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What Might Buildings, Settlements and Even Regions Look Like Through the Lens of Permaculture Design? Part 2

September 11, 2018

WHAT MIGHT BUILDINGS, SETTLEMENTS AND EVEN REGIONS LOOK LIKE THROUGH THE LENS OF PERMACULTURE DESIGN? PART 2

This is part 2 of 2 of a transcript of a talk given by Paul Jennings to the recent SBUK Big Straw Bale Gathering. Paul has built his straw-bale family home on a ‘One-Planet Development’ smallholding in Wales (costing £12,000).

You can read part 1 in this link.

PERMACULTURE PRINCIPLES AND BUILDINGS:

Site design improves building function. Working from patterns of landscape design and land use, we work to details, like how our buildings fit into the landscape. From pattern to details is a technique of nesting one pattern or design in another, a higher order system. For example: a bioregional pattern to localities; localities to site developments; site landscape developments to buildings, gardens or orchards; house to conservatory; conservatory to watering system or composting process; watering system to plant species choice or gardening practice.

Credit: Paul Jennings

Hopefully then, you’ll see that design of good buildings, the sort which we might readily call “ecological”, cannot really begin with just building design. By definition the ecological must be linked in a complex web of relationships to both higher and lower order systems. If ecology is your thing (and it should be your thing) then the short phrase which is your house makes no sense unless combined in a sentence which refers both to landscape and how you deal with your bodily wastes, or what you use to clean your worktops, or how much of your own food you grow.

So let’s place our buildings in an understood and designed landscape where windbreaks reduce our energy needs, and where zonal design reduces work and helps us to create self-sustaining abundant household and settlement economies of the sort we are going to need.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Energy Transition: Too Little, Too Late

December 10, 2017

The Energy Transition: Too Little, Too Late

The idea of the energy transition (“energiewende” in German) originated in the 1980s and gained legislative support in Germany in 2010. The idea is good and also technically feasible. But it requires sacrifices and, at present, sacrifices are politically unthinkable since most people don’t realize how critical the situation really is. What we are doing for the transition seems to be is too little and too late. 

So, how are we doing with the energy transition? Can we eliminate fossil fuels from the world’s energy system? Can we do it before it is too late to avoid the disasters that climate change and resource depletion will bring to us if we continue with business as usual? The debate is ongoing and it sometimes it goes out of control as in the case of the controversy between the group of Professor Jacobsen at and that of Professor Clack which even generated a lawsuit for slander.

As usual, the debate is often based on qualitative consideration: on one side we see plenty of naive optimism (“let’s go solar, rah, rah!”), on the other, we have pure statements of disbelief (“renewables will never be able to…..”).

But science is based on quantitative evaluations and we have plenty of data that should permit us to do better than playing the game of the clash of absolutes. This is what we did, myself and my coworker Sgouris Sgouridis, in a paper that was recently published on “Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality” and titled “In Support of a Physics-Based Energy Transition Planning: Sowing Our Future Energy Needs”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Latest Threats To Global Energy Security

March 17, 2015

The Latest Threats To Global Energy Security

The vast global network of energy infrastructure is, for all intents and purposes, a living, breathing organism. And like other organisms, it’s full of vulnerabilities. Across all sectors and at every point in the supply chain, physical – and of course cyber – weaknesses pose serious threats to the functionality and reliability of vital energy systems.

Just how vulnerable is the global energy system? It’s a difficult question to answer. Weather-related outages in the US alone are estimated to cost between $18 billion and $33 billion annually. Direct theft of oil and gas is harder to quantify – in Nigeria it’s a $1.5 billion a month business; and in Mexico millions of barrels disappear every year. What we can do is identify some pressure points moving forward. Broadly, they can be divided into three categories: production, transportation, and distribution. In the interest of time, climate preparedness – a worthy category on its own – will be largely left for discussion another day.

Security of supply is the defining principle behind each of these categories, but perhaps more so the first two. How secure is our global supply from a production and transportation standpoint? Generally speaking, quite secure, but the grey area is large enough and sufficiently unpredictable to warrant a closer look.

Let’s begin with some of the more tangible issues facing energy transportation before turning our attention to production. Practically speaking, no method is perfect, and most present more than a handful of issues.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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