Nut tree planting in Totnes.

Plantations of modern nut varieties are much more productive than similar areas of arable crops. Wheat commonly produces between 2-10 tons/acre on good soils. On much poorer soils chestnuts have an annual yield of 7-11 tons, pecans 9-11 tons, hazelnuts,[most suitable for northern temperate climate] 9-12 tons, and walnuts 10-15 tons.’ [carbohydrate yields]

from Richard Mabey, ‘Fencing Paradise’.

This venture started in March 2007 with the planting of a few nut trees on Vire island. This planting was attended by the Mayoress, Prue Boswell, and supported by Alex Whish of South Hams district council, who had helped by providing the stakes and tree ties and overseeing us! About 6 of us, including Rob Hopkins, took part in this first event, planting almond trees and walnuts.

Sadly, within a week or two of the planting all the trees had had their main stems snapped. However, resilient as they are, all have survived and put out side shoots, and in spring 2008 as I write this, they are in leaf again and looking as if it will take more than a few vandals to put them down!

Choosing sites.

In May 2007 we held a day to gather people interested in supporting this project, both for some teaching, from Martin Crawford and Liz Turner, about tree planting; and to go out into Totnes and find sites for tree planting.

We started by gathering in Bogan house for the morning, about 12 of us, to discuss the project and share information. Two groups scoured the town for a couple of hours after lunch, and came back to mark sites on a map for the central part of town and Borough park and Bridgetown. We’d had fun imagining these groves of trees here and there, in more or less likely places. We had already been given a map of suggestions of likely planting places in Follaton and surrounding part of Totnes by Sky Chapman, who has been a keen supporter and financial sponsor throughout.

Involving the community.

Learning from our experience on Vire Island, we determined to be more active in trying to involve as many of the Totnes community as possible for further planting, especially those living near the sites where planting was being planned. To this end, three volunteers from the Msc. Students at Schumacher college joined us to plan the next planting events and the publicity needed. We also decided at this point that trees needed to have ‘tree guardians’ to watch over them, to repair damage if it occurred, to water and prune them if needed.

So the next planting was preceded by an intensive publicity campaign, in the local press, and through leafleting through people’s doors, to alert people to this project, and hopefully get more people involved as planters, tree guardians and sponsors.

Further planting.

We held another tree planting day on Dec. 1^st.2007, planting on various sites down the so-called ‘chicken-run’ in Bridgetown which extends from Elmhirst playing field at the top, to the Pathfields playing field at the bottom, with two other intermediate sites.

About 24 trees were planted, with about 25 people helping during the day, despite inclement weather. We were supported this time not only by Alex Whish with stakes and tree protectors, but also Liz Turner of Trees for Health, who brought loads of tools. Frank Buddingh, experienced arborculturist from Schumacher, was also able to bring his expertise to the day. All the trees were in their new homes by lunch-time. A few children took part, and a blind young woman was one of the most enthusiastic participants. Several people living near the planting sites took part and have become tree guardians of trees near their homes. We planted sweet chestnuts, walnuts, hazel and pecan trees.

On Feb.12th 2008 we had another planting day, this time on Longmarsh, on one of the playing fields in Bridgetown, on Borough park playing fields and in Follaton gardens. As the sites were spread out we worked in two groups. We planted walnut and sweet chestnut trees on Longmarsh, and a few almonds on the Weston Lane playing fields. More almonds were planted by the playground in Borough park, and a mixture of trees in Follaton gardens.

We had even more volunteers on this day, 35 or so, including several children, and people who had come from surrounding towns and villages to lend a hand. We realised what enthusiasm there is for this project, how many people’s imaginations it is firing. During the planting at Bridgetown, we involved 3 boys playing nearby who undertook to be unofficial guardians of the trees. Good luck to them!. The trees at the edge of playing fields are most at the mercy of footballs and drunken revellers. We also had with us an extended family, of 4 generations, who brought with them a nut sapling they had grown from a walnut, and involved the youngest to the oldest in the planting.

One of the Bridgetown volunteers, Kevin Baumbach, followed up this day by planting 4 apple trees on the grass outside the street where he lives. This was done with the collaboration and blessing of Tor Homes garden manager, Rob Schofield, and the agreement of all his neighbours who will look out on the trees. Another volunteer hope to plant outside her house in Copland meadows, if agreement from Dartington estate can be secured.

Sponsors.

During this first year’s planting, we have been given a grant from the Tree Council, from West Country Housing association, and from several individual donors. South Hams district council, via Alex Whish, has donated some tree stakes and protectors.

Forever Trees nursery, near Denbury, donated several trees, hazel, walnut and pecan, for our planting in Dec.2007.

Training.

We were very fortunate in this first year of planting to have with us Frank Buddingh, while he was doing his Msc at Schumacher college. He offered 2 training days for tree guardians, following the plantings in Dec. 2007 and Feb. 2008, in which he shared with us his love for trees and passion for caring for them well. He gave us useful information, inspired us, showed us pruning techniques [in the Dartington orchards], and gave us new eyes to look at the trees we already have around our town.

Wendy Stayte and Teresa Anderson; Co-ordinators of nut tree project.

**Stephan Harding** is the co-ordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science and staff ecologist at Schumacher College. He has lived and worked at Schumacher College since it began in 1991. He teaches Gaia theory, Holistic Science and Deep Ecology on the College’s short course programme and goes into these subjects in greater detail on Schumacher’s one year MSc Programme in Holistic Science. He is the author of ‘Animate Earth – science, intuition and Gaia’. Here he answers the 8 ‘Skilling Up For Powerdown’ questions that you’ll have already seen others answer here at **Transition Culture**.

**Do you see peak oil as a crisis or an opportunity?**

Both actually. Its obviously a crisis if we don’t do anything about finding alternative sources of energy. But it is also an opportunity to make us realise that resources are finite, that we don’t live on a planet that can provide us with the infinite amounts of the materials we need for our culture. So it’s a great opportunity for us to realise that there are limits to how big our economy can be and limits to our footprint on the planet. So, it’s both. At the moment of course it’s more of a crisis than an opportunity.

