that time. When I met Bill Mollison back
in the 1970s, there were certainly people in
his circle who were quite catastrophist or
survivalist in their attitudes and responses
to imminent collapse. I saw a lot of people
working through trying to understand how
modern industrial society might unravel.
A lot of the early thinking about that can
now be looked back on as quite naïve,
but it also created a lot of the building
blocks for thinking about a world of energy
descent. Some of my generation decided,
for example, “I want to learn how to be a
blacksmith because, after the collapse of
industrial civilization, we’ll need to know
basic, old-school metallurgy.” This is one of
the reasons that we have blacksmiths today,
because the older generation who had those
skills in many regions of the modern world
were dying out. Apart from horse farrying,
the art of blacksmithing was disappearing.
So this conservation of old skills is part
of a legacy from those back-to-the-land,
self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself activities that
were partly informed by lifestyle choice
and partly informed by a sense of necessity,
whether in the short or the long term.
Over those decades, my understandings
and perceptions about what I came to call
the energy-descent future, rather than a
collapse future, have been a very important
part of my work. I emphasize how the his-
tory of past civilizations suggests we face
crises that feel like collapses, followed by sta-
bilizations and reorganizations of society at
a lower level of complexity, discarding some
things that society was starting to do rather
than constantly expecting to do more and
more complex things on top of all the things
we’ve always done; a longer historical pro-
cess of change, rather than some immediate
event. From some perspectives we’re many
decades into that energy-descent process,
while the dominant paradigm is still the one
I was fed by boys’ magazines when I was a
child in the 1950s that I would have holidays
to Mars and my own personal rocket pack.
Vollmar: In your book Future Scenarios,
you zero in on climate change and peak oil
as the key variables in projecting these four
visions of the future. How will the intersec-
tion of those two particular crises define the
future of the human race?Holmgren: Amongst all the huge factors
that are challenging the business-as-usu-
al growth of industrial society, the two
primary drivers, which show up in many
other different forms—geopolitical stress,
financial system instability, and the risk
of pandemics—are peak oil and climate
change. There was uncertainty in both.
There was great uncertainty about when
the world would peak in production of
conventional oil, which is a significantly dif-
ferent resource than the unconventional oil
now being extracted, a resource with much
lower net energy. The uncertainty was not
so much about when the peak would be
but what the rate of decline postpeak would
look like. Whether it would be relatively
gentle, allowing for some sort of structural
adaptation to less net energy available to
society, or whether it would be more pre-
cipitous and pull apart and fundamentally
damage the structures of industrial society.
That, then, is overlaid on a different axis
with uncertainties about climate change.
While I’ve never been a skeptic about the
process of climate change, I’ve been a radical
skeptic about the uncertainties of the rate
and the severity of the unfolding of climate
change from the complexity of the models.
What we’re seeing by the evidence is that
most of the models and certainly the IPCC
forecasts have been way too conservative.Will the onset of climate change be relatively
slow and relatively benign in its effects, or
will it be quite fast and catastrophic in its
effects in a relative sense?
That creates four spaces. The most benign
one I call Green Tech, though not in the
sense that most people would use the term.
It’s a world of contraction but one where the
wealth shifts to being derived from more
distributed forms of energy like solar and
wind. That means wealth shifts back to
hinterlands and places where those sources
of energy are, which follows the old pattern
that existed before industrialization. Before
we got our primary power out of “holes in
the ground” and concentrated it in our cit-
ies, we got it from farms and forestry, which
are distributed across the landscape. That
suggested a world where farming, forestry,
and renewable energy would become bigger
parts of the economy. There would be a lot
of structural adjustment that might fur-
ther encourage low-carbon strategies, which
would further feed back into reducing the
severity of climate change and further con-
tract the dependence on oil. This scenario
moves, at least for some period, into a stable
state.
The next scenario I looked at I call Brown
Tech, where the oil decline postpeak is rela-
tively slow again but climate crisis onset is
quite severe. Because that expresses itself
through crisis, like tornadoes, hurricanes,
and bushfires, government is forced to
respond and rediscovers its role in a com-
mand rather than a market economy. The
same way that even in the United States
during World War II, the market economy
was shunted aside in favor of a command
economy under Roosevelt. So we know
that, even in these places where there is an
ideological commitment to markets, when
the crisis is big enough, people wake up and
say, “We’re the government and we’ve got to
do something.”
A lot of the things that get done, though,
end up feeding back into more greenhouse
gas emissions. Like the desalination plants
built in Australia over the last decade, which
all use huge amounts of energy. Building
massive sea walls to protect cities from ris-
ing sea levels would be another example.Peak oil, the constraint
of the world’s
most important
nonrenewable resource,
is emblematic of the
limits of resources,
and climate change is
emblematic of the limits
of sinks.WORLDLIT.ORG 67