David Holmgren's Four Scenarios for Coping with Climate Change and Resource Depletion
= in 2009, David Holmgren brought out a thesis he titled 'future scenarios,' which corresponded to the four general quadrants laid out by his two major variables: the rate and severity of climate change
URL = https://www.futurescenarios.org/
Description
By Rutilius Namatianus:
""Ten years ago, David Holmgren brought out a thesis he titled 'future scenarios,' wherein he laid out some reasoning for two main axes along which the next few decades could be characterized and developed four main scenarios which corresponded to the four general quadrants laid out by his axes of primary variables.
His two major variables were the rate and severity of climate change, and the rate of oil/energy/resource depletion. See his paper here, https://www.futurescenarios.org/ where he laid down the following scenarios:
- Slow/benign climate change, slow resource depletion: 'green tech.' A scenario in which conditions remain stable enough and resources abundant enough to develop an organized and controlled descent to lower resource consumption and ultimately lower complexity, without falling into chaos. This is the solar power, wind farms, electric cars and tech future type of story that is being pushed hard by the propaganda machine of the 'establishment' during the past few years.
- Fast/harmful climate change, slow resource depletion: 'brown tech.' A scenario in which the situation gets more chaotic, more rapidly, where economic imbalances and breakdowns prevent a 'green' transition, and where instead the focus remains on extending the service life of existing energy sources in a top-down forced reduction in consumption. This scenario is characterized by pragmatic totalitarianism, and gratuitous violence to control resources. If it is possible to consolidate power quickly, current societal structures can even hang on for some decades until they run out of the stores of high-quality energy embedded in leftover technology it can't reproduce. Then, society breaks down into a more decentralized post-tech picture.
- Slow/benign climate change, fast resource depletion: 'earth stewards.' A scenario where chaotic environmental conditions cause a rapid breakdown of large power structures, so that nobody can manage any sort of green tech build-out before things slip down the decline curve. The situation stabilizes at a salvage-tech society of highly localized cultures who, while they go through a huge decline in population and complexity and affluence, manage to catch a foothold in an eco-wholesome scenario characterized by permaculture, with most people working on farms in small polities - which might be more like the high middle ages than anything else.
- fast/harsh climate change, fast resource depletion: 'lifeboat.' A scenario where things are too rapidly evolving for any centralized power to hang on to a brown-tech regime very long or very effectively, and civilizations melts down in chaos until there are only scattered bits of structure left, living primitive farming, hunting/gathering, or scavenging cultures on whatever's left. Large regions are abandoned as unexploitable by anything by nomads and nomads make a big comeback. Population is probably lowest in this of all the 4 scenarios.
Holmgren also describes two general affinities among these scenarios, where 'green-tech' will overtime devolve towards 'earth steward' and where 'brown tech' will over time devolve towards 'lifeboat'."