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.