Dave Foley, of the stylish architectural practice Holland and Foley , comments at Worldchanging :

[...] There's one thing that's hard to do with efficiency and renewable energy: project military power.

He's wrong: efficiency and renewable energy would make America's fun new imperialism more sustainable.

Militaries depend on supply lines and logistical trains, and far from being an exception the modern American military has quite a high tail:teeth ratio, around 10:1 as I recall.  A lot of this is just moving oil around.  You'd keep the rocket fuel for the big bangs, but the less dramatic parts of the military have efficiency gains galore.  

If, for instance, plug-in hybrid electric humvees, recharged from in the field solar panels, were available, it would extend supply lines, reduce needed support personell, and make the military power who controlled them even more potent.   Indeed Wired has reported on this in the past , and a tank is just a chunky car with a big gun.  The long Pacific supply lines of the USN would also see pretty useful benefits from efficiency or distributed generation - imagine if the airstrip on an aircraft carrier could also be a solar array.  And I haven't even started talking about my Mongol hordes riding super-efficient solar-charged light-aircraft scenario yet.

Armed force isn't going away in a hurry, but if they could kill/liberate people without bringing Sydney Harbour into Pitt Street, I'd appreciate it.

A key theme in environmentalism is industrial and agricultural self-reliance, interpreted as a strong ethical relationship between yourself and the energy and materials you consume and produce.  This expresses itself in a heavy focus on localism, village trading and life, to the point of personally producing and maintaining a sizable chunk of one's clothes, tools, and growing a large chunk of your own food.  This exists even in the bright green consensus reality of technoprogressive environmentalists; Vinay Gupta of Worldchanging wrote recently of being Unplugged, and previously of a Global Sustainable Peasantry.

I imagine Mencius asking: How do you have an Unplugged neurosurgeon?

Mencius was one of the great early Confucian philosophers. Amongst other things he is credited with an early argument for the division of labour.

4. Mencius said,'I suppose that Hsü Hsing sows grain and eats the produce. Is it not so?' 'It is so,' was the answer. 'I suppose also he weaves cloth, and wears his own manufacture. Is it not so?' 'No. Hsü wears clothes of haircloth.' 'Does he wear a cap?' 'He wears a cap.' 'What kind of cap?' 'A plain cap.' 'Is it woven by himself?' 'No. He gets it in exchange for grain.' 'Why does Hsü not weave it himself?' 'That would injure his husbandry.' 'Does Hsü cook his food in boilers and earthenware pans, and does he plough with an iron share?' 'Yes.' 'Does he make those articles himself?' 'No. He gets them in exchange for grain.'

5. Mencius then said, 'The getting those various articles in exchange for grain, is not oppressive to the potter and the founder, and the potter and the founder in their turn, in exchanging their various articles for grain, are not oppressive to the husbandman. How should such a thing be supposed? And moreover, why does not Hsü act the potter and founder, supplying himself with the articles which he uses solely from his own establishment? Why does he go confusedly dealing and exchanging with the handicraftsmen? Why does he not spare himself so much trouble?' Ch'an Hsiang replied, 'The business of the handicraftsman can by no means be carried on along with the business of husbandry.'

 -- Mencius, Book III, Part 1, Chapter 4

The division of labour - specialization - is not an artifact of modern industry, it's an attribute of the world itself. Natural selection works by progressive specialization. Sure, specialization has risks that have to be managed, as it can make you vulnerable to context shocks - the decline of ecosystems or industries.  ((People are great generalists, and great at learning skills quickly when required - for a good description of it, via its suppression by institutional schooling, see education anarchist John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education.))  Jobs for life may have been replaced, but they've been replaced not by jack-of-all-trade jobs but by a series of specialisations, each adapted to the circumstances of the moment.

Why would the division of labour not apply to a modern green peasantry, technological or no?  The only answer I can seem to find from advocates is an aesthetic or moral one: it's a more fulfilling way to live, and you shouldn't take more than you put in.  But the peon aesthetic doesn't much appeal to me, and people are no more virtuous now than the 3rd century BC.

Jared Diamond argues that Australia has poor soil fertility due to the lack of recent volcanic or glacial activity. The areas that did have glaciers over-turning the land were the area south of Fremantle and the Adelaide area. By Australian standards these are very fertile - by world standards they are average.

Diamond mentions that Adelaide was the first self-supporting colony using European agricultural methods due to the fertility of its soil. He consequently asks;

... would Australia be better off economically without much of its present agricultural enterprise?

The background to this rethinking is the realisation that only tiny areas of Australian land currently being used for agriculture are productive and suitable for sustained agricultural operations.

While 60% of Australia's land area and 80% of its human water use are dedicated to agriculture., the value of agriculture relative to other sectors of the Australian economy has been shrinking to the point where it now contributes less than 3% of the gross national product.

