Peak to Pool

Peak Oil – once you are familiar with the term and what it means, you can’t think the words without picturing Hubbert’s Peak, the graphic bell curve showing oil use as a blip on the timeline of human presence on Earth.

And you worry over our response – will we manage our energy descent to ensure the softest possible landing? or suffer the sharp shocks of a run-away descent? or worst of all possibilities, suffer collapse and die-off? You want to help to ensure the soft landing, but it is psychologically difficult – it’s hard work and the danger of despair is always a shadow over your shoulder.

Rob Hopkins has come up with a simple change of perspective that gives us a much better way to look at it in The Trasition Handbook.

It’s simple, he says. Just turn the bell curve upside down and change the Peak to a Pool.

So in 1846 (the year we started using kerosene in lamps) we dove in head-first – and a great adventure it was! There is no denying we did some great things. But we made mistakes too – and over the years the consequences of those mistakes have become harder and harder to deal with.

We now know that (beyond a fairly modest level of money and goods needed for a comfortable life with a bit of disposable income available for fripperies) the consumer life does not make us happy. Nor is our life made better with the stresses arising from trying to cope with the gigantic problems created by enormous systems far beyond the human scale. We have let our technologies outstrip our wisdom and our institutions outstrip our capabilities. We live increasingly isolated and out-of-control lives – no wonder we are unhappy.

So now we are deep down in a sticky hellhole and (most of us) no longer enjoying the swim.

Thus our task is to swim for the surface with all our might – back toward sunlight and pollution and toxin-free fresh air. Swim toward a sunlit surface where the future is healthier, happier, less stressful – a future abundant in community, in time for joining our friends, neighbors, and families in learning new skills for living a rich and convivial life on far less energy.

Looked at like this our new direction becomes “an instinctive rush to mass self-preservation, and a collective abandonment of a way of life that no longer makes us happy.”

If the Transition Towns movement interests you, check out the networking site started by Michael Brownlee of Boulder, Colorado for the U.S. Transition Towns movement:  http://transitionus.ning.com

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”.