Permagenda 2011

A Blogging Marathon

Edited 4/18/2011

Happy New Year, esteemed Permavegan readers, and welcome to the first day of Permagenda 2011.  Permagenda 2011 is my resolution to post daily entries in a year-long blogging marathon aimed at accelerated contraction and convergence to a steady-state global economy. 

I'll be tracking with Joe Romm on developments in U.S. climate policy; Energy Bulletin on all things net energy; Keith Akers on vegan and vegetarian ethics; Global Commons Institute on contraction and convergence; Portland Maine Permaculture Meetup for the latest wisdom from the local permaculture hive mind; and CASSE on degrowth to a steady-state economy. 

To name just a handful of sources that will inform my analysis.

How am I going to maintain this level of productivity without missing out on critical information, on the one hand, or getting paralyzed by information overload, on the other?  And how am I going to organize my cyber-advocacy in such a way that it stays relevant for a global audience while simultaneously facilitating on-the-ground emergency degrowth to a fair, stable, and full-employment economy right here in Maine? 

I've got four strategies in mind.

Four Strategies

The first strategy is systematic diversification through a seven-day narrative structure that addresses distinct but interrelated readerships.  (This seven-level narrative structure is a slight modification of the five-level veganic permaculture model I proposed in Solagaia 2.0.)  On Sundays, for example, I'll write to an interfaith readership, and on Thursdays I'll write to a community development readership.  Over the course of each week, I'll address all seven levels of eco-psychosocial organization, from the global to the local, in a sensible sequence:

1. Sunday: Global Interfaith Ethics
2. Monday: World Citizenship
3. Tuesday: National Citizenship (was National Security)
4. Wednesday: State Citizenship (was Steady-State Planning)
5. Thursday: Regional Citizenship (was Community Development)
6. Friday: Local Citizenship (was Family Resilience)
7. Saturday: Veganic Permaculture (was Home Economics)

Mindful of Dubos' maxim to "think globally, act locally," my second strategy is to consistently examine all seven of these levels through the vertically integrated lens of a social welfare cyber-advocacy campaign, focused on local planning long-term economic degrowth.

Adaptation to long-term degrowth may sound excruciatingly dismal at first, but that is only because we have been indoctrinated to worship economic growth, and to mistake the economic highs and lows of our addiction to hydrocarbon energy, animal products, fast money, and garage-loads of stuff (in short, our affluenza) with a reasonable pursuit of happiness.

The literature suggests happiness is not found in this direction, however, but is far more likely to be found on a critical path I will constantly reinforce in my third marathon blogging strategy: the gentler and more soul-satisfying pursuit of a steady-state economy based on renewable biomass energy, plant-based nutrition, public slow money, and simple, low-hydrocarbon living (aka "the good life.")

I do not want readers to mistake this emphasis on degrowth as an attack on economic growth in all times and places.  Far from it.  In many regions, economic growth is the obvious and urgent prescription.  But degrowth is now very much the order of the day in my home state of Maine, as it is throughout the United States and Canada. 

Furthermore, in both the over-developed Global North and the under-developed Global South, there is a mutual need for cooperative, open-source research, development, and diffusion of appropriate technologies that can make a good life for all world citizens.  We must, in other words, build the case for a steady-state economy using a toolkit of appropriate veganic permaculture technologies that scale well in a planetary civilization of nine-to-ten billion people by 2050.  The identification of these technologies is the fourth key strategy I will rely upon as I blog my way forward.      
    
A Leadership Curriculum

I can conserve precious energy in this blogathon by bundling the above four strategies together into an integrated curriculum for world citizenship:

Figure 1. Solagaia World Citizenship Curriculum

    
These curriculum strands can be understood as levels of "advanced generalist" social work action-research; zones of veganic permaculture design; decks of distributed cognition on spaceship earth; and building blocks of self-organizing command and control in a non-hierarchical, open-source intelligence network for global-to-local governance.

