Transition Chicago (TC)

by Sharon Astyk
http://sharonastyk.com/

My friend, Permaculturist Keith Johnson’s site pointed me to this excellent article
(there’s a direct link to the whole original there), in which ecologist and ecological footprint inventor William Rees makes the case that cities (and really, not just cities, all people in the developed world) are rather like human feedlots, disconnected from the acreage on which they really “live” – ie, the acreage that supplies their food, energy and other needs.

Rees writes,

“What eco-footprinting shows is that, in ecological terms, the Dutch don’t live in
Holland. Similarly, urban dwellers don’t “live” in their cities; urbanization simply
separates us from the productive ecosystems that sustain us but lie far beyond
the urban boundary. An apt analogy is “the city as human feedlot.” Like the city,
a livestock feedlot is an area with an extraordinarily high density of consumer
animals and a corresponding major waste management problem. Cities and
feedlots are incomplete ecosystems – the productive land component is some
distance away.”

Now I think this is an acute assessment – but I hope it will not be taken simply as the sort of indictment of city life that many rural dwellers, who do not like city life, are inclined to make. Before I was a rural dweller, I lived in a number of cities, and I do like them. I do not think that cities will disappear, or that living in one is inevitably disastrous. Nor do I think that the above statement is inaccurate if you substitute the terms “suburban” or “rural” in most of the developed world – even in places where one potentially can meet most of one’s needs from the agricultural and natural resources readily available, few people do. But I think this is a tremendously useful way of thinking about this issue – to say that we truly live where our needs are met forces us to ask the question – if our lives are not in the places we reside, where are they? Where should they be?

Now to some degree, as long as there has been human trade, there have been “shadow acres” – that land that supplied needs that could not be locally met. It is a very ancient reality – there has been trade almost as long as there have been humans. And yet, there is a real and qualitative difference between societies that provide much of their own needs, and those that do not. Among other things, distance makes us willing to be exploitative – that is, we do not feel we have an incentive to preserve the acres of other people, far away, even if that land feeds or clothes us.

For cities, historically the surrounding outlands provided their food – often in literally reciprocal relationship. Rees mentions the enormous waste-management problem caused by urban population density – in much of the world, the reciprocity of that relationship was direct, food was brought in to the cities from the outlying countryside, while human wastes were brought out, to be applied back to the fields. While the direct application of human manures to the fields is not desirable, this relationship is almost certainly one that will have to be re-established – but one made difficult by the fact that our growing land is quite distant from most of our largest cities – the transmission of municipal manures would be enormously energy intensive, and the surrounding suburbs, densely populated themselves, cannot absorb them. That is, without large quantities of fossil fuels, there’s really no way to set up a truly sustainable system, in which waste becomes not a problem, but a benefit.

All cities, indeed, all non-indigenous societies involve some deferral in where we live, with some resources coming from elsewhere, but we have taken this to new and problematic heights. For example, the Indian historian Dharampal has demonstrated that before British colonialism, 80-90 percent of India’s resources were utilized at the local level for the local economy, resources and well being. Less than 20% – often much less, depending on the region, went to serve leaders or central authority. Colonialism completely reversed this economy – taking 90% of produced resources for export or to serve the empire and its landlords and central authorities, leaving only 10% for general populace – with a corresponding destruction in wellbeing and personal economies.

Ecological footprinting shows that the results of globalization, which is colonialism’s ugly step-sister, are similar – where local resources once were “wasted” on the populace, now they concentrate wealth and serve mostly people who are already affluent. For example, research demonstrates that the vast majority of green revolution grain increases went not into the mouths of the poor and hungry who they supposedly were meant to serve, but into livestock and processed foods that fed people who were never hungry and were already affluent. At the same time, places that once fed themselves shifted to export crops, and were made vulnerable to fluctuating markets, dumping and ecological destruction.

Do we live where our food is grown? After all, most of us eat 3 times a day. So look around you and ask this question – where does our food come from? If our relationship with that place means that part of us “lives” there, how is our citizenship within that place? That is, do we treat it as a place to extract resources from, at minimal return, as a colony to provide for our needs, or as a place we are citizens of, with an investment in its well-being and future? For most of us, it is the former – and from this, I would argue, stems much of the deep hostility of rural places to those who consume their food, and much of the deep political divide in this country.

Do we live where our water comes from? We know that similar hostilities exist in places where the water comes from far away – my own region supplies part of the watershed for New York City, and at times, conflicts. But this is nothing compared to water-poor areas of the country – the conflicts between Northern and Southern California, say or Georgia and northern Florida, much less across the US/Mexican border. If we cannot grow food, or even live without water from somewhere else, what is our relationship to that place? What happens when both parties need the water?

Do we live where our goods come from? We are finally beginning to ask this question – Sir Nicholas Stern has opened the door to considering whether China’s emissions, for example, belong only to it, if it provides goods that are mostly used in the rich world? Can we blame China for its coal use entirely if we absorb the products of that use, if Chinese factories replace our own, and allow us to claim a reduction in emissions?

Do we live where our energy comes from? To this question, we might answer a resounding yes – we know for a fact that the Iraq war was about oil, that it followed in the footsteps of the Carter doctrine, which observes that since inconveniently, “our” oil is under their sand, our military and political agendas must always center on the Middle East. But we live their not as citizens, but as a military presence, building more and more resentment and anger.

Do we live where our waste goes? Do we float in the Dead Zone off the gulf of Mexico? Do we live where our old computers contaminate the soil and poison children in Africa? Most of us do live where our own feces contaminates our water, those things we imagine being whisked magically “away” that inevitably, somehow, come back, floating on the water at the beach, until we pour chlorine in and try hard to pretend it never happened.

Do we live where the primary work, once done mostly by us, is now done by others? If we eat meat, do we live where the great slaughterhouses are, where migrant laborers are hurt and killed to provide us with our clean, packaged foods? If we wear t-shirts with clever sayings on them, do we live where Vietnamese teenagers sew 12 hours a day in unventilated rooms? If we use toilets, do we live where they are cleaned by poorer people than we?