**If the approach that you propose were to come to fruition, and you woke up 30 years from now, in that reality, what would it look like, smell like, feel like, talk us through it.**

I think I would wake up in an eco-village, in a cob house probably. It would be the middle of summer, I’d open the windows and I’d gaze out on a gorgeous sunlit scene of other small cob houses in the ecovillage, with beautiful diverse gardens growing all sorts of wonderful food plants and herb plants all around us. Lots of colours, lots of different species growing together. Then further out there’s be a forest garden, beyond that there’d be meadows, and beyond that a wilderness, of forest (if it was Britain). I would know that I could put on my rucksack and walk out of the village and into the forest and be really in the wild country for days and days if I wanted to. Also that if I wanted to I’d be able to dip out of the forest and visit another nearby ecovillage. So, my vision would be for an interconnected network of ecovillages, with lots of wild countryside in between, but also some lovely small cities where there would be theatre, culture, museums and good libraries, and good coffee shops, gorgeous organic architecture.

The human population would be reasonably small, but it would be enough for there to be interesting intellectual and artistic synergies between people, enough for there to be tremendous creativity. But most of would live not far from wild nature, very connected to nature. All of us would be involved in growing food to some extent, all of us would be involved in looking after children and old people, we’d have a much less specialised and more holistic existence, much closer to the ground. We’d all be engaged in some craftwork, perhaps we’d make our own furniture, or perhaps we’d be involved with making houses, or, as I said before, with gardening. There’d also be a lot of time for celebrating Gaia, for deep meditation, for rituals. Our young people would be taken through rites of passage, which would be mystical experiences, in which they would be opened up to the mysteries of the cosmos.

**How do we get from here to there?**

Well I think on two fronts. We need a top down approach, and a bottom up approach. The top down approach I think is necessary now because the crisis is so severe. This would be simply that Government needs to impose some very strict rules about how much of any given element or molecule can be emitted by us into the body of Gaia. We already have this in embryonic form, with the carbon emissions trading schemes that the European Union and Kyoto are playing with. I think we need to do similar things for every element or molecule that we take out of Gaia or manufacture. So this has to come from the top, to be fairly draconian, given the situation, as it was during World War Two. We need to press Government now for tight regulation. Indeed business is now asking Governments to do this. Recently there was a delegation of big multinational companies that went to see Tony Blair, including Shell, asking him to impose limits on carbon emissions so they could get on and make money based on a sort of level playing field. So there’s an important role for Government in this. So that’s the top down approach.

The bottom up approach is to foster lots of small ecological initiatives all over the world, involved with every aspect of life, food growing, education, architecture, medicine etc, and then link them up as much as possible, so that they create a sort of synergistic net out of which the new way of being in the world can emerge. These two approaches are, I think, really essential.

**To what extent do solutions to the energy problem involve action in other, non energy, fields?**

Well they do because it is a systemic problem, a problem of the entire system. Ultimately the problem isn’t an energy problem, it’s a problem of world view. We just simply have the wrong world view in our culture. We see the world as a dead set of resources that we extract as and when we wish. We see the Earth as a dead thing, the cosmos as a dead thing, as a soulless thing. That is the fundamental problem that we have to solve. If we could see the world as ensouled, as alive, as animate, if we could see our planet as a great vast spherical living personality that hurtles around the sun, then we would have the right world view based in a deep love of the Earth with which to solve the energy crisis. So, fundamentally, it is a problem of world view. But of course, its not just a problem of energy – this is just a symptom of a far vaster problem, since everything is linked up together. But at the core of our difficulties lies a world view that’s rotten in its very heart which we have to abandon.

**What are the problems and bottlenecks?**

One of the problems I think is that we need to move towards a steady state economy, that’s to say an economy where the throughput of matter no longer grows but is kept at steady levels that Gaia can support. We can have growth of love, information, spirituality, poetry, but we can’t have growth in the sheer number of molecules extracted from the Earth moving through the economy. This simply can’t grow without limit unless we want our civilization to plunge miserably into oblivion in the fairly near future. So one of the major bottlenecks I see is the difficulty of moving from a growth-based economy to one that’s at steady-state. Very difficult to achieve given the current growth model.

Perhaps the ultimate bottleneck is climate change itself. That is going to be a real crunch. We only have a certain amount of time left it seems before the huge changes in climate begin to kick in and by that time it’s going to be too late. The changes could happen very suddenly, very quickly, for there may well be tipping points in the climate system, which means that the Amazon could collapse catastrophically, that there could be methane releases, etc. etc. So if these things happen we’ve lost our opportunity. So that’s a bottleneck, a bottleneck in time. The other bottleneck of course is that there’s only a certain amount of energy that’s extractable reasonably cheaply, by that I mean fossil fuel energy, with which we could fuel our efforts to develop viable renewable energy. So if we squander the energy that’s available to us now, there’ll be none left to develop renewable energies.

**What are the skills we need to learn and the training & education we need to put in place to respond to peak oil?**

On an intellectual level I think what we need to do is develop deep systemic thinking. We need to understand that we are part of a vast living system called Gaia, and that our economy is as much a part of it as any microbe, tree or ecosystem. We need to understand that our economy is not separate from the last living economy of the planet. Everything is interconnected. We need to learn the art of thinking in interconnected ways, in which we realize that there are no separate objects, that relationships are primary, that networks are of primary importance, that when you put interacting parts together, surprising emergent properties arise that you couldn’t have predicted from the knowledge of the parts alone. These ideas are the intellectual tools for deep systemic thinking. That’s one thing we need to do.