Solagaia

I call the study and practice of this total curriculum Solagaia.  The term combines the Roman, masculine "Sol," for sun, with the Greek, feminine "Gaia," for earth, to suggest an art of planetary energy stewardship that draws on multiple streams of the world's wisdom literature, including climate science, ecological economics, and the Hegelian dialectic, to name just three of these streams.  The discipline is now entering its second stage of development.

The idea that a healthy civilization of the future will be based on the intelligent management of a renewable biomass economy is a unifying principle of the Solagaia conceptual framework.  This is generally consistent with steady-state thinking such as the CASSE briefing on The Trophic Structure of the Economy.  However, in contrast to many other analysts, I read the data on limits to growth, peak oil, and U.S. energy consumption to necessitate movement toward a vegan agroforestry economy.  I think the following chart, for example, is a fairly clear illustration of the importance of biomass energy in a long-term context:

Figure 2.  Composition of U.S. Energy Use (Source: Cutler Cleveland)

 
I believe the bulk of our future energy and resource throughputs will derive from appropriate technologies applied to closed-loop agricultural production of food, wood, fiber, biofuels, biomass electricity, and biocomposites.  I think non-nuclear, green-tech renewable energies will play a vital but ultimately partnership role to this biomass economy, primarily because of scale-up problems related to the scarcity of rare earth metals, as well as constraints on energy storage and distribution in a wind-water-solar milieu. 

I will say much more about this hypothesis, and the way it intersects with plant-based nutrition and the carbon sequestration potential of agroforestry, as I proceed through the year.  At this juncture, I want to emphasize that a deep, multilevel appreciation for the movement of solar energy (including its embodied hydrocarbon forms) through the cycles of life in one's immediate ecoregion - and throughout the global system as a whole - is central to a more even-handed interaction with these flows of energy and matter, and is our surest route to a steady-state planetary economy.

For this reason, I am anchoring the Solagaia curriculum in some graphical depictions of the movement of solar energy through our planetary system, beginning with a graph of annual temperature highs and lows for the Presque Isle region in Aroostook County, where I live:

Figure 3.  Average High and Low Temperature (Fahrenheit) 
for Presque Isle, Maine (Source)  

The red line of average high temperature and the blue line of average low temperature create a waveform across the anual period.  The point of greatest warming occurs late in July, and the point of greatest cooling occurs late in January (in each case about one month behind the summer and winter solstices here in the northern hemisphere, somewhat suggestive of the effect global warming inertia is now expected to have on a planetary scale, i.e., considerable future warming is already in the pipeline.)

Each of the four grid colors in this chart represents a distinct season, and the lines between these colored subdivisions represent the solstices and equinoxes.  I am not actually going to blog for the full 365 days of 2011, but plan to take five days off before and after each solstice and equinox.  This will give readers a break from my analysis at a time when they may want to be observing these solar energy turning points in other ways.  It will also create a calendar of four curricular quarters that are consciously tuned to the seasons, with a goal of helping readers eventually gain a feeling for daylength, insolation, and biomass productivity as these are determined in part by time of year and geographic location. 

Again, I simply want to emphasize at this juncture that Solagaia is a ultimately a discipline for the wise and compassionate capture, conversion, and redistribution of solar information and energy through a cybernetic or ecotechnical medium for the benefit of all.

Here are some additional graphics that will start to make this a little more clear.  Local variations in daylength, insolation, and temperature over the course of the year are fundamental to steady-state economic planning:

Figure 4.  Daylength in Hours by Latitude and Month (Source)

Figure 5.  Solar Insolation by Latitude and Month (Source)

 

Figure 6.  NASA Images of Solar Insolation Across the Globe (Source)

The NASA images are illustrative of the reversal in solar insolation that occurs between the northern to the southern hemisphere as our tilted earth completes its orbit around the sun.

A YouTube Illustration of Solagaia

Here is video introduction to the Solagaia concept in musical and metaphorical terms:

Administrative Note

If you subscribe to my blog with a feed, please be patient with me as I occasionally make tag updates to my posts that refresh old content.  Also, as I get farther along with my system, I do expect to post shorter articles and get them out early each day.  We'll see how that goes.