Martin Crawford recently launching his book 'Creating a Forest Garden', at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Last week I cycled round to Martin Crawford’s house to interview him.  Martin runs the Agroforestry Research Trust, is one of the world’s authorities on the subject, and recently published ‘Creating a Forest Garden‘.  I had wanted to ask him about the drought in the southeast and the implications for the future of farming.  On the day I visited Martin though it was pouring with rain, but as you’ll see, that made little difference to his thoughts on the matter.  I have included a couple of films about his work as well, mixed in with the interview. 

So Martin, the thing that inspired me to think I wanted to come around and talk to you was the drought situation in East Anglia and the southeast, which has been very much in the news in the last few weeks – although it does seem to be slightly superseded by events, as we sit here with the rain pouring down outside!  But I wondered firstly what your thoughts are on that and also what that tells us about farming as it’s currently practiced in that part of the country.

Yeah, it’s very easy to look outside and see it’s pouring with rain and think, “Oh, it’s actually fine now”.  And it’s even pouring with rain in the east of the country sometimes too now.  But it’s not all fine – the damage has been done.  Yields from arable crops in the East of the country, (which is where the main arable crops like wheat are grown in this country), are going to be down by at least 25% and maybe more, because the damage has been done.  It can’t be recovered – it’s too late for that now.  It’s not all fine now and it really shows that a spring like this, which seems to be becoming the norm…..for the last four years we’ve had pretty dry springs – not as dry as this one but it seems to be becoming a pattern.  Whether that continues or not, it’s impossible to say.

In such a dry spring, the value and resilience of perennial plants is very obvious, so in my forest garden for example where everything is perennial it has been looking lush this spring and not drought affected at all.  I haven’t watered anything in there and it’s been absolutely fine.  So I haven’t been one of the people complaining about lack of rain all the time – it’s people who are wanting to grow lots of annual vegetables or farmers growing annual plants that have been screaming about the weather because if you’re sowing annual plants in spring, you’ve got to have water – they’re not going to grow without it, and put their roots down and so on.

In terms of looking at the future – if we’re going to grow more of our own food as a country and as a region, this is going to have a significant impact.  And on a larger, world-wide scale, it’s actually quite bizarre in some ways.  If you look at it in an ecological way, it’s quite bizarre we’ve based almost our whole agriculture on annual plants because if you look in nature, annual plants are rare.  You only get them if there’s been a soil disturbance, and then for a short time because they’ve been taken over by perennials.  So in a sense our whole agriculture is quite unnatural, based on annual plants, and very prone to any kind of climate extremes – whether it’s drought or water-logging from extreme events or whatever.

Unfortunately, because of climate change,  those extreme events are going to get more and more frequent – all extreme events, not just droughts.  Annual crops are going to get more and more susceptible to crop failures as time goes on, certainly in the next few decades.  And that could have quite serious effects.  In terms of grain stores in the world – grain stores are lower than they’ve ever been because there are increasing failures of harvest in some of the big grain producing countries.

Why is it that your forest garden is green and lush while everyone else is having to water their garden – why aren’t you having to dash around there with a hosepipe?

It’s partly because the plants are perennial.  They’ve been planted several years ago, most of them.  They’re well established, they have deep root systems already so they haven’t got to have that constant moisture in the top few inches of the top soil, which annual plants need to get the seeds to germinate and the roots to grow down.  So it’s partly that but it’s also to do with the system as well – it’s not just them being perennial plants because even perennial plants can sometimes be prone to drought problems.  But it’s the system as well so a forest garden system, or any agro-forestry system with a large proportion of trees in tends to protect the soil from drying influences.  So any shade protects the soil from drying; wind speeds are reduced so that reduces the evaporation from the soil as well.

Then there’s all sorts of effects that are very subtle and we often don’t ever see – for example there’s an effect called a ‘hydraulic lift’, using a horticultural term, and that is when, in a very dry or drought situation you’ve got deep rooted trees, what actually happens is that they can tap in to water reserves deep down in the sub-soil.  For their own use they bring that water up but when it’s very dry a big proportion of that water leaks out of their roots higher up in to the top soil and actually enables some of the other plants to use some of the water that they’re actually bringing up.  So there are some really fascinating effects that we don’t know the half of yet because the soil’s a mysterious place and not much research actually goes in to what happens there.  But it’s not just plants competing with each other, it’s much, much more complicated than that.

So it’s like the ‘trickle-up’ process…

It is, yes!

If you were an enterprising cereal farmer in East Anglia who was sitting there looking at the yield being 25% down this year and looking at the data about climate change and thinking, “Well, this is where we are now”, what would you do?  What would be your advice?

Martin Wolfe on his trial agroforestry farm in Sussex.

My advice would be to think carefully about what you’re going to do in the future because these droughts are likely to get worse not better as the years go on.  If you want to keep growing cereals, then probably the simplest agro-forestry system to do that in is called alley cropping and there’s a guy called Martin Wolfe over in Sussex who does this on his own farm and he grows cereals and does a lot of research as well.  And it basically means having lines of trees and alleys of your cereal crops cultivated in between.  You still get some benefits from those trees – you get shade, you get shelter benefits, and that will help to some degree.

But if you’re still growing annual wheat, say, it is still going to be prone to annual drought problems, whatever tree system you grow it in.  I don’t think there’s any way really of getting away from that.  The only alternative is to look towards perennial crops and unfortunately, as the last 100 years of agricultural research has progressed, it’s all gone into annual plants – very little has gone into perennial plants.  If the same effort had gone into perennial plants, we would now have perennial plants and it wouldn’t live forever but maybe 8 years, 10 years…it would have very deep roots and you wouldn’t have to keep cultivating it and so on.  Instead of which, perennial wheat is around – it hasn’t been highly developed but various small organisations have been doing some work on it, particularly in North America.  But it’s probably going to be 20 years, 25 years maybe until the work of their breeding and selection comes to a good fruition.  So there’s a gap there.

Wes Jackson’s working on that.

Yes, Wes Jackson and Tim Peters as well – there’s another guy working on that.  They’re not working together, they’re doing it independently but they’re both doing some fascinating work.

If there isn’t perennial wheat yet and the annual wheat’s buggered, or there’s certainly much, much less dependable, then we’re talking about perennial-based crops instead.  So what potential crops are we looking at there then?  Obviously the cereals that are grown there are a big source of carbohydrate that feed very easily into an industrial food system – what would be the most viable substitute?

Well to take you back one step, I would say that’s not how a big cereal farmer would see it.  A big cereal farmer in East Anglia would think, “Well, I need to keep growing big cereal, therefore I need water, not perennial crops.  I need water so I can keep the thing watered and keep it growing.  And you can surely irrigate wheat – you look in Australia where they grow wheat and they can grow it with masses of irrigation systems if you’ve got the water available.”  It could be done – it’s a huge infrastructure thing.  We’re not set up for massive irrigation in this country, although we would like to still get plenty of winter rainfall.  So if you can store it from winter, you could use it in the summer.

In the meantime, I think people are practically likely to try and go down that route if they can get access to water.  And it’s naïve to think people will easily or quickly move from a wheat based diet as their carbohydrate staple, to something perennial and more unusual.  It might happen slowly and hopefully it will but people are fairly conservative about what they eat and to try and change diets massively wouldn’t be a quick thing.

We’re way off walnutabix then!

Walnuts...

(Laughs)  I think we are!  Nuts are an obvious route to take if you’re looking at high energy foods, which are perennial – either carbohydrate nuts like sweet chestnut or oil based nuts like walnuts.  Both of them have fantastic potential in this country and elsewhere.  If the infrastructure was there to process it – if you dry chestnuts you can then make chestnut flour and that’s an easy ingredient for people to make stuff out of.  The processing of nuts on a small scale is labour intensive and that’s probably what puts people off buying more nuts in shells because you have to crack them and that’s a faf – it’s nice doing a few but if you have to do pounds and pounds, or kilos and kilos then it starts to become a big of a drag.

It needs those processing facilities to make them more accessible for people to use.  It’s not high tech stuff.  All the processing equipment is around in places like France – they grow a lot of nuts there – but it’s not around in this country yet because there aren’t enough growers to warrant big equipment, like cooperatives as you see in France.

I guess the other approach that you would put forward from a different perspective would be to have some genetically engineered wheat that was more drought tolerant?

Yes…..they may well be working on that – I don’t know what they’re doing.  I do know they’re trying to introduce the genes for nitrogen fixation in cereals for example, so you have to use less fertilisers – that’s the theory.  But I don’t know if they’re working on drought resistant genes, they may be.  Frankly, I think the GM route is a red herring.  Personally I think there’s probably not that many dangers in GM – there’s a lot of stuff about GM and a lot of people are very frightened about it because it’s relatively untested technology.  I think the dangers are probably over rated – I think there are probably not that many dangers.

But actually I think it is a complete red herring and a waste of time and effort going down that route because I don’t think that is the answer to solving the world’s food problems, which is what it’s claimed.  The world’s food problems at the moment are caused not by lack of varieties of wheat or whatever else – it’s much more complicated than that, socio-economic stuff, food wastage, food miles, all sorts of other stuff that actually, if you could work out all of that, you don’t need GM.  It’s irrelevant.

In terms of agroforestry, there’s the work you’re doing, there’s Martin Wolfe’s work, there’s other bits and bobs – other individual projects that others have – but in terms of it being able to scale up as something that’s seen more widely as a solution, or part of the solution to the impact that climate change is already having on food production in East Anglia, how might it scale up?  How might it take that step across?

