essential reading: david holmgren’s new future scenarios website.

some good quotes from the site:

There is a huge body of evidence that the next energy transition will not follow the pattern of recent centuries to more concentrated and powerful sources. The likelihood that this transition will be to one of less energy is such an anathema to the psycho-social foundations and power elites of modern societies that it is constantly misinterpreted, ignored, covered up or derided.

The explosion of economic activity based on financial services and information technology in the dominant economies during the early 90’s gave some credibility to this concept of the “weightless economy”, although it is now clear that globalisation simply shifted the consumption of resources to other countries to support this growth in the service economies.

The gentle whine of the electric milk float is a sound I remember vividly from my childhood slumbers. This quiet and efficient vehicle delivered our daily milk early each morning. In many parts of the UK they also delivered bread, fruit-juice and other perishables.

The beauty of an electric milk float is that it can charge each night when not doing the rounds and the electric motor is very efficient for the stop-start of a delivery round. Also, by delivering early they can be fairly sure that people are in to pick up their produce.

I think a Transition Town project somewhere should (if they haven’t already) start up a ‘local food float’ initiative and get a fleet of floats back on the road. Perhaps the ‘local food float’ could load up at a central distribution point where local producers bring their produce for distribution the evening before. This would save vegetable box schemes some of their distribution costs. Farming Today recently ran some programmes on how rising fuel costs are hitting local producers just as hard as the supermarkets. Conventional sustainability wisdom says that local producers will benefit as fuel costs rise as they can finally out compete the supermarkets on something - however most ‘local’ producers still rely on oil based distribution to get their produce out to the consumers - or for the consumers to drive to their farm.

Some great info on milk floats at milkfloats.org.uk.

I would like to echo Graham and point you to Rob’s excellent interview with David Fleming for brilliant insights on where we are with liquid fuels and some options for the medium term.

Of course this is all ridiculously hopeful given Brown and Bush’s sabre rattling today which makes me so angry at their stupidity. How can Gordon Brown sleep at night? It took Tony Blair 10 years to go this bonkers. Bloody idiots.

George Monbiot has written one of the best things he’s done for a while. I feel so passionately about the importance of a peasant culture that the lack of possibility for it in England was a major reason I left the UK (along with not wanting to pay taxes for nuclear weapons, the oppressive police powers and the over-population).

Ireland is still thankfully a nation of small farms.  We were able to buy 11 acres for reasonable money and have been allowed to build a house and live on the land.  This would be unthinkable in the UK. 11 acres is hardly considered big enough for a farm in many rich countries. However, when we move there later this year we will embark on as much primary production of food, fibre and fuel as we can. We are fortunate to be surrounded by many people who are doing similar things. We will share knowledge and mix the best of the old with the best of the new. The hope is that through judicious use of knowledge, crop varieties and technology we will be able to live good lives in a world with less fossil energy.