Reviews…
The future up for grabs
In 2009, permaculture co-founder, David Holmgren, published Future Scenarios, a book outlining his thinking around the different paths along which societies and civilisation itself might travel. Because of the book’s continued topicality I republish my original article and review it here.
A review from 2009
How to make permaculture an applied technology for a community-based response to climate change and peak oil
IT MIGHT BE UNDERSTANDABLE that David Holmgren’s latest book, Future Scanarios, leaves some readers feeling depressed. That’s because of some of the scenarios he outlines, scenarios likely to result from the combination of climate change and the peaking of the global oil extraction, are rather glum.
Most of us have at least a working familarity with climate change and its likely consequences, however the peaking of global oil extraction and the impacts that it is likely to bring are less well known. Peak oil, as it has become known, is the time at which extraction from economically accessible oil wells reaches its peak. After that, extraction plateaus for awhile, then starts to fall below demand.
The effect of this will be a demand-driven oil price rise and the increasing cost of anything that uses oil in its extraction, manufacture, processing, transportation or consumption. That’s a lot of things. It is most of the goods and services we use. New oil field discoveries, such as those likely to be accessed by deep sea drilling made possible by the retreat of the northern ice cap and those below the Greenland ice cap as it melts, will bring temporary relief but are unlikely to affect the longer-term downward tend in global production.
Future Scanarios is not a large book in terms of number of pages, but it nonetheless serves as something of a wake-up call for those still in the slumber of an oil saturated present.
Exploring future scenarios for cities
People familiar with David’s reasoning will find much that is familiar in the book. David takes the reader through his four scenarios that range from the consequences of business as usual, the survivalist ‘lifeboat’ scenario of social desperation, a green hi-tech future and his preferred scenario that he calls ‘earth stewardship’.
This latter invokes life as decentralised, self-governing towns and communities, with at least a partial abandonment of city cores that are mined for their materials. Life continues in the suburbs, although far from its present form. Although he does not go into detail in Future Scenarios, the model of suburban conversion that David discussed during his 2006 national tour with US journalist and peak oil analyst, Richard Heinberg, would be relevant here.
David’s model sees the development of multi-generational households and a substantial increase in urban food production, water harvesting and the use of renewable energies in the suburbs. In terms of urban infrastructure, it is a model I first encountered in the 1990s while working for Dr Ted Trainer at UNSW, a model he called the ‘conserver society’, the title of a book be published on the topic. Through his books and in his courses at UNSW Ted presaged many of David’s ideas on how we could reimagine and remake the suburbs into places for sustainable living.
These illustrations, made by Ted Trainer in the 1990s, illustrate his ideas on how the suburbs could be transformed:
David’s ‘ruralised city’ scanario is a model criticised by the authors of Resilient Cities (2009; Island Press, Australia), including the noted planner and educator, Peter Newman (and here). The book asserts that cities are not farms although a reasonable amount of food can be grown within their boundaries and, as has traditionally been done, on the periurban regions on the edges of the cities. Cities exist for other reasons such as exchange, according to Brisbane-based placemaking consultant, David Engwicht. They are places where people gravitate to in search of opportunity such as livelihood, education, access to services and the company of others. To some extent, that accounts for urban growth and the depopulation of rural towns. Peter Newman and David Engwicht’s explanation of the city give them roles inclusive of but well beyond food production.
David’s book does not explore how his model would evolve in any detail — it is an investigation using the scenario development methodology that precludes detail, focusing instead on larger trends along a timeline. The method has been used by government, corporations and civil society for decades and takes existing demographic, resource, political, economic and other factors, trends and projects and imagines how they could evolve within variables set for each scenario. Trends in oil production and other resources form the basis onto which David grafts projections about the possible impact of climate change to generate his four scenarios.
Are there problems in scenario projection?
There are three potential problems with the scenario development model.
- faulty input data
- assumptions made in developing the starting conditions for scenarios
- the linear thinking of the process that can create a path dependency based on the information used as the starting conditions.
The development of scenarios and of systems in general is critically dependent on starting conditions. Misinterpreted and faulty starting data embeds error into the scenario development process. Starting conditions set the path the scenario will follow, making the possibilities that it turns up dependent on the path the original data sets, what we call path dependency.
