Permaculture Principle 2: Catch and Store Energy

This principle reminds us of the need to gather and save natural energy for our long-term needs in a time of energy descent.

Our unprecedented wealth is largely due to our profligate consumption of earth’s natural resources, especially fossil fuels. We have been squandering our wealth, forgetting that — like all things — it is finite. “In financial language,” Holmgren says, “we have been living by consuming global capital in a reckless manner.”

As we begin to slide downslope on the bell curves of critical non-renewable resource supplies, shortages and rising costs begin to underscore the urgent need to save and reinvest what we currently consume or waste.

But it is hard to begin on a course that so strongly opposes the direction of our current culture. We know the slogan, “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” but to put it into practice, except in the most superficial ways, is not so easy. Moving in this direction opposes ‘the mainstream’. It opposes powerful vested interests (sometimes our own), opposes strong political and financial incentives for growth and consumerism.

Holmgren lists as some important sources of energy to save:

• Sun, wind, runoff water
• Agricultural, industrial and commercial wastes
• And important means of energy storage include:
• Fertile soil with high levels of humus
• Perennial vegetation, especially trees
• Water bodies and tanks
• Passive solar buildings

One more natural resource of incalculable value comes through ourselves and each other, our elders, and our ancestors — knowledge, collective experience, sometimes embodied in technology, and software.

But we need to overcome our tendency to believe we can solve all problems with technology. Over and over and over again we have found ourselves dealing with the unintended consequences of our technological solutions. As Holmgren put it, we must use technology very carefully, always recognizing that it often “acts as a ‘Trojan horse’ recreating problems in new forms”.

He chose the proverb “Make hay while the sun shines” to remind us that in a world of energy descent we have only limited windows of time to catch and store energy “before seasonal or episodic abundance dissipates”.