The other thing we need to do is develop our wisdom, our heart connection with the Earth, through our intuition, our sensing and our ethical sensibilities. This is almost more important than the intellectual development, for this involves the opening of our heart, or our ‘ecological heart’, of our deep ecological sensibility. We can do this by spending time outdoors in the wilderness, perhaps by means of vision quests for young people, as I said earlier. On a more practical level, we will need to teach children, adults, everybody in fact, how to survive- we all need to learn basic survival skills. If it is true that civilization is about to collapse, we’re all going to have to learn to grow our own food organically, we’re going to have to learn to build our own houses using local materials, we’re going to have to learn how to make energy out of what we have available in our immediate surroundings. These are the bprimary, practical survival skills that we all may soon need. We also need skills in community building, and in how to relate effectively with others.

**How can this issue be communicated to the widest possible audience?**

There are various ways. One is Lovelock’s tactic of frightening the hell out of everybody! (laughs). That’s one way you could do it. Fear is good motivator, but love is better. Getting people to fall in love with the Earth, by whatever means, through television programmes (probably the least effective means!). The best way is to actually get people out in nature, either growing things, or being outside in semi- wild places or in real wilderness, or by engaging in ecological restoration, or by helping people to directly experience the living quality of the Earth. We also need practical demonstrations of sustainable living. We need to have functioning ecovillages, and we need to start building them now, to show how much more enjoyable a life in that kind of setting is than in some horrible inner city housing estate.

We need talks, lectures, demonstrations, events, articles, we need to use all the means of mass communication available to us to get the message out, and that message simply is that the Earth is in crisis, and that the Earth is a living being, that the Earth is alive, that the Earth is animate, and that there is tremendous joy in connecting with this great animate being which gave us birth and that we are now threatening.

**What would most help you in your work to achieve this vision?**

I think I could answer that on a very local basis, local to where I live, and that’s at Dartington. I think it would help me hugely if we could have an ecovillage, set up here on the estate at Dartington. If I could be part of visioning that ecovillage and actually creating it with my own hands with friends, like yourself, perhaps we could build our own cob houses, disconnect from the Grid, grow profuse gardens of vegetables, have our children running around enjoying it all, and demonstrate to the world that it is possible to live like in this way and yet be part of wider society. We would demonstrate this is an option for many people, and that it is possible to have a very low ecological footprint and to live a materially far simpler life that is deeply rich in ways that are really important, such a community, connection with nature, time for philosophical reflection, time for artistic creativity.

We could demonstrate to the rest of Britain, and indeed to the rest of the world that you don’t have to have lots of possessions to be happy, that in fact after a certain point there is an inverse relationship between wealth and how many material goods you own. The real wealth comes from community, from our relations with the community of humans and from the community of the more than human beings that surround us and ultimately from the animate Earth herself.

**Thank you very much.**

Thank you.

A selection of articles by Stephan can be found [here](http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/Resources/Articles.html#GL”Stephan”)

“My work has focused on what I call ‘ethical leadership’, that is how organisations and leaders maintain both effectiveness and leadership. Chaos is a topic that lends light to ecology, art and to leadership. It is an ancient figure/topic/sensibility, which exists in all traditions. Chaos and Gaia both embody the creative principle. Gaia pulled life from chaos and gave it form, it is a fundamental part of life. Nowadays we are not willing to embrace chaos, yet we need that abyss, we have to face the emptiness and chaos before anything new can emerge, it is a partner in the creative process. There are three ways in which we experience chaos;

**1. Being Plunged into Chaos**.

We all know about chaos. We have all experienced times when life is fine, all going on OK, when an unexpected event tips our equilibrium. We are cruising along, all is well, when something happens which tips us into chaos. Although the chaos can feel like pure darkness and meaninglessness, we usually reorganise and find new ways forward. We either emerge or we don’t. We can use the chaos. Medicine can be used to medicate it, yet in spiritual traditions it is seen as the Dark Night of the Soul, a spiritual transition.

When we emerge from this where do we find ourselves compared to where we were before we entered the period of chaos? Higher or lower than before (“Higher!� say the audience). Yes, higher. Once we emerge from this our lives can be richer and better. After things fall apart we emerge stronger.

**2. In the Creative Process.**

We can also use chaos in the creative process. When we are involved in the creative process, we can find ourselves losing our way and losing the moment of inspiration. This is, however, necessary for the true creativity to emerge. You can’t be creative if you refuse to be confused. It is in that state that we let go of how we hold the problem. Insight is never incremental. It is only when the artist throws his brushes down, the writer destroys his/her PC or the scientist storms out of the lab in frustration, that moment of letting go, that you are open to insights.

**3. In Natural Disasters.**

Hurricane Katrina was a good example of this (she shows a slide of 50 buses swamped by flood waters). Here are 50 buses in New Orleans that could have been used to evacuate people, but bureaucracy prevented their use (I didn’t get why…). Bureaucracy can never respond quickly enough. The more we try to control chaos the more chaotic things become. During the New Orleans disaster, a building was on fire, the firemen arrived from nearby cities but found that when they arrived they were required to do training in sexual harassment and diversity issues before they could attend the fire, and the training was in Alberta! When they go there, one of the firemen, furious at this stage said “�I’m not here for this, I’m here to fight fires!�, and was told “you work for the Government, you’ll do as you are told!� Big agencies are not able to get things done quickly enough.

Communities are capable of amazing self organisation. In times of chaos, our need to create calm creates more chaos, we really can rely on human compassion and generosity. Stuart Kaufmann writes “we live in a world where you get order for free�. It spontaneously organises. Chaos is a stage of condition which allows the new order to emerge.

In 1990 the penny dropped. I had been told up to that point that order has to be man made, otherwise there is chaos. We substitute ourselves with God. Order appears as shapes, as patterns, as recurring patterns in trees, clouds, ferns. If you look for it it’s amazing. Life organises itself into order through shape.

