Kunstler is best known for his non-fiction book, The Long Emergency, a disquieting exploration of what might eventuate when the world passes through the peak of oil and other critical resource production and goes into shortage. His scenario is that the cities become unviable and life devolves to small town rural living. World Made by Hand is a fictional exploration of that world as lived in one small town.

The story follows the main character through a hot summer some time after the oil peak and following a major conflict in the Middle East in which the US was involved. Washington and Los Angeles have been destroyed by terrorist nukes and central government has broken down. Armed gangs are on the loose and people are on the move. There has been inter-ethnic conflict between white and black as well as with hispanics. The town is fortunate as it is out of the way of most of this chaos, though the inhabitants also suffer for their isolation as they have little news of what is happening anywhere else. Kunstler speculation on post-apocalyptic living in the small town is reported through the lives of the lead and supporting characters, which includes members of a Christian religious sect that moves into the abandoned town school.

The book opens gently and picturesquely with the main character and a friend walking home from a fishing trip to the river. It follows with a description of recent history leading to the present situation then follows the main character through his relationship with two townswomen and his appointment as mayor. This leads to the two challenging incidents of the book, the rescue of a number of townsmen from imprisonment by the dictatorial leader of a river trading town and the bringing of justice to the authoritarian and violent leader of nearby settlement that lives off salvage. These provide the action highlights needed to counterpoint the descriptions of life and economy, Kunstler’s explorations of a world that continues to use federal currency though at local valuation and mixes this with barter.

The title of the book comes from a statement of one of the religious sect and refers to the reliance on manual skills and tools in a time when the energy and maintenance infrastructure required by power tools and machinery is no longer present.

Post-apocalypitic writing

This scenario cements the book in the post-apocalypse genre of speculative fiction of which there are numerous examples spanning the good to garbage. The value of this genre is that it engages in reflection on our present society and its vulnerabilities and speculates about how people would adapt without our existing infrastructure.

The book draws on a vein, a tradition perhaps, of apocalyptic thinking that is prevalent more in the US than anywhere else. Much peak oil literature belongs in the genre because it forecasts societal doom and downplays creative adaptation. This especially so in the US where peak oilers have proposed building fortified rural retreats in which to sit out the chaos they expect. Both the genre and the peak oilers reinforce the notion that the veneer of civilization is rather thin spread in the US and that the society would be likely to devolve into social chaos without a great deal of provocation.

Techno-collapse

Kunstler’s world is, of course, one without cars. Highways and roads have become walkways for people and the dominant form of transport other than walking, which is horse and carriage. The roads are quickly falling into disrepair, the paved surfaces disintegrating and becoming overgrown. But what about bicycles? They figure prominently in imaginings of a post-peak oil future, bit in Kunstler’s world these too have disappeared as they rely on a manufacturing industry no longer working and on the supply of rubber for tyres, an imported resource no longer available.

Electricity still exists but only for very limited and unreliable periods, and it seems to be on it’s way out. It is unclear in the book where it comes from. There is infrequent, limited radio broadcasting from locations undisclosed but it carries only ranting religious preachers and nothing useful like news. Lighting comes from candles. Flu and other diseases have swept through the region and the town resulting in a population decline, and medical supplies have fallen back onto the herbal and salvage.

This is a salvage society living off the pickings of technological civilisation. Such a situation cannot endure indefinitely and it would be necessary to develop replacement materials. Skills such as carpentry (the lead character is a builder), farming and food processing to produce preserves are those in need and agriculture is the dominant activity for most people living around the town.

Without modern agricultural technology, plant pests and diseases take on a frightening potential and a clearly a concern. There are hints of climate change through the story and the summer of the story is a particularly warm one and indicative of a trend. One of the large farms, more enterprising than the others, has attracted people to live and work on it and has taken on the quasi-plantation structure once common in the southern states of the US. This, one of the characters describes as serfdom.

Dialogue is kept simple and draws on traditional rural American styles of speech. The characters are believable and you get the idea that Kunstler has deliberately used stereotypical personality types for the preachers and other characters, though he shows the members of the religious sect to be subject to human vulnerabilities too.

In it’s description of isolated rural life lived day-to-day, the book reminds me of another title I once picked up and read, Son of Heaven by David Wingrove. This is set in the UK and follows post-apocalyptic life in a remote rural village following the deliberate collapse of modern civilisation through manipulation of the global online trading system. A couple decades after collapse, the Chinese arrive to colonise the UK and other nations. In its pre-Chinese period this, too, is a salvage civilization complete with local trading networks and dangers from roving, marauding bandits, something that is a distinct possibility in a world in which the infrastructure of modern society has gone.

Sobering reading — think twice

For those peak oilers and others who look forward to a post-hi-tech world, Kunstler’s book is sobering reading in that it shows that such a world is one of personal and societal uncertainty with the return of old diseases and a general lack of ability to treat disease, added to the great potential for crime in the absence if any state enforcement of law and order. Food security would be a continuing challenge because, in the circumstances, it calls for production of a nutritionally balanced diet that is far removed from what is practiced in home gardens.

In the writing around a post-peak oil scenario, it has been speculated that society would revert to something like that of the mid-nineteenth century and that manufacturing would be craft rather than machine based. It pays to realise, though, that rural centers are affected by the loss of the urban markets that they rely on. Kunstler’s town of Albany is appropriately situated on the river at a time when longer distance road transport is problematic due to lack of road maintenance, and the river has become the highway for the transport of tradable goods. Reading this, you can’t help but recall the role of the Mississippi and of the steam paddlewheelers that carried goods and people along its liquid highway, tying together the towns and cities of that place at that time in US history. Mark Twain’s world emerges as a model for Kunstler’s.