We are not good global citizens – we know that. We are devourers of the world. But is it even possible to be a decent and honorable global citizen? Certainly, in some measure. Certainly, it is possible to be better global citizens of the places that we live than we are now, and if we are to draw resources from somewhere, we are going to have to work on this. We will need to work on building those connections, on finding those means of honest internationalism. The world is not going to go away, we will not be instantly reduced to a kind of isolated localism that needs have no truck with other nations – truck with other nations long preceeded fossil fuels and modernity, and will be even more essential in warming world, full of migrants and refugees escaping rapidly changing economies, ecologies and war.

But there’s a measure in which being a true citizen of a far distant place is not fully feasible. I cannot honestly know whether my rice, grown on the Indian coast, was grown by someone who loves to grow rice, who does it well, or who is coerced by the large corporation that uses them as slave labor. I cannot know how they use their land. I can learn a little about their place and time, their needs and wants and hopes for the future, particularly if their rice is my primary indulgence. But I cannot be a part-time citizen of India for rice, Bolivia for flowers, China for electronics, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil, etc….ad infinitum. I cannot. All I can be in that case is a consumer.

And not only is a consumer an ugly, faint thing to be, a pale imitation of an engaged and fully human citizen-participant, but because a consumer only eats and by necessity, excretes their waste where they are, the relationship is destructive in two ways – not only do I take away soil nutrients or oil or wood or water and participate in the exploitation of distant places in my country and others when I consume their resources, but because all of us make our waste where we live, I then foul my own nest.

I do this because it is not possible, in such an expansive world, to transform the outputs of our consumption into anything but waste. Consider the difficulty of human excrement now – even sterilized and dehydrated, it is tremendously energy intensive to even consider returning human manures from, say, Boston to the places where most of its food comes from in Iowa or Nebraska. And human outputs are not the only kind of waste that could managed on a smaller scale – historically the end points of human cloth making became paper, animals were fed on scraps and bones that are now transported into landfills. The problem of scale, the problem of taking and excreting always seem to defeat us. We can do much to ameliorate them, but the first and most important amelioration would be to live where we live.

Of course, that’s a difficult proposition. The suburbs of even midwestern cities like Chicago are often filled, not with farmland, but with suburban landscapes of the densities of small cities of the past. Even if they can harness their land base to grow food, they are unlikely to have much to export, and they have plenty of their own manures and wastes. One must go much further afield, and expend more energy to get food, and to find a sustainable way of turning wastes into valuable inputs. To some degree, dependence for water, goods and food is written into every large city – and indeed, has been overinscribed by our investment in fossil fueled agriculture into the developed world as a whole. Our project now is to uninscribe it as best we can.

Obviously, the proportion to which we are able to actually live where we live is going to vary by where we are. For urban dwellers, there is absolutely no doubt that the proportion is vastly higher than is conventional in developed world cities, and a small number of urban community gardens is merely scratching the surface. We know that this is true – we know from the examples of Havana, the Jewish ghetto gardens during WWII, from Harare and Kampala how urgently necessary urban food production is – that it can sustain far larger populations than anyone would expect in a crisis, whether a war or simply poverty.

But cities are not going to feed themselves, and they are not going to provide their own water in the whole – many cities could probably produce 25-50% of their meat and produce, but they will never provide most of their own staple crops. Which means that urban-rural ties must be strengthened – that those who are citizens of a city must also be partly citizens of the rural towns that supply their dinners, the rural areas that collect their water. But this is not a one way transaction – cities as centers of trade, and renewed (we hope) centers of manufacture will have their own rural and suburban citizens – the customers who rely on urban areas to meet their need for goods will have to end their contempt for city life and city dwellers, since their hammers and clothing come from those cities.

If we cannot eliminate shadow acres, we must find ways to narrow them, to mostly get our goods and services from our bioregion, or as near to it as we possibly can. Aaron and I have called this “the bullseye diet” – but it doesn’t apply just to food. And in order to do this, we are going to have to build reciprocal economies, and reciprocal senses of citizenship. Some of this is in its nascent stages, as city dwellers come out to “their” farm to pick up their CSA share, or to pick the cherry tomatoes or strawberries, or volunteer, or as rural and suburban dwellers come into “their” cities, to enjoy art and music, culture and diversity not available to them, and then bring those things in small measure back to their own places. But we are still at a beginning point.

I often speak of these issues in terms of the practical imperatives for doing so – we must, for example, reduce fossil fuel usage because of climate change and peak energy, or we must build local food systems because we may not fully be able to access distant ones. But I like very much the idea of asking ourselves the moral and aesthetic question “where do I want to live?” I think for most of us, this is not a complex question. If we have a choice, most of us want to live where we chose to live – we would like, in the abstract, to live there as fully and wholly, as well and honestly as we can. We would like to be good citizens, in a place with a lively and vital civic life. If we live in other places, we would like to live there kindly and lightly, as participants and welcome members, even part-time, rather than hated colonizers or bad neighbors. We would like, in short, to love our neighbors as ourselves. We simply do not know how.

Viewed through this question of how and where we wish to live, the choices we make in localization, conservation and consumption, in our acts of citizenship and participation take on a new weight. We are not merely eating, we are travelling to a distant land, or a neighboring state, taking part in their bounty, and incurring some obligation to reciprocation. How shall we reciprocate? What can we offer them in return? We are not merely excreting, and flushing our wastes away – there is no place called “away.” Instead, we are contaminating those downstream – or we are returning our outputs to the place that fed us, or to some neighboring place that can be enriched.

Most of us give considerable thought to this question of where to reside – we consider schools and neighborhoods, climates and soils, family and friends. Our new project is to give as much attention to the question of where we live – where our needs are met. None of us will ever live without some shadow acreage, without some resources from far away, but the quantities can be great or small, the relationship civic and civic or colonial and hostile, the result contamination and waste or reciprocity and fertility. It all depends on where we choose to live.

