the energy descent

I'm reading a good on permaculture. It's not a detailed "plant this here, and that there, and lay out your water collection this way" kind of book. It is a design philosophy overview. It was written in 2002, and is still way ahead of me in thinking through the things we need to do to figure out living in a world where we slowly transition off of the fossil fuel buzz we've been on for really only a few decades. Today's sharing: Reduce, reuse, recycle always sounded like a neat, tidy mantra to help you figure out the right thing to do in life choices. Well, the author goes this two better, and I hadn't even heard this till reading this 9 year old book. refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Damn, I was feeling all righteous green by at least filling the recycling tub each week, and I'm doing the least useful thing on the list. He starts with refusing to consume at all, and finding another way to accomplish your goal. The main thrust of this section of the book is that we are so immersed in the addiction to fossil fuel powered life that we can't even see the alternatives we could be doing. This book is very dense in ideas and observations on moving to a sustainable life, but it's also pretty spare on writing style, so it doesn't bog you down, although I'll need to read it again to catch more of the insights that went past me while I was mulling over the ones that caught me first.