cities or to the 'sponge cities' of the inland, such as Dubbo and Wagga Wagga, which are growing at the expense of the smaller towns and villages in their region - a localised form of centralisation and an anomaly in a broad region losing population).

So, I can't see the value of depopulation or its being forced by a reduction in the availability of fossil fuel (which would be experienced as a sharp price rise affecting mainly the poorer segments of society - including many rural permaculturists struggling to make financial ends meet in a context of the falling viability of rural economies in Australia - as well as many middle-class people close the the financial edge).
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Russ Grayson
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pacedge@magna.com.au  Phone/ fax: 02 9588 6931
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