Sharon

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/22/my-home-my-shadow-home-where-we-really-live/

by Sharon Astyk
http://sharonastyk.com/

Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, meet rock. Rock, over here is known as “the economy.” Hard place, on the other side, can be described as “our energy situation.” Because while green shoots might look awfully good to a lot of people who are desperate to have the economy go back to what it was, we should remind ourselves that “what it was” involved awfully high energy prices. Sure, some of it was speculation, and some of it was the Chinese Olympics, and some of it was the falling dollar. And of course, the good news is that none of those things will ever happen again…we don’t have speculators in the energy markets anymore, of course – we took care of that right off, nor does the dollar ever…oh, wait. But I can promise that Beijing won’t host the Olympics again for a while, if that helps.

$70 isn’t that bad, you argue. With the economy in recovery, we can afford our gas and heat bills, right? People won’t decide that they have to save for next winter’s oil bill. And this recovery is so solid that it won’t matter that tax burdens are headed up to compensate for falling revenues and increasing debt – people will have plenty of money to pay for gas and food and those higher taxes, now that new jobs are being…oh, wait. It also won’t matter that at higher energy prices, the stimulus money buys less stuff – asphalt paving prices go up, and they hire two fewer guys. The energy costs of all this highway work and other infrastructure investment goes up, the number of salaries goes down. But we don’t need those jobs that bad, right?

Nor will the volatility of energy prices and debt servicing matter – a couple of years of people never knowing if they will have enough money for a summer’s a/c, or a winter’s heat, if they’ll be making enough to cover their commute and daycare costs, whether they can afford enough food to keep the pantry full, whether the unemployment benefits will run out or be extended… none of those measures of insecurity will affect consumer behavior at all. We’re all going to go back to buying stuff. Nor will the cutting of credit lines, and the addition of bad debt to the balance sheets of the banks, or rising interest rates. And we never did care about the trade deficit, right?

Rock, you know Hard Place. Now, let’s meet Immovable Object. This is climate change – she’ll be with us all the time now. Think of the current situation as you trapped, rock on one side, hard place on the other, and immovable object is now suspended very slightly above your head. And oh, yeah, it can move after all – you can’t move it, but it can come crashing down and squash you like a bug.

Now one of two things is going to happen in the next couple of years – in the climate talks occurring in Europe now, in the painful negotiations with China, in Congress in the US and in Copenhagen. We’re either going to do something about climate change, or we’re not. And one of two results is possible if we do something – either it will be sufficient, or it won’t.

Now I won’t lay odds here on these two bets, although I think I could. But let’s consider just our choices. “Do something” on a scale that actually would matter, means that we face higher energy prices. I realize that a lot of climate activists don’t like to talk about this part, but the truth is the truth – even if we attempt to offset those costs for lower income people with carbon trading revenues or whatever, energy prices will go up. In general, I think this is wise – however, it will have an effect on the larger economy. Yes, yes there are dozens of studies that presume that shifting to renewables will grow the economy. Each of those studies assumes growth – assumes we’re going to be getting richer, not poorer as it happens. None of those suggest that renewable energies can fix our economic crisis. And, quite bluntly, a lot of those used energy reduction targets that were far lower than anything we have to actually deal with – the Yale study that showed growth across the board topped out emissions reductions at 40%.

Unfortunately more likely is that we don’t do enough soon enough – the Waxman-Markey bill making its way through Congress right now is a good example – they keep trimming emissions targets. Even though 80% by 2050 will, we know, absolutely not mitigate climate change, we’re now down to about 45% by 2050, as Charles Komanoff demonstrates. In which case, we’ll probably see a drag on revenues and unmitigated climate change. Goody.

Sir Nicholas Stern’s famed Stern report estimated that unchecked, climate change could cost every single world economy 20% of its GDP – that is, we’d be using one fifth of our GDP just to fix the damage climate change was causing (this was a world average – those people whose countries won’t be there anymore probably find it hard to create a GDP at all). The statistics are probably higher for the US, which as Joseph Romm notes, has more wealth on its coastlines than almost any other nation.

In four years, two American cities have effectively been destroyed – New Orleans and Galveston. What about the next one? What happens when it is Miami or some other major city? Besides the enormous human and communal costs, where will the money come from to rebuild, to evacuate, to deal with the economic costs? Anyone want to bet that we won’t see any more major hurricanes? Add on to that the little costs – the rising food prices from drought and flooding around the world, the costs of health care, of everything from new disease to increased low birth weight babies (yup, even that goes with climate change). Are we all set to grow our way out of that?

But even in the best scenarios, where we do limit emissions and get back down to 350 ppm, we cannot expect economic growth and radical emissions reduction simultaneously – they are are not compatible. Let’s say we do finally grasp how immovable this object is – and that we’re about to slam into it. Actually addressing climate change will require us to reduce total emissions by nearly 100% worldwide. We know that building out enough renewables just to keep up with basic needs will be a huge challenge, and may not be done fast enough to prevent a major energy bottleneck – moreover, as I keep pointing out, we may not be *able* to do this as fast as we’d like, even if we could build out renewables quickly – that is, since all our renewables are build with fossil fuels at every stage, we may not be able to do a massive buildout without risking crossing our tipping points – that is, we may have to say “ok, for the next decade we’re all going to do with a lot less energy, so that the future has some hope” and build out much more slowly. And we’re not going to be growing our economy.

Not to mention that fact that in such a case, where we allocate much of our fossil fuel production to a renewable build out, because we’re facing peak oil, we’re going to have to take the energy *from* somewhere – that is, we’re going to have to get our energy by not using it elsewhere – probably in the consumer economy. I’ve written much more about the fact that doing this would be a lot like WWII – no luxuries, no false usage, state controlled economy – than anyone has liked to admit.

I haven’t even talked about the ways that rock, our financial crisis, hits immovable object – because all of this requires enormous amounts of capital, and secure state economies. In order for nations to take on the enormous indebtedness required to push through this massive shift in our economy, we would have to have the ability to service that debt (each American now owes an additional 155K, btw), and buyers for that debt. Where is the money for this build out going to come from?

