Lifeboats for civilisation triage

Civilisation triage is referred to on a web site about climate change and the peak oil issue ( http://www.futurescenarios.org/) This describes the processes by which remaining social capacity (beyond meeting immediate basic needs) are focused on conserving technology and culture that could be useful to a future society, once energy descent is stabilised after a precipitous but limited collapse process. This is not the dominant process of the scenario but the most significant in terms of future cultural capacity. The Christian monastaries that saved many of the elements of Greco-Roman culture and later provided the foundations for the Renaissance of Western civilisation is one historical example that could serve as a model for understanding how this process might work. The web site authors argue that knowledge of ecological processes and their creative manipulation using minimal resources are retained and developed in the Lifeboat communities, then survival and resurgence of a more than minimalist culture may allow global human population to be sustained at perhaps half, rather than one tenth, of current levels. More importantly it may be possible to embed the wisdom of the lessons learnt so that unconstrained human growth does not repeat such an intense cycle. Clearly these last thoughts are highly speculative but build from the same linage of permaculture thinking developed over the last thirty years that informs the rest of the scenarios.