She then showed an equilateral triangle and then explained two simple rules. The points of the triangle are ordered 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6 respectively. You roll a dice and move halfway towards the number you rolled. If you do this repeatedly, what would appear to be a completely chaotic process, you create this exquisitely ordered shape, known as the Serpinski Gasket. It is a formula that repeats and repeats in a spirit of freedom. You can read a more detailed account of how to do this [here](http://richardbowles.tripod.com/excel/weird/serpinski.htm”Serpinski”).

Relating this to an organisation, our ideal would be to have very few rules, no hidden agendas, and that this is non-negotiable. People joining an organisation want the values that appear on the surface, its publicly stated principles, to be true, then they go inside the organisation and find the real set of principles! While there is a need for rules, ideally they would have the following characteristics. Everyone would use the rules to make their own decisions based in the immediate solution (this evokes our maturity), and everyone would be held accountable to explain their decisions based on these rules.

She then talked about a High School she visited, which she has also written about in a [recent article](http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/life.html”Article”), so I’ll just paste here that section, which is far more thorough than my notes…

>Last year we met a junior high school principal who gave us a superb example of creating a complex and orderly system from a few simple patterns. He is responsible for eight hundred adolescents, ages twelve to fourteen. Most school administrators fear this age group and the usual junior high school is filled with rules and procedures in an attempt to police the hormone-crazed tendencies of early teens. But his junior high school operated from three rules, and three rules only. Everyone; students, teachers, staff, knew the rules and used them to deal with all situations. The three rules are disarmingly simple: 1. Take care of yourself; 2. Take care of each other; 3. Take care of this place. (As we’ve thought about these rules, we’ve come to believe that they might be all we need to create a better world, not just a junior high school.)

>Few of us would believe that you could create an orderly group of teen-agers, let alone a good learning environment, from such simple rules. But the principal told a story of just how effective these three rules were in creating a well-functioning school. A fire broke out in a closet and all 800 students had to be evacuated. They stood outside in pouring rain until it was safe to return to the building. The principal was the last in, and he reported being greeted by 800 pairs of wet shoes lined up in the lobby.

>Principles define what we have decided is significant to us as a community or organization. They contain our agreements about what we will notice, what we will choose to let disturb us. In the case of these students, wet shoes and muddy floors were something they quickly noticed, something that disturbed them because they had already agreed to “take care of this place.” They then acted freely to create a response that made sense to them in this unique circumstance.

The current image of successful leadership is that if a duck with ducklings behind. Ducks are actually very bad mothers, yet it is what most leaders hope for. The model of command and control has seen a resurgence of interest in recent years in response to uncertain times. It is a myth that high risk requires high control. You need intelligence everywhere rather than top-down. A second myth is that there is no order without a power structure, without organisations. A third myth is that people do what they are told. They do not. Everyone has the freedom to do what they want. A final myth is that fear is a good motivator.

Implementing these myths leads to high levels of worker disengagement, people ithdrawing from their work place, what we might call “warm chair attrition�. People end up feeling exhausted and stressed. What happens to the human brain under stress? It loses about 4/5ths of its functioning, and it loses its ability to see pattern. Pattern making is how humans create meaning. Without meaning we feel lost in the Universe.

What is the relationship between chaos and the human spirit? There is a great relationship between humans’ experience of life, which includes cycles, chaos, death, how we experience that as a culture, and the kind of art we produce. So, my hunch is that cultures that live close to life are not afraid of chaos, are not afraid of death, or trying to ward off life, instead they embrace it and show in their art this harmonious relationship with the cosmos, that is not available to us when we have separated ourselves and are trying to play God. D.H. Lawrence wrote of the Etruscans that they *“preserve the natural humour of lifeâ€?*. Why has humanity had such a lust to be imposed upon, when we thrive more with things that are flexible and alive? Greek art was obsessed with the human form, not with Nature’s chaos. It was about falling in love with the human form. Man was seen as the centre of the Universe. Etruscan cultures and those of Southern Greece had at their core the divine feminine. (She closed with a beautiful excerpt from her latest book about the art of a peoples who lived in the Mediterranean on an island with a large volcano which kept having small eruptions but who kept returning to the island and who made beautiful art). You can find it in her latest book, [Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time](http://www.margaretwheatley.com/findingourway.html”FTW”).

**The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity**
A Review by Albert Bates for The Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006

*It is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat*. – James Lovelock

James Lovelock turns 87 in 2006 and wants to take another turn around the book signing circuit before he bids adieu. After that he can leave his Devonshire cottage and go into the West as Middle Earth passes out of the age of elves and men.

Picture Lovelock, clad in sandwich board, standing on Hyde Park corner declaring that the end is nigh. Forecasting the future is not something many scientists attempt, and setting a firm date for say, a mass die-off of the human population, is hardly even scientific, but Lovelock does, and that date is 2056 to 2081 (in order to be witnessed by our children or grandchildren). The Revenge of Gaia is both a tour de force and a sad collection of the rantings of a crazy old man.

Too many variables stand between here and 2056 to make me comfortable with that prediction—the waning of 11, 80, and 200 year solar cycles, the slowing of the Atlantic conveyor, Peak Oil, and a plethora of permaculturists making soil and planting trees, to name a few.

At its low points, Lovelock‘s stridency in postulating arguments—on the side of fission, fusion and synthetic food, against organic farming, environmentalists, solar and wind energy—to his real and imagined critics, reveals a lack of deeply seated confidence in his own positions. By contrast, when he is in his element, he is a stolid font of higher wisdom and a gifted educator.

An example of the weaker Lovelock is his suggestion that wind power is impractical because it would take 39,900 three-mW turbines to power the UK (although Germany had 40,000 windmills in the 19th century); that so many windmills would change the climate (the wind dissipation is about 0.7% of the total actual dissipation caused by the land or water surface under the windmill); and that windmills kill birds (less, actually, than house cats, and only if poorly designed and operated).