Rock, hard place and immovable object are going to continue to bang up against one another, and the space we’ve got to move in gets smaller and smaller – as does our hope of finding a way out. Roughly, our financial crisis makes it harder to finance the renewable energy we so desperately need to address both climate change and peak oil. Meanwhile, peak oil means that every time we start to climb out of the financial hole, we fall back in – we can’t grow without cheap oil, and we only have cheap oil when the economy is crashing. And climate change comes ’round and says “oh, and some of what money you do have will be needed to deal with me now – don’t plan on using it for anything affirmative, you’ll want it for the next city, or the next drought, or the next…” If we do address climate change, we push up energy prices, and create lots of ugly temptation for the government to take the revenues from cap and trade and spend them on debt servicing and bailing out rich people, rather than offsetting costs. High energy prices would be good – except that they come with high taxes, high price volatility for basic needs, high unemployment, high bankruptcy rates and declining credit, not to mention our energy intensive infrastructure.

Round and round and round she goes, and wherever she stops, we crash into something heavy and hard. My husband once said “isn’t it ironic that we’re facing all these crises simultaneously?” No, I don’t think it is ironic at all – I think it is inevitable – that is, as long as there was one way out of the hall of mirrors you could put off the crisis for a while, or at least, off thinking about it. That is, it seemed perfectly feasible to convert, someday, when we got around to it, to renewables as long as we were flush with wealth. It seemed perfectly possible to deal with the oil crisis as long as we were rich, and it was someday. It seemed perfectly possible to take on debt and build a credit card economy as long as we had energy to make the economy go. It seemed perfectly possible to address climate change, as long as we could switch to lower emissions natural gas and dig a little deeper… Again, I am reminded of the conclusions of the 30 year Update of The Limits to Growth – in most scenarios, the crisis point does not come because of one single thing, but because “the system runs out of the ability to cope.”

Our ability to cope has, to put it starkly, run out. I don’t mean that the end of the world is now here – I mean that we can no longer put off our problems. And we are stuck where we put ourselves.

Is there an out from this ugly trio? The only one I can see is this. If our ambitions became smaller, in proportion to our reality, we might be able to slip out of our trap in the cracks around our triple crisis. That is, if we acknowledged now that we cannot, as the Rolling Stones put it, get what we want, that we must settle for what we need, and content ourselves with the hope that our actions now can enable a decent future, we might be able to go forward.

The first item on that agenda would be a realistic assessment of what we need to do for climate change. The odds are this would be painful, and politically unpopular. And we need to do it anyway – emissions targets must be set lower and sooner, and while we can all hope that economic growth will magically begin, we must begin from the assumption that it will not. That is, we must cut much of our emissions simply by not making them. That means a massive shift in our society – ideally with tradable rationing as George Monbiot has proposed, which is the sanest of a lot of mediocre options. Thus, the poor who already make fewer emissions than the rich, get to trade off their emissions allotment, and get a little richer, if they are willing. But there must be absolute, strict caps.

The bailing of the rich and its corporations must stop – if we accept that economic growth in any sustained way is manifestly unlikely in the coming years, we can’t keep borrowing. So what money we spend has to be spent on protecting the people, and reviving the domestic and informal economy – because, after all, if people’s basic needs are met, growth itself isn’t as important – this doesn’t mean that such a contraction will be easy, but it can be far less painful than it will be. And the political difficulties could be navigated by a leader powerful enough to make the case for self-sacrifice for a larger goal. I don’t claim this is easy – merely necessary.

Finally, we would simply need to use vastly less energy, while gradually allocating as many of our resources as humanly possible to renewables and infrastructure investments, not primarily for the short term, but for the long term. We must begin from the assumption that all of our densest energy sources are in decline – we face peak oil, coal and natural gas, and that our supplies of all are uncertain – so reducing our reliance on these *and* preserving a supply of these valuable materials for the future is essential.

Most of us reading this blog have thought for a bit about the implications of needing less energy, and they realize that in and of itself, this need not be unmitigated suffering – that is, we are not going back to banging rocks together in caves. But we must invest our resources in making this possible, both at the personal and at the national, state and regional levels. And we need to make compelling the vision of the future that we are offering – hope for our children and grandchildren, vs. no hope; a simpler life, harder in some ways, better in others; an honest truth, with some good and some bad.

All this would entail convincing the American public that at this point, the most important thing we can do is to protect our future. We have done this in the past – in World War II, that was our narrative. We asked millions to risk death, to be parted from their families. Hundreds of thousands actually died for this goal. The story we were told is this – we face a vast and terrible threat, one that risks destroying everything we value, we must fight it with everything in our power- and your sacrifice now buys you a future. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1941,

“We are now in this war. We are all in it all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories – the changing fortunes of war.”

I do not claim that getting the American or the world’s people to share in this project would be easy. I do claim that it is possible – every time I mention this many observe that we are now lazier, softer, more selfish than our grandparents ever were. And that may be true. But more than our grandparents, even, I think we long for meaning and purpose, for a vision of the future, even if it is difficult. Nor are we as soft as we like to say – Americans are very much invested in their own image of themselves as tough, as willing, as courageous – so invested that I have little doubt that they will rise to the occasion. I have no doubt this would be very hard. I also have no doubt it is possible.

That said, I don’t find it probable, much as I would like to, that our present leadership will lead us there. And there is a real chance that even if we made the shift, we might fail to mitigate climate change, we might fail to create a decent future – we’re pretty close to the edge here. But then again, we might have failed in World War II as well – at the start, it seemed very unlikely that Britain would not fall to the Germans at the very least. The fact that you might fail might not be as important as we think it is. In the end, if we face up to our realities, and acknowledge them, the very best any of us can do is everything we can.

Our present position, is, to put it mildly, unenviable. We are trapped, proverbially, between rock and hard place, with immovable object pressing down on top. We have squandered our chance to find the easy ways out, and our best options aren’t that appealing to most of us.

The only possible case for them is that they are real. That is, that outside the world of fantasy, outside those invested in raising consumer confidence or denying our ecological predicament for their own purposes, we have the choices we have. Nobody chose this. Nobody wanted it, and yet, it happened, and we allowed it. And now, we go from where we are. Or we do not, and we never go anywhere at all worth going – we spend the rest of our lives in a trap, with the walls slowly moving together.