Scenario development can take a linear form based on cause and effect of the possibilities it turns up. For example, the starting conditions for the neoliberal order and its economic globalisation in the current era was the emergence of neoliberal economic theory in the 1970s and its popularisation by UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Regan. It started by following a linear development path with the privatisation of previously-government-owned services and turning publicly-owned institutions and services, such as tertiary education, into markets. This occurred in Australia from the mid-1990s. A linear scenario development process would postulate economic globalisation continuing to unfold into a global free market economy were it not for the appearance of black swans. A black swan is an unanticipated event that has a substantial impact. The name was coined by writer, Nassim Taleb. The black swan that impacted economic globalisation was the global economic crisis of 2008.
The scenario method cannot account for significant changes over its timeline unless they are foreseeable and included as possibilities in the starting conditions. If unforseeable, they are unknowns that can change the trajectory of the scenario timeline or bring it to an abrupt end. As an example, were the method to have been employed in projecting the developmental path of Australian society and the economy at the start of the 1970s, it might have developed a scenario in which industrial mechanisation increases but society, the economy and social relationships still track along on its then-current path. It would have missed the computerisation of the economy that got underway later in the decade and the deflection of society onto its digital economic and social trajectory that followed. The computerisation of the economy and the consequent spread of IT through society was disruptive, and changed it.
This is a risk for David’s four scenarios. It is what happened to the 1970s scenario predicting social collapse in the near future because of population growth and resource depletion. That failed to materialise. If there is one thing we can learn from the past about predicting the future, it is that most predictions will be wrong.
Earth stewardship: a different type of civilisation
The earth stewardship model would be the optimal outcome of any substantial collapse of the economy or of civilisation itself.
If not forced upon people during a collapse, earth stewardship could be a model with limited appeal. It renders useless the skillsets of many. It is basically an agrarian/artisanal future in which manual skills are the most valuable. It is parasitic in its initial history because it would pillage resources from the collapsed society, such as construction and other materials as well as knowledge. Earth stewardship would be a profoundly different future, one less secure in many ways because of the loss of institutions that maintain the social memory and that are repositories of knowledge. Without hi-tech medicine, old diseases would return with little hope of cure.
The bioregional conundrum: how would regions cooperate in an earth steward future?
There is also the risk of a return to parochialism were global electronic communications to cease with any collapse or severe withdrawal of current technical civilisation. That is taking it at its extreme setting and is contrary to Ted Trainer’s scenario in which his ‘conserver society’ retains a hi-tech capacity that brings together David’s earth steward and green tech models.
The scenario raises questions. How would human knowledge be preserved? Would there be any capacity to cooperate on projects over large regions? How would resource use be negotiated between regions? How would a coordinated approach to crises affecting larger regions be developed? How would people who cannot fully participate in a society be supported—the disabled and aged?
These are the same questions that pertain to the bioregional, self-government model of decentralised society. That model started to influence permaculture thinking in the 1990s when the notion of bioregionalism as a definable geographic area characterised by terrain, vegetation, geology, drainage and landuse became part of permaculture thinking. The idea was that bioregions would be best-placed to manage their own geography and affairs. Without a means of making decisions and cooperating over a territory that includes many bioregions, we end up with a hotchpotch of approaches and regulation. This takes bioregionalism into the realm of politics, the governance of a region.
Intermediate technology in an earth steward civilisation
Writing this review, I recall ideas from the 1970s that were part of the exploration of what we then called ‘intermediate technology’, a term coined by British economist, Fritz Schumacher. Propelled by the 1973 oil crisis — the embargo of the West imposed by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in retaliation for Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war of the same year — intermediate technology (later to be renamed ‘appropriate technology’) sought simpler, cost-effective and more-easily-maintained tools and technologies to produce life needs. These were often manual tools and simpler, locally-maintainable machinery.
Situated between traditional and hi-tech (intermediate tech is more efficient and effective than traditional tech but requires less specialised knowledge, materials and tools in its fabrication and use than hi-tech), the interest in intermediate technology saw the dawn of renewable energy systems and paralleled the rise in popularity, although it remained largely organisationally separate to, organic gardening and farming. Those were intermediate technologies because they relied upon inputs that could be produced within a region.
Initially, intermediate technology found practical application on the intentional communities that started during that period, however there was substantial interest among the more innovative of urban people, especially those who considered themselves a part of the alternative culture of the time, and by international development practitioners. With its reliance on the resources available in a bioregion, including skills, knowledge and materials, appropriate technology would surely be the dominant technology in David’s earth stewardship society.