While post-apocalyptic rural life, with the population reduced due to displacement and disease, is sometimes painted in more glowing terms in the genre, the decline of rural civilization following the collapse of Imperial Rome shows that when the cities go so does the countryside. Civilization folds into itself and becomes parochial, communication is cut, knowledge and skills are lost as is the sense of security that comes with a functioning state. A new dark age of subsistence and technological and educational statis comes about.

In his book, Future Scenarios, David Holmgren takes the reader through a post-peak-oil civilization struggling with the impacts of climate change and resource depletion. David’s, too, is a salvage civilization living off the manufactured materials of technological society and returning food production to what presently are the suburbs. A salvage civilization is a transitional civilization, however, as even tehno-society’s leftovers will fall into short supply and degrade, with no replacement possible. Such a society has to be on the way to something else, and the hope is that it is not a new dark age.

The difference with David’s society is that it follows an orderly shift into it’s low-energy future, however we must also entertain the idea that a new age of scarcity will be one of sometimes violent conflict. Many would presumably flee the city with it’s collapsing water, energy, transportation and medical infrastructure for the country, but would they be welcomed by rural townspeople and farmers? Probably not. Such a scenario is only viable where societal collapse has obliterated laws about land ownership and urban refugees can engage in subsistence farming where they can acquire the skills.

It’s no secret that ours is a technology-based civilisation as have all of humanity’s cultures. This made interesting a video clip on the UK Transition towns website that asked some of those involved in that movement, including it’s main spokesperson, Rob Hopkins, what technologies they would like to retain in the event of a partial post-peak-oil wind down of society. They could have three of their own choosing. Two that came up a number of times were the bicycle and the internet, suggesting that communication is a valued benefit of modern society. Both are multiple pulse technologies and it is this that creates their value. The video didn’t ask the question, but it’s worth asking anyway—how can we move to a lower energy consumption society and retain these hi-tech things we value? That, I believe, is something worth thinking about.

Clearly, modern societies with a higher degree of social coherence would fare better than super-competitive societies in the collapse described in Kunstler’s book.

Being a speculative book about a world few of us have experienced makes Kunstler’s World Made by Hand a worthwhile read for those who wonder what would happen were civilization to collapse.

What of their future?

Now that you know how the world got to its situation, the book leaves you wondering how things went in that little town in north eastern North America in the years after that hot summer. Was a national government reestablished? There were rumours about the existence of such a government through the book, though one without power or presence, and in which city it was supposedly based remained mere speculation. You get the idea that, in a situation with limited communication, stories of even a weak national government were rumours. Rumours are what you get when there is no reliable communcation. Then there are the other questions that come to mind. Did the existing, river-based trading network grow after the Albany despot was deposed? Did the religious group come to dominate the town… there were signs of tension between some townspeople and the newly-arrived group.

Did the occasional printed news sheets continue to travel along that river-based trading/communications network and did they help to recreate a broader, cohesive culture and open up the isolation of the town? Was the remaining radio broadcast capacity wrested from the religious and repurposed for news and useful information to assist the scattered communities develop their essential services and to rebuild a regional culture?

The book…

I obtained my copy of World Made by Hand from the Amazon Kindle digital books website and downloading the iPad version. I know buying books that way does little to support local booksellers (which is why they propose taxing book imports of this type but don’t look to their own maintenance of high book prices in a protected market as driving people to internet markets) but the book was very cheap and, unlike ordering a paper book and waiting weeks and weeks for it to be brought into the country if there are no local supplies, as there often are not, I could start reading it within a minute of pressing the download button. In a world made by hand, however, such convenience would be a distant memory.

It was less Dreyfus’ name than another that attracted my attention to this recently re-released book—that of someone called Julian Assange. Assange, who has been in the news a bit during these early months of 2011, did much if the research for the book. You can imagine how that might have prepared him for his recent exploits.

The publisher’s move in re-releasing the title shows that someone in the industry has some marketing savvy, and the prominent display of the publication in Kinokuniya bookstore near Town Hall indicates the presence of some like minded person there too, and that’s pertinent now that booksales are nosediving.

The first generation

Dreyfus and Assange’s book explores the world of the first generation of youthful computer hackers from the late 1980s into the 1990s. The latter years of that period were the time that governments in Australia, the UK and the USA introduced laws against hacking and it was the application of these laws that saw many of this generation of hackers end up in court.

This is an Australian book and it is interesting to see how the Australian courts dealt with those hackers, none of whom ended up in prison. It also follows the trials of US and UK hackers and it becomes clear that there was quite a divergence of thought between the courts and the agencies pursuing the hackers through the digital underground, agencies such as the Australian Federal Police.

For the hackers, their all-night activities were more of a game. Most entered and explored computer systems and had an ethic against doing damage. These were—for the most part—look and see adventures with the hacking into supposedly secure systems the reward. And which computers were hacked? Banks, corporations including computer manufacturers, the US military, NASA and even the systems of computer security experts which, for the hackers, were the prize sites.

The subtext of the book is about how monolithic institutions like government and corporations react to technological changes. This is usually through law—if they don’t easily comprehend what’s going on they usually make it illegal, and it’s the excessive nature of those laws that the book emphasizes. In the final chapter, the writer proposes that look-and-see hacking be reduced to a minor offense so as to separate it from hackers who would trash systems and from those who hack to make a living from industrial espionage.

Corporate fears

Corporations panic at the prospect of being hacked because they fear their marketing strategies and new products will be harvested and sold to competitors.

That’s a valid fear in these days when there is a black market for trade secrets and I can understand their horror of being hacked. Figures on the frequency of hacking, whether for look-and-see or for industrial espionage, are hard to come by because hacked corporations don’t want to divulge their vulnerability as this could have serious commercial consequences.

