Customer Reviews

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Considering how David Holmgren and Bill Mollison created Permaculture, I thought I'd go ahead and order this book on Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change to understand David's thoughts on these subjects.

I was prepared for another hard-to-read book similiar to the author's previous book: Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. I found that book extremely difficult to get through, although it was filled with many great ideas. I can't say I'd recommend that book to anyone outside the sustainability field. My recommendation for learning about Permaculture remains Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison (pricey but by far the best).

When I started reading Future Scenarios, I was delighted to find that he must now either have a new editor or a ghost writer - This is an amazing book, relatively easy to read, and filled with ideas and perspectives on the future convergence of Peak Oil and Climate Change that I haven't read anywhere else.

I can easily recommend this book for all audiences, both experienced and those new to these concepts. I even gave this to my father to read as an introduction to Peak Oil. After reading this, he now wants to learn about Permaculture!

I would recommend this short book to anyone who has the task of creating a workshop for a community to develop strategies to deal with the converging threats of Peak Oil and Climate Change. Or indeed for anyone, who wants to understand these issues.

It would be an ideal planning resource for a rural based intentional community and in particular one that has embraced permaculture principles.

The book is short but dense, in the sense that every sentence and diagram needs to be considered and understood.

David Holmgren explores the four scenarios that could each represent our most likely future, depending on how well and how quickly the world's political leaders deal with this greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.

This quote from the back cover explains it well: "Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probable futures, explains Holmgren, range from the relatively benign 'Green Tech' scenario to the near catastrophic `Lifeboats' scenario." Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change

Encouragingly, the G8 have recently adopted the target of reducing emissions recommended by the world's climate scientists for not exceeding the critical 2ºC of average global warming ([...]). It remains to be seen whether individual countries will do the same.

FUTURE SCENARIOS: HOW COMMUNITIES CAN ADAPT TO PEAK OIL AND CLIMATE CHANGE should be in every general lending library's collection: it comes from a permaculture co-originator and sustainability innovator and shows how to adapt to the cultural, political and economic implications of two forces that will shape our world in years to come: peak oil and climate change. Packed with invaluable applications for survival, this is not to be missed.

The book isn't that long and is an easy read. That's a plus. However, it seems to just re-hash the same ideas I have already read. It's not that it is bad, it's just that I already knew most of the stuff presented. It's a good starting book, but that's all. 'Collapse' is a much better book in dealing with the theories behind the oil crisis.

Gripping from the beginning, difficult to put down. Holmgren is signifigant to this movement and his ideas should be brought before the current administration.