That’s a tricky one and I work on the smaller end of agroforestry – the intensive, forest gardening type, which is obviously more appropriate to people with their own gardens, or people with small amounts of their own land.  Now I estimate there’s between 3 and 400 acres of forest gardens in this country, most of which have been started relatively recently.  In terms of larger scale agroforestry systems, and getting them adopted by farmers, that is more difficult.

Probably the biggest player of that now is the Organic Research Centre at Elm Farm, which Martin Wolfe is very involved with and they are actually taking a much more pro-active stance towards agro-forestry and putting a lot of research and doing trials – trials of different agro-forestry systems for farmers to go and visit.  They’re in Berkshire so they’re not far away from a lot of arable farmers.  So perhaps that’s going to have a big influence  in the future.

The problem with farming is that it’s all got subsidy based and farmers depend on their subsidies from grant schemes via the EU and the Common Agricultural Policy.  It’s a great big mess – that’s how it seems to me.  A very unhealthy system for farmers to have been forced or enticed onto this system where they feel they don’t have much choice but to do what the bureaucrats in Brussels hand down.  For them to start putting in agroforestry systems, half the time they find they start loosing grant money when they do that.

Although agroforestry is gradually getting into the European mentality and the CAP, it’s still very patchy and it’s not applied in the same way in every country.  So for example, in France with agroforestry systems – if you’re setting one up, you get grant money to do that.  You don’t here – we have the same rules but they’re applied very differently.  So clearly government has a role here as well because government doesn’t understand what agroforestry is and how important it can be.

So if it’s the case that the way to be able to get that very large-scale, intensive farming to move more in this direction, it’s almost that you need political lobbying at that kind of level.  And these days when that world is so evidence based, do you feel that after the 15, 20 years that you’ve been doing this work that there is now a strong enough evidence base that could underpin lobbying in that kind of way?  Could a case be put forward that’s coherent enough to shift the EU subsidy patterns more in that direction?

Alley cropping.

I think it could, particularly the large scale trials of agroforestry. There have been a lot of these – alley cropping systems and so on – from this country, from France.  A lot of research has gone on in France and there’s plenty of evidence out there.  I don’t think it’s the lack of evidence – I don’t think it’s that.  It’s perhaps a question of who’s going to do it, who’s going to take that on.  It’s not going to be me – that’s not what I do!  It’s unfortunate that it’s needed in a way because I’m a believer in actually transforming your own life and starting from that basis – affecting others by doing something good yourself.  That’s my belief.  I don’t believe in big government – I don’t think it’s good in any way to have big government.  But we’re lumbered with it and unfortunately somebody’s got to tackle them on it.  I don’t know who that’s going to be.

You don’t see that push coming from any other bodies?

Well, there’s Martin Wolfe and the Organic Research Centre in this country – they’ve done some.  And certainly Martin Wolfe has been invited up to the House of Commons on occasion to give presentations about what he does.  But last time I spoke to him he said he’d been invited up and not one MP turned up – there were some other people there but it was a room in the Houses of Parliament.  So what can you do if nobody turns up to start with… it’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it?

If you were able to throw your mind forward 20 years to that part of the country, if actually there had been a shift in policy and agroforestry was supported and enabled……at the moment you walk around that part of the country and it’s just massive, open-prairie style farming – can you describe to us what you think it could be like then?

If you were driving along a road you would see masses of trees.  It would probably develop into alley cropping systems, mainly I would think.  It still wouldn’t look like a natural environment because you’d have lines of trees – not necessarily single lines, it could be multiples lines of trees – with gaps in between with cultivated ground with wheat or other arable crops there.  But basically there would be a lot more tree cover as a proportion of the land –there’s almost none in parts of East Anglia now.

Going through that area would have a very different feel about it.  And the trees, as well as giving some benefits to the arable crops – and trees can be crop trees as well, so they could be nuts for example and as they matured and gave crops, and their crops increased, that would off-set any reduction in yields of cereals.  Obviously, as the trees get bigger and bigger, depending on what spacing you put them at, the shade increases and arable crops can’t tolerate very much shade so as the shade increases the arable crop tends to decrease in time.  If you’ve got a productive tree, you gradually move from one crop to another and you could end up, after a few decades, with mainly tree crops there.

The question I should have asked you at the beginning – it’s presumptuous everyone knows what we’re talking about – could you just give us a little elevator pitch of what agroforestry is?

Agroforestry is basically growing trees and crops – lower crops that is – in the same space.  It can vary – there’s a lot of different types of agroforestry, so probably the most intensive type are called forest gardens and that’s a very intimate mixture of trees and perennial shrubs and so on, usually on about 4 acres or not much more than that.  That’s an intensive form and at the other end of the scale there are extensive forms that are used on a much bigger scale.

In terms of arable cropping, it’s usually alley cropping in lines of trees – they may be productive trees themselves like fruit trees or nut trees or maybe timber trees for the future – with cultivated alleys in between where normal harvesting or sowing operations take place.  Or you can have, in areas like the west of Britain where there’s not so much arable land and more grassland, you can have trees in pasture, which is sometimes called silvopasture.

Silvopasture: trees mean happy cows...

Those trees can have a lot of benefits in terms of benefits to the pasture but also in terms of benefits to the animals that are grazing on the pasture.  Because animals actually love having trees around; they love the shelter of trees in hot weather, and perhaps in wet weather as well.   Generally, with the extra shelter they get, animals actually do much better than in an open grass field.  Old fashioned parkland is a kind of agroforestry system where you have scattered big trees dotted around pasture and that’s one of the very old, traditional agroforestry systems that’s been around or hundreds of years here.  So some systems have been around for a while.

My final question is, we’re talking about what’s been the grain bowl of the UK having its yields down by 25%, and presumably at this stage, in terms of research around yields and so on, could agroforestry feed the world?  If we talk about an allotment on a small scale….an allotment is always talked about as being the most productive use of a small amount of land, can a forest garden on the same size out-yield that?  Can agroforestry feed the world?

There’s lots of strands to that question.  First I’d say the overall answer is yes.  Could you have an intensive forest gardening system that yields more per unit area than an allotment?  Yes you could.  But I would argue that just looking at yields and the maximum you could get out of a piece of land is the wrong way of looking at it.  That’s what agricultural scientists have let us down to – everybody looks at what you can get out of a piece of land.  Is it enough to feed the country, the world, whatever?

From my perspective, that’s the wrong question.  The question should be, what can a piece of land provide sustainably, without degrading the environment, without reducing wildlife value dramatically, and obviously still produce useful stuff for people – which is a different question entirely.  What a piece of land can produce sustainably isn’t always as much as a field in East Anglia that has chemicals piled on all year round – fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides etc.  You probably can’t match that very easily in terms of output, with any agroforestry system.  But that’s not sustainable.

So it’s a much more complicated question.  If you start with the question, ‘What is a sustainable output?’, then that will lead you on to the inevitable question – ‘What is a sustainable human population?’.  And that’s the thing that is almost never discussed because it’s a very sensitive topic.  But it should be because actually human population can’t go on forever getting bigger and bigger because there’s only so much the earth can provide sustainably.

Thank you very much.

Wow, what a question! Relief I think! It’s been a long process, and it feels so good to finally see the fruits of everyone’s labours that have gone into this book, and to feel that it can now go out and be a help to people. And I can’t get over how much I love the cover design – we spent ages getting it right, and I’m totally in love! I think it’ll be a while before it all sinks in. (Below is a short promotional film for the book produced by Green Books).

Can you give us an idea of what ‘The Transition Timeline’ is about, and how it differs from ‘The Transition Handbook’?

Ok, well the book is in two halves. The first half lays out four realistic visions of the history of the next twenty years, in the UK and the wider world, covering the range of possible responses to the challenges we face. Then it takes the most desirable of these, the Transition Vision, and examines it in depth, fleshing out key areas like food, energy, population, healthcare etc, to provide a sense of context for Transition initiatives visioning a positive future for their own communities. The third section you know better than me, since you wrote it, but it explores how Transition initiatives can use the book to support their Energy Descent Planning process, and looks at what pioneering communities have been doing since the Transition Handbook came out.

The second half is an update on the latest evidence on climate change and peak oil, and more depth on the interactions between the two. There’s also a section here focused explicitly on the UK impacts of these twin challenges, looking at the impacts we have already seen here, the Government’s responses, and what we are likely to see in future. This
provides a lot of information from authoriative sources that should be useful in dealing with sceptical individuals or organisations in Transition Towns.

Tell us a bit about yourself. What has been the journey that led you to sitting down and starting to write this book?

Well I used to run a learning centre for marginalised groups, primarily working with drug misusers, asylum seekers and people with learning difficulties. I loved that work, but I was learning more about climate change and peak oil in my spare time and eventually got to the point where I felt working to help people reintegrate with society wasn’t the most useful thing I could be doing if society itself was heading off a cliff!

So I left my job and started living very cheaply while researching what I might be able to do to make a difference. In 2006 I attended the two-week Life After Oil course at Schumacher College, which is where I first met you, David Fleming, Richard Heinberg and others, and decided that Transition Towns and Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) felt like big parts of what we need to build a better future.

Since then, working to help support and develop those ideas has been the focus of my time and energy, and the book grew out of that. In 2007 Transition initiatives were feeding back to the Transition Network that they needed more input on the big trends that were likely to affect their communities over the next twenty years, and that was the initial brief that you guys gave me for what eventually became this book. I made the mistake of then asking lots of  transitioners what else would be useful to include, which is why the project took about a year longer than we originally expected!