Government as hacker

What’s muddying further what are already murky digital waters is the role of government hackers—strange, isn’t it, that governments should take up the very tools that they so decry. This was revealed by the alleged break in to Google’s Chinese system by Chinese government hackers and attempts to penetrate US military and government systems. Then there was the hacking of Iran’s nuclear refinement centrifuges that temporarily set back it’s nuclear program, presumably an act of the Israeli or US government. Hacking is rapidly becoming the weapon of choice.

Of concern to military planners is penetration of their systems by trojans and worms that conceal themselves digitally and sleep until woken by their controllers when there is a conflict. Then they can do a lot of damage to military plans. This was realised by one of the hackers in Dreyfus’ book when he hacked a US military telephone exchange. We don’t know if any such digital sleeper have been discovered but you can bet system administrators actively hunt for them because their existence is so potentially damaging.

Dreyfus and Assange’s book is written in a fast paced style more like you would expect from a novel, and this makes it hard to put down. It introduces the technical elements of hacking without reading like a book for nerds.

The fate of hackers

What’s interesting is where some of these hackers have ended up. Some experienced mental health problems associated with their work but most recovered. Now, those pioneers of the digital underground are working mainly in the computer industry, some, curiously, in computer security. Here, their experience provided an excellent training ground that put them ahead of security experts who learned their trade by more orthodox means.

But what of the new generation of hackers? The author reports that they have not been discouraged by anti-hacking laws but, as a result of those laws, they are far more secretive and technically savvy.

So they are still out there, the hackers, tapping at their keyboard late into the night, poking and prodding and slipping subtly into the systems of the world’s corporations and governments where they unknowingly rub digital shoulders with unsavory characters such as industrial spies and assorted government hackers. The digital is a strange world where the illegal collides with the quasi-legal.

I like receiving mystery packages providing they don’t tick. Thus, it was with anticipation that I opened this most recent parcel, postmarked South Australia, and found it to contain a rectangular object. Realising this was a DVD (you can tell by the round shiny thing inside the case), I slid it into my Mac’s disk slot and discovered it was about an orchard… about a particular kind of orchard. Watching it, it dawned on me that this was the work of a particularly notorious Adelaide gang of freerangers, but more on this gang later and its links to another media product of Adelaide’s urban food subculture.

Some of us benighted residents of Australia’s most populated and productive state wonder why it is that Sydney is usually the last in line when it comes to community initiatives. Several theories have been developed around this, but they are not for this article because they are too depressing for local people.This DVD that arrived in the mail merely reconfirmed our perceptions about our city.

Why was this so? Well, Sydney has tried but it has so far failed to develop an enterprise like this orchard described in the DVD. That’s because it is a special sort of orchard… an urban orchard… the Urban Orchard.

Pleasing it was to discover that those Adeladians didn’t invent the Urban Orchard. Melbourinians are responsible for that which, for any patriotic NSWelchperson, only makes it all that more depressing. Adelaide, after all, is further away down on the southern shoreline and people are less likely to notice that city developing something ahead of Sydney. Intercity rivalry aside, it has to be admitted that the two far southern capitals have achieved much when it comes to their Urban Orchards.

Urban Orchard is a…

So what is an Urban Orchard? It’s a food swap. You grow too many lemons, so why not swap them for other edibles at your Urban Orchard market. It’s about the power of bartering… apples for asparagus, carrots for capsicum. It’s simple, but for a monetary economy, it’s profound.

Watching the Urban Orchard video was like watching a cavalcade of friends and colleagues… there was Joel Catchlove who is doing outstanding work advocating for local, South Australian food and the future of the Adelaide region’s small farmers. Just to show that someone attached to Adelaide’s Fiends of the Earth can inhabit the social mainstream, he’s formed a relationship with the new Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Then there’s Jeremy Nettle, another regional food systems advocate. And there’s Kate Hubmayer, Black Forest primary’s education-in-the-school-kitchen-garden maven and contact for the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network. What surprised me was that (Dr) Harry Harrison of Adelaide’s Rare Fruit Societywas missing in the video. But you can’t have all of this innovative mob at once, I guess.

The video takes you though how Urban Orchard operates and, if you live outside of Adelaide or Melbourne, leaves you wondering how it is that your city doesn’t have one. The video traces the history of food production and gathering on the Adelaide Plains from the time of the Kaurna Aboriginal nation to the present day, and visiting productive home gardens of the past, the video features Phil Bagust, co-author of The Native Plants of Adelaide, Phil Dixon from the Living Kaurna Cultural Centre and Friends of the Earth’s Jeremy Nettle.

Then, there’s a minor disjunction as the Urban Orchard crew descend below a railway bridge and enter the murky world of a city creekline infested with what some would call weeds and others call food. Being Adelaide, there’s no water in the creek but that’s beside the point, for it is what grows on the banks that is interesting.

Which brings us to something that this gang or urban freerangers produced in the time before the Urban Orchard. I discovered it and got one when in Adelaide for last year’s Paddock To Plate conference on the future of food. Then, I misplaced it – easy to do given the size of the thing – and only recently rediscovered it squashed between a couple of books. This hand written production sits comfortable in the palm of the hand between the fingers and wrist, and its link to the Urban Orchard video is a prickly one.

Here’s the link. The video shows the freerangers – including one of their young children – traversing the matted vegetation of an Adelaide creekline and harvesting the fruit of Opuntia. And that tiny handwritten microbook is on the same topic – how to understand, harvest and cook the same species. And Opuntia? For those whose education did not include urban food foraging, the title of the microbook gives it away – The Gentle Pleasures of the Prickly Pear. Yes, the spiky, flat-bladed prickly pear that few know as a food, unless they are Mexicans. It turns out, Jeremy explains in the video, that this plant – its oblong, spiky ‘leaf’ and its red flower so reviled by bush regenerators and other plant ethnonationalists, is a culinary delight. Now, that rally is weed to wok.