The stronger, beatific Lovelock observes that the fact that animals dispose of excess nitrogen in a plant-available form as urine, rather than conserving water by exhaling it as nitrogen gas, cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution. Unless you tilt in the direction of intelligent design, you have to accept that we piss out our vital water and then have to go in search of more because Gaia prefers mammals to make the nitrogen available for plants, which in turn feed us and supply our oxygen. It’s symbiosis.

Lovelock is a master of the pithy analogy. Some examples:

*We are now approaching one of these tipping points, and our future is like that of the passengers of a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagra Falls…*

* * *

*It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited*.

* * *

*We are like the smoker who enjoys a cigarette and imagines giving up smoking when the harm becomes tangible*.

* * *

*We are already farming more than the Earth can afford, and if we attempt to farm the whole Earth to feed people, even with organic farming, it would make us like sailors who burnt the timbers and rigging of their ship to keep warm.*

* * *

*We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbon dioxide their plane was adding to the already overburdened air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive fossil-fuel powered-civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered descent.*

* * *

*The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners*.

* * *

*We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think that an apology is enough*.

One of his few and well-chosen graphs takes a page of predictions from Stephen Schneider’s seminal 1989 book, Global Warming, and marks us somewhere between the middle and upper line of damage, or right on track to cross a point of irreversibility by the late 21st century.

Lovelock says that Gaia probably has at least two states of repose, one colder and one warmer. We have been in the colder realm for the past fifty-five million years and might have lingered in our cool world longer had we not broken into the storehouse where Gaia had been putting the excess carbon she had wrung from the air to keep the sky clean. The Eocene domain we are destined to revisit when we cross the magic point of a carbon-dominated atmosphere is much warmer than humans are accustomed to. For that matter, it is much warmer than trees are accustomed to. Lovelock says that in a 5-degree warmer world the Amazon rainforest, the Eastern boreal forests of North America, and the forests of Europe, Africa and Asia will be replaced with blowing dust.

If that were really true, we would expect to see wildfires in the Southeast and Southwest USA, claiming millions of acres. We would be seeing hurricanes of unprecedented strength, some coming in times of the year or visiting places they have never been seen before. There would be more frequent droughts, along with an increase of tornadoes and insects knocking down whole forests. Hmmm.

In certain ways the human world is re-enacting the tragedy of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. … He was unaware that the forces of General Winter were siding with the Russians….

This profound alteration of the habitability of Earth leads Lovelock to conclude that we are at the end of any and all civilization. *“We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.â€?*

**(See Right. The world as it looked 5 degrees cooler, how it looks today, and how it might look 5 degrees warmer (by mid-Century). The bands in the ocean show where the production of algae and plankton is greatest. Pale areas in continents are deserts).**

Lovelock’s folly is his choice of nerdy solutions to guide us into “the soft landing of a powered descent.� Nuclear power first rears its ugly head at page 11 of the book and won’t let go of its readers, chapter after chapter thrashing us like a ragged doll in its drooling maw. Three salient quotes reveal his nuclear bias:

*The preference of wildlife for nuclear waste sites suggests that the best sites for its disposal are the tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by hungry farmers and developers.*

* * *

*The nuclear waste buried in pits at the production sites is no threat to Gaia and dangerous only to those foolish enough to expose themselves to its radiation.*

* * *

*I have offered in public to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land; it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and fit safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home.*

The first statement is very reckless, and shows that he does not fully appreciate the unseen genetic alterations going on in the gene pool of Gaia’s wildlife. The second statement refers only to buried wastes in pits, not to the bulkier tailings and high-level containerized wastes, but it is simply wrong to suggest there is some sort of consensual process, especially with regard to future generations downstream, to random compulsory genetic engineering.

The third statement employs age-old nuclear PR deceptions, which can scarcely be believed in 2006. Defining “high-level” down to a thimbleful of transuranics is like US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Bush biscuit teams in Guantanamo and Uzbekistan defining “torture” to exclude anything involving mental processes. It is also doubtful that Lovelock’s backyard Sakcrete barbecue pit would withstand the temperature and not embrittle and crack, spilling its contents onto his patio with every rainfall.

The antinuclear movement has many bones to pick here. Economists would point to the serious lack of financial justification for nuclear energy, with subsidies today running to $42 per barrel oil equivalent, and huge, largely externalized costs to be borne essentially forever. Physicists point to the brittle engineering and human fallibility of operators. Security experts know that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not separable, and that every reactor, every shipment, every waste repository, is a terrorist target. But pay attention here, Sir James, there is also a Gaian argument. It is one I raised before the US Supreme Court in 1979 in Honicker v. Hendrie.

In the natural environment, our species has always been enveloped in radiation: from our sun and moon; from distant stars and cosmic winds; and from elements distributed in the soil, rocks, and oceans of the Earth. All human populations pass through life exposed to some part of this radioactive environment. It is now estimated that up to half of all new cancers are caused by this “background” radiation, which had previously been thought harmless, or even beneficial. The small dose that we receive from natural background radiation, typically in combination with free radicals of oxygen, is a significant factor in the normal aging process, the process of the bodies of living organisms whereby abnormal cells gradually replace normal cells until a vital function is sufficiently impaired to result in death.

Before life could begin upon the Earth, it took millions of years for our planet to quench the radiation from its surface and to erect atmospheric barriers to radioactive bombardment from space. Yet background radiation has continued to play a vital role in our billion-year process of evolution. By continual death and replacement, and by continual minor mutations over many eons, the human species, as well as all other lifeforms, have developed into what they are today.

Very early in this evolutionary process, primary emphasis had to be given to the protection of our genetic code through the development of extremely efficient and sophisticated chemical repair mechanisms. Only in this way could the advancements of evolution be protected against the deteriorating effect of oxygen and natural radiation, and could the high stability of the human species over periods of millions of years be assured. For evolution to proceed, however, it was also necessary that a balance be struck between the ability of the human organism to repair itself and the need for continual death and replacement to evolve the species. This fine balance was made between the evolving human organism and the relatively constant natural background level of radiation over the course of millions of years, and is an extremely delicate one.

