Happy holidays, Alex. And thanks.

Keep up the good work Alex, too bad I'm too poor to donate.

I can't tell you how much I agree that we can't all go back to the land. I suspect that if we solved all our emissions and energy problems tomorrow morning, we would only hasten the end of life on earth. Green power appeals to permaculture types because it's part of the Me First - Damn The Rest Of The World. I know because I grew up that way in the 1970s. We can run, but we cannot hide. I support permaculture, I just don't think they should live in denial. We cannot escape what's coming, so I posted an article on the Reddit-permaculture site called.
Mass Extinction Vs. Green Energy
http://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/2qg5s9/mass_extinction_vs_green_energy/

"...revive some extinct species, like the carrier pigeon..."

Alex, I think you mean "passenger pigeon".

Fascinating piece by Gordon Katic!
The notable disparity between Gordon and Jan's knowledge and respective outlooks remind me of the work that needs to be done in the mainstream environmental communities to get people up to speed on issues regarding natural limits. My own experience has been that popular environmentalist groups are eager to get behind the issues of global warming or ecological degradation for example, but have proved reluctant to explore issues regarding long term sustainability and population pressures. Accepting the notion natural limits (e.g. arable land, water, fossil sunlight, etc.) and human limits (e.g. cognitive, technological, behavioral, etc.) is difficult emotionally, because one must then grapple with a wide range of moral dilemmas. But that is the nature of the converging problems that humanity is facing. Anyway, the interview reminded me of how important it is to continue to strive toward a deeper understanding of the challenges we face, and to better appreciate of our fellow inhabitants of this finite planet that we share! :-)

Well now I really want to kill myself.

Thank you Alex; Great info to share.

However, The interviewer is symbolic of sooo many visitors to PermaLot, the intentional community we tried to start for 10 years in rural Czech Republic.

He required help with transport to get there, not really contributing with a thing, wants to know everything within a weekend and believe that he can learn enough from such short experience to go on and talk about it to others...(Hrmpf!) No wonder that folks hosting such 'eco tourists' tend to burn out.

I'm grateful that he doesn't go with the gossip and completely tarnish the reputation of the project in public, however it was clearly one heck of a gamble to allow such person inside the property...

Love the podcast Alex.
First time commenting, unfortunatley to state how terrible this guest podcast by Gordon Katic was. I presume in a few years he will look back and cringe however the lack of reflection Gordon offers is amazing. Gordon seems to barely have heard about peak oil, seems doubtful about climate change and accuses Jan about being pessimatic about the future.
At 37:16 Gordon states the weekend is boring - did he visit for the weekend to be entertained by others? This reflects a personality sucking on the tit of commercial TV, cinema and big media - entertain me, entertain me he cries!
37:42 Gordon complains there is little political discussion - while all around him there is practical opposition to the consumerist life Gordon desires to be entertained.
At 38:422 Gorden describes the others having go out in gale to secure a tarpulin over hay - while he stays indoors!

I agree with Simon and Alex - that interviewer was really respectless and clueless. And he even put an intentionally negative spin on what was said by his interviewees - i.e. claiming that Jan said "80% of humanity HAVE TO die", implying that Jan advocates genocide and shouldn't be listened to on ethical grounds. What Jan and other people aware of ecological limits and the history of human civilisation mean is that a large part of humanity unfortunately WILL die (due to slow malnutrition, epidemics, lack of sufficient fuel in winter, suicide and alcoholism as a response to joblessness and despair, etc.), not that anyone wants them to so the rest can be better off. That's simply how unequal social structures always respond to economic crises, and anyone who relies more on historical experience than wishful thinking can see it coming.

Also, I haven't heard the whole podcast yet, but that rapper (or at least the song in the beginning) strikes me as painfully naive. Okay, so he likes to go into nature on occasion - how will he do that when gasoline becomes a luxury good or rationed for essential stuff, like transporting food into cities? And while I'm all for urban gardening, people like him just don't have an appreciation for the kind of massive scale of agriculture and transport one needs to feed a city. Yeah, you can possibly produce all the vegetables you need in the city, and in my mother's childhood, cities still had urban cow sheds for fresh milk, but most of the plain calories (grain) for humans and animals still have to be trucked or shipped in. I shudder to think of the result when that will become prohibitively expensive, and/or farmers won't be able to apply massive amounts of artificial fertilisers anymore to keep up grain yields at the current level.