Imagining the scenarios
David outlines two ways of looking at his scenarios — as separate trends and in a nested structure. For me, it is the nested structure that is the most realistic as it recognises that different trends exist simultaneously in a society. Thus, the 1970s alternative culture existed within the growth economy it sought separation from. It has been the same for permaculture. Today, David’s earth stewardship model exists as loosely connected components in contemporary society focused around a number of movements and initiatives such as permaculture, climate change amelioration, community gardening, food cooperatives and community food systems, regenerative agriculture and environmentalism. While these are separate organisationally they have the leaky margins that allow ideas to trickle between them sufficient to give a sense of common direction.
Another way of looking at this is to see the new being born and prototyped in the bosom of the old. From that comes the resolution of the contradiction of change agents making a living and pursuing their agendas within the infrastructure of a society they would modify or replace. They live in the old but they use its surpluses and abundances to create the new. Realistically, they live with a foot firmly planted in both worlds at the same time. It is akin to making renewable energy technologies using petrol-powered tools.
Simultaneous existence
Elements of the earth stewardship and the green technology scenarios of his Future Scenarios book are found within the permaculture milieu that David has some responsibility for creating. Here, there is a creative tension between the advocates of a largely ruralised lifestyle and those who seek socially constructive solutions through green technology. The trend in permaculture has been to value the manual over the mechanised and automated. That’s the impression I have picked up over the years. This might be fine for small scale projects but can be time-consuming and add to the costs of the larger-scale.
There is a tension between agrarianism and urbanism within the design system that has bearing on David’s scenarios, especially the earth steward model. Most of its practitioners live in larger cities, yet all-too-often the focus of permaculture design courses has been the rural smallholding. When my partner and I organised and taught permaculture design courses, only a handful of students aspired to a rural smallholder future. Most planned to stay in the city where their livelihoods were. Our focus was on urban permaculture.
David sees green technology a starting point for the journey to earth stewardship. The transition will come as fossil fuel energy supplies run down over time.
The influence of government
David writes that government has a substantial influence on these different scenarios, with local government holding most promise of influencing community-based initiatives that would form elements of the earth stewardship model. Its limiting factors include a lack of the expertise required for transition to a post-peak oil and climate change world, and funding. Its useful factor is that local government retains the power to allocate land use.
David’s model for urban living is clearly based upon he and his partner, Su Dennett’s notion of the ‘household economy’. This views the household — whatever its makeup — as primarily a productive rather than consumptive entity. In reality, households would be both consumers and producers, not only of food but potentially of electrical energy via rooftop photovoltaic arrays, what is not consumed by the household being distributed through the grid. We are already some way along the road of the home as energy producer because the economics are becoming more conducive towards its development. More problematic for working people because of time constraints and the need for relaxation time to wind down from demanding jobs are domestic arts like home food production and preserving. Some might say that vegetable and fruit growing are just the type of relaxing activities that busy working people need to slow down, however they require time to be set aside to acquire the skills. Not everyone likes gardening.
Seen as ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) entities or as micro-lifeboats, households in an earth steward scenario would:
- produce in home or community gardens (and process as preserves or dried) some of the food their inhabitants consume; surplus could be traded by exchange or selling to food co-ops
- harvest and store rainfall as garden irrigation
- generate energy via photovoltaic or other system, and distribute surplus
- form the basis, perhaps, for some home-based industry that produces goods or services for trade with others through cashless, mutual credit LETS-like community exchange systems (Local Exchange and Trading Systems) or as part of the informal or formal economies.
Local government, though in still-too-few cases, has made a start in educating people in these basic skills. Some offer workshops and courses in sustainable living where participants pick up largely forgotten skills in what Rob Hopkins, spokesman for the Transition Towns movement, calls ‘skilling-up for powerdown’ — growing food, harvesting and storing rainwater, producing home energy and other things. Some councils facilitate the setting up of community food gardens and farmers’ markets. Others install photovoltaic systems on their buildings and harvest rainwater.
These things are not done as some deliberate policy of popular skilling-up but because they are components of the green technology model, the most popular model of sustainability, and because they are compatible with local government policy on ameliorating and adapting to climate change. The motivation does not matter because such initiatives smooth the way to both a green technology/earth stewardship society.