When a marauding high-energy particle rips a nucleoprotein out of a DNA sequence, the entire code is thrown askew unless and until fortuitous breaks occur elsewhere that restore the correct sequence. Radioactive bombardment endows biological molecules with such unstable properties that they can produce all kinds of energetic chemical reactions that would never have been possible before the exposure, multiplying the genetic damage in many invisible and enduring ways.

When a mutated gene is responsible for regulating normal cell growth, an uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer, can develop. When mutation occurs in the procreative cells or in the developing embryo, birth defects can result. When mutation occurs in the blood-forming tissue, impairment of the immune response system can result, and this can increase susceptibility to an entire spectrum of human disease as well as lowering resistance to a host of environmental insults.

Early studies of genetic mutation demonstrated that only one percent of the latent damage of exposure to radiation may appear in each generation. We will have to wait 100 generations of human population to experience the full genetic effects of the late 20th century’s nuclear dalliance, including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the atmospheric tests, Chelyabinsk, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and whatever comes next. In the past 50 years our species has doubled the planet’s natural background radiation.

Lovelock misses all this with his nuclear blinders firmly attached. He says we should be developing synfood brews from carbon, nitrogen and oxygen waste streams rather than wasting our time on organic farming, and power these synfood factories with first fission, then fusion. He gets livid at the mention of windmills, seeing them as a blight on the landscape, and pooh-poohs solar energy as impossibly inadequate to the needs of civilized peoples. He makes some interesting suggestions about sending mirror arrays towards the sun to partially block its light, and generating fog over the ocean to reflect light back into space, but this is all still tugging at Gaia’s elbow instead of going with her program.

What is our role, as humans, in Gaia, he asks himself repeatedly. He doesn’t really answer this directly, but he does give a clue when he describes the process by which humans excrete urine. Our service to Gaia is as providers for plants. Think of that the next time you stand in front of a urinal or squat over a toilet bowl. Walt Whitman drew the circle even wider in Leaves of Grass (1900):

>Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corp ses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, 45
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

***Albert Bates** is director of the Ecovillage Training Center at the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. His forthcoming book, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, will be out from New Society Publishers in September, 2006. In a previous incarnation as an environmental attorney, he argued nuclear power health issues before numerous federal courts. Honicker v. Hendrie, which challenged the constitutional authority of the United States to sacrifice future civilian lives to produce electricity, went four times to the US Supreme Court and is the subject of two books. Albert Bates also wrote an overview of the science of global warming in 1990, in Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do.*

**References:**
Abdussamatov. H.I., “About the long-term coordinated variations of the activity, radius, total irradiance of the Sun and the Earth’s climate” in Multi-Wavelength Investigations of Solar Activity: Proceedings of the 223rd Symposium of the International Astronomical Union, Saint Petersburg, Russia June 14-19, 2004.
David W. Keith, D.W., et al, The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate, PNAS 101:46 November 16, 2004, posted at www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0406930101v1.pdf
Bates, A.K., The Karma of Kerma: Nuclear Wastes and Natural Rights, Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation 9:3, February, 1988, posted at www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/albertbates/akbp5.html

Brian Goodwin is a Visiting Scholar at Schumacher College and teaches on their MSc in Holistic Science. His research and teaching interests are on the use of the sciences of complexity to study emergent phenomena in evolution and to understand health in various contexts: in individuals, communities, organisations, economies and ecosystems. This involves a fundamental rethinking of basic scientific assumptions and leads to a new science of qualities. He is the author of Signs of Life : How Complexity Pervades Biology,
How The Leopard Changed Its Spots : the Evolution of Complexity, and Form and Transformation : Generative and Relational Principles in Biology. He very kindly undertook to answer the 7 questions developed as part of the Skilling Up for Powerdown course being prepared at the Cultivate Centre in Dublin.

Do you see Peak Oil as a crisis or an opportunity?

I see it as primarily an opportunity. One of the things that we look at quite extensively is the fact that a lot of the most important opportunities arise out of a very chaotic situation, in society generally. So this transition from chaos to some new kind of order, which is of course the opportunity to put something different in place, is not going to be an easy transition at all. It is however an extraordinary opportunity to recover a sensible lifestyle with high quality living. That is the opportunity.

If the approach that you propose were to come to fruition, and you woke up 30 years from now, in that reality, what would it look like, smell like, feel like, talk us through it.

(Laughs). I had this vision of the human race becoming largely invisible on the planet. That would be my vision 30 years from now. We are extremely visible, and we have a very high influence on the state of the planet as we all know, in terms of pollution, global warming, light pollution, noise pollution, I mean, the poor cetaceans in the ocean, the whales and dolphins, are just bombarded with noise all the time. We are extremely visible and audible on the planet.

So my vision for 30 years from now is that human beings will be largely invisible. Now that seems like an extraordinary vision, and I don’t know how we are going to get there in detail, but it’s a bit like the deer and the badgers, the squirrels and most of nature, there are plenty of them around but they are largely invisible because they have a different lifestyle. I’m not talking about a Rousseau ‘back to nature’, I’m talking about using appropriate technology, natural materials and energy to achieve a lifestyle in which we blend with the natural world, we have learnt how to live in a way that other species have, and therefore we reduced our footprint, decreasing it dramatically to the point where we are one among many instead of an absolutely dominant species.

How would we get from here to there?

(Laughs) Ah well, that’s the question! I think we can see many of the elements that we need to put in place to achieve that. The current mantra of ‘sustainability’, ecological sustainability, getting away from growth, is very important, in that we have to use all of the resources available to us now. We have fantastic resources at the moment, and we could invest those in the technologies that we require in order to become invisible, to become integrated with the natural world in a much more reasonable way than we are now. I emphasise again this does not mean going backwards, it means going forward to a very very desirable, beautiful, culture.

