THE ANTHROPOCENE: IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT US - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 61

ally uncompetitive with other sources of electricity. Solar and wind are getting cheaper, but they're
intermittent and tend to undermine commercial utility companies' business models. While our list
of potential energy sources is long, none of these sources is ready to be plugged quickly into our
existing systems to provide energy in the quantity, and at the price, that the economy needs in order
to continue growing.
This means that humanity's near future will almost certainly be energy-constrained. And that,
in turn, will ensure that—rather than engineering nature on an ever-greater scale—we will still be
depending on ecosystems that are largely beyond our control.
As a species, we've gained an impressive degree of influence over our environment by deliber-
ately simplifying ecosystems so they will support more humans, but fewer other species. Our prin-
cipal strategy in this project has been agriculture—primarily, a form of agriculture that focuses on a
few annual grain crops. We've commandeered up to 50 percent of the primary biological productiv-
ity of our planet, mostly through farming and forestry. 17 Doing this has had overwhelmingly negat-
ive impacts on nondomesticated plants and animals. The subsequent loss of biodiversity is increas-
ingly compromising humanity's prospects, because we depend upon countless ecosystem services
(such as pollination and oxygen regeneration) that we do not organize or control, and for which we
do not pay.
The essence of our problem is this: the side effects of our growth binge are compounding rapidly
and threaten a crisis in which the artificial support systems we've built over past decades (food,
transport, and financial systems, among others)—as well as nature's wild systems, on which we still
also depend—could all crash more or less simultaneously.
If we've reached a point of diminishing returns and potential crisis with regard to our current
strategy of constant population/consumption growth and ecosystem takeover, then it would seem
that a change of direction is both necessary and inevitable. If we were smart, rather than attempting
to dream up ways of further re-engineering natural systems in untested (and probably unaffordable)
ways, we would be limiting and ameliorating the environmental impacts of our global industrial
system while reducing our population and overall consumption levels.
If we don't proactively limit population and consumption, nature will eventually do it for us,
and likely by very unpleasant means (famine, plague, and perhaps war). Similarly, we can rein in
consumption simply by continuing to deplete resources until they become unaffordable.
Governments are probably incapable of leading a strategic retreat in our war on nature, as they
are systemically hooked on economic growth. 18 But there may be another path forward. Perhaps
citizens and communities can initiate a change of direction. Back in the 1970s, as the first energy
shocks hit home and the environmental movement flourished, ecological thinkers began tackling
the question: What are the most biologically regenerative, least harmful ways of meeting basic hu-
man needs? Two of these thinkers, Australians David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, came up with
a system they called permaculture . According to Mollison, “Permaculture is a philosophy of work-
ing with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted
and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treat-
ing any area as a single-product system.” 19 Today there are thousands of permaculture practition-
ers throughout the world, and permaculture design courses are frequently on offer in almost every
country. 20
Other ecologists didn't aim to create an overarching system, but merely engaged in piecemeal
research on practices that might lead to a more sustainable mode of food production—practices that