How has your work around Transition affected how you live your life on a daily basis? What do you do differently now?

Well right now I seem to be spending every moment writing or talking about this book, but perhaps that isn’t quite what you mean! I suppose for me awareness of peak oil and climate change has been shaping my life for the best part of a decade now, as we discussed, but the key contribution of Transition for me personally has been pulling me away from my dangerous instinct to approach everything alone.

I spent too long on my own reading incredibly depressing information on the internet and not really having any peer group around me that I could share that with, and I didn’t really know what to do about that.

Nowadays I meet weekly with my local Transition Steering Group and am always involved in arranging events, plotting future projects and discussing things with others who share a similar understanding of the challenges we collectively face.

To be honest I’m still not quite sure what it is about the Transition process that brings such amazing people out of the woodwork in all these towns, cities, villages etc, but there is clearly a very powerful energy there, and it has made a huge difference to my life. Strange to think that just a few short years ago we were sitting at Schumacher College with
what was then a very young idea, and wondering where it might go..

One of the key threads of the Transition Timeline is the need for new cultural stories and narratives. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Yes, my personal education was actually in philosophy, and although I see climate change and peak oil as probably the biggest forces shaping our future, I am always struck by the fact that in a sense they are only symptoms of something deeper – they are consequences of the choices we have collectively made and continue to make, and those choices are shaped by our understanding of the world and of what is important to us.

Stories are key to the process of shaping our collective understanding, and in particular I feel that our culture’s dominant stories about the likely shape of the future are not serving us very well. The main narratives here could probably be summed up as “more of the same”, “apocalypse” and “technology will save us all”, but I don’t believe that
choices guided by any of these narratives are likely to create a very desirable future.

The sections in the book about peak oil and climate change are very thorough. Clearly they involved a lot of research. What did you find out through that research that was new to you or that came as a surprise?

Hmm… I think probably the most interesting concept that was a real revelation for me was the insight that while peak oil is essentially a problem of flow rates and not ultimate reserves, climate change is essentially a problem of ultimate total emissions. There is a difference in impacts based on when emissions take place, but it is not the key consideration on the timescales we are considering. For me, nailing that helped a lot in thinking through how the two problems interact.

What would be your 10 second elevator pitch as to why people reading this really need a copy of The Transition Timeline?

If you’re planning to live in the UK, or even in the world, over the next twenty years, this book will tell you what to expect. And how to make it better.

The booklaunch for ‘The Transition Timeline’ takes place tonight at 7.30pm at the Totnes Bookshop, High Street, Totnes (next to the Civic Square).    Copies of the book can be ordered here.

—

A short history lesson.  The histories of Tibet and China have long been intertwined, sometimes parts of Tibet were part of China, and sometimes vice-versa. Tibet lead a very isolationist existence for hundreds of years, it wanted little to do with the rest of the world, and didn’t sign the kinds of treaties and accords that would identify its sovereignty in international law, yet its culture, language, traditions, dress, music, architecture, religion and politics were always entirely distinct from that of China.

In 1950, China invaded Tibet. Between then and 1959 it tightened its grip on the country, especially on the East of the country, what was called Amdo province, but which the Chinese rapidly absorbed into China, calling it Quinhai province. By 1959, the tensions in Tibet had reached breaking point, and an uprising broke out in the capital, Lhasa. In the resultant confusion, the Dalai Lama fled to India, and between 10 and 15,000 Tibetans were slaughtered in Lhasa in a period of just 3 days.

In Central Tibet, between March 1959 and October 1960, 87,000 Tibetans were killed by Chinese forces tightening their grip on the country. During the 1960s, agricultural reforms that dictated that China needed plants that struggled to grow in China led to widespread famine across Tibet. The Cultural Revolution led not just to increased carnage in terms of the many thousands of Tibetans exterminated in ‘struggle sessions’ and in prison camps, but also the most appalling cultural carnage. Before the Chinese invasion, Tibet was home to over 6,000 monasteries, an extraordinary treasury of ancient Buddhist artifacts, manuscripts and ancient buildings. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, during which young radicalised Maoists tried to eradicate all traces of the past, only 13 were left. The huge monastic cities of Sera, Drepung and Ganden were shelled with cannons for weeks until all that remained were stumps in the landscape.

Tibetans were forced to use holy scriptures as toilet paper, to murder their teachers, and to actively desecrate religious icons, melting down any valuable ones and sending the bullion to China. Prison camps in the north of Tibet were set up, hundreds of miles from anywhere in the vast desert regions, home to over 10,000 prisoners, forced to work in borax mines in dreadful conditions. The Panchen Lama (second only to the Dalai Lama), speaking in Beijing in the late 1980s, said that “in Amdo and Kham, people were subjected to unspeakable atrocities. People were shot in groups of ten or twenty… Such actions have left deep wounds in the minds of the people”.

All of this was inflicted on the Tibetan people in the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘democratic reform’. Estimates vary, but it is thought that at least 1.2 million Tibetans have perished since 1950, one of the worst cases of genocide since World War Two. Until the mid-80s, Tibet was closed to the world, with reports emerging only from those brave enough to make the journey across the mountains to India.

Then in September 1987, the city of Lhasa saw major demonstrations, hundreds of monks protesting at the treatment of their people. This and subsequent demonstrations were ruthlessly suppressed, with the head of security for the Tibetan region, who visited shortly afterwards, praising the ‘merciless repression’. While we in the UK are rightly indignant at the idea of 42 day detention without charge, in Tibet people can be detained for such charges as speaking with foreigners, singing patriotic songs, putting up posters, or having images or recordings of the Dalai Lama, or even speaking favourably of him. It can be months after being detained that one is even formally arrested, and often it is down to relatives of those detained to track their loved ones down.

The Chinese have also embarked on a vast programme of population transfer in order to break the back of the Tibetan identity. The city of Lhasa has been all but completely rebuilt. Aside from the key tourist sites like the Potala Palace and the Jokhang temple, most of the Tibetan housing has been replaced by Chinese housing. Tibet operates like an aparthied state. Most good jobs go to Chinese, and most businesses are owned by them. When I went to Tibet in 1991, in a town just half an hour north of Lhasa, I only saw one example of Tibetan writing, and all the shops were owned by Chinese people.  It was a deeply saddening experience.

The attitude of the world towards Tibet has depended largely on what it felt it could get out of China at any given time. Initially the CIA funded a small Tibetan guerilla group, but that ceased when the US started making overtures towards China during the Nixon era. China was a vast potential market for Coca-Cola, and has rapidly become the world’s great sweatshop, the source of most of what is for sale in the West’s shops, as we in turn have closed down most of our own manufacturing. The Dalai Lama has for 50 years led an increasingly lonely mission to try and get Western governments to recognise the rights of the Tibetan people.

Quite early on he relinquished the idea of Tibetan independence, speaking of Tibet being given greater autonomy, but within China. The Chinese have refused to budge on anything, and as China’s economic might has grown, Western governments have become increasingly obsequious and fawning to Chinese interests. The tolerance of the behaviour of the ‘guardians’ of the Olympic torch in London recently was one indicator of this, as was Gordon Brown’s refusal to meet the Dalai Lama on his recent visit to the UK, but the recent statement finally recognising Beijing’s direct rule over Tibet is an utter disgrace.

Take a look at Zhu Weiqun telling the BBC that the UK has merely finally seen sense and fallen “in line with the universal position in today’s world”.  Tibetans, he said, are China’s ‘brothers and sisters’.  This is patently nonsense, the following film offering but one insight into why.

When I went to Nottingham earlier this year to see the Dalai Lama, there was a pro-Chinese protest outside, an extraordinary sight, of young Chinese students clearly with no grounding in the history of the Tibet/China issue, protesting that the Dalai Lama wants to ‘split the Motherland’.

As the energy peak-underpinned recession deepens and continues to bite, Gordon Brown’s pitch to the G20 meeting was the need to increase borrowing and cut interest rates in order to stimulate economic growth.  This is akin to offering fresh carrots and a thorough whipping to a horse that just died from exhaustion.  China is of course key to this.  If the world is to spend its way back to economic health it needs the Chinese.  It needs their cheap trainers and toothbrushes, their un-unionised factories and low wages.  It also needs their money, the vast amount of currency they have stashed away after the recent years of growth.  Finally, it needs their energy, given the phenomenal rate at which they have been buying up energy resources around the world in recent years.  In short, when you are utterly dependent on someone, you find it both easy and convenient to overlook their obvious flaws.  It is easy to see why the Dalai Lama recently spoke of ‘losing hope;’ for the future of Tibet.  The world needs China.  It doesn’t need Tibet.

If the world is to pursue a path of continuing to believe that economic growth and economic globalisation  have a future in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, then we merely deepen our reliance on and our need to turn a blind eye to the atrocities perpetuated by those on whom we become increasingly dependent.  A world in which countries and economies were more resilient, less dependent on international trade and less dependent on imported energy, more self-reliant and more resourceful, would be one in which one could actually have an ‘ethical foreign policy’.  At present, to speak of such a thing is laughable.

In Gordon Brown’s growth-fixated worldview, having China on board is essential.  Tibet is, once again, paying the price for not having oil, for not having asserted its independence in the 1940s, and for having been invaded by one of the world superpowers.  Now it has been officially decided that the Tibetan people can sod off, that the world will do nothing about the ongoing eradication of their culture, that they have no-one to turn to as China continues to import hundreds of thousands of Chinese into Tibet and to brutally suppress any opposition.  When people suggest that building resilience and becoming less dependent on economic globalisation somehow sentences the developing world to poverty, Tibet is just one of many examples of places for whom the demise of our addiction to China means that finally, the world may actually find its voice in terms of speaking out on the ruthless and relentless eradication of one of the world’s great cultures.