Also, you Americans have really no idea how a famine actually works, do you? As it happens, my country (Germany) had one in living memory. Not because of peak oil (though gasoline shortages were a major issue in the war and shortly after - my grandfather even used a wood-fuelled tractor at one point), but because of lack of labourers (most of the men between age 16 and 50 were dead, invalids, or in POW camps). Still, that is a kind of energy shortage. And what resulted was the "hunger winter" after the war, and severe rationing for years. And the city people got the short end of the stick. Why would farmers sell you food if they barely have enough to feed their own families? Sure, city people could exchange some things that were still available in the city due to earlier stockpiling (soap, medicine, etc.), and the trains at the time were full to bursting with desperate people going into the country for a day to find food. But most of the things exchanged on this black market were luxury goods (cigarettes, chocolate, nylons - all imported by the occupying military forces from countries not affected by the crisis, i.e. the US) or cheerished family heirlooms. My mother was born in 1944, in Berlin, and while her family did have a vegetable garden, and her father had access to essential goods (he was a pharmacist), they still ended up having to give away things like porcelain and silverware handed down for generations. The coffee pot that my great-grandmother had rescued on her flight from Silesia bought them all of half a pint of milk, enough to feed my mother for a single day. A famine is always a seller's market, and no-one is really interested in gold. And remember that post-war food shortage only lasted for a few years until production could be modernised to use oil instead of people labour, and our part of the country (the Soviet military occupation zone) was at least intent on making things socially fair, even as they took away nearly a hundred billions worth of money, natural resources and industrial infrastructure (machinery, train tracks, etc.) as war reparations until 1953. (The western Allies only took about 2 billion from their occupied zones, so yes, it made quite a difference in terms of economic recovery.) So for all its structural problems, the socialist system and its political goals meant for example that treating my mother (age 4) for a severe bout of tuberculosis at a public hospital was not financially ruinous. Nor was it impossible to get the dysentery epidemic under control that swept Berlin a decade later and forced her to repeat a year in high school due to long illness. (The government simply forced all the doctors, nurses, and even medical students into emergency service.) Try that in a capitalist country like the US without putting the country under martial law.

My father, born 1940 as one of 5 sons of a farmer and miller, was much better of, even though the government stole most of their land a few years after the war in a scheme to create large collectivist farms that could be worked on with large, expensive machines. Despite that, he didn't get tuberculosis (generally a disease that befalls the chronically undernourished), until he came to the big city as a teenager in order to study, without his parents' support. And that even though, as the child of a farmer/worker, he would have gotten a small allowance from the government in order to be able to get higher education.

Sure, it's true that we can't go all back to the land. But most of those that don't have the opportunity or refuse to even when times become tough, will die. Not immediately, of course, and likely not even in the lifetimes of today's adults. But since most developed countries aren't building up the kind of scale of renewable energy production needed to keep cities supplied with all the essentials now, while there's still time, those cities will shrink back to what they were in the pre-industrial era, one way or the other. (Rome at its height could support a million inhabitants, but only on the resources of a huge empire - large annual grain shipments from Egypt, for example, and hundreds of thousands of slaves working on commercial farms and in mines - which is what they needed that massive army for. The first European city to reach that size again after the fall of the Roman empire was London, as far as I know. I'm not sure if they hit a million during the Renaissance (with the help of resources stripped from the New World, and a profitable slave trade around the world), or only with the onset of industrialisation.)

I'm just glad that I live in a country that is at least trying to get some renewable energy and train transport infrastructure in place before it's too late. And where most towns are old enough to have been founded long before the age of oil, usually on rivers, so as to allow for shipping by barge. (And Germany's largest city, Berlin, has only about 3,5 million inhabitants and is both surrounded by fairly depopulated rural countryside and, in its urban area, very 'spread out' (lots of park space for urban gardens, with at least some of the old "Schrebergarten" style ones from the 19th century never having been closed and still being protected by special laws)

Though I don't actually live in the city (and I wouldn't want to - first time I went back there for university my eyes actually stung from the air pollution). I live in a semi-urban suburb. Not the kind of purely residental suburb you Americans mean by that term, more a small town (originally a farming village founded in the 13th century) that was incorporated into the urban sprawl. A lot of people commute to the city for work, since the local industry and farming was trashed by the Reunification, but that could change quickly again. And besides, most essentials (shops, schools, library, doctors, etc.) are at bicyling distance, and it's only an hour to the center of Berlin by electricity-fuelled public transport in the rare case a non-commuter might want to go there, so it's supportable even in a peak-oil scenario. And a lot of people have at least a small garden, with no local rules against food production. (One of my neighbours even keeps chickens and ducks. Another has rabbits, though they don't eat them. My father used to raise pigeons and a few fresh water fish in a pond. Two streets away, at the edge of town, a guy has horses on a meadow. Most people at least try to compost their kitchen scraps, because at 5 Euro per emptying of the non-recycling trash bin, why on earth wouldn't you?)
Best of both worlds, really. I admit that I wouldn't want to live in my parental grandparents' 200-souls village, either, with no access to shops without a car, no hospital reasonable close by, and no decent internet connection. There's a reason the countryside is so depopulated right now.