Both idea and template
Future Scenarios will no doubt be criticised because it will be seen to offer little option other than evolution towards an earth stewardship society. Green technology advocates might feel a little chargrined that their preferred future might be only a transitional form between the present and the future. That is understandable, because much of the search for solutions to impending global trends focuses on technological fixes even though some foresee a less growth-oriented, perhaps even an economically steady-state economy emerging (such as advocated by Ted Trainer).
It is in discussing these different models that Future Scenarios has value. The book, and the workshops David offers as a means of exploring the topic more fully, introduce a sophistication to the permaculture design milieu that is not always present in its popular forms, such as gardening. In doing so, David offers permaculture as an applied technology for a community-based response to climate change and peak oil. It is a response that offers opportunities to the more innovative permaculture and community-based organisations capable of addressing those social issues outside their usual sphere of influence.
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The view from 2022
In the years since penning that review, the upsurge in adoption of renewable energy systems and the growing momentum pressuring government and industry to address our hating climate suggests we are starting to move from the business-as-usual, brown technology model towards David’s green tech. As far as it goes, that is true. However, social forces unimagined when David published Future Scenarios that now challenge it.
I am talking about the emergence of political conservatives and radicals in technologically advanced countries. We had the Trump years in the US, authoritarian figures coming to power in other countries and the Nationals and Liberals in Australia, all opponents of climate change amelioration and renewable energy technologies. All were strong advocates of the fossil fuel and the mining industries and promoters of social conservatism, the very forces that hold back a green tech and earth steward future.
With the onset of the pandemic they were joined by a revanchist far-right that captured some people active in the environment movement and permaculture, creating something of a moral dilemma for those permaculture practitioners because of the industries that political force supports. This political formation did not exist as a strong political entity when David wrote his book. What may become a turning point came with the election of the Albanese Labor government in May 2022 with a clear mandate to act on climate change. How this pans-out we wait to see.
It is clear that we are now moving into the green tech future. Households, institutions and industry are investing in photovoltaic and wind energy systems. The South Australian government teamed up with Tesla to install a grid-scale battery to even out the flux of power coming into the state grid from renewables. More are planned. Electric vehicles are becoming more common although they still constitute only a small percentage of the national vehicle fleet. The ACT government announced in 2022 that from 2035 the sale of fossil-fueled vehicles would be banned in its territory. It offers zero-interest loans to supplement the purchase of electric vehicles so as to stimulate their adoption. The NSW, Victorian and South Australian governments offer similar packages .Transport electrification is set to grow with major automotive manufacturers switching to electric drive and more charging stations being installed around the country.
Australia households installed 362,000 rooftop solar systems in 2020, an increase of 28 percent on the previous year, bringing to around one-third the number of homes with rooftop solar, the highest uptake in the world. At the same time the cost/watt of energy production via photovoltaic panel has fallen from around $8.50/watt in 2006 to around $0.52 per watt in 2019. This is the result of research and development and in the resulting efficiency gains, demonstrating the key role of science in moving towards a green tech future.
Households, institutions and industry is voting by the kilowatt hour for a renewable energy future and are well out in front of government policy. At the time of writing, the green tech future is in battle with the old, decaying brown tech model whose oil, coal and gas infrastructure is increasingly at risk of becoming stranded assets as society changes around them. They continue to pressure government for favours and government listens, only to be dragged screaming towards the new future by the change in public and industry sentiment and investment.
With bushfires, floods and a heating climate ravaging not only Australia but other nations as well, global heating is a hot political topic. It simmers away in the background ready to reclaim its primary place once the pandemic recedes, something we see happening now. While it drives a green tech future it also stimulates the lifeboat scenario David talks about in Future Scenarios.
Is it correct to see the exodus from the cities to rural areas over the latter part of 2020 and into the present day, driven by people believing they will be more secure there, as the lifeboat scenario David talks about in action? Probably. Also driving it is escape from the pressures of the workplace that are part and parcel of the brown tech model.
The unfortunate outcome of the exodus has been a massive increase in the cost of rural and regional urban housing and rents, as demand for out-of-city living exceeds the housing supply. The selling price of houses has escalated, worsening the situation of people wanting to enter the housing market, especially for younger buyers and the increasing number working in the financially insecure gig economy. Permaculture, and David in his Retrosuburbia book, talk of looking for houses with solar aspect, energy conservation and other features, however the challenge for many is simply getting a house at all, so things like energy efficiency don’t come into the buying equation for a lot of people.
