End of a Year, End of an Epoch

…and the beginning of “energy descent.”

Descent” is not necessarily a word that anticipates or necessitates a crash, though it might. A soft landing is possible in our case, but it is far from being a given. For a soft landing, it is going to be essential to think now about what the world will be like on the right hand side of the fossil fuel curve IN OUR LIFETIMES and about how we can gracefully weather the descent into a steady state future.

Here are some ways to understand “descent” taken from the Transitiontowns blog:

…The term (descent) was further developed by Holmgren (2003b.); “I use the term ‘descent’ as the least loaded word that honestly conveys the inevitable, radical reduction of material consumption and/or human numbers that will characterise the declining decades and centuries of fossil fuel abundance and availability.

…It is “the continual decline in net energy supporting humanity, a decline which mirrors the ascent in net energy that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution. It also refers to a future scenario in which humanity has successfully adapted to the declining net energy availability and has become more localized and self-reliant. It is a term favored by people looking towards energy peak as an opportunity for positive change rather than an inevitable disaster.”

As I mentioned yesterday, this is not a cheery, diversionary front porch chat with pretty pictures.

So those readers whose expectations for this blog is for it to keep only on the sunny side, I’m posting from the more sober, less ethereal side of my writer’s mind on Nameless Creek and I’ll be making changes there in the sidebars to offer resources toward Sustainability, Post Peak Oil, Global Shift and Transitional Culture topics.