End of a Year, End of an Epoch

A John Fowler & Co.
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…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.

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. Wow! I didn’t know you had another blog, Fred. Interesting. Yes, Peak Oil is a very unpleasant subject to read about. As it unfolds, the consequences are going to seriously upset the apple cart, to say the least.