Sharon
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/11/rock-vs-hard-place-vs-immovable-object/

By Lisa M. Hamilton
http://www.alternet.org/

By consolidating, centralizing and homogenizing our food system, we’ve put all our proverbial eggs in one basket — and that’s a big risk.

This spring, local foods advocates have reason to be hopeful. In 2009, there will be more farmers markets than ever, nearly 5,000 nationwide. And in backyards everywhere are some real green shoots, with 43 million Americans planting gardens this year.

But look beyond the local, and so far 2009 has been disastrous for agriculture. Drought, freeze and rain in the Plains all but ruined this year’s winter wheat. In North Dakota, our top producer of spring wheat, much of the state’s farmland has been sitting unusable, still waterlogged from the March/April floods. And in much of the Corn Belt, seemingly endless rain delayed planting for more than a month. As of mid-May, only 20 percent of corn in Illinois had been sown — in a normal year they would have been 92 percent complete.

The danger is that crops planted late almost always suffer in yield and/or quality. In most cases, that beats not planting at all, although this year many farmers won’t even have that choice. The USDA has predicted that in North Dakota alone, up to 3 million acres — 15 percent of the state’s farmland — may go unplanted because of flooding.

There may still be light at the end of the tunnel. Many farmers will switch from wheat or corn to soybeans, which can be sown later and for which there is a global shortage (at least for now). Others have simply planted their intended crops late in hopes that somehow, for the rest of the year, the weather will be perfect. And perhaps it will be. But the fact that we must cross our fingers at all signals that our food system isn’t as durable as we believe. Already analysts are warning, for this and other reasons, of a renewed global food crisis later this year.

The root cause is not unlike what has happened with so many investment portfolios of late. By consolidating, centralizing and homogenizing our food system, we’ve put all our proverbial eggs in one basket. Sure, there are a hell of a lot of eggs in that basket, but when something goes wrong with it — too much rain, too little — we have no safety net.

As investment advisers will tell you, at least part of the solution is to diversify. By this I don’t mean more farmers markets and gardens, but rather the renovation of the large-scale grain farming that provides most of our calories. To become more resilient, that system needs greater diversity at every level.

To begin with, the system needs genetic and biological diversity, which grant crops the latitude to perform well, not just in an optimal environment but in a range of conditions. As it is now, grains are planted in monocultures of DNA, often millions of acres with a single genetic code. When disaster strikes, all suffer.

The system also needs geographic diversity, meaning grain crops grown in various parts of the country, not just in the “belts” where they are now concentrated. That way, when North Dakota floods and drought hits Kansas, national wheat losses could be buffered by production in places like New Mexico, Vermont and Oregon.

Finally, the system needs a more diverse marketplace. A central reason why this spring’s weather has had such impact is that farmers have so little flexibility. The commodity market, encouraged by subsidies, dictates that farmers from Ohio to Nebraska have essentially three choices of what to grow: corn, soybeans and wheat. It’s not because that’s what people want to eat — most of the corn and soybeans aren’t even consumed directly; they feed livestock. Instead, it’s because this three-legged system is the best fit for the industrial principles that guide our food system.

But what if, to change this, we consumers brought that farmers market attitude — that active approach to food choices — to the rest of our shopping? What if we created a significant market for alternatives: Buckwheat, lentils, chickpeas, oats. Regionally grown wheat. Grass-fed meats, raised on grain acreage converted to perennial pasture. This diversified agricultural economy could do much to release farmers from the limitations of the corn-soy-wheat triumvirate.

If that all sounds like too radical a departure, consider where we may be in a decade or two. As climate change brings more erratic weather, and the cheap energy and fresh water that subsidize our current system run out — as that industrial-ag portfolio ceases to pay reliable dividends — this more diversified approach may in fact be one of the few practical options we have. Invest now, and we might just build a safety net in time for when we really need one.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/140535/why_our_food_system_may_suffer_the_same_fate_as_our_financial_system/

by Dmitry Orlov
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com

This talk was presented at The New Emergency Conference in Dublin, on June 11, 2009.

1. Good morning. The title of this talk is a bit of a mouthful, but what I want to say can be summed up in simpler words: we all have to prepare for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbours. I will take as my point of departure the unfolding collapse of the global economy, and discuss what might come next. It started with the collapse of the financial markets last year, and is now resulting in unprecedented decreases in the volumes of international trade. These developments are also starting to affect the political stability of various countries around the world. A few governments have already collapsed, others may be on their way, and before too long we may find our maps redrawn in dramatic ways.

2. “Sustainability” — what’s in a word?

In a word, unsustainable. So what does that mean, exactly? Chris Clugston has recently published a summary of his analysis of what he calls “societal over-extension” on The Oil Drum web site. Here is a summary of his summary, in round numbers. I don’t want to trifle with his arithmetic, because it’s the cultural assumptions behind it that I find interesting. The idea is that if we shrink our ecological footprint by an order of magnitude or so, that should make the whole arrangement sustainable once again. This is expressed in financial terms: here we are lowering the GDP of the USA from, say $100 thousand per capita per annum, to, say $10 thousand. Clugston draws a distinction between making this reduction voluntarily or involuntarily: we should make it easy on ourselves and come along quietly, so that nobody gets hurt. I find the idea that Americans will voluntarily lower their GDP by a factor of 10 rather outlandish. We keep the same system, just shut down 9/10 of it? Wouldn’t that make it a completely different system? This sort of sustainability seems rather unsustainable to me.

3. My plan

I would like to offer a more realistic alternative. Everybody should have one US Dollar, for purely didactic purposes. This way, all Americans will be able to show their one dollar to their grandchildren, and say: “Can you imagine, this ugly piece of paper was once called The Almighty Dollar!” And their grandchildren will no doubt think that they are a little bit crazy, but they would probably think that anyway. But it certainly would not be helpful for them to have multiple shoe-boxes full of dollars, because then thir grandchildren would think that they are in fact senile, because no sane person would be hoarding such rubbish.