Urban Orchard is a wonderful melange of edible ideas… food for the swapping and food for the finding. So, how would you use the 32 minutes of this video (apart from watching it for the pleasure of the sheer exuberance of people who set up something so simple yet so timely as a food swap, and who hunt the elusive Opuntia in its native habitat of Adelaide’s urban creekline)? Unlike many food issue videos, Urban Orchard is not so long that you don’t have time for a structured conversation around the topic after showing it to a group. It’s presentation is light and enthusing and skilled educators will be able to draw out pertinent themes for later discussion.

Adelaide might be at the bottom of the continent in a map makers sense, but when it comes to innovations in community food, it’s right there at the top thanks to that bunch of freerangers wandering around the city’s urban creeklines and setting up productive community places where your excess production of food can be swapped. To paraphrase Bill Mollison, Urban Orchard is a proven way to turn consumers into producers.

An Urban Orchard. A film by Joel Catchlove and Jeremy Nettle, edited by Simon Gray.
Order from: Friends of the Earth Adelaide
$20.00 postage included.

Rosemary Morrow

She had been at a course in something called ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, which is a process that has something to do with strategic planning for organisations and that is based on systems thinking. She told me that the process focuses on what is right with an organisation or its activities and builds on that, rather than focusing on what goes wrong.  ‘What we focus on grows’, says the course’s handout.

Maybe this is the way to think about Gary’s video, I thought. If so, then what is it that is right with the image it presents of Rosemary’s work, what aspects of it can we focus on to improve our own work? And if it is to be built upon by people involved in international development and in the permaculture design system of which Rosemary is a well-experienced practitioner, then what lessons does her experience as documented in the film offer us?

I was aware that having known Rosemary for quite some years my opinion might be a little biased. I was also aware that the setting for the film, Afghanistan, is the pointy end of what US writer, Samuel Huntington, describes as the ‘clash of civilisations’, the clash between cultures he said would emerge following the ending of the Cold War. I thought that using my own experience in international development, in the South Pacific and mainly the Solomon Islands might be a useful filter in defining learnings of use to those involved or planning to be involved in such work.

Permaculture and Rosemary

Rosemary and permaculture design are closely coupled. She teaches the skills of the design system and has done so in Vietnam, Cambodia and Africa as well as in Australia. She wrote The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture which I had the pleasure of launching in her home town of Katoomba.

“Permaculture offers people skills they can do”, Rosemary says in the film, explaining that if people can grow food then “ ..they can go on to do other things”. This truth was defined by Abraham Maslow in his well known heirarchy of needs when he put food and water as being among the basic survival requirements that people must have before they can go on to improve their lives. The others are personal security, health, appropriate clothing for the climate and shelter. It is these things that are conspicuously missing in Afghanistan.

Permaculture has its own code of ethics and so does Rosemary. Perhaps it’s not going too far to say that they coincide remarkably. According to Rosemary, both individuals and organisations need such a code to guide their work in the world.

Social permaculture — the key to self-help

So, this Appreciative Inquiry stuff about improving the work of our organisations and ourselves by building on what it is that we are doing right — what could I see in the film that Rosemary was doing that came across as positive, as ‘right’?

My own bias influenced the first thing that came across about her work. In my years as a permaculture educator, advocate and commentator I have noticed that the design system is good at doing physical things but less good at doing things involving working with people and the social side of design. I generalise, of course, and recognise the people/social skills work of people like Robina McCurdy and Robyn Clayfield.

So it was heartening to hear Rosemary talking about ‘social permaculture’, a topic we have discussed briefly in the past. She says that social permaculture is as relevant in Australia as it is in Afghanistan and I believe she is right.

Essentially, social permaculture is about social design, working with people to improve their ability to organise themselves to achieve their goals and to gain useful skills in the process of doing so.

In Afghanistan, Rosemary’s social permaculture was about building the capacity of the NGO (non-government development organisation) she was working for, Mahboba’s Promise, to carry out its work of supporting war widows and their families and working with internally displaced people, mainly children. Capacity building, as it’s known in international development-speak, or social permaculture in Rosemary’s words, is a means of assisting the NGO to do its people-care work more effectively so that people can manage their own future.

Another reason I found affinity with Rosemary’ approach to doing permaculture is that her social permaculture is not unlike my own work for local government in assisting new community food garden teams make a start. The lesson for me in this is that developing effective working relationships is essential to achieving other goals.

No cult-of-permaculture-hero

What else is there in Gary Caginoff’s film that is the sort of positive thing that could be used to improve the work of individuals within the permaculture design system?

I thought about this after watching the video and realised that there is something missing in Gary’s film just as there is something missing in Rosemary’ personality. It is something that from time to time creeps into permaculture when people go out to work in lesser-developed countries, especially when they do this solo, offering workshops here and there then moving on.

So what is it that is missing? It’s ego, or ego of the wrong type. Despite all her work in Australia and overseas, Rosemary does not come across as a ‘permaculture hero’, a saviour bringing ‘the knowledge’ to those less fortunate. Although not so common now in permaculture circles, the gung-ho ‘hero’ image harks back to the bad old days of international development when the ‘expert’ descended upon village communities to bless them with the knowledge of how to do things and then left them to work it out for themselves.

