Brain dump:

Reading V. Smil's "Energy and Civilization a History" has made me realize that the Applied Ecology (Permaculture) epoch would be a fundamentally new form of civilization.

Cf. Hemenway's lecture: "Permaculture can save Humanity and the Earth but not Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo
It's about an hour. Here are some notes I took:

He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.

He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activites, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.

Five culture types based on food getting technology:
Foraging
Hunter-gatherer
Agricultural (cities)
Pastoral (Animal herding)
Industrial

Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."

(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...

Holmgrin's scenarios:

- Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)

- Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.

- Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.

- "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.

"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.

Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.

The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects. https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway-vid...

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OMG: Obvious ways that we are out of whack with Nature:

Glass windows kill millions of birds.

Windshields kill billions of insects.

Rain brings out earthworms that then die on the sidewalk.

Asphalt covers n% of the Earth and vulcanized rubber particles are continously emitted into the ecosystem.

Plastic collecting in the Oceanic Gyres and beaches of the world, as well and in the bellies of animals, and coating and fusing with rock.

Gas-burning, noise- and air-polluting leaf blowers that are inherently wasteful (each item is typically blown about 2~5 times before arriving at resting point. Compare to vacuum cleaner.)

In fact, all the pollution.

Lawns are everywhere. Intrinsically wasteful, deliberately stunted and impoverished ecosystems, massive applications of chemicals.

Agriculture. Literally counter-productive: untouched ecosystems are orders of magnitude more productive. Doing nothing is more productive than farming.

We wear shoes that insulate us from contact with the Earth (lit. grounding). We do this because we have poured concrete all over everything.

Where the meat comes from...

And so on.

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Part Yay: Humans are Nature's turbo-chargers!

We can increase the productivity of natural system by an order of magnitude again over baseline untouched ecosystems. (Example: WPA built miles of massive swales across the western states, and years later (with no maintainence) there are plants and animals there where before there was desert. TODO: look this up.)

(Cf. Yeoman's Keyline techniques. Draw water out onto ridges to gte more use out of rainfall. http://www.keyline.com.au/ )

Broadly speaking we can corrugate terrain and systems to get more surface area and interaction and create more niches and therefore more life. Recall that life exists in the thermodynamic flow from the Sun (and yes, the oceanic heat vents) to ultimately the rest of the sky, and that we are nowhere near the physical limiting factors. It's relatively easy to add niches to an existing garden. Especially if you're able to make modifications! I have a whole DVD about Permaculture water harvesting where they bring in a backhoe to dig out a new little lake and some canals! A one-time expenditure of fossil fuel to make a vast change in the water/energy flows of a local system to ultimately increase the ecological robustness and yield makes sense. And in theory, locally grow alcohol fuel could be used to power land-shaping machines.

There is also a possibility to use Bucky Fuller-style Tensgresity (or merely geodesic) structures to create "3D" gardens.

With Permaculture techniques you can revitalize salty desert in a few years ("Greening the Desert" Geoff Lawton) and there is plenty of desert. All of the necessary factors are themselves organic and therefore capable of geometric increase. We could green the deserts from Southern CA to Texas and accomodate several hundred million people in an ecologically (climate proof!) way.