4. An unpalatable alternative

Clugston offers an alternative to the big GDP decrease: a proportionate decrease in population. In this scenario, nine out of 10 people die so that the remaining 10% can go on living comfortably on $100 thousand a year. I was happy to note that Chris did not carry the voluntary/involuntary distinction over to this part of the analysis, because I feel that this would have been in rather questionable taste. I can think of just three things to say about this particular scenario.

First, humans are not a special case when it comes to experiencing population explosions and die-offs, and the idea that human populations should increase monotonically ad infinitum is just as preposterous as the idea of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. The exponential growth of the human population has tracked the increased use of fossil fuels, and I am yet to see a compelling argument for why the population would not crash along with them.

Second, shocking though this seems, it can be observed that most societies are able to absorb sudden increases in mortality without much fuss at all. There was a huge spike in mortality in Russia following the Soviet collapse, but it was not directly observable by anyone outside of the morgues and the crematoria. After a few years people would look at an old school photograph and realise that half the people are gone! When it comes to death, most people do in fact make it easy on themselves and come along quietly. The most painful part of it is realising that something like that is happening all around you.

Third, this whole budgeting exercise for how many people we can afford to keep alive is a good way of demonstrating what monsters we have become, with our addiction to statistics and numerical abstractions. The disconnect between words and actions on the population issue is by now is almost complete. Population is very far beyond anyone’s control, and this way of thinking about it takes us in the wrong direction. If we could not control it on the way up, what makes us think that we might be able to control it on the way down? If our projections look sufficiently shocking, then we might hypnotise ourselves into thinking that maintaining our artificial human life support systems at any cost is more important than considering its effect on the natural world. The question “How many will survive?” is simply not ours to answer.

5. What’s actually happening


Back to what is actually happening right now. There seems to be a wide range of opinion on how to characterise it, from recession to depression to collapse. The press has recently been filled with stories about “green shoots” and the economists are discussing the exact timing of economic recovery. Mainstream opinion ranges from “later this year” to “sometime next year.” None of them dares to say that global economic growth might be finished for good, or that it will be over in “the not-too-distant future” — a vague term they seem to like a whole lot.

There does seem to be a consensus forming that last year’s financial crash was precipitated by the spike in oil prices last summer, when oil briefly touched $147/bbl. Why this should have happened seems rather obvious. Since most things in a fully developed, industrialised economy run on oil, it is not an optional purchase: for a given level of economic activity, a certain level of oil consumption is required, and so one simply pays the price for as long as access to credit is maintained, and after that suddenly it’s game over. François Cellier has recently published an analysis in which he shows that at roughly $600/bbl the entire world’s GDP would be required to pay for oil, leaving no money for putting it to any sort of interesting use. At that price level, we can’t even afford to take delivery of it. In fact, at that price level, we can’t even afford to pump it out of the ground, because the tool pushers, roughnecks and roustabouts that make oil rigs work don’t drink the oil, and there would no longer be room in the budget for beer.

And so, the actual limiting price, beyond which no economic activity is possible, is certainly a lot lower, and last summer we seem to have experimentally established that to be around $150/bbl. which is something like 25% of global GDP. We may never run out of oil, but we have already run out of money with which to buy it, at least once, and will most likely do so again and again, until we learn the lesson. We will run out of money to pump it out of the ground as well. There might still be a few gushers left in the world, and so there will be a little bit of oil left over for us to fashion into exotic plastic jewelry for rich people. But it won’t be enough to sustain an industrial base, and so the industrial age will effectively be over, except for some residual solar panels and wind generators and hydroelectric installations.

I think that the lesson from all this is that we have to prepare for a non-industrial future while we still have some resources with which to do it. If we marshal the resources, stockpile the materials that will be of most use, and harness the heirloom technologies that can be sustained without an industrial base, then we can stretch out the transition far into the future, giving us time to adapt.

6. Key points

I know that I am running the risk of overstating these points and oversimplifying the situation, but sometimes it is helpful to ignore various complexities to move the discussion forward. I do believe that these points are all true, roughly speaking.

1. Global GDP is a function of oil consumption; as oil production goes down, so will global GDP. At some point, the inability to invest in oil production will drive it down far below what might be possible if depletion were the sole limiting factor. Efficiency, conservation, renewable sources of energy all might have some effect, but will not materially alter this relationship. Less oil means smaller global economy. No oil means a vanishingly small global economy not worthy of the name.
2. We have had a chance to observe that economies crash whenever oil expenditure approaches 1/4 of global GDP. Attempts at economic recovery will cause oil price spikes that break through this ceiling. These spikes will be followed by further financial crashes and further drops in economic activity. After each crash, the maximum level of economic activity required to trigger the next crash will be lower.
3. Financial assets are only valuable if they can be used to secure a sufficient quantity of oil to keep the economy running. They represent the ability to get work done, and since in an industrialised society the work is done by industrial machinery that runs on oil, less oil means less work. Financial assets that that are backed with industrial capacity require that industrial capacity to be maintained in working order. Once the maintenance requirements of the industrial infrastructure can no longer be met, it quickly decays and becomes worthless. To a large extent, the end of oil means the end of money.

Now that the reality of Peak Oil has started to sink in, one commonly hears that “The age of cheap oil is over”. But does that mean that the age of expensive oil is upon us? Not necessarily. We now know (or should have learnt by now) that once oil rises to over 25% of global GDP, the world’s industrial economy stalls out, and as soon as that happens, oil ceases to be particularly valuable, so much so that investment in maintaining oil production is curtailed. The next time industry tries to stage a comeback (if it ever does) it hits the wall much sooner and stalls again. I doubt that it would take more than just a couple of cycles of this market whiplash for all the participants to have two realisations: that they cannot get enough oil no matter how much they pay for it, and that nobody wants to take their money even for the oil they do have. Those who still have it will see it as too valuable to part with for mere money. On the other hand, if the energy resources needed to run an industrial economy are no longer available, then oil becomes just so much toxic waste. In any case, it is no longer about money, but direct access to resources.