Rosemary might not be a gung-ho permaculture hero but over the years she has taken the ‘hero’s journey’ in the Jungian sense of the term by journeying out from her everyday life in Australia to modestly offer her skills where people might need them. In doing so, she has overcome fears and challenges and transformed herself through gaining insight into her own essence and that of other peoples, then sharing what she has learned with others on her return. It is in this sharing that Rosemary’s meeting with film producer Gary Caginoff has been fortuitous because the medium he is expert in has made Rosemary’ insights available to all with electricity and a video player or computer. If you were of superstitious frame of mind you might say that their meeting was synchronicity rather than accident.

While Rosemary has more than enough accomplishments to claim the status of permaculture hero, thankfully it is Rosemary’s modesty that is most impressive and refreshing.

Meet the producer

That’s Rosemary. What about producer Gary Caginoff?

Gary has Lysis Films, his own production house in Katoomba. It was he who produced A Good Home Forever, Rosemary’s story of how she retrofitted her house for energy efficiency.

The Garden at the End of the World is a far different film whose mood is set with the opening images of mountains and mist accompanied by singing in the traditional style. It continues in this steady, measured pace for its duration, without dramatic bursts of activity and energy.

You get the sense that Gary has a feeling for landscape as the venue in which life is carried out from the images where he slowly pans the camera across vistas of mountain and plain. Another sense you get is that he uses the video camera like a stills camera to capture portraits of people. Young and old, they appear though the film looking to camera as if gazing directly at the viewer. This adds to the film’s power.

All of this could lead to describing Gary’s production as a ‘visual’ film in which Rosemary’s pieces to camera and scenes of her sitting talking with children in the orphanage, intercut with reportage footage of conflict, provide counterpoint.

Return

Good stories often have return and reflection written into them. Rosemary’s time in Afghanistan was a return to her past.

We learn in the film that Rosemary had come this way — through Afghanistan  — in 1975. The few years around that period, from the late 1960s to the ill-fated Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, was a unique time when people made journeys that are no longer possible. Off they set from London in van, old bus, truck or on foot hitching to venture down through Turkey and across Asia to their fabled destination, Kathmandu.

It was an escape from Western civilistion as much as it was an escape into the world for a generation searching for something different to what industrial society could offer. The route is well described in Rory Maclean’s Magic Bus — on the hippie trail from Instanbul to India (2007, Penguin Books, UK), a documentary travelogue by the writer who traversed the trail 30 years later. It was heartening to know Rosemary had been somewhere on that trail in its heyday.

Now, that overland trail is no more. Borders have closed. Wars have intervened.

A undercurrent of dilemma

This is not a political film. It is critical of all protagonists that have brought war to this country these past 21 years — the Soviets, the Taliban and assorted warlords, the present intervention by NATO-led forces. All have left the country in ruins, in what Gary Caginoff describes as a “political, social and environmental nightmare”.

As a production about a remarkable woman and the NGO, Mahboba’s Promise, the film does not delve into the dilemma that is presented by Afganistan’s potential future although the scenes of ruined buildings that permeate the production are a constant reminder of this. Yet, watching the film, this dilemma resurfaces in mind and Gary, in describing the history of big power rivalry in the region, reminds us of it.

What is this dilemma with Afghanistan that runs as a constant anxiety in the background of today’s big powers? It is this. Were Afghanistan again to fall to the Taliban, Pakistan could be destabilised (given the complicity of that country’s intelligence service in past support for the Taliban and the presence of Taliban in the country) and, were an allied force to gain control, they would find themselves with nuclear capability. What would the US do in these circumstances? More pressing, what would nuclear armed India do given the history of Indian-Pakistani conflict? Would they seek negotiation? Stand by and watch? Or would they perceive a great danger and act? And would that acting be more than diplomacy? Would India act by taking out Pakistani nuclear weapon capability, presumably with conventional weapons, but could it go nuclear? If either of the latter, how would the Islamic world react?

This is the potential nightmare both the US and India are well aware of, especially given the recent resurgence in Taliban activity. It is not explicit in the film, but if you have followed trends in the region, it might be implicit.

How to use this video

Gary’s story of Rosemary and Mahboba’s Promise would be useful as the centrepoint of a group discussion around international development and the role of the permaculture design system in it.

Focus questions in a discussion could be about what permaculture has to offer peoples in circumstances such as those found in Afghanistan; how social permaculture could be improved to increase its effectiveness; now that aid workers are targetted by combatants, how could their personal securty be improved; which of Rosemary’s experiences and insights could be of use in Australia?

This is a film that is both a documentary and a travelogue of a journey through a ruined land. It is stark in its contrasts of the impacts of war with the everyday lives of people trying to create new lives, of ruined city and the bare beauty of the mountains, of the conditions in the country and the efforts of one woman small of stature but big of goodness in doing her small part to put things right.

The film ends with one of Gary’s video-come-stills-images. Seen through a window, a young girl sits in a room. Outside stands a bicycle. It is raining. I think it was the rain that raised in me a sense of hope that something really will rise from the chaos of this unfortunate country, that just as the rain nourishes the soil and the plants that grow in it and the animals that graze upon them, so too will the work of Rosemary Morrow and Mahboba’s Promise create new lives for Afghanistan’s people. Is this too much to ask or hope for?

I asked at the start of this review what it was that was right, that was positive about the film that viewers could focus on to make their work in the world all that better. Now I have the answer. It is the example that, no matter where we are, we can take those small steps to make life better for those around us. These can be modest things like the capacity building that Rosemary describes as social permaculture… and other little things that we can do.

In writing this the words of TS Elliot, about how experience can change perceptions of the everyday, come to mind. His words, I realise now, are about that ‘hero’s journey’ I mentioned before, a journey we can undertake wherever we are simply by finding the courage to take that first step beyong the familiar and the comfortable. The words are something that The Garden at the End of the World, in bringing us the tale of Rosemary’s own journey, remind me strongly of. Let’s finish with TS:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Shall be to return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

……………………………………………………………..