**Small is Inevitable after oil runs out.**
By Anthony Steen MP.

How do you wean a nation off its addiction to oil? Transition Town Totnes is an experiment trying to do just that and find the answer using a small, historic market town of 4,000 people as its model.

‘Peak Oil’ is the phrase used to identify a high point, probably reached this year, when the world’s conventional or crude oil production rate will reach its maximum output only to then fall into decline. Whilst this gloomy picture may be seen as scare-mongering it contains one vital and indisputable truth: that the world will face a ‘supply crunch’ around 2012 when reduced output will collide with ever-increasing demand.

Currently 86 million barrels of oil are produced each day but since production recently stalled the price per barrel has sky-rocketed to US$76. Whilst the International Energy Agency believes that there might be as much as 20,000 billion barrels of oil or ‘black gold’ running through the veins of our planet, most of it will never see the insides of our petrol tanks remaining undiscovered below earth’s surface. Historically we are at the ‘tipping’ point, as we are now using more and more oil to support our ever affluent lifestyles. Yet we know from the lorry drivers strike in 2000 how little resilience we have when oil stocks don’t reach us.

Our dependency on cheap, readily available oil has allowed us to become complacent. Organic carrots grown in Cornwall, are driven to the Midlands for washing and grading, then to London for pricing and finally back down to the West Country for sale in a local supermarket because oil is cheap. That also explains why vegetables continue to be flown daily from Africa, fruit from Mexico, apples from China, and lamb from New Zealand.

Whilst access to cheap oil has allowed the economy to grow year by year, the thought that the supply should restrict the organic carrot’s journey is something which has not even been contemplated. When cheap oil is no longer available – what prospects then? What will happen to our lifestyle? In our modern world we burn oil indiscriminately. We use it to heat our home, get us to and from work, fertilise our food, and fly us around the globe. It fuels not just our cars but our lifestyles. With climate change leading the global action agenda, we have to consider life after oil ideally through an Energy Descent Action Plan.

Is it possible that a future with less oil could improve the quality our lives resulting in a renaissance in agriculture and small businesses? Could Peak Oil help change attitudes and rebuild ‘social capital’ by bringing people and disparate groups together to cooperate and focus on a common goal. Peak Oil could well be the amber light warning us that there is a major obstacle on the road ahead.

So what is happening down at the grass roots? Transition Town Totnes has already published its first food directory in which local growers, food producers and caterers are listed with the aim of encouraging people to ‘buy local’, reducing food miles and therefore oil consumption. Last March I launched the Totnes Pound, together with Rob Hopkins the inspiration and initiator of the scheme to offer an incentive to buy locally. The Totnes Pound gives 5% off every purchase of local goods, ie – for every £9.50 Stirling one receives £10 of Totnes currency. Shortly 10,000 more Totnes notes will be issued as 70 businesses have agreed to take on the currency. This will build economic resilience as well as creating locality loyalty. The Totnes Pound is only available to purchase locally produced goods. The theme of Transition Town Totnes is not so much that small is beautiful, but rather that small is inevitable. This is a move away from the concept of the Global Village, back to the Local Village as highlighted by Tom Stevenson in the Daily Telegraph (10 July 2007):

>“Looking a generation and more ahead, I think the unspoken truth about the looming oil crisis is that the so-far inexorable march of globalisation should not be taken for granted. In the great sweep of history, the 200-year oil age may be seen as a blip before a return to a more sustainable, more local economic system.”

The aim of Transition Town Totnes is to raise awareness that oil is not here forever and alternative ways of living must be pioneered. There are already there are 20 transition towns in Britain and 90 more expressing interest. The work of Rob Hopkins has resulted in Liverpool University creating the facility know as ‘Oil Vulnerability Auditing’ which offers local businesses an individual evaluation on how well they will manage with possible oil shortages.

Transition Town Totnes is not some PR gimmick. It is based on two fundamental truths: that the world supply of oil has peaked, and global warming is in full swing. If the Totnes Pound stops the travelling carrot, encourages holidays in Britain and reinvigorates a declining agricultural industry, then it will have already achieved its purpose. But there are many other spin offs not the least as T. S. Elliot put it in ‘The Four Quartets’:

>“We will arrive where we started
>And know the place for the first time.”

Ri. Is David Fleming in the room? I don’t think so. Well it’s too bad David Fleming isn’t in the room because he’s the one really to address this. I think it’s an ingenious proposal – the idea of tradable energy quotas, or carbon quotas, or petrol quotas, or whatever ways it could be administered. Because it actually uses a market mechanism in a way that supports individual behaviour, that actually makes sense. Is everyone familiar with the idea? The essential idea is that everyone would get a free quota…here we go, this is Energy and the Common Purpose, David Fleming’s booklet on the subject, which is currently being revised.

Everyone would get a quota at the beginning of the year – probably in electronic form, in the form of a credit card – and then as you purchased energy, petrol at the station, whatever, you would surrender some of these quotas. You’d still have to pay for the energy resources, whether it was gas or electricity or petrol. If you ran out before the end of the year, you’d have to purchase more quotas on the open market, and of course the price would be determined by supply and demand.

On the other hand, if you were very conservative in your use of energy, you’d have extra quotas before the end of the year and you could sell those and benefit financially, so there would be an ongoing transfer of wealth within the society, from the energy guzzlers to the energy misers, again using a market mechanism to support this kind of rational behaviour. Everyone would know that next year their quota would be smaller. So that would create the incentive for getting rid of your car, riding a bicycle, using public transportation, changing your behaviour sooner rather than later.

**Q8. The power of these sessions – someone just mentioned the words ‘common purpose’ there, and I ask the question, how familiar are you with the organisation Common Purpose, in the UK? Is anybody familiar with it? There are some people in the room. Common Purpose is an organisation in the UK that started out of their concern about the leadership in cities. It’s now spread out in to towns and villages as well, and it works by identifying the next step of leaders in cities. They work across the private sector, the public sector, and the voluntary sector. They get leaders from the police, the ambulance service, the big companies, the small companies, and they are asked to commit a weekend and a day a month for a year.**

**They go away and have a series of workshops, lectures, study groups, to come up and try to tackle the major issues in their cities. It just strikes me, that to take peak oil to Common Purpose might be a really good way of getting this message in to the key places. That is something that was triggered by someone talking about common purpose. I do have a question of my own. Sitting listening to the presentations yesterday, I spent eight years working in Manchester, and was there grappling with the challenges faced…that city and all the other industrial cities in Britain, and across the world suffered, after the collapse of the industrial revolution.**

**What was so interesting about Manchester was, if you look at the facts – the growth of the cotton industry and cotton production, which started in the 18th century – it was a continuous climb of production, despite major recessions in the ‘20’s, ‘30’s, last stretch of the 19th century etc. Production was continuous steep climb for 200 years, and it collapsed in 10. And I think you’ll find that the cities who’ve had to grapple with those challenges, will be much more receptive to actually now start to plan ahead and be receptive to the challenges of peak oil. So the question I ask – are there lessons and parallels to be learnt from that history?**

Ri. Good comment.

**Q9. My name’s James Norman, I’m a farmer. I’m particularly interested in energy. All this is to do with the national and global picture – my particular interest is to do with the energy economics and energy balances at the farming level, because I’m not convinced that the strength of organic farming to produce food in a low energy way has been recognised, even at this conference, which is where the greatest expertise on that subject has been gathered. For this purpose, I’ve worked out my energy needs for all purposes on the farm, including inputs, although I don’t use any external energy input really at all. This comes to about 24 litres per ton of grain produced – I produce grain, at 24 litres of oil per ton, virtually zero for that amount. This means – I worked this out more or less – I should be able to run the farm using 12% of my arable area, or 6% of the total area, growing my own bio fuel.**

**I’m not suggesting this is a general argument for growing bio fuel, I’m suggesting that properly run organic farming is sufficiently energy efficient to be able to have a massive net positive energy balance – in other words it can be self sufficient in energy while still producing, in my case, something like 90% of the food I currently produce. So, I’m not convinced that we need to… this doesn’t mean that we then need to localise food supplies and to engage more people in agriculture and to produce a lot more veg close to where it’s used and that sort of thing. All those arguments are desirable, but the mainstream production – for example, grain and livestock – providing it’s done organically, I think it can be done with energy produced on the farm itself. I’m happy to back up those figures with details if anyone needs them.**

Ri. Well that’s why we’re having this discussion about peak oil at a conference of organic farmers, because they’re the people that have the solutions really. This kind of energy analysis needs to be carried forward more broadly, and with considerable rigour, because the argument needs to be made widely and loudly, that this is the direction agriculture needs to go in, because globally it’s not the direction that agriculture is going…organics are growing, let’s say in the US, by a pretty substantial margin every year, but, for example, Monsanto corporation…before I was writing about peak oil I was writing primarily about genetic engineering and food crops, and I sort of shifted my attention away from that, and then I was brought up short a few weeks ago when I was talking to a friend who actually follows Monsanto as a corporation and how the stock is doing and so on…its stock has doubled, and doubled, and doubled again, over the last ten years.

The general trend in agriculture still is towards centralisation of production of seeds as well as products, further intensification and so on. So the arguments that we’re making here…it may seem as though we’re preaching to the choir in a sense, but I hope we’re in a sense at a gathering of preachers, training the preachers to go forth and give this message about the direction that agriculture desperately needs to go, to a wider audience, and to add impulse as an underscore to the argument.

