[Peakoil-announce] lecture this Friday March 18, 10am Forestry Building ANU

[Jenny Goldie]

Human Ecology Forum

This Friday at the forum we have a presentation (& discussion) by Dr John Barry, Queen's University, Belfast.



Topic - Thinking about resilience, sustainability and collapse: Insights from Permaculture, the Transition Movement and Peak Oil


Abstract: 
'Resilience' for some is the 'new sustainability' within the 'anthropocene age' of the 21st century. It certainly seems to be in the thinking of those within the grassroots and growing Transition movement with its focus on developing localised strategies in the face of climate change and peak oil.


For example, Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition movement, in his comparison of 'Conventional Environmentalism' and 'The Transition Approach' contrasts 'sustainable development' with 'resilience/relocalisation' (Hopkins, 2008a: 135). It is interesting that he, and others, are consciously seeking to distinguish the politics and approach of 'sustainable development' from that of the Transition Movement. At the same time, David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture thinker and originator of the concept of 'energy descent', contends, like Hopkins, that, 'Mainstream approaches to sustainability tend to assume stability if not expansion in the energy flows available to humanity even if there are major transitions in the nature of the energy sources. Consequently, continuity of many of the structures underpinning current social and economic systems is assumed' (Holmgren, 2008: emphasis added). Finally, we have the Peak Oil perspective represented by figures such as Richard Heinberg (Heinberg, 2008), David Korowicz (2010), James Howard-Kunstler (2003) who articulate what can be termed a 'collapse' perspective in terms of what they see as the inevitable collapse of industrial societies under the interlocking and re-inforcing logics of the climate, energy, financial and economic crises. Apects of this collapse perspective can also be seen in the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006) who has a (more or less) 'positive' take - in terms of 'breakdown leading to breakthrough', while more pessimistic versions of collapse can be found in the most recent work of James Lovelock (2009) for whom 'sustainable development' is a waste of time and wold have had to have been implemented decades ago for it to have any positive effect now.


I would like in this discussion to talk about these issues of sustainability, resilience, collapse - how they relate to one another, whether people think sustainability and/or resilience should still be the goal of ecologically informed policy etc.? I discuss these issues in a book I'm currently finishing for Oxford University Press provisionally entitled, Vulernability and Green Politics in the Age of Nature: Resistance, Resilience and Republicanism, and know I would benefit greatly from having a discussion shaped around the themes outlined above.


References for this presentation are available on the Human Ecology Forum web site: http://hec-forum.anu.edu.au.

PLEASE NOTE:  The Human Ecology forum will be returning to Room 101 (Old Library), upstairs in the Forestry Building (No. 48), from 10am-12 noon each Friday.


All welcome.