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Market Row is a defile in the cityscape that must be all of four to five meters wide. It’s all hard surface here, from the asphalt on the ground and up the buildings which rise abruptly either side to create this artificial urban canyon. Bonafides cafe has taken over this end of the lane and put out seats and a planter box to demark the end of their territory that must get all of a few minutes direct sunlight a day. At the end of the lane people walk by, none even glancing along down here. It is at one of those cafe tables that I sit in the dim morning light, thinking about a book that I have just read—Suelette Dreyfus’ 1997 publication, Underground: tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.
It was less Dreyfus’ name than another that attracted my attention to this recently re-released book—that of someone called Julian Assange. Assange, who has been in the news a bit over these early months of 2011, did much of the research for the book. You can imagine how that might have prepared him for his more recent exploits.
The publisher’s move in re-releasing the book shows that someone in the industry has some marketing savvy, and the prominent display of the publication in Kinokuniya bookstore near Town Hall shows some like minded person there too. That’s important now that booksales are nosediving and bookstores closing.

Hacker—generation 1

Dreyfus and Assange’s book explores the world of the first generation of youthful computer hackers from the late 1980s into the 1990s. The latter years of that period were the time that governments in Australia, the UK and the USA introduced laws against hacking and it was the application of these laws that saw many of this generation of hackers end up in court.
This is an Australian book and it is interesting to see how the Australian courts dealt with those hackers, none of which ended up in prison. It also follows the trials of US and UK hackers and it becomes clear that there was quite a divergence of thought between the courts and the agencies pursuing the hackers through the digital underground, agencies such as the Australian Federal Police.
For the hackers, their all-night activities were more of a game and most of them had an ethic of doing no harm to the systems they penetrated. These were – for the most part—look and see adventures with the hacking into supposedly secure systems the reward. And which computers were hacked? Banks, corporations including computer manufacturers, the US military, NASA and even the systems of computer security experts which, for the hackers, were the prize sites. That these sites were hackable—sites that should have been secure because of the sensitive nature of what they held—raises interesting questions about the security of personal information held by institutions. You could say that the real problem was less the hackers and more those institutions with the systems that were hacked— maybe it’s not going too far to say that they deserved being hacked.

Corporations panic at the prospect of being hacked…

The subtext of the book is about how monolithic institutions like government and corporations react to technological changes. This is usually through law. If governments don’t easily comprehend what’s going on, and the evidence is that their comprehension of digital systems borders on the woeful, they usually make it illegal. It’s the excessive nature of those laws that the book emphasizes. In the final chapter, the writer proposes that look-and-see hacking be reduced to a minor offense so as to separate it from hackers who would trash systems and from those who hack to make a living from industrial espionage.
Corporations panic at the prospect of being hacked because they fear their marketing strategies and new products will be harvested and sold to competitors. That’s a valid fear in these days as there is a black market for trade secrets and I can understand their horror of hacking. Figures on the frequency of hacking, whether for look-and-see or for industrial espionage, are hard to come by because hacked corporations don’t want to divulge their vulnerability as this could have serious commercial consequences in the marketplace.
What’s further muddying what are already murky digital waters is the role of government hackers— strange, isn’t it, that governments should take up the very tools that they so decry—as revealed by the alleged break in to Google’s Chinese system by Chinese government hackers and attempts to penetrate US military and government systems. Then there was the hack of Iran’s nuclear refinement centrifuges that temporarily set back it’s nuclear program, presumably an act of Israeli or US government hackers. For governments, hacking is rapidly becoming the weapon of choice.

many of those pioneers of the digital underground are working in the computer industry…

Of concern to military planners is penetration of their systems by trojans and worms that conceal themselves digitally. These might sleep until woken by their controllers when there is a conflict. Then they can do a lot of damage to military plans. This was realised by one of the hackers in the book when he hacked a US military telephone exchange. We don’t know if any such digital sleeper have been discovered but you can bet system administrators actively hunt for them because their existence is so potentially damaging.
Dreyfus and Assange’s book is written in a fast paced style that reads more like a novel, and this makes it hard to put down. It introduces the technical elements of hacking without reading like a book for nerds.
What’s interesting is where some of these hackers have ended up. While some experienced mental health problems associated with their work, most of those have recovered. Now, many of those pioneers of the digital underground are working in the computer industry, some, curiously, in computer security. Here, their experience provided an excellent training ground that put them ahead of security experts who learned their trade by more orthodox means.
But what of the new generation of hackers? The author reports that they have not been discouraged by anti-hacking laws but, as a result of those laws, they are far more secretive and technically savvy.
So they are still out there, the hackers, tapping the keyboard late into the night, poking and prodding and slipping subtly into the system of the world’s corporations and governments where they unknowingly rub digital shoulders with unsavory characters such as industrial spies and assorted government hackers.

Most of us have at least a working familarity with climate change and its likely consequences, however the peaking of global oil extraction and the impacts that it is likely to bring are less known. Peak oil, as it has become known, is the time at which extraction from economically accessible oil wells reaches its peak. After that, extraction plateaus awhile, then starts to fall below demand. The effect of this will be to boost oil prices and the cost of anything that uses oil in its extraction, manufacture, processing, transportation or consumption. New oil field discoveries, such as those likely to be accessed by deep sea drilling made possible by the retreat of the northern ice cap, will bring temporary relief but are unlikely to affect the downward tend in global production.

Peak oil is not a theory. The US peaked in 1970, Australia in 2000, and the North Sea wells peaked in 1999 — there, production had dropped by 43 percent by 2007. David Holmgren made this point — that peak oil is reality, not theory — while speaking at the Conversations With Authors at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair this year. There is plenty of empirical evidence for the peak. As for the projected price rises as supply falls below global demand for oil, that relationship is basic market economics.

