The Climate Change Punch Up Topic

[paulo]

What a fascinating discussion; how do you find enough time to manage your plot, eat, sleep and follow the climate change subject in such detail tinamou? Judging by the times of some of your entries, maybe by not sleeping much?

Isn't it all a matter of timing? Are we being too arrogant as human beings (we often have been before)? Maybe our unwitting role is to exhaust our main resources, multiply hugely while they last, and then face inevitable extinction like so many other species before us. The earth once had a climate with carbon dioxide predominant, and the atmospheric oxygen concentration rose, as organisms used the CO2 resource and polluted the atmosphere with oxygen. Eventually the oxygen killed them off, except in niches such as estuarine muds and our guts, and other organisms and eventually animals such as humans evolved, putting the CO2 back into the atmosphere. Or are we collectively intelligent enough to be an exception to this rule and find a way of extending our lifespan by all adopting permaculture?

I certainly agree with Patrick Whitefield's assertion - "I'd rather be part of the solution than part of the problem". If you think the oil companies are a problem, just wait until the glass manufacturers get in on the act, and start convincing governments that to avoid global freezing we should glaze-over the whole of the earth!

It is hard though - I have been feeling so smug these recent years, earning most of my money from home using a computer and the internet without needing to drive anywhere much, and now it's becoming apparent that the internet competes with air travel as a producer of greenhouse gases: http://whatsthisgottodowithstorage.com/2010/07/23/boil-the-kettle-data-rationalisation-and-reduction-could-take-a-while/. After reading that, maybe someone can calculate how much CO2 this forum is responsible for - make sure it's worth it everyone!

[tinamou]

What a fascinating discussion; how do you find enough time to manage your plot, eat, sleep and follow the climate change subject in such detail tinamou? Judging by the times of some of your entries, maybe by not sleeping much?

Hi Paulo,

The answer re finding enough time, is that I don't.

It's actually worse than that. I suffer from chronic cluster headache combined with chronic migraine. That means, I have very severe headache attacks twice a day ( at the moment, sometimes as many as 8 times in 24 hours ) which are ten out of ten on the pain scale, equivalent to giving birth to a baby ( or so I'm told, not being female myself, I can't be sure ) for which I have to take lethally high levels of medicine to manage the pain. While the side effects of the drugs wear off, I can't do much, but I can sit at the computer and read and write.

This handicap, illness, has been with me all my life, getting more severe and frequent until it became a chronic condition every day, maybe 10 years ago, and there's no cure. So I live with it. My response is to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Because I cannot 'manage my plot', instead of despairing, I let nature get on with it, just tweaking bits here and there.

This has given me considerable insight which I wouldn't otherwise have gained.

I think most folks are almost insane with their urgent desire to control and manipulate. One of my neighbours cannot bear to see a field hedge that hasn't been chopped and restricted down to a neat regular manicured barrier. He likes perfect green grass fields, with no weed or bird or molehill to disturb his vision. He wants everything on his farms to be organised, in a military fashion, totally subjected to his domination.

This is a kind of fascism. It's like totalitarian dictatorship. It's like the Victorian idea that children and servants had to be seen but not heard and be instantly obedient or subjected to a thrashing. It goes all the way back to Genesis in the Bible where God says humans are given dominion over all other living things. It's a cultural thing, and it's one of the causes of our demise and the destruction of the biosphere, the only place where we can live.

So, because I cannot exercise that type of strict control over my land, no choice, I let IT do what IT wants, and try to fit my own needs into that, causing minimal perturbation. So I have wild birds that will come if I call, I have wild rabbits that will feed from my hand, nature is not my enemy to be attacked and forced to do my will, nature is my lover, my sustainer....

That's all very very fine, but it's only what Aldo Leopold understood, long ago, 'Thinking like a mountain', and only what the taoists understood, thousand of years ago. There is NO figure in Western history of culture who symbolises a 'good' relationship with nature... well, maybe St. Francis of Assissi, but his followers soon wrecked that tradition... whereas, if you look at ancient taoist and buddhist art, there's paintings portraying their bodhisattva ideal, which depict hermits in the mountains surrounded by wildlife which has no fear of them. The whole of Western culture and history is a tale of cruelty, killing, clearing nature out of the way so that we can build an artificial replacement 'in our own image', and so we end up with a sterile bleak poisonous landscape of tarmac and concrete, neon lights and industrial estates and wretched housing estates and traffic noise, jets overhead car doors slamming, plastic refuse blowing in the wind...

I'm fighting back. I'm saying that a bluebell wood in spring is better than ANYTHING civilisation has produced. I'm saying I can't force people to stop destroying nature, I don't have the power, but I'm damned if I'm going to join in and help them.