The technology we need to put in place, well we all know about it, it’s solar, wind, ecological buildings, using sustainable materials, redesigning everything that we make in the culture so that we don’t spread toxins around, we don’t have landfills, we are doing what the natural world does in terms of recycling, using energy efficiency, everything gets recycled, every product is functional and it is beautiful. So, we have a beautiful culture with a high quality of life, and plenty of quantities, but they are the quantities that we need, to live a high quality life.

To what extent do solutions to the energy problem involve action in other, non energy, fields?

I would choose a couple of things. One is the whole issue of currencies and economics. We are in an economic system at the moment which is ingenious; it gives a lot of freedom to exchange of goods, services and so on, but underneath it is deadly. Deadly because it forces economic growth, and economic growth forces the destruction of Nature, and of us. We are on the way to becoming an endangered species if we go down that route. So we need to diversify.

One of the keys in natural phenomena is the diversity of different strategies used. We have adopted a single strategy for currency and economics and our economic system is based on and driven by that. We need to diversify our currencies. This is not something that has never been heard of before, it happens spontaneously all the time. In Argentina the economic system has collapsed, that is the conventional dollar-based system has collapsed, but they’ve put in place an alternative. They are trading and exchanging goods, and they are using their own local currencies. This is therefore a spontaneous thing to happen, it’s part of the process of localization, going local, developing appropriate local currencies, connected to useful resources, like energy, food, buildings and so on.

The other area is education. Education needs to be fundamentally transformed. I’ve been in Universities nearly all my life, and in my experience University education has now become pretty thoroughly irrelevant to the training that people need to receive in order to make the transition that we are going through. We need a new education. So what is the image of this new education process? I have just been talking about local currencies, well education needs also to ‘go local’. Universities should serve their local communities and they should serve them with the ingenuity that comes out of this concentration of creative energy in Universities in terms of putting together new communities, developing new technologies, so that we develop what I like to think of now as something that Fritjof Capra has introduced into the dialogue here at Schumacher College, looking at the Renaissance, the period of Leonardo da Vinci, which had a workshop culture.

A lot of people got their practical skills in workshops. I love this idea. If Universities and schools could become in some sense workshops, playshops, toyshops, whatever you want to call it, but where practical skills are developed for the whole person, and we don’t fragment the world of learning into specialized disciplines. We will still have specialized skills, because people will want to develop high quality abilities in different areas, but that’s up to the individual to choose, and that will give them the creativity to put things together in a new way. So those are the two things I would focus on, currency systems and the education process.

What are the problems and bottlenecks?

The economy is a major bottleneck. Without that changing I think we are going to have great difficulty going local. Another is the values that we have in society. Without a change in values, and what it is that people feels gives meaning to their lives, we are stuck in a way of life that’s a kind of, what you would call in behavioural studies, displacement activity. In other words, we get quantities of goods, of cars, of whatever it might be, in order to substitute for qualities and meaning. So there is a shift of values that needs to be achieved, and that is a kind of bottleneck, a conceptual bottleneck in the culture.

What are the skills we need to learn and the training & education we need to put in place to respond to peak oil?

At a risk of repeating myself, we need to have an education system that develops these practical skills. I can see all kinds of alternative technology systems emerging from this. We need to learn all these. We need to learn about permaculture, low maintenance, low energy, high productivity systems that are at the same time beautiful and natural. This doesn’t mean that we make a full switch to permaculture but that we diversify our agricultural systems. So in the first place, we go organic, but we also have a certain amount of farming, we use polytunnels and so on, but we intersperse that with permaculture systems, which are in come sense natural ecosystems but they are selected, to be high productivity.

We have a vision here at Schumacher: in 15 years I’d love to see Stone Pines growing here and producing pine nuts, so that this area of land now becomes beautiful, perhaps with an understory of herbs, so the whole thing is productive, low maintenance, and beautiful and it serves the college’s needs and the needs of the local community. We have the world expert in forest garden permaculture, Martin Crawford, here on the estate. So we use our land, resources and skills in a way that is appropriate to the new culture that is emerging.

How can this issue be communicated to the widest possible audience?

The campaign to Make Poverty History showed that you can use the media and personalities and music. I think of this as a 60s culture, the rebirth of Orpheus, and music as a vehicle for bringing people together and getting a message across in a very joyful way, so that this is the way in which entertainment can become part of this transformational culture and we use the personalities in the way that Geldof has used people to publicise this and to bring about some of these changes in mindset and values, and to create a sense of community around the world.

I think you can also use politics for this. Now I think it is going to be a different politics than the one we have, but nevertheless that is important. The political spectrum is another very important vehicle for getting these ideas across. So I would use these to any extent that can be effective. It can reach an awful lot of people and it can use the media extensively.

What would most help you in your work to achieve this vision?

I think what would facilitate this more than anything else would be a change of mindset in people. Without a change of mindset, without a change of values, and ambitions, we’re not going to move at all. Somehow this has to come about. Now, it is happening spontaneously, and there is a whole network of organisations and associations, people and individuals, including yourself, who are working on this transformation. There will come a time when there is a critical mass, and we have no idea when that will be or even if we will achieve it, but in the normal course of events they will link up, and bring about a transformation that is faster than any of us ever expected, it will be the flowering of a new culture, a Renaissance, which is creative, innovative, has high quality of experience and values, has meaning for people, is integrated with the world, but the first thing is to change the vision.

You can read a selection of articles by Brian here.

He began by outlining the environmental crisis that underpins his approach and which motivated his writing the book. He showed a number of charts, all showing exponential upward curves, pollution, climate change, losses of biodiversity and so on. We live on a planet in crisis, he said. Our very society is changing, everything is on the move. We are living through the 6th greatest extinction in history and it has been caused by our culture, the same culture that has educated us, made us what we are. Stephan said that he felt very concerned about this, the incredible loss of complexity and diversity. Most books on the environment write from within the same paradigm that caused the problems in the first place. The title of the book, ‘Animate Earth’ comes from the latin, *’animus’* meaning ‘soul’. He asked the question “can we bring a sense of soul to science?”.