7. A reasonable set of objectives

Now, I expect that a lot of people will find this view too gloomy and feel discouraged. But I feel that it is entirely compatible with a positive vision of the future, so let me try to articulate it.

First of all, we do have some control. Although we shouldn’t hold out too much hope for industrial civilisation as a whole, there are certainly some bits of it that are worth salvaging. Our financial assets may not be long for this world, but in the meantime we can redeploy them to good long-term advantage.

Secondly, we can take steps to give ourselves time to make the adjustment. By knowing what to expect, we can prepare to ride it out. We can imagine which options will be foreclosed first, and create alternatives, so that we do not run out of options.

Lastly, we can concentrate on what is important: preserving a vibrant ecosphere that supports a diversity of life, our own progeny included. I can imagine few short-term prerogatives that should override this – our highest priority.

8. Managing financial risk

It will take some time for these realisations to sink in. In the meantime, we will no doubt keep hearing that we have a financial crisis on our hands. We must do something to shore up the banks, to deal with the toxic assets, to shore up our credit ratings and so forth. There are people who will tell you that this was all caused by a mistake in financial modelling, and that if we re-regulate the financial sector, this won’t happen again. So, for the sake of the argument, let’s take a look at all that.

Financial management is certainly not my speciality, but as far as I understand it, it is mostly about assessing risk. And to do that, financial managers make certain assumptions about the phenomena they are trying to model. One standard assumption is that the future will resemble the past. Another is that various negative events are randomly distributed. For instance, if you are selling life insurance, you can be certain that people will die based on the fact that they have been born, and you can be reasonably certain that they will not all die at once. When someone dies is unpredictable, when people in general die is random, most of the time. And so here is the problem: the world is unpredictable, but classes of small events can be treated as random, until a bigger event comes along. It may seem like an obscure point, so let me explain the difference in a graphical way.

9. This is (pseudo)random

Here is a random collection of multicoloured dots. Actually, it is pseudo-random, because it was generated by a computer, and computers are deterministic beasts incapable of true randomness. A source of true randomness is hard to come by. Even very good random noise generators can have higher-order effects. Small events are frequent, and therefore we can treat them as random, larger events are less frequent and rather unpredictable, and some of the really large events put an end to the careers of the statisticians trying to model them, and so we never find out whether they are random or not. To a layman, this is random enough, but eventually you run out of randomness and hit something very non-random.

10. This is not random but predictable

Like this. Now this is not random, even to a layman. This is like oil expenditure going to 1/4 of global GDP. That certainly wasn’t random. But was it unpredictable? We had a few years of monotonically increasing oil prices, and the high prices failed to produce much of a supply response in spite of record-high drilling rates, investment in ethanol, tar sands, and so on. We also have some good geology-based models that accurately predicted oil depletion profile for separate provinces, and had a high probability of succeeding in the aggregate as well. So this is definitely not random, and it is not even unpredictable. So, at a higher level, what sort of mathematics do we need to accurately model the inability of our financial and political and other leaders and commentators to see it, or to understand it, even now? And do we really need to do that, or should we just let this nice brick wall do the work for us. Because, you know, brick walls have a lot to teach people who refuse to acknowledge their existence, and they are very patient with students who need to repeat the lesson. I am sure that the lesson will sink in eventually, but I wonder how many more full-gallop runs at the wall it will take before everyone is convinced.

11. His models mostly work

One person I would like to have a close encounter with the brick wall is this fellow, Myron Scholes, the Nobel Prise-winning co-author of the Black-Scholes method of pricing derivatives, the man behind the crash of Long Term Capital Management. He is the inspiration behind much of the current financial debacle. Recently, he has been quoted as saying the following: “Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete.” Now, imagine a structural engineer saying something along those lines: “Most of the time our structural analysis works, but if there is a strong gust of wind, then, for any given structure, it is incomplete.” Or a nuclear engineer: “Our calculations of the strength of nuclear reactor containment vessels work quite well much of the time. Of course, if there is an earthquake, then any given containment vessel might fail.” In these other disciplines, if you just don’t know the answer, then you just don’t bother showing up for work, because what would be the point?

12. We love their lies

The point certainly wouldn’t be to reassure people, to promote public confidence in bridges, buildings, and nuclear reactors. But economics and finance are different. Economics is not directly lethal, and economists never get sent to jail for criminal negligence or gross incompetence even when their theories do fail. Finance is about the promises we make to each other, and to ourselves. And if the promises turn out to be unrealistic, then economics and finance turn out to be about the lies we tell each other. We want to continue believing these lies, because there is a certain loss of face if we don’t, and the economists are there to help us. We continue to listen to economists because we love their lies. Yes, of course, the economy will recover later this year, maybe the next. Yes, as soon as the economy recovers, all these toxic assets will be valuable again. Yes, this is just a financial problem; we just need to shore up the financial system by injecting taxpayer funds. These are all lies, but they make us feel all right. They are lying, and we are buying every word of it.

13. Fastest way to lose all your money

Let’s face it, these are difficult times for those of us who have a lot of money. What can we do? We can entrust it to a financial institution. That tends to turn out badly. Many people in the United States have entrusted their retirement savings to financial institutions. And now they are being told that they cannot withdraw their money. All they can do is open a letter once a month, to watch their savings dwindle.

We can also invest it in some part of the global economy. I know some automotive factories you could buy. They are quite affordable right now. A lot of retired auto workers have put all of their retirement savings into General Motors stock. Maybe they know something that we don’t? (Actually, that’s part of a fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Obama administration, to pay off their banker friends ahead of GM’s other creditors.)

Well then, how about a nice gold brick or two? A bag of diamonds? Some classic cars? Then you could start your own personal museum of transportation. How about a beautifully restored classic luxury yacht? Then you could use the gold bricks to weigh you down if you ever decide to end it all by jumping overboard.

Here’s another brilliant idea: buy green products. Whatever green thing the marketers and advertisers throw at you, buy it, toss it, and buy another one straight away. Repeat until they are out of product, you are out of money, and the landfills are full of green rubbish. That should stimulate the economy. Market research shows that there is a great reservoir of pent-up eco-guilt out there for marketers and advertisers to exploit. Industrial products that help the environment are a bit of an oxymoron. It’s a bit like trying to bail out the Titanic using plastic teaspoons.