R. Certainly, the publication that we’re editing that will come out a month or two after this conference, the One Planet Agriculture handbook, will have a balance of looking at what is best practice already within organic farming, and moving beyond that in to distribution and much wider than that, but it definitely acknowledges the good practice that’s already in place…

**Q10. Just on that…as an organic farmer – the gentleman was saying that organic farming can grow its own fuel – as an organic farmer, we need to rotate our fields, and our arable land used to have… we need to have four years of grass and clover before you can go back and plough up for your cereals, and there’s great tracts through the East of England where’s there’s no animals and no grass producing the nation’s cereals…so you’ve got to be careful with organic farming – the country can just turn to organic farming, whole tracts of land which are just growing cereals have to go down to grass, you can utilise that grass to feed more animals… and so it’s not a clear cut message. It’s not easy for organic farming to feed this country the way it is at the moment, from my perspective, because we need four years of grassland where at the moment there’s complete cereals year on year. You might like to respond to that…**

**Q9. I’m not sure whether I’d like to or not! I recognise the answer that the panel gave, which is that organic farming is not being taken up fast enough, and we have to get the message out that organic farming has solutions to these problems. But the point I’m making here, is that I’m not sure it’s recognised within organic farming just how good these solutions are…there’s only been a very limited amount of work done on energy use within organic systems in comparison to conventional systems, and I’m not convinced that we’ve identified best practice – you were saying there’s something on this – within organic farming.**

**I’m saying that this is the solution, and we have to identify that for ourselves first, before we can get the message out to a wider audience. At the moment there is still…the article in The Economist in December put the cat among the pigeons as far as the direction they’re trying to go, a fake professor at Edinburgh suggested that organic farming is actually less energy efficient than conventional farming. This kind of nonsense is still in the public arena, and I’m offering my farm and am prepared to contribute to work to prove that this is not the case…**

**Q11. I’m an organic dairy farmer in Pembrokeshire. I was just pondering your comments, Richard, about the need for land reform, and wondering actually if that was the way forward. I appreciate the comments from yesterday that we need more farmers on our land, and more people to concentrate on food production, but was it the way forward just to reform land ownership? So I’ve been working out in my mind what I thought could happen, and I’ve been to Poland in the eighties and seen the large cooperatives which were failing because nobody had a sense of ownership who worked there.**

**At the same time there were thousands upon thousands of little farms of a hectare a piece which fed the family, but couldn’t feed anybody else in the system. So trying to look at the way forward… farmers are, it may be a contradiction in terms but we’re asked to be more efficient, economies of scale are always quoted to us, hence I’m farming with my neighbour – we pooled our cows, working from one milking parlour to save energy costs that way, and I know other farmers have copied that in our area, but to land reform I thought, well perhaps we ought to go the way some progressive farmers are going, in New Zealand, in mid West America, where they’re creating equity partnerships.**

**Now these tend to be farmers buying up large farms, putting on their manager who would be a farmer, and they’re very profitable I understand. But perhaps, if we can educate the public as to what’s going on with peak oil, we can get people buying shares who are non farmers, but they buy equity shares in farms, large farms. Then if we say, perhaps we want local production – can we have local people buying local land? I don’t know if it’ll work, I think it’s a long way off, but perhaps that’s one way forward. To sell shares – I can’t see it happening on the stock market, but if there were literally land for food, in the future, sales? And finally I just thought, perhaps we all should just look at the Amish as a model, because that seems to be the way forward, or one way.**

Ri. Good comment. As I think was talked about a bit yesterday – we also need more urban farming, more food production in the cities and close to cities. In those cases, very often, there are urban lots or areas that are either owned by the city or by land speculators, and we need to find ways to make those bits of land available to people with the skills and the incentive to produce food. And that’s actually one of the strategies that Oakland is contemplating, as it looks at how it can actually produce 30% of its food by 2020.

**Q12. I’m from Organics into Wales. Talking about the performance of organic farms, I thought I should let you know about two projects I’m working on. One is a DEFRA funded project, which is environmental bench marking for organic farming systems. This is through the organic research centre at Elm Farm. That’s a rather heavy program – it takes a lot of datae collection and its hard work persuading farmers to take part, but I hope at the end of that to have a protocol, whereby if farmers are interested we can do the energy balances.**

**But it’s also for looking at socio-economic, and other sustainability issues. I’m very happy to talk to anybody who’d like to, about that. The other one is the one I call my light and fluffy. I did financial bench marking in farms, and its remarkably difficult to get people to even do that, when you’d think they’d really need to know their cost of production. I thought this environmental bench marking was asking so much that we needed to start right at the other end. So I’ve got with me some questionnaires, which are intended just to start people thinking. They ask questions regarding all branches of sustainability, and includes things like, ‘Do you take a holiday every year?’, and ‘How happy are you with your work/play balance?’, and that kind of thing which is intended to start people thinking.**

**That’s going to go on the web, and then people will be able to look at their answers and see how they are as a dairy farmer compared with a non-organic dairy farmer, or a beef and sheep farmer, or grower. And that, without telling them ‘bench marking’, that will start, I hope, people thinking about how they’re doing compared with other people. And then hopefully we can wean them on to doing the real work of keeping the records, so they can see what they’re doing, and how they compare with other farmers, and try and aspire to improve their sustainability. It’s going to be www.(fitforourfuture?).org.uk, but it won’t be there till March. But if anybody would like to fill it in, I have to have a population on the database before it goes live, so if any organic farmers here would like to fill it in, then we can put them on and they’ll be the first people to go live – something to compare the work with.**

Ri. I just thought of a metaphor which may seem a bit off the wall, but here goes anyway…I play the violin, and I have many friends who are professional violinists, so I sort of think in those terms a bit, and there have been some studies of job satisfaction among string players. It turns out that orchestral violinists have among the lowest rates of job satisfaction of people in any kind of artistic endeavour, it’s just terrible. People I know who are professional string players in orchestras typify this – they’re always grousing and complaining about a conductor in the first chair, concert master…and yet violinists or string players in general who play chamber music, who play in professional string quartets or whatever, have among the highest rates of job satisfaction.

Here are people doing exactly the same thing – from any objective standpoint they’re playing the violin…so I wonder if the same thing could be true of farmers. It would depend on how the situation is set up – how much autonomy one has, how much of a sense of community one has with others as to how much job satisfaction, work satisfaction one has. So I think it bares some thought.

**Q13. I’m from Yeo Valley Organics. Just to follow up on Sue’s comment about the importance of having data about energy usage on farms, because DEFRA – I don’t know if anybody has seen this – DEFRA, a month ago, published a report called The Environmental Impacts of Food Production and Consumption, and it’s done by Manchester Business School. This isn’t the whole thing because I couldn’t print out all 180 pages of it. But what it says, for example, on organic milk: ‘Organic milk production appears to require less energy input, but much more land than conventional production. Whilst eliminating pesticide use, it also gives rise to higher emissions of green house gasses, acid gasses and neutrifying substances per unit of milk produced.’**

**Neutrifying substances apparently is stuff going in to water filters. So this is DEFRA’s latest information, which strikes back at the issue of are our authorities getting the right information and acting on it? And if that’s what they’re reading, then no. And across organic farming in total…I’ll just read one more sentence. It says: ‘There is no clear cut answer to the question – which trolley has the lower environmental impact, the organic one or the conventional one?’ This is DEFRA! We should be waking up to this stuff!**

**Q14. I’m Tracy Worcester, I’m a campaigner. I just thought maybe having these speakers here for an organic farmer audience, was to actually enforce the Soil Association’s local food activities, because just like that report says, organic food has a huge food mile input, or whatever you call it, because the food is coming in at 80% from abroad. Many of the organic farms are pretty similar in the way that they’re farmed, and surely the way that we’re trying to go perhaps, is to get away from the supermarkets, and provide for the farmers markets, and sort of revitalise peoples’ distrust in organic from god knows where, and to reconnect with the local farmer.**

**And thereby giving more livelihoods to British, local, small scale farming systems, which I would say are far more ecological than the big, and let’s make more room…it’s not just about land reform, which I think is important. It’s first of all about making small scale farming viable from the bottom up, i.e., people going to the local shop and buying the local food, and coming away from the supermarkets.**

Ri. Any questions about peak oil? We have some pretty heavy hitters here in terms of knowledge on that subject so…

**Q15. Sorry, this is not one about peak oil! I’m interested to know, does anybody on the panel have any view point on immigration policy? For obvious reasons…this government has taken the view that it’s much better to let the accession states have easy access here, whereas I think France, Germany, Italy and some of the others have put restrictions on labour movement, or rights certainly from people coming from those accession states.**

**By all the estimates I think any of the presentations made yesterday, the number of people required to work in farms, to feed the world, has got to increase dramatically. And yet even with the most adventurous forms of recruitment, it doesn’t seem likely that you’re going to find an indigenous group to manage that. And therefore it would seem quite interesting to look at how the Soil Association could perhaps persuade government to be a little bit more imaginative in its immigration policy, and effectively, look at knowledge transfer from…we saw the Cuban example, and there are also many others like that.**

Ri. Interesting proposition! Immigration in my country is a politically very difficult question to address, and I’m not sure it’s as difficult here, but in the US, to even start talking about the subject, you might as well just paint a target on your forehead! Enough said.

