Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem. In my last post (and the accompanying video), Starhawk talked specifically about how permaculture would sequester carbon in the soil.

Carbon Farmers of America is a group that’s taking this issue seriously. Star explained that they’re funding research to discover the best practices for large-scale building of soil and paying farmers for every ton of carbon dioxide they capture in new topsoil by marketing carbon sinks to the public to fund the work. Topsoil has the capacity as a carbon sink to capture the excess carbon in our atmosphere. And our soils desperately need that carbon. So this group is creating a win-win situation, really taking the permaculture saying “Pollution is the solution,” and applying it directly to “global warming” and topsoil depletion.

On a small scale, Starhawk reminds us, we can all compost our garbage. It’s simple and straightforward. All you need is a hole in the ground where you drop your food scraps and let them rot.

“Climate weirding” is a huge challenge in terms of large-scale change, Starhawk reminds us. It will affect our economy, our food growing systems, our energy systems, our production systems, and our technology. It will require enormous lifestyle transformation, and it has to happen really fast, Star emphasized. But the techniques for turning this around are simple. They are ones that Mother Nature has used for millions of years.

Star underscored the reality of “global weirding” by saying that we’ve run out of time to change things in a leisurely manner. In fact, the most reliable science tells us that we need to keep global warming to 2° C. if we want to avoid the worst kinds of destabilization and collapse of life support systems across the planet. And that means we need to reduce the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere from 385 — at which we stand today — to about 350. In order to do this, the U.S. — one of the largest producers of carbon on the planet — needs to shrink its carbon footprint by 90% by the year 2050. And the sooner we do this, the better, because that extra time will give us a greater chance to maintain social stability and biodiversity.

This kind of transformation seems enormous, Star said. But it’s exactly what we need in order to create lives for ourselves that are healthier and food that is more nourishing, in contrast to the massive amounts of junk food we eat in the U.S. today. This change will also re-root our industries and other enterprises in the communities they inhabit, instead of allowing them to roam all over the globe in search of the lowest labor costs and the most lax environmental standards.

So many environmentalist these days talk in ascetic terms, Star said, becoming environmental moralists with a hair shirt or sackcloth mentality. But Starhawk likes to look at how the upcoming changes in our lives will shift our values away from thinking that more and more stuff will make us happy, and helping us realize that it’s actually the relationships in our lives that make us happy. And as a permaculturist and a Pagan, Star means that in the most expanded sense, including our relationships with soil, with our food, with other people, and with the work we do. This kind of shift will make for a healthier world, a healthier community, and a healthier psyche in each person.

Starhawk stressed that this transformation is do-able. There’s no technological barrier to making this change now. We have solar and wind technologies along with other renewable techniques for energy production. We don’t need fancy, new nukes that even if they were safe — and building them safely would take 20, 30 or 40 years — would still have terrible environmental consequences in terms of uranium mining and the toxins it produces.

Star added that we can also conserve in a much bigger way than we do today. In fact, if we had continued to save energy at the rate that we used in the 1970s during the “oil crisis,” the U.S. would be energy-independent today. In California, where Star lives, the GDP (gross domestic product) has increased tremendously since then and so has the population, but the energy usage has remained essentially flat. This is not because of any great sacrifices, according to Starhawk, but because energy use has become more efficient.

In contrast to California, a lot of what we’ve done in the U.S. since the 1970s is waste, Starhawk tells us. Remember the permaculture saying, “Pollution is an unused resource” that Starhawk talked about in the first segment of this interveiw. She went on to say in this last segment that as we make this transition, if we can figure out how to turn pollutants into resources, we’ll have enormous abundance.

The barriers to making this shift are the vested interests — both political and economic — that are so short-sighted that they seem to have forgotten that they live in this world with the rest of us. They’re fighting tooth and nail, because they fear change and somehow believe that they have the right to reap profits at the expense of all the rest of us as well as at the expense of the planet. Ultimately, I added, it’s at their own expense and the expense of their children and grandchildren, who will inherit a marginal or damaged biosystem.

Star ended her interview with me by advising us to get our political will together and educate ourselves about the real solutions to our problems. And then to push for those solutions, lobby for them, and make them happen.