Intro to Permaculture State of the World Video Transcript

We’re going to look at the state of the word right now, and it is dark. I mean literally we’re going to look at the world in the dark, to understand what is happening. By following the lights, we can see the patterns of energy consumption and modern development on the planet. We can see where the resources are being concentrated; fossil fuels, minerals, energy, just follow the lights.

And we can also see places where we know people live, yet it is dark. According to the International Energy Agency in 2013, 1.2 billion people, or 17% of the world’s population, did not have access to electricity at all. In some enormous regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 1/3 of the nearly 1 billion people living there have any access to electricity. Look at Africa compared to the electrification of Western Europe. The entire continent of Africa has 6 times more people than Western Europe.

Now, let’s travel and look over here at North Korea versus South Korea. We can see the bright border and the huge difference in the levels of electrification.

Let’s travel once again and look over here at Haiti or Cuba next to Florida, or the US Gulf Coast versus Northern Mexico. This translates to refrigeration, night lighting, heating and cooling, transportation, and basic tools and machinery for the common person. It also fuels mass migrations and refugee crises, as people seek a higher standard of living for themselves and for their families.

So we have this disparity of resource distribution, a steadily increasing global population, and you can only imagine how that leads to conflict, as countries strive to secure and control resources for their citizens. There’s a race towards higher and higher consumption, yet the bi-products are carbon in the atmosphere and pollution in the air, water, land and sea. Resources like oil, gas, metals, and fertilizers are extracted from one place and concentrated in another, making some areas rich while others become more impoverished.

[ZOOM IN TO AL BAHYDA PROJECT] The Permaculture solution for this conundrum is to build the local resource base for everywhere on the planet, so the richness of each area can be maximized. Permaculture examines each region to design the most sustainable and resilient systems for energy, food, water, housing, and materials that do not rely on the ongoing massive transport of fossil fuels around the planet.