Nicole Foss Talks About David Holmgren’s Crash on Demand: Podcast

I like your articles and advice and I only have one problem with the basic ideas. And that is the statement “8) Be worth more to your employer than he is paying you.
That statement seems like a lack of understanding of the crash. What employer? What would that employer pay you with? Getting bogged down with someone who is paying you with empty promises will only set you back at the most important time. I am an electrician that is independent but if I went to work for someone else it would mean less money and less free time and less of a flexible schedule etc…it would not make sense in a collapse to work for someone else unless they could guarantee some sort of realistic payment and in a collapse that seems futile……Ted

ted – he means “if” you have an employer, be worth more to your employer than he is paying you up until a crash happens. If you are a great worker and your employer is still hanging on after the crash, who’s he going to keep? You.

The discussion was very cogent. If I were to boil things down further, what you said in the post responding to Holmgren, and more succinctly in the interview, is that how you frame the problem frames the possible solutions, and that every member of the suggested solution set when you frame the problem as “climate change” would actually make climate change worse. I suppose another, equally valid point you make implicitly is that climate change is a symptom, not the disease; that it is how we consume energy and debt that is consuming us: reducing our (over)consumption of energy and debt will more effectively address climate change than anything we might try to do to address climate change directly. Did I get that right?

Anyway, thanks for the informative, thoughtful posts.

I was thinking that Nicole’s remarks were very human centric (instead of blowing up dams, use that embodied energy for something “useful”, or permaculture regenerates the soil to provide humans with more food) but her further explanation about how permaculture fitted in was much better (humans are just part of the ecosystem).

On climate, although scientists can’t be exact about the outcomes of, say 400 ppm CO2, neither can economic or financial analysts be exact, quantitatively, about what certain economic conditions will lead to. Actually, we do have some semi-empirical evidence to give us a very good guide on what to expect from climate forcings, the paleoclimate evidence. I think it’s enough, or should be, to focus people’s attentions on the issue. We’re now at about the highest surface temperature (ignoring other warming for now) in the Holocene, with more built in. That’s also fairly quantitative.