permaculture

[John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

Three cheers for them...!
Not that I'm biased just because I have ancestry there... :-)

One issue I think they will hit in a couple decades is use of their 
plantation wood for biofuels (and everything else they use it for too of 
course).  They have got to be getting on to their third rotation (at 
least) in lots of their tree plantations and some sustainably/holistic 
forestry practitioners predict/suspect that that's about when mass 
monoculture plantation forestry will start to collapse.
Finland is likely to have a similar problem in a similar timeframe, 
along with any other similar contexts in N. Europe.

Good news that they plan to stick to the no new nukes committment at least.
And they have a Minister of Sustainable Development, imagine that.  Hey 
W., can we get one of those please?  And a Department of Peace too while 
you're at it.

If the Swedes can even come reasonably close to this goal, it will set a 
high bar for the rest of the industrialized world to aim for.  Sweden is 
fully a first-world industrial nation with all the mod cons we Yanks 
expect and then some - like national health care and national pensions, 
whatta concept!  And they have a looong cold dark winter too, it's not 
like it's easy for them because they're in the tropics or anything like 
that.

The Euros are way ahead of the USA on use reduction anyhow - they've got 
"first-world" lifestyles plus considerably less deep/chronic poverty and 
homelessness and social injustice and so on (and did I mention national 
health care??)...and they do it on half the water and one-quarter the 
gasoline per capita.  Oh, and they've got national health care too.

Maybe it's time to move to one of my ancestral homelands... :-?

cheers,
John S.

Saor Stetler wrote:
> Published on Wednesday, February 8, 2006 by the Guardian 
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk> / UK
> Sweden Plans to Be World's First Oil-Free Economy
> · 15-year limit set for switch to renewable energy
> · Biofuels favoured over further nuclear power
> by John Vidal
>  
>
> Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western 
> economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - 
> without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.
...

--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
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