J. Well that’s ok because it’s not at all controversial in the UK! I’m really regretting getting out of the audience here, because I’ve been sitting here taking… this is the first time I’ve been on one where I’ve been taking notes about things that I haven’t heard before, and learning. But not being a politician, I’m allowed to say, am I not, that I don’t know on this one, I really don’t. I think obviously it’s going to be…hopefully not literally, but possibly literally, a battle ground. The fascists are mobilising fast on this.

18% of us, the British people, say that we would be prepared to vote fascist, the BNP. Of course they dress it up as something else, but that’s ultimately their objective. And this is there, pretty much, single, unifying issue. So you’ve got that on one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, you have completely free immigration, and the fact that bathrooms would not be decorated in London if we did not have a very high level of immigration from Eastern Europe at the moment…so I’m dodging the question – somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, just as we had to grab the political land mine of land reform, and somehow untangle it if we’re going to fashion a survivable, sustainable solution to peak oil, so we will have to come to some sort of rapprochement on the issue of immigration.

**Ugo Bardi** is a Professor at the Dipartimento di Chimica at Università di Firenze in Italy, and is also President of [ASPO Italy](www.aspoitalia.net”ASPOIT”), who so ably hosted ASPO5 in Pisa earlier this year. In this article, Ugo delves back into the history of his region of Italy, Tuscany, and identifies strategies and lessons of relevance to societies in their attempts to respond to peak oil. Having lived in Tuscany myself for a couple of years, it is a part of the world I am very fond of, so here is an article which mixes post-peak solutions and Tuscan history, and offers some very useful points in so doing.

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The fall of empires is a subject that has fascinated us from the time of Gibbon’s 18th century classic “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.�? More recently, in “The Collapse of Complex Societies�? (1988) Joseph Tainter reports the case of 18 societies in history that declined and disappeared. Of these, the Roman Empire is still the one we know best and that fascinates us the most. Its fall was a major discontinuity in history; it was not just a reduction in population, nor just the disappearance of a political system. It was the loss of most of what we call “civilization�?: government, laws, justice, art; everything. The science and the literature accumulated over nearly a millennium would have been completely lost had not been saved, in part, in the Irish monasteries and the Islamized East. It was the kind of collapse we fear for our own civilization.

But not all societies collapse so completely. There are cases in which a society manages to contain decline and to keep its structure, its traditions, and its way of life. One may be the decline of Tuscany after the great expansion of the Renaissance, a case that had many points in common with the fall of the Roman Empire, but which was not so abrupt and devastating. Centuries of history are a complex story to summarize in a few pages but, as a Tuscan, I think I can at least sketch the main elements of what happened in Tuscany after the start of the decline, around the end of the 16th century. From this story, perhaps we can learn something useful for us today.

Historians don’t agree on what are the causes that make societies decline; Tainter cites 11 different explanations in his book. However, we are starting to understand that the main cause of decline is the lack of resources which are, almost always, provided by agriculture. We can still see how agricultural decline brought down the Roman Empire when we look at the city of Antium on the Tyrrenian Sea. Today, Antium is an inland city but, in imperial times, it had been the gateway of Roman commerce; the riches of the Empire went through its harbor. The disappearance of Antium’s harbor tells us the story of an agricultural disaster.

We know that the Roman Empire reached its maximum expansion in the 2nd centurty A.D.; afterwards, without the riches that came from plundering its neighbors, it started declining. The only answer that the Romans could give to stop the fall was military; war was what they knew best, what they had built their empire on. They strenghtened their legions, they built new fortifications, they developed new and better weapons. In this way, they managed to keep the Empire together for a while. That, however, put a terrible strain on their agriculture. The land was overexploited; erosion progressively destroyed the fertile soil and transformed it into the silt that flowed with the Tiberis River and buried Antium’s harbor. Other silted port cities show that the problem was widespread all over the Empire. Eventually, erosion became so serious that agriculture collapsed and the Empire disappeared, destroyed by famines and depopulation.

Tuscany had been part of the Roman Empire and it had collapsed with it. But, in the period that followed, the Tuscan land was left in peace for centuries and could recover its fertile soil. In the Middle Ages, Tuscany could again produce enough food to sustain a growing population. The great economic expansion of Tuscany of the Renaissance came from industry and commerce, but it couldn’t have been possible without a healthy agriculture. But nothing can keep growing forever. With the 16th century, Tuscany started showing all the symptoms of agricultural overexploitation. Today, if you look at the city of Pisa on the Tuscan coast, you’ll see that it is an inland city. But, once, Pisa had been one the seafaring republics of the Middle Ages. In the 15th century, Pisa’s harbor is reported to have been already silting from sediments carried by the Arno River. In the 17th century, silting became so serious that the harbor had to be abandoned. The destiny of Pisa was the same as that of Antium centuries before. Overexploitation of the land had led to the loss of agricultural soil, carried to the sea by rivers. The sediments that destroyed the harbor of Pisa were once the rich soil that had supported the Tuscan population.

One of the reasons for the erosion of the Tuscan land was overpopulation, another was the the development of firearms. Firearms are made in steel and to make steel charcoal is needed. Charcoal comes from trees and when trees disappear, erosion appears. More wars meant that more trees had to be cut and that meant losing more fertile soil. The Tuscan agriculture was following the same path of decline of the Roman agriculture of several centuries before. With the decline of agriculture, the Tuscan economic system started imploding; commerce and industry could not survive without food.

The Tuscan cities declined also in terms of military strength. As it had happened to the Romans long before, Tuscany was invaded by more powerful neighbors. The free cities of Tuscany fell one by one. The republic of Florence fell to the Spanish Imperial Armies in 1530. The republic of Siena fell to the combined armies of Spain and of the Florentine Medici in 1555. Tuscany became a province of the Spanish Empire, independent only in name. In 1571, Tuscany still had enough resources to send galleys to fight alongside the Spanish ones at the battle of Lepanto, against the Turks. They brought back home some glory but nothing else. At the end of the 16th century, the proud citizens of Florence, the city that had been called the “New Athens,�? started going hungry. According to a chronicler, in 1590 Florentines were reduced to eat a kind of bread that “in older times would have been given to dogs, and perhaps dogs would have refused it.�? The whole 17th century was a disaster for Tuscany; the chronicles report famines, epidemics, locusts and all sorts of calamities. Tuscany had become one of the poorest regions of Europe; the situation was so bad that, in the last years of the century, the government was forced to forbid the export of all kinds of food as a last resort for fighting famines.

But Tuscany didn’t make the mistake that the Romans did, that of seeking for military solutions for their troubles. The Grand Dukes of Tuscany preferred instead to concentrate their resources on agriculture. They had new land reclaimed, they experimented with new techniques, and they continued the ancient medieval tradition of caring for the trees. In this, they were perhaps following Saint Giovanni Gualberto (995-1073), the Tuscan saint who spent most of his life planting trees. The first Duke who really made these policies the focus of his activity was Ferdinando 1st, who took over in 1587 and reigned until his death in 1609.

**A modern image of St. Giovanni Gualberto, (995-1073) the Tuscan saint who spent his life planting trees.**

Ferdinando favored agriculture and spoke of Tuscans as “worker bees�? (“api operose�?) meaning that they had to work hard all together. His motto was “Maiestate Tantum�?, meaning that his reign was based on “dignity only�? and not on miltary force. Some warlike spirit remained in Tuscany during Ferdinando’s reign and the Tuscan fleet managed to defeat the Turks in some minor battles. But the Dukes who followed progressively reduced military expenses. The navy was disbanded in 1646 and the army was reduced and strength until it was formally disbanded in 1781. Tuscany simply couldn’t afford war. Her borders had to be opened to invaders; it caused less harm than fighting them. It may not have been a glorious strategy but it worked. After the fall of Siena, in 1555, Tuscany didn’t see her cities besieged and bombarded until 1944.

**The “Working Bees�?, (“Api Operose�?) symbol of Ferdinando 1st (1549-1609) Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1587-1609). Image on the monument in Piazza SS. Annunziata, Firenze.**

Not everything was perfect all the time and the rules that protected trees were relaxed more than once. It is reported that, in 1780, a group of woodcutters fell on their knees in front of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, pleading hunger; this resulted in a decree liberalizing tree cutting. Later on, when Tuscany was already part of Italy, a new wave of deforestation started. But every time the mountains were reforested and agriculture remained a focus of the policy of the government. Pietro Leopoldo 1st was especially active in this field and, in 1753, he created the “Georgofili�? academy with the specific task of promoting agriculture. The academy still exists today and its motto is “For the sake of public prosperity�?.

**The symbol of the Georgofili Academy esablished in Firenze in 1753. The writing says “In favor of public prosperity�? (“Prosperitati Publicae Augendae�?)**

It took time, but eventually caring for agriculture had its effects. From the 18th century onward, agriculture managed a comeback. Famines didn’t disappeare but could be contained while commerce and industry restarted with a new network of riverways and roads. With the 19th century, Tuscany was back to a modest level of prosperity and the last recorded famine in Tuscany was in 1898. Even during the worst period, the old spirit of freedom and intellectual independence of the Renaissance had survived in Tuscany. In the early 17th century Ferdinando the 1st had created a safe haven in Leghorn for the Jews fleeing from Spain; Tuscany kept her universities and academies and, in 1786 Tuscany was the first European state to officially abolish torture and the death penalty.