To begin telling the story of the book he went back to the time of the Greeks. Hesiod (700BC) wrote about Gaia, he saw the Earth as a personality, with wisdom to be tapped and from which we can draw inspiration. He termed the phrase ‘anima mundi’ or ‘soul of the world’, a mysterious power that move the wind and the birds and so on, also of the knowledge or soul of the world, being full of knowledge and meaning.

All indigenous peoples have held this view, seeing the Earth as sentient, full of soul. We have now lost this sense. How did that happen? This is very complicated, Stephan said, but at some point historically it was pushed out of the picture. Francis Bacon wrote “we must endeavour to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the Universe”. For Galileo everything in the Universe could be reduced to mathematics. Descartes wrote “I have described the Earth and the whole visible Universe in the manner of a machine”.

They all saw the Earth as having no soul, as not being ‘animate’. From this we have evolved this terrible misunderstanding which has led our culture to believe that the world is an inanimate object to be used. Is it a surprise therefore, Stephan mused, that we have ended up in our current crisis? ‘Animate Earth’ draws in part on the work of Carl Jung and his insights into why our culture has gone so wrong. He developed what is now called the ‘Jungian Mandala’. This has four elements arranged like the our cardinal points. These are Thinking, Intuition, Feeling and Sensing. We now need to develop a science that enshrines these values.

He first explored the element, **Thinking**. To explain this he turned to Gaia Theory. In Gaia Theory we are seeing ‘anima mundi’ returning to our culture, through the work of Lovelock and Margulis. In the 1960s science held that the world had two element, the Biota (all the living stuff, the flora and fauna) and the Abiotic Environment (rocks, water, atmosphere and so on). Science at that point held that the rocks ran the show, that the Biota was a second class citizen.

The Gaia Theory was a major paradigm shift, as it postulated that there were feedback loops between the two, that the Biota had a huge impact on the abiotic, that the two are tightly coupled. The term ‘Gaia’ to describe this system of emergent self-regulation, was coined by novelist William Golding, who was a good friend of Lovelock’s. Gaia Theory is much more than just a theory. The concept of Gaia is an ancient archetypal idea, for the first time in 4,000 years scientists within science talked again of Gaia as a living being.

Stephan talked of the idea of Gaia in action, the idea that if you understand Gaia you can be, as it were, ‘Gaia-ed’, she can take over your psyche. He then went on to talk about these tiny plankton-like things called coccolithophores, only 4 microns across, unicellular beings which photosynthesise and live in huge amounts in the ocean. They like particular areas of the sea, not tropical seas, in fact they especially like the coasts off South Devon it transpired! They are found all over the planet, and live at the surface of the ocean. The amazing thing is how they regulate the Earth’s climate.

As they proliferate they release sulphuric acid, which acts to seed clouds and generate rain. The clouds that they seed are not just any old clouds, rather the kind of dense white clouds that reflect solar energy back into space. These tiny beings, which would conventionally be seen as irrelevant, create massive clouds which greatly affect the climate. He quoted Lyn Margulis, “microbes rule the Earth”. So the process goes that the coccolithophores bloom and release di-methyl sulphide (DMS), a form of sulphuric acid, this forms clouds which then shade the sea and cool the surface and lead again to further blooms, a feedback loop.

This feedback loop is much more complex in reality, he said, but it illustrates the point. So why do these tiny beings emit the DMS that seeds the clouds? Do they do it for the good of Gaia? No. To combat their drying out? This could be part of it as DMS does prevent their drying out. One of the most likely explanations is dispersal. The DMS can help the algae disperse. When the coccolithophores bloom they quickly use up the nutrients in the sea, so they either die or they need to move to fresh waters. When they emit DMS and create clouds, the clouds rise and the resultant updrafts suck algae up as water vapour which is then carried until they are dropped down later into more nutrient-rich waters.

He then moved to the second element of the Jungian Mandala, **Intuition**. He led a guided visualisation imagining ourselves as coccolithophores riding along on the cloud on the way to new waters. We can, he pointed out, use intuition to draw us into new ways of seeing the world. The third element is **Feeling**. This connects to Deep Ecology and to its statement that “all life has intrinsic value, irrespective of its value to humans”. The final element is sensing, sensing the wind and so on, feeling a deep connection to the Earth and all its processes. All beings have the right to exist, independent of their value to humans.

And that was that (I’m sure I missed a lot out due to only being able to write so fast…). I am reading his book at the moment, and am finding it a very readable and informative account of the Gaia Theory but somehow it goes much deeper, almost acting as a mediation on Gaia, providing a deep connection with her and her intricate processes. As someone who had all enthusiasm for science driven out of me by education, and whose head seizes up when a formula appears, the way Stephan presents ecology and science makes it accessible and fascinating. He writes about relationships between different elements as if it were a drama. This is a wonderful book, one which I am really enjoying, and one which is deepening my understanding of Gaia Theory and making it alive, relevant, everyday and yet also sacred. It feels to me to be a book of the most profound importance.

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**Transition Culture’s Animate Earth Competition – win a copy of the book.**

Our dear friends at [Green Books](http://greenbooks.co.uk”GreenBooks”) have very kindly offered a copy of Stephan Harding’s new book to the lucky person whose correct answer to the following question is drawn first from the hat.

*James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Theory, is also responsible for an invention for which history probably won’t thank him quite so much in the long run. Is it;*

*a. Nylon tights
b. The satellite TV dish
c. The microwave oven
d. The ‘nodding dog’ often seen in the back of cars.
e. The mobile phone.
f. Barney the Dinosaur (as in “super-dee-dooper”)*

Please email your answers to **robjhopkins (at) gmail.com** by **Friday 19th May**.