Future Scanarios is more or less a paper version of David’s website of the same name. It’s not a large book in terms of number of pages, but it nonetheless serves as something of a wake-up call for those still in the slumber of an oil saturated present.

Exploring future scenarios

People familiar with David’s reasoning will find much that is familiar in the book. David takes the reader through his four scenarios that range from the consequences of business as usual to futures ranging through green technology, the survivalist ‘lifeboat’ scenario of social desperation that can end only in civilisational collapse, and his preferred scenario that he calls ‘earth stewardship’.

This latter invokes life as decentralised, self-governing towns and communities, with at least a partial abandonment of the cities which are mined for their materials. Life continues in the suburbs, however, though far from its present form. Although he does not go into detail in Future Scenarios, the multi-generational model of suburban conversion that David discussed during his 2006 national tour with US journalist and peak oil analyst, Richard Heinberg would likely be relevant here.

The model sees the development of multi-generational households and a substantial increase in food production, water harvesting and the use of renewable energies in the suburbs. In terms of urban infrastructure, it is a model I first encountered in the 1990s while working for Dr Ted Trainer at UNSW and that he called the ‘conserver society’, the title of a book be published on the topic. Through his books of the period, and in his courses at UNSW, Ted presaged many of David’s ideas on suburban conversion. This ‘ruralised city’ scanario is a model criticised by the authors of Resilient Cities, including the noted planner and educator, Peter Newman.

The book does not explore how this model would evolve in any detail — it is an investigation using the established scenario methodology that precludes detail, focusing instead on larger trends. The method has been used by government, corporations and civil society for some decades and takes existing demographic, resource, political, economic and other factors and projects how they could evolve within variables set for each scenario. Trends in oil production and other resources form the basis onto which David grafts projections about the possible impact of climate change to generate his four scenarios.

Return to appropriate technology

Earth stewardship is a model that is unlikely to be found universally appealing because it renders useless the skillsets of many. It is basically an agrarian future in which manual skills are those most valuable. It would be a profoundly different future, one less secure in many ways. Without hi-tech medicine, old diseases could return with little hope of cure. There is also the risk of a return to parochialism were global electronic communications to cease.

The scenario raises questions. How would human knowledge be preserved? Would we lose the extensive knowledge base drawn up over thousands of years of civilisation? Would there be any capacity to cooperate on projects of common endeavour over large regions ?

Writing this review, I recall ideas from the 1970s that were part of that exploration of what we then called ‘intermediate technology’, a term coined by British economist, Fritz Schumacher. Propelled by the 1973 oil crisis — the embargo of the West imposed by members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, in retaliation for Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war of the same year — intermediate technology (later to be renamed ‘appropriate technology’) sought simpler, cost-effective and more easily maintained tools and technologies to accomplish life needs. It was the dawn of renewable energy systems and paralleled the rise in popularity, although it remained organisationally separate to, organic gardening and farming.

Initially, intermediate technology found practical application in the intentional communities that developed during that period, however there was substantial interest among the more innovative of urban youth, especially those that considered themselves a part of the ‘alternative culture’ of the time, and by international development practitioners. Appropriate technology would certainly come of age in David’s earth stewardship society.

Imagining the scenarios

David outlines two ways of looking at his scenarios — as separate trends and in a nested structure. For me, it is the nested structure that is the most realistic as it recognises that different trends exist simultaneously, though at different scales and in different social milieus, in Western and, probably, other societies. Thus, the 1970s alternative culture existed within a growth economy then still expanding. Today, David’s earth stewardship model exists as loosely connected components in contemporary society focused around a number of movements such as permaculture, climate change and some elements of environmentalism.

Another way of looking at this is to see it as the new being born and prototyped in the bosom of the old. From that comes the resolution of what is a perceived contradiction among change agents making a living and pursuing their agendas within the infrastructure of a society they would severely modify or replace. Realistically, they have to live in both worlds at the same time, with a foot firmly planted in both. We all do.

Elements of the earth stewardship and the green technology scenarios are found within the permaculture milieu which David has some responsibility for co-creating. Here, there is a creative tension between the advocates of a basic and largely ruralised lifestyle and those who seek socially constructive solutions through green technology. Fortunately, David sees green technology a starting point for his journey to earth stewardship. The transition will come as energy supplies run down over time.

It is the force of David’s reputation, based on his role as co-originator of the permaculture design system and in recent years as its most prominent thinker, that leads to the ready adoption of his ideas by those within that milieu.

The influence of government

David writes that government has a substantial influence on these different nested scenarios, with local government holding most promise of influencing community-based initiatives that would form elements of the earth stewardship model. Through legislation, regulation and subsidies, local government has an influence on the structuring of households as, in effect, microcosms of the lifeboat scenario yet, at the same time, as components of the earth stewardship model.

What is implied here is David and his partner, Sue Dennet’s notion of the ‘household economy’. This views the household — whatever its makeup — as primarily a productive rather than consumptive entity. In reality, of course, households would be both consumers and producers, especially where they participate in a community-based, non-monetary system of exchange such as time dollars or LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System).

Seen as ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) entities and as micro-lifeboats, households would:

• produce in home or community gardens (and process as preserves) some of the food their inhabitants consume
• harvest and store for subsistence purposes rainfall and overland flow (the later where households have garden space)
• generate energy via photovoltaic or other system
• and form the basis, perhaps, for some home-based industry that produces goods or services for trade with others through LETS-like systems or as part of the informal or formal economies.

