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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] 2030
  • Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:52:08 -0500

Hi, Everyone,
Colin Mason wrote a book, /2030 Spike/, that got a lot of attention in some circles. Now he's written another, /A Short History of the Future: Surviving the 2030 Spike/, that offers strategies for survival.
Seven drivers, some human constructions but a few natural, converge in 2030. Depleted fuel supplies (Republicans just blocked taxing Big Oil to jumpstart the renewable energy industry), massive population growth (the next billion people comes faster and faster), poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages, and international lawlessness (witness how much of Dubya's War on Terror fails in the largely Republican US courts) are the drivers.

To me, these are the surface components of the ecological crisis that we have been warned about since Lynn White, jr. wrote "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" in /Scientific American/ in 1967. The cause of the ecological crisis, as I see it, is the mindless practice of ideologies of dominion that have been advanced by the wealth of the G8 countries in general and the US in particular, especially after WWII when US policy elites found the US holding the war debt of a great deal of the world's former powers and began edging toward the US Empire. In other words, the Christian axiom that nature has no reason to exist save to serve humans is to blame for the ecological crisis that threatens to kill life back to the bacteria from which we emerged millions or perhaps billions of years ago.

Most critiques of the ecological crisis come at it from one or the other of the seven drivers of global ecological collapse. Mason keeps all seven in play. Systems theory remains outside the mainstream of human thought processes, sadly.

This is why I bring dominion to this listserv. Permaculture was conceived in systems theory and it's mantra, "The solution is in the problem," contains the wisdom of systems theory. It's not about plugging in the next external "solution," the newest new technology. It's about balancing human interactions within the natural order. That, in my opinion, is what Permaculture ought to be doing, instead of sinking all of our energies into growing food for ourselves.

I've been a Green for almost three decades and almost went to grad school in Environmental Ethics instead of fiction writing, so I come from there. /Ishmael/, /Black Elk Speaks/, and /A Sand County Almanac/ are major guidebooks for me.
We can be as myopic as we want, but Permaculture is one of the few systems that offers a way to support people whose systems are breaking down faster than anyone wants to think. Industrial agriculture, for example, hangs by a fragile petrochemical thread. Permaculture has to step up and serve nature by saving enough life to prevent a total planetary ecological collapse around 2030.

We're halfway through 2007. We don't have a lot of time to fool with denial. Permaculture feeds a relative few people and has an almost indistinguishable effect in the greater world. Permaculture needs, in my opinion, to come to political maturity and create the systems to liberate life from dominion. /The Liberation of Life/, written by a religion professor and a biology professor, John Cobb, Jr. and Charles Birch, respectively, makes that case nicely.
Weep and moan all you want, but know it's futile, and know that right action in the world now is all that will save life from the ecocide of dominion. We've been on this fence since 1967 and it's time to get off and get to work.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX




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