Permaculture is strangely silent on the housing crisis. Is this because it focuses more on the individual and family rather than forming coalitions with other entities to engage with larger and pressing challenges? Permaculture pays lip service to community involvement and many practitioners do engage in actions beyond their garden gate, however permaculture has little to no collective presence in big social issues.
In 2018, David published his substantial book, Retrosuburbia. It can be read as a continuation of his earlier ideas on remaking our suburbs and also as a model for his earth steward scenario described in Future Scenarios. For me, it carried echoes of the earlier work of Ted Trainer but differed in that it reported initiatives while Ted’s book remained at the big-picture level.
Is Future Scenarios still of value?
All four of David’s future scenarios — green tech, lifeboat, brown tech — and as practiced more at the personal and household level, the earth steward model — coexist and vie for advantage. Is this how it will be into the foreseeable future? The different models do not exist exclusively and never will. Like water undergoing a phase change when heat turns it into steam, the different models move one into another, the residue of the superseded model continuing into its replacement over time.
Does Future Scenarios continue to be useful as we move into the 2020s, more than a decade after it was published? I think so, in as much as David’s scenarios provides us with a useful starting point to think of future possibilities so long as we don’t see them as mutually exclusive, and so long as we leave the mental space to add newly-emerging scenarios. What do I mean by that? In the more than a decade since the book was published, newer ideas on the shape of future societies have emerged and it is these that we need to embrace or reject.
For speculative fiction author and permaculture advocate, Kim Stanley Robinson, the preferred future is a blend of David’s earth stewardship and green technology models. He writes that life basics like health care, housing, food, water and education could be provided for people while their extraneous wants are handled by a scaled-down market system. He favours the Scandinavian model of social democracy.
From scarcity to plenty: a new green-tech revolution
Another model comes from Aaron Bastani (here and here)who writes that our civilisation is laying the foundations for a society beyond both scarcity and work, and who asks in whose interest this society will be created. Looking at the grand sweep of human history, Bastani says we have undergone two substantial transformations that created what are essentially new civilisations: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Now, he writes, we stand on the transformative edge of a new civilisation that “will signal a departure from all history before it, heralding a beginning more than a final destination.”
Much is made in permaculture of the edge effect as a location where two systems, such as two ecological systems, interface. Species, and in our consideration, beliefs, institutions and practices from both systems occur in this ambiguous edge zone where they vie for place and dominance. It is here, Bastani says, that we “see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the twentieth century to feudalism, or urban civilisation from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades which, only now, are set to undermine the key features of everything we had previously presumed to be as unchanging as scarcity itself.”
Those technologies Bastani refers to are now in their infancy. They are being deployed. We know them as AI—artificial intelligence—machine learning, robotics, automation and more. Rather than retreat in horror from the new hardware and software machine sback to isolated farm and field, Bastani says they are the key to shorter working hours and the replacement of an economy based on scarcity with one based on abundance—if we move beyond our present economic system.
In short, Bastani would like to take our technological civilisation, and David’s green tech scenario, to a higher level by automating everything so as to free humanity from what are known as ‘BS jobs’, to free our time and provide everyone with the basics of life. While he doesn’t spend time analysing the energy requirements of such a civilisation, a worthwhile thought experiment would be to consider whether it may be possible to run it on renewables, themselves the ongoing focus of research and development to improve their effectiveness and efficiency.
In a society marked by abundance there would be no need for an acquisitive consumer society with its high energy consumption and waste. Bastani’s model extends David’s green technology future scenario by marrying it with regenerated social and economic futures that embrace what humanity has always done well since the era of the first stone tools: develop technologies.
The question is whether permaculture practitioners are ready to step over the edge into Bastani’s fully-automated future. The scenario did not exist when David published his book. Technological development over the succeeding decade and more now makes it possible. Is it a scenario we now need to integrate into David’s four? Are there others?
References
Future scenarios: how communities can adapt to peak oil and climate change; 2009, David Holmgren; Chelsea Green UK. ISBN-10: 1900322501.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism; Bastani, Aaron, 2019; Verso.
Retrosuburbia; 2018 David Holmgren, 2018, Melliodora, Hepburn Victoria. ISBN 9780994392879. https://www.retrosuburbia.com