Local government, though in still-too-few cases, has made a start on educating people in these basic skills. Some offer workshops and courses in sustainable living where participants pick up largely forgotten skills in what Rob Hopkins, spokesman for the Transition movement, calls ‘skill-up for powerdown’ — growing food, storing water, producing home energy and other like things. Some councils facilitate the setting up of community food gardens and farmers’ markets. Others install photovoltaic systems on their buildings.

These things are not done as some deliberate policy of popular skilling-up but because they are components of the green technology model, the most popular model of sustainability, and because it is compatible with local government policy and practice for ameliorating and adapting to climate change. This motivation does not matter, of course, because such initiatives smooth the way to a earth stewardship society and have a firm place within it.

Both idea and template

Future Scenarios will no doubt be criticised because it will be seen to offer little option other than the evolution of earth stewardship societies.

Green technology advocates might feel a little chargrined that their preferred future might be only a transitional form between the present and the future. That is understandable, because much of the search for solutions to impending global trends focuses on technological fixes even though some proposing this foresee a less growth-oriented, perhaps even an economically steady state society emerging.

It is in discussing these different models that Future Scenarios provides a service. The book, and the workshops David offers as a means of exploring the topic more fully, introduce a sophistication to permaculture design that is not always present in its popular forms. In doing so, David once again offers permaculture a new lease on life as an applied technology for a community-based response to climate change and peak oil that complements that being developed by the transition initiative movement and that offers opportunities to the more innovative permaculture and sustainability, community-based organisations that are capable of addressing those parts of society outside their usual sphere of influence.

But what about campaiger? Well, Mark is this too and his new book, which he has called Climate Action, takes him further along this path.

To start proceedings at the launch, ABC science journalist, Robin Williams, made he point that, despite the publicity that climate change skeptics get, the overwhelming scientific opinion is that climate change is reality and that human activity directly contributes to it.

This makes climate change no longer a scientific issue — rather, it is a social and political issue.

Labor — party of the old economy

Articulate Tasmanian Greens politician, Christine Milne, reiterated Robin’s sentiments and described how the political process works against change. Continually when seeking to discuss policy ideas with Labor politicians, she has come up against Labor machine politics and the party’s unwillingness to deviate from the government line or to do anything to damage its blue collar, coal mining and extractive industry workforce industry support.

Clearly, Labor is a party of the old economy despite Prime Minister Rudd’s rhetoric about climate change.

The two old parties represent the values of the extractive mentality

It’s no secret, Christine suggested, that a great many people feel betrayed by Labor which made all kinds of noises about climate change and renewable energy before the last federal election but then turned against those who voted for it on those grounds once elected. This is guaranteed to turn people, including a great many youth already partially alienated from the political process, further from it and to give renewed credence to the cliche and truism that you can’t trust a politician.

Both Christie and Mark agree that government is driven by vested interests, namely the ‘greenhouse mafia’ of the coal, oil, forestry and aluminium industries.

“The two old parties represent the values of the extractive mentality”, she said. “What we need is people, including the ‘solar generation’ of youth who believe in renewable energy, to take political action, the time is urgent an the task is great”.

Beyond individual action

One point Mark and Christine agree on is that the issue of climate change has now gone well beyond the capacity of individual action to find a solution.

“We have to vote out those proposing deep carbon cuts”, emphasised Christine.

While individuals should still take action at home to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, it is political action that now is the imperative. Changing lightbulbs, taking sorter showers and all of those other things that have been promoted ad nauseum are useful but are no longer the solution alone.

“We have to vote out those proposing deep carbon cuts”, emphasised Christine.

Greenhouse drivers

For Mark, the forces driving climate change are:

• the impacts of consumption per person
• population growth
• cultural factors that include the values and philosophy of consumer society.

Add money-hunger and vested interests, and you have trouble.

Reiterating the already expressed sentiment that federal Labor and state government schemes are “a sham”, Mark explained that solutions such as the ballot and individual action are too little too late. In the face of the power of the Greenhouse Mafia and some unions, he proposes democratic, collective social action to counter their influence.

And that’s what Climate Action is all about. It’s a campaign manual, a how-to of organising to exert influence on political, cultural and economic decision makers, including the mainstream media that is also culpable. Perhaps it is this that is one of the reasons for falling newspaper sales and for the rise of the citizen-commentator in blogs and online.

A campaign manual

To provide the information needed to practice participatory democracy and to reinforce the citizens movement around climate change politics, Mark takes the reader through he arguments, technologies and ideas that form the knowledge base on which to mount a campaign. He then delves into strategy and tactics.

First he says that it is critical to frame the issue in the campaigners’ own terms. Framing
is about how the issue is presented to the public in a context and language that campaigners choose. He warns that mainstream media and opponents will try to put campaigners’ arguments  into a box of their choosing and to frame them through labeling.

He says that campaigners need to define a campaign proposition — a summary of what the campaign is about — then state the problem, the solution and the benefit, identify who is responsible and what additional actions are needed in addition to solving the immediate problem.

Mark discusses actions that local government can undertake to address climate change. These include:

• plan local destinations, parking, footpaths, bicycle paths, roads to reduce car usewave planning approvals and restrictions on solar hot water, solar electricity, solar clothes drying
• implement home energy audits until it is done by higher levels of government
• public training workshops on home energy efficiency
• support community installation of solar and wind farms
• improve council’s own operations to make them energy efficient  and reduce the volume of emission of greenhouse gases that they are responsible for — buildings, street lighting, vehicles, waste, heating swimming pools
• join Cities for Climate Protection.

Make no mistake about it. Unlike Mark’s earlier book that described the renewable technologies that would be deployed to address climate change, Climate Action is a hands-on, practical manual of citizen action.

Diesendorf M, 2009, Climate Action; University of NSW Press, Sydney. ISBN 978 1 74223 018 4