Here’s a photo of a famous Permaculture person. Can you guess who it is? He was photographed with this shovel back in 1956 at the age of two. He is wearing a child restraint belt usually attached to a long cord as was customary in those days to prevent him from running away to play in the dirt. But he did run away to Australia. He will soon be appearing in a new Soils DVD – but with a bigger shovel….

In a warming world pests migrate and flourish in previously inpenetrable habitats and latitudes.

Of course there are obvious problems with Frank’s position here – like what happens when your subsistence gets washed away by some other unpredicted AGW shitstorm.

As ever, Permaculture looks straight into the heart of things.

Further Reading:

• The Gospel of Consumption

Loaded dice and extra spots, courtesy of DotEarth.

Whilst the Russians learn to live without buckwheat and displaced people are poised for land-struggles in Central Africa, boffins crack the wheat genome, which promises to keep us trying the same industrial scale thing for ever. And how will we fuel this ever expanding industrial agriculture sector? Hmm, maybe.

BAA propose to compost food waste – who’d have thunk it?

The UK Gov’t backtracks on cast iron commitments to environmental performance standards to make space for more dirty coal.

I can’t help thinking it’s a sweetener to bring the big energy companies on board for the stalled nuclear programme. Investors won’t commit unless the taxpayer guarantees their profits and underwrites the decommissioning costs.

Public debt for private profit, without so much as a mention of consumer restraint – all sounds depressingly familiar.

Russian president Medvedev puts unprecedented weather conditions down to Climate Change. The potential impacts on food supplies of this sort of occurrence are pretty clear.

Further Reading:

• The Biology of Global Warming
• Rising Temperatures Raise Food Prices
• The Looming Food Crisis and the 2030 Report
• The Food Crisis: “A Perfect Storm” – and How to Turn the Tide
• Orchestrating Famine – a Must-Read Backgrounder on the Food Crisis
• A Call to Large Scale Earth Healing and Lessons from the Loess Plateau (Video)
• Carbon Trading Under Scrutiny
• Carbon Trading – and What Should Be on the Negotiating Table at Copenhagen

Some time ago the National Geographic did a piece on the connection between the introduction of caffeinated drinks into Europe and the Industrial Revolution.

It’s hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn’t exist. – National Geographic

If this is so, then, of course, my incessantly wandering mind must put two and two together. If caffeine was an essential ingredient to bring about the Industrial Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution brought about widespread environmental destruction and climate change, then… that’s it… caffeine is bringing us to the brink of disaster!

Electricity, combined with caffeine, keeps us up late at night – when in pre-industrial times it would have been lights out hours ago. We’re no longer ‘burning the candle at both ends’, but rather the coal-fired power station that lights our homes and powers our televisions through the sunless hours.

And the next day – how does the day begin for most of us? Out of our beds we emerge like the walking dead from a B-grade zombie movie, until we reach for our kick-start-in-a-cup, and begin the cycle again.

Caffeine not only fueled the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution and caffeine together saw the demise of the siesta – the mid-afternoon power-nap that was common in many parts of the world, including northern Europe.

And here’s another misunderstanding about siestas. It’s not really a Mediterranean invention – it’s just that those southern European countries have had the good sense to preserve the tradition.

Before the industrial revolution and fixed working hours, it would have been perfectly normal in northern Europe for people to take an afternoon sleep…. – BBC

We’ve written about factory farming several times on this site, and how our industry attempts at efficiency are back-firing in disease. Our industrial mindset takes a biological creature, like a chicken, and puts it into an industrial setting – trying to… er… squeeze out the maximum ‘widgets per chicken-hour’ (in this case, eggs) as possible. We treat the animal like a machine, and when it doesn’t operate as we want, we pump it with drugs until it does. It’s unnatural, and it’s unhealthy.

In a similar way, it’s interesting how we, also a biological creature, are applying this same template to ourselves – patterning ourselves after the machines we’ve created. Our economy is about widgets per man-hour, mathematics, and supposed efficiency. We’re bending our body’s biological clock to fit a schedule dictated by a mechanical clock on the wall, and we’re the only creatures on the planet to do so. Recent studies are proving that our bodies know best.

To reverse environmental degradation, won’t we need to slow down?

While you guys are rolling this around in your mind and thinking how to comment on this, I’m going to go and have forty winks, and come back at peak efficiency.

Zzzz……..

The Uk may have to import waste to burn as it builds more incinerators than we can use, whilst waste pickers in the majority world – the poorest of the poor – complain that their livelihoods as recyclers are being destroyed by incineration plans. Oh – and there’s a car that runs on shit.

With phyloplankton levels crashing and the whole marine food chain going belly-up, perhaps marine life should follow this whale’s example, and be a bit more pro-active.

Greenpeace shut down 50 BP flagged petrol station franchises in London in order to apply pressure on the incoming CEO, Bo Diddley, er… I mean Bob Dudley, as his predecessor heads for Siberia. I can’t see him giving a tuppenny shite, personally. He’s got a whole planet to fry and his paradigms ain’t for shifting.

Nice try though.