That's a huge allocation of land and scarce water to an enterprise of such low value. Furthermore, it is astonishing to realise that over 99% of that agricultural land makes little or no positive contribution to Australia's economy.

It turns out that about 80% of Australia's agricultural profits are derived from less than 0.8% of its agricultural land, virtually all of it in the south-western corner, on the south coast around Adelaide, in the south-eastern corner and in eastern Queensland

Those are the few areas favoured by volcanic or recently uplifted soils, reliable winter rains, or both.

I was not aware of the inherent disadvantage in Australian soils. I just assumed soils were soils all over the world. The soils were rich once, but basically over millennia have been leached into the oceans. Ironically, the poor soils mean few nutrients reach the ocean, so much of the fisheries in Australia are poor by world standards as well.

For a long time Australia was not a self-supporting colony. It was dependent upon trade from Britain to sustain itself. We are a trading nation today, maybe we should eradicate subsidies for agriculture and leave ourselves at the mercy of the free market. At worst it will probably mean we pay less for food.

Australians are aware of environmental damage, water is probably the one that we are most cognisant of. It is obvious to most Australians that having a water intensive agricultural industry like rice in the Murray region is repugnant. Maybe awareness of the poor quality of our soils needs to permeate the public conscious in the same way managing a scarce resource like water has .

Bruce Sterling recently declared that Viridian greens are winning . In a week where John Howard hails climate scientist Tim Flannery as Australian of the Year , he might have a point. In 2007, you're green or you're dead in the water. Which brings us to libertarians.

Greens and libertarians tend to see themselves as natural antagonists. Greens see libertarians as right wing extremists; selfish, corporate shills for the ugliest side of heartless capitalism. Libertarians see greens as nannies finding yet another reason to expand the state towards omni-competence and tyranny.

In the US, the green movement in the seventies emerged in parallel with libertarian reactions to wealth destroying command economy techniques used throughout state and federal governments. A representative clash of those worldviews might be Julian Simon's 1980 bet with Paul Ehrlich on commodity prices. Simon won, but also kind of missed the point, and it showed a telling intellectual naivety on the part of Ehrlich and his colleagues. This instinct of mistrust continues to the present day: the otherwise excellent Reason magazine flogged the climate change denialist horse long after it was dead. (Even last month Ronald Bailey was unable to write an article on the topic without putting the word solution in quotes.)

Though the market is a recognised green tool , in green philosophical terms, libertarians are off the map (PDF) .

This is a shame. There are a number of intersections between greens and libertarian philosophies, and plenty of opportunities for synthesis. Libertarians believe in individual responsibilty, agency and moral conscience, not just as a way of making oneself rich in a narrow sense, but as a better way of living, and this extends to choices about drugs or lifestyle. They believe that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, but that shadow boxing should not be stomped on by the police. They believe that using the state to distribute services or largesse ties citizens to a dead central hand, and impinges on both innovation and liberty. In addition, many libertarians tend to be materialists and empiricists who see their philosophies as hard headed responses to the physical universe and human nature.

Environmental values are not usually cast in these terms, but once you accept the existence of environmental externalities, they are not just comprehensible but useful from a green perspective. In a world where the climate has been changed by industrialisation, your right to swing your carbon ends where my coastline begins. Failing to control that is a failure of stewardship on an individual level. By contrast, relying on the state, or utility monopolies, to provide water and and energy, ties you to their command economy apron strings in a way a more decentralised solution would not. For example, using water tanks in combination with larger reservoirs provides a more robust decentralised solution than relying solely on dams and stormwater drains. The common aesthetic is one of enlightened self-reliance.

Dan Sullivan recognised common aspects of greens and libertarians in a 1994 essay . He ties it back to the moral basis for private property and distinguishing property earned through one's labour from common community assets partitioned amongst individuals. One of the technical names for this position is Geolibertarianism . This is particularly relevant today to air and climate, but it relates to a much older debate about land and land taxation that harks back to Locke, Paine and Jefferson. The usual policy outcome is support for a Land Value Tax. Since we don't have a good way to partition air, or climate variation for that matter, you could recast it in terms of an air or climate services rental fee.

We live in a time of large governments, where legislation structures and directs many aspects of our economic and environmental lives. Now that the political and cultural ground on climate change has shifted, that means government will need to move too: it will be activist and dynamic reorganisation, or a failure. The ten tonne koala leviathan is on the move already, and when government moves, it usually moves power to itself. This week the Howard government proposed taking control of the Murray-Darling river system, without, of course, this being balanced by additional state autonomy in any other area. Soon the 500 tonne gorilla in the east Pacific will be on the move too. Without an environmental sensibility libertarians will be catapulted into further irrelevance. Without a libertarian sensibility green policies will be servants of a brittle, stifling, central state.