Now, if that sounds all very noble and idealistic, it's not. I'm stuck in exactly the same jam as everyone else is, dependent upon electricity from the grid, and factories in China that make computers, and petrol for my chainsaw... I'm forced to compromise to survive. I get my food delivered by Tesco. I am not vegan or vegetarian. Animals die after rather miserable lives, so that I can eat. Seems perfection is unattainable, just like 100% certainty in science is unattainable. But I keep aiming in that direction and resisting the pressure that comes from the mega-machine we are embedded in.

I'm one old man with a disability. This place was supposed to be a community, and not long back there were 4 other adults and two babies. The couple and the babies gave up after a year, during the severe snow, it was too hard for them. The american guy had to return, because his grandmother died and he wanted to support his mother dealing with that, and will inherit some cash to get his own place. The other person will return in a month and hopefully live here thereafter. Single person permaculture, or self-sufficiency, doesn't really work, theoretically or practically, as Paul Kingsnorth says, he's exactly right IMO, I've added some comments ( wolfbird )

...but crucially depends upon building resilience both into real, geographical communities and into the human spirit; resilient human communities are the rock on which everything else is built.

http://www.dark-mountain.net/blog/

Having got that all off my chest, I could say a lot more, and also reply to your other points Paulo, but I must attend to other things... maybe later.

[tinamou]

In terms of the ethics themselves, it's still possible to care for people without agreeing with them.

Not in my experience lately. When you can be castigated, and personally attacked, on a Permaculture forum, with tacit approval (and/or possible collusion) from the site administrator; for repeating a view taught by Bill Mollison on his PDC in 1981, and still taught in a 2008 PDC by Geoff Lawton, the hypocrisy in some UK Permaculturists is palpable.

The whole experience has effected my psyche. I had plans to work towards the Land Project criteria, opening up my site to the wider public eventually, but why bother putting yourself out there? I mean, if people claiming to practice permaculture for 20+ years can disregard the second ethic at the drop of a permaculture topic, what can be expected from the uninformed public? Whatever is expected, I don't need it.

After a few sleepless nights I am seriously considering disengaging from mainstream permaculture all together and just getting on with it.

Pumpy's post,

referencing this thread, ( on the Is my neighbour's back yard permaculture ? thread) viewtopic.php?f=2&t=845

Look. Pumpy, I hope you read this and continue to contribute to the forum.

I have nothing against you personally, and I'm sure we'd get on fine face to face. However, in online or real life debates over emotive issues where people have very strong views, people often get offended and upset. Heck, I dislike the views of 90% of people out there, I just have to live with it.

The reason I responded harshly to some of your posts is because I'm not going to tolerate distribution of lies. Let me demonstrate an example :

Look at this 'Atmospheric CO2 has not increased in 150 years ' the headline says.

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-f ... -150-years

Okay. Do you or other readers believe that ? Is it true ? If it's not true, who might have an interest in saying that ? Maybe big oil and big coal, and the owners of the big media companies ?

Of course, it *might* be true, but if it was a lie, would the people passing it on also be liars, or just falling for a con trick ?

Let's have a look for the source. Here it is. It turns out that the scientist who wrote the paper didn't say what the report says.
He's interviewed by a journalist ( before the report became twisted and spun by the denialists ) and explicitly says that it does not support the denialist viewpoint. But they took the abstract and distorted the meaning, and spread it around, as a propaganda exercise to mislead the general reader. That's what's immoral, and unethical, and extremely dangerous too, because we all need to know the truth about the predicament that we are in, re climate change.

So, if you, Pumpy, or anyone else, helps to spread what IMO is clearly disinformation, I'm going to tell you you're wrong. I have no choice, or else I'd be colluding with the bad guys and acting immorally myself. If I treated you too roughly, whilst making my points, I do apologize, and hope you are clear now, as to what my position is. Okay ?

“Basically, Bristol University scientist Knorr has discovered that the proportion of CO2 being absorbed by natural ‘sinks’ (i.e. the oceans and forests) has stayed roughly the same, despite the amount of carbon being emitted shooting up.

The implication is that we have more time to address climate change than some believe because more carbon has been absorbed than previously thought.

But Dr Knorr is adamant that we must still adress climate change, and favours mandatory caps on emissions. I ask him if that’s what we need to do and he says, “There is no other way”.

But I was aware this story would generate a lot of coverage suggesting the research supports climate change denial, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. I think when the nationals get hold of this (probably tomorrow) it’ll go into overdrive.
So here is an interview in which I ask Dr Knorr specifically whether his research backs up climate sceptics. (He says no, if you can’t listen to it)”

http://jonesthenews.wordpress.com/2009/ ... ge-denial/

[JohnB]

This topic isn't really getting anywhere, and is causing a lot of bad feeling. Although it's important to know what the problems are, permaculture is about finding solutions, and is what we should be discussing on this forum. If it was one of many topics being discussed at the same time it wouldn't be so bad, but all other discussion seems to have dried up. There are plenty of other forums out there where people can scratch each others eyes out fighting over climate change, so I'm going to lock this topic now.