Today, Tuscany is still one of the most forested regions of Italy, but times have changed. The present Tuscan administrators seem to be convinced that it is a good idea to pave the land with houses, highways, parking lots, and shopping centers, all in the name of “development�?. Because of this building frenzy, some of the once fertile areas of Tuscany are starting to look like suburbs of Los Angeles. With a population four times larger than it was at the time of the Renaissance and with the oil crisis looming in the near future, Tuscany is facing difficult times. But we have a tradition of caring for the land that has helped us in the past. It will help us also in the uncertain future.

Can Tuscany be sees as a model of “soft collapse�? for other regions of the world? Perhaps; at least it gives us a recipe that worked. We may summarize it as three rules from the history of Tuscany of the time of the Grand Dukes:

1. Plant trees
2. Disband the army
3. Work together

It doesn’t seem that the world is exactly following these rules, right now. But we may have to learn.

I arrived by plane from Exeter, a historic (for me anyway) trip, it being my last plane flight, my having [decided not to fly any more](http://www.transitionculture.org/?p=408″flying”) some months ago (this trip had been arranged before that decision was made). I was met by Alasdair at the airport, and then had supper with him and representatives of the other groups behind the invitation. Alasdair had my visit to Jersey organised with military precision, I was given a very detailed itinerary for the time I was there.

On Wednesday morning I was in the studios of BBC Radio Jersey by 8.30, and did a 10 minute interview on peak oil and on the challenges it presents to the island on their morning news programme, making the point that if the island is able to engage with the challenge of peak oil, it presents the opportunity for a historic and ultimately positive transition.

I then had a meeting with Chris Newton, the Director of the Environment Department on Jersey. We discussed the island’s emerging energy policy, a draft report that explores the energy options for the island. Chris clearly has a good handle on the energy challenges facing Jersey, and has been looking in detail at some of the options it has. As an island with a long coastline, the potential for tidal power is great. The report will be followed by an energy audit for the island, to which I suggested a food and medicine audit may well prove useful. There seemed to be a lot of interest in exploring the challenge, but much less enthusiasm for responses such as traffic management, and grants for microrenewables and conservation. The feeling seems to be that the market will deal with this, which I don’t see borne out anywhere else. It was very interesting to see how decision makers such as Chris are attempting to deal with this challenge, and while a lot of effort is going into evaluating the island’s energy options, I didn’t detect a sense of urgency correspondent to the scale of the challenge.

I then went to the offices of the Jersey Evening Post to meet Alasdair to do an interview with him for the paper, which should be in the paper some time next week. I’ll post it here at **Transition Culture** when it is done. Then it was off to Jersey College for Girls, where I met my host Tom Fallon, one of the teachers in the school. The school has a strong environmental programme, and next week has a visit from the island’s environment minister. I gave a 15 minute presentation to a school assembly of 700 girls, introducing the idea of peak oil and the need to respond to it. My slide of Wallace and Gromit as a model of post-peak living went down well!

I then had a few hours off, to check emails in the nearby internet café, and have a bit of a wander around. At 7.30 I was back at the Jersey College for Girls for the main part of my visit, an evening talk entitled “The Future of Local Food Production�?. Over 80 people turned up, and I introduced the peak oil concept and what we could do about it. A number of island officials were in the audience, and the talk was very well received. There were lots of questions and feedback at the end.

The next day began with a trip to Francheville Farm, run by Ian and Angela Mitchell. Francheville Farm is an organic dairy farm with Jersey cows, a beautifully docile and high yielding breed. On Jersey no other breeds are allowed onto the island. The Mitchells went organic after their herd had a case of BSE in the 1990s, which was brought onto the island in imported feed which contained the remains of other infected animals. We had a walk around the farm, which despite the pressure in agriculture to build new sheds and slurry pits, still used the old stone buildings. A very well run organic farm, and Ian was a very impressive and informative guide.

I then went to the offices of the Jersey Evening Post again to meet Alasdair, Hugh Forshaw, the chairman of the Environment Forum, and James Godfrey, chief executive of the Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society . We talked for a while about issues raised by my talk of the previous evening, and about the practicalities on an EDP process for Jersey, as well as what the impacts of peak oil might be on the island.

Finally it was off to [La Mare Vineyards](http://www.lamarevineyards.com�?LaMare�?), a wonderful local enterprise, using local grapes and apples to produce a wide range of drinks and foods. Red and white wine, rose, champagne, apple brandy, cider and a lovely Jersey Crème, like Baileys but made with apple brandy. I was shown around the premises, seeing all the different stages of the winemaking process, from the pressing and fermentation through to the casking and bottling.

Also there was the beautiful still, from Normandy and over 100 years old. I was given samples of the various wines as well as some of the food products, such as apple brandy fudge. It was very impressive to see this operation, using traditional recipes and techniques but also producing very high quality products. Then it was off to the airport and back home.

Reflecting on my visit, I was struck by the challenge that peak oil presents to Jersey. An island with a historical population of around 10,000, it is now home to around 90,000 people. It is dependent on imports for much of its food, as well as most of its daily commodities, and almost all of its electricity, which is imported from France. Its 100,000 vehicles are run on petrol and diesel which are also imported. Jersey is a very wealthy place owing to its financial services sector. The challenge for Jersey will be the practicalities of what degree of import substitution will be possible with such a large population on such a small landmass. Clearly, conventional approaches will be insufficient. From my perspective, a number of basic assumptions will need to be rethought.

Could Jersey’s agricultural sector feed the population? No. At present much of the nation’s farming is aimed at export markets. Mark Foskett of the Jersey Organic Association showed me some rough calculations he had done regarding how more innovative approaches to food production would affect this. Using the biointensive approach as developed and promoted by [Ecology Action](http://www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/Ecology.html#about”EA”) in the US, the amount of land required to grow one person’s food can be cut from 20,000 sq.ft. to 4,000 sq.ft. In other words, conventional farming could feed around 1/3rd of Jersey’s population, biointensive methods could feed it twice over.

The drawbacks? According to Mark, this diet would need to be vegan, and being much more labour intensive, around 25,000 people, just over ¼ of the island’s population, would need to be employed directly in agriculture. Clearly with this approach being able to feed the island twice over there is some spare room for a small amount of biodiesel, fruit production, perennial tree crops and some livestock, given some careful integrated design. Jersey also has a wonderful sea food resource.

The question is, in a relatively wealthy population, where will the incentive come from to begin the move towards this? Clearly it is such a huge shift, not just in land use, but also in the economy and in skills, that it might appear impossible. What it clear though is that peak oil will render business-as-usual increasingly difficult to sustain in this island economy. If an Energy Descent Plan approach does emerge from my visit, it would prove an invaluable tool for exploring the practicalities of this.

While it is important that the energy issues facing the island are explored, it is clearly also essential that the intertwined issues of education, health, economy, food and so on are also explored. In many ways Jersey is in an enviable position. It has a wonderful climate, a great tidal resource, a history of sail powered trade with both the UK and France, clean seas and a wealthy economy. Whether or not it chooses to apply new thinking to its challenges and finds itself able to ask the right questions will be the key to its successful navigation of the years ahead.

*Many thanks to Alasdair Crosby for organising my trip to Jersey with such impressive precision! Thanks also to the Jersey Organic Association, the Jersey National Trust and Jersey Slow Food.*

***Dennis Meadows** is one of the key figures in the environmental movement over the last 50 years, and one of the authors of perhaps the single best known environmental book “Limits to Growth�?, published in 1972. His presentation was one of the highlights of ASPO5 for me, and I was fortunate enough to be able to do an interview with him afterwards, which you’ll see as soon as I have transcribed it. You can download Meadows’ full presentation [here](http://www.aspoitalia.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=113&Itemid=90″Meadowsppt”).*

‘Limits to Growth’ was criticised for predicting that oil would run out and for being wrong in that prediction. However, oil depletion is not mentioned once in the original 1972 report, this is a completely bogus criticism. Now that oil actually is running out and peak oil is impending, it is tempting to say “we told you so�?, but we didn’t!

The key issue here is the relationship between oil flow and reserves, which I call the usage rate. Peak oil looks at this usage rate, whereas critics look at discovered resources, not the usage rate. The feedback loops controlling this are changing, the feedback loop that has managed this relationship over the last 50 years is changing (here I confess he lost me a bit, you’ll find his description of these feedback loops in his powerpoint here).

There are four effects of a rise in oil price.
From the fastest to the slowest;
Lowered quality of life – i.e. drive less
Increased energy efficiency – buy a Prius
Adapt a new energy supply – ie. ethanol.
Changed cultural aspirations- ie. uy a house in the city, no need for a car.

When we try to envision life over the next 100 years these 4 are adjusting to reduce energy supply. Alternative energy will never replace oil, and we will face a decline in the 4 ways above.

Matt Simmons recently wrote that he had reread Limits to Growth and was amazed at its accuracy. Limits to Growth began in the 1970s with the Club of Rome, a group who sought to raise awareness of environmental problems. No-one paid any attention, so they organised conferences, published books and so on, and after a few years people began to see that there was a problem. It was at this point, as all they had been able to contribute was observations on the nature of the problem, that they began to become irrelevant. ASPO needs to be aware of this possibility too, and to be helping people at a local level, offering solutions rather than just observations on the problem.

We don’t need a computer model to be able to prove that there are physical limits to physical growth on a physically finite planet. Some people will believe the premise and won’t need a computer model to convince them, and other people who refuse to even accept the premise won’t be swayed or convinced by all the computer models you can produce.

The contribution of Limits to Growth was to show that population and industrial growth are inherently exponential, and that exponential growth takes a resource to its limits very quickly. It showed that global society will most likely adjust to these limits by overshoot and collapse, not an S-shaped growth curve. However, I do still believe that sustainable development is possible, if important changes are made.

What I will be going on to say; 35 years of data shows that our original study results were correct. Climate has already peaked, global food production will peak in the next 15 years, even with no energy crisis, water is nearing its peak, oil being just one peak of many. Critics of LTG have shifted their criticisms over time. In 1972 when the first LTG was published we were below the limits to growth. Now we are well above. We have overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity.

We never considered the model to be predictive, the scenarios we developed in 1972 for world population and industry were accurate.

So what do LTGs critics say? They have gone through a series of phases. First they said there are no effective limits. Then they say perhaps there are but they are far away. Then they say perhaps there are but technology will save us. Then they say that perhaps technology won’t be able to solve all the problems, but the market will solve it for us. Finally they say markets do not always work, but it is too late to avoid the overshoot, we must learn to adapt. In any event, don’t worry!

People are starting to get worried. LTG is now in its 3rd edition. World population is increasing exponentially. The gap between rich and poor is widening, in China now 60% of the wealth is controlled by 1% of the population. Our ecological footprint was overshot in the 1970s.

Wackernagel developed the ecological footprint model, not perfect but the best seen yet. We are now at 120% of global capacity, and can’t go much higher. Some indicators of overshoot are the deterioration in renewable resources, surface and ground water, forests, fisheries, agricultural land, rising levels of pollution. Also growing demand for capital, resources and labour by military and industry to secure, process and defend resources, and rising levels of personal debt. Insurance company losses are also rising.

The issue is not that you are running out of something, rather that the quality of the resource depletes. One of the reasons it is hard to (see change coming? Change direction quickly?) is long delay and ambiguous signals. For example, capital investments for US energy. The US energy structure at the moment includes;

150 oil refineries
4000 offshore platforms
160,000 miles of oil pipelines
10,400 electricity generating plants
410 underground gas storage fields
1.4 million miles of gas pipelines
160,000 miles of high voltage powerlines
Port facilities to handle 15 million barrels/day of oil.

Replacing oil with another energy source is one thing, replacing the infrastructure is a whole other area.

He then talked about the dangers of short term thinking, best illustrated in the diagrams below. His point was that the actions that will actually lead us to a sustainable society require early steps that look difficult and uncomfortable, whereas the things we could do in the short term that look like we are doing something actually lead us to a place where we are actually far more vulnerable.

People are unable to do things that they know will make life harder. The problem is that most politicians and decision makers only look forward in a short time frame, the trick is to stretch the time horizon out so that the benefits become clear and it all becomes more realistic (this has echoes to me of the difference between Holmgren’s Green Tech Stability scenario and his Earth Stewardship one).

We will not be writing a new version of LTG, as it is now too hard to think of policies for sustainable development. He then gave an energy breakdown of a nuclear power station which showed that they are not in any way a response to peak oil.

**Comments and Reflections.**
It was quite a coup for ASPO to get Dennis Meadows to attend the conference. I really enjoyed his talk, although you couldn’t exactly call it uplifting. Dennis has spent 40 years number crunching this information, and his thoughts and conclusions are based on really knowing his material. I was lucky enough to get to interview him later that day, which was very illuminating, although being at the more gloom and doom end of the spectrum he wasn’t the best person to ask the Skilling Up for Powerdown questions…

He began his talk by saying that he had decided to write Revenge of Gaia when he became aware of the scale of the problem of global warming after a visit to the Hadley Centre near Exeter, one of the world’s foremost climate centres. The sober and detached way the scientists told him of the various processes underway in the world, almost as if they were talking of a different planet, shocked him. He talked of the various feedback loops that are starting which will speed up climate change, and that the Earth has ‘caught a morbid fever that will last 100,000 years”. In the same way that when a human has a fever their self regulation mechanisms go awry and do the opposite of what they are meant to do, the Earth is starting to act in ways that go against self regulation.

He spoke of the ‘global dimming’ phenomenon, caused by particulates in the upper atmosphere, mostly from air travel, which ironically keeps the earth 2 – 3 degrees cooler than it would otherwise be, in effect, he said, we live in a ‘fool’s climate’. He repeated his belief that in 100 years there will be only a few breeding pairs of humans living in the Arctic Circle. He then moved on to what can be done about it. He said that the challenge is to to sustain life for as long as possible. We can’t just turn the power off, we need to facilitate a gentle descent. The UK is like a large city he said, dependent on the developing world for food. We can grow enough food to be able to live like we did in World War Two, but that would not lead enough land for growing biodiesel. Even if we did our best, it is unlikely that the US and China will adapt, so we have to face the fact that our children will need to adapt to ‘one hell of a climate’. Humanity, rather than being a disease on the planet, needs to act as its nervous system, we should be the heart and minds of Gaia, and act now while we are still a cohesive mass, rather than a broken rabble.

The most useful part of the evening was the questions and answers session that followed. He was asked about renewables, and he trotted out the tired and entirely redundant argument that the countryside is for growing food and the city for people to live. It was criminal, he said, to put wind turbines in rural areas, “we’ll need every inch of land to grow food on”. This is complete nonsense, why on earth are windturbines and agriculture mutually exclusive land uses? Wind turbines are usually sited on marginal land only good for grazing anyway. His ‘urban/rural’ split failed to take into account the fact that cities can be net producers of food, seeing cities as farms, in many ways they are the ideal places to grow food, more shelter, more immediate markets, nutrient cycles, as can be seen in Cuba. The recent book [Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes](http://books.elsevier.com/uk/architecturalpress/uk/subindex.asp?isbn=0750655437&country=United+Kingdom&community=architecturalpress&ref=&mscssid=V6D1QCV4DNRM9NN18L5RAJ2P42B7B7F2″CPUL”) (review pending) sets out this concept very persuasively.

He argued that nuclear power is the only realistic way to power the transition, although I was interested to hear, contrary to the impression I had of his position, that he was not advocating a programme of new nuclear power in the UK, rather simply not decommissing those that are due to be closed in the next 10 years.

He said that we have passed the point of no-return, and that basically whatever we do now will have no effect. Another area that I disagreed with him strongly on was his assertion that people know something is looming, but will do nothing until there is a crisis, a shock. He said that Government will not act in time, but that we need leadership which is real and purposeful, we need, he said, “good generalship”. Ultimately he felt people are not going to act, so we are finished. I feel that the critical mass of people who are aware that there is a problem is already in place, what is missing is the mechanisms to do anything about it. If you have 2 kids, a mortgage, and job and are running furiously in order just to stay still, it is not a realistic option to stay home and grow carrots…. . As I have often written at **Transition Culture**, we need to build the infrastructure for a post-carbon world around people in such a way that it is relevant to them. Buckminster Fuller put it very well, ““you can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete�?.

I was outraged at his response when asked, very passionately by the woman sat in front of me, how he could defend nuclear power when it created waste that was so toxic and left such a long lasting legacy? She worked with children from Chernobyl, and argued that it was dreadful to argue that nuclear power was inherently safe. He said that all the nuclear waste in the UK could fit inside the Albert Hall, it is far less than people imagine. Other fuels are far more polluting, fossil fuels make carbon dioxide that look certain to end life on earth, and in the 1950s, coal burning in London killed 5000 people a year. In essence, he said, people die. It was his version of “yes, nuclear waste can potentially be dangerous, but hey, shit happens”. I was stunned by this. He didn’t mention the security implications of nuclear power, particularly in a week when George Bush visited India to offer them nuclear technology while at the same time threating Iran for having nuclear technology. The last thing the world needs is more nuclear technology.

I asked him about the work Colin Campbell was involved in at Uppsala University in Sweden, which stated that there was not enough oil available to actually meet the IPCC’s climate change forecasts. He said it made no difference, as we were already at the point of no return.

Discussions afterwards revolved around the fact that he seemed so out of touch with the movements looking to implement practical solutions. There was little mention of localisation, of actually creating localised infrastructure, despite the excellent host Brian Goodwin attempting to nudge him in that direction. He seemed so stuck in the need to preserve business as usual at all costs that, for him, any other approaches were illusory. Yes, climate change is real, and will be grim, and things will be very different. However, despite once being at the cutting edge of innovative thinking, he seemed now to have thrown in the towel. Where can you go from a starting position that we are all doomed? If Lovelock had done a permaculture design course 10 years ago I wonder how different his world outlook would be now? A lot of it comes down to visioning, if the vision of the future you give people is one of apocalypse, why is anyone going to do anything?

We have a huge job to do if humanity is to have any hope of waking up generations hence in a Garden of Eden, but I, for one, believe it is possible. It certainly won’t be easy but it is the Work of our times. Whether you call it The Great Turning, The Great Work, Creative Energy Descent, or as I increasingly seem to be calling it, The Great Adventure, what is essential is that we try, and that we assist people to visualise how wonderful it would be once we get there. I have often likened it to trying to persuade a hestitant friend to join us on holiday, we have to tell them how great it will be, how beautiful it will be and about the gorgeous sunsets there this time of year. Lovelock’s offer of 2 weeks at Fawlty Towers is not especially appealing, and will inspire no-one to act. We need to offer the Holiday of a Lifetime, a vision of the future that can inspire and engage people in the task of turning around the mess he so graphically described. We need to be rolling up our sleeves, not throwing up our hands.

*This piece has been slightly modified since it was originally posted, as on reflection I felt I was perhaps slightly stronger than I had originally intended. I still have a deep respect for Lovelock and the work he has done with the Gaia theory, I just find myself disagreeing passionately with this most recent stance he has chosen to take.*