Another great marketing opportunity for our time is in survival goods. There are some web sites that push all sorts of supplies to put in your private bunker. It’s a clever bit of manipulation, actually. Users log in, see that the stock market is down, oil is up, shotgun shells are on sale, so are hunting knives, and if you add a paperback on “surviving financial armageddon” to your shopping cart you qualify for free shipping. Oh and don’t forget to add a large tin of dehydrated beans. Fear is a great motivator, and getting people to buy survival goods is almost a matter of operant conditioning: a marketer’s dream.

If you want to help save the environment and prepare yourself for a life without access to consumer goods, then doing so by buying consumer goods doesn’t seem like such a great plan. A much better thing to do is to BUY NOTHING. But that is not something you can do with money. But there are useful things to do with money, for the time being, if we hurry.

14. How to lose all your money (but have something to show for it)

Most of the wealth is in very few private hands right now. Governments and the vast majority of the people only have debt. It is important to convince people who control all this wealth that they really have two choices. They can trust their investment advisers, maintain their current portfolios, and eventually lose everything. Or they can use their wealth to reengage with people and the land in new ways, in which case they stand a chance of saving something for themselves and their children. They can build and launch lifeboats, recruit crew, and set them sailing.

Those who own a lot of industrial assets can divest before these assets lose value and invest in land resources, with the goal of preserving them, improving them over time, and using them in a sustainable manner. Since it will become difficult to get what you want by simply paying for it, it is a good idea to establish alternatives ahead of time, by making resources, such as farmland, available to those who can put them to good use, for their own benefit as well as for yours. It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels – better than most. They are compact and easy to store.

Lastly, it makes sense to work towards orchestrating a controlled demolition of the global economy. This calls for a new financial skill set: that of a disinvestment adviser. The first step is a sort of triage; certain parts of the economy can be marked “do not resuscitate” and resources reallocated to a better task. A good example of an industry not worth resuscitating is the auto industry; we simply will not need any more cars. The ones that we already have will do nicely for as long as we’ll need them. A good example of a sector definitely worth resuscitating is public health, especially prevention and infectious disease control. In all these measures, it is important to pull money out of geographically distant locations and invest it locally. This may be inefficient from a financial standpoint, but it is quite efficient from the point of view of personal and social self-preservation.

15. Beyond finance: controlling other kinds of risk

Coming back for a moment to the poor bankers and economists, it seems rather disingenuous for us to treat economics and finance as a special case of people who generate a lot of unmitigated risk. Do we have any examples of risks we understood properly and acted on in time? Are there any really serious systemic problems that we have been able to solve?… The best we seem to be able to do is buy time. In fact, that seems to be what we are good at – postponing the inevitable through diligence and hard work. None of us wants to act precipitously based on what we understand will happen eventually, because it may not happen for a while yet. And why would we want to rock the boat in the meantime? The one risk that we do seem to know how to mitigate against is the risk of not fitting in to our economic, social and cultural milieu. And what happens to us if our entire milieu finally goes over the edge? Well, the way we plan for that is by not thinking about that.

16. The biggest risk of all

The biggest risk of all, as I see it, is that the industrial economy will blunder in for a few more years, perhaps even a decade or more, leaving environmental and social devastation in its wake. Once it finally gives up the ghost, hardly anything will be left with which to start over. To mitigate against this risk, we have to create alternatives, on a small scale, that do not perpetuate this system and that can function without it.

The idea of perpetuating the status quo through alternative means is all-pervasive, because so many people in positions of power and authority wish to preserve their positions. And so just about every proposal we see involves avoiding collapse instead of focusing on what comes after it. A prime example is the push to develop alternative energy. Many of these alternatives turn out to be fossil fuel amplifiers rather than self-sufficient resources: they require fossil fuel energy as an essential input. Also, many of them require an intact industrial base, which runs on fossil fuels. There is a pervasive idea that these alternatives haven’t been developed before for nefarious reasons: malfeasance on the part of the greedy oil companies and so on. The truth of the matter is that these alternatives are not as potent, physically or economically, as fossil fuels. And here is the real point worth pondering: If we can no longer afford the oil or the natural gas, what makes us think that we can afford the less potent and more expensive alternatives? And here is a follow-up question: If we can’t afford to make the necessary investments to get at the remaining oil and natural gas, what makes us think that we will find the money to develop the less cost-effective alternatives?

17. How long do we have?

It would be excellent if more people had these realisations, and started making progress toward making their lives a bit more sustainable. But social inertia is quite great, and the process of adaptation takes time. And the question is, is there enough time for significant numbers of people to have these realisations and to adapt, or will they have to endure quite a lot of discomfort?

I believe that people who start the process now stand a fairly good chance of making the transition in time. But I don’t think that it is too wise to wait and try to grab a few more years of comfortable living. Not only would that be a waste of time on a personal level, but we’d be squandering the resources we need to make the transition.

I concede that the choice is a difficult one: either we wait for circumstances to force our hand, at which point it is too late for us to do anything to prepare, or we bring it upon ourselves ahead of time. If we ask the question, How many people are likely to do that? – then we are asking the wrong question. A more relevant question is, Would we be doing this all alone? And I think the answer is, probably not, because there are quite a few other people who are thinking along these same lines.

18. It’s always personal

I think it is very important to understand social inertia for the awesome force that it is. I have found that many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand what I have been saying, and many others understand it on some level but refuse to act on it. When they are touched by collapse, they take it personally or see it as a matter of luck. They see those who prepare for collapse as eccentrics; some may even consider them to be dangerous subversives. This is especially likely to be the case for people in positions of power and authority, because they are not exactly cheered by the prospect of a future that has no place for them.

There is a certain range of personalities that are most likely to survive collapse unscathed, physically or psychologically, and adapt to the new circumstances. I have been able to spot certain common traits while researching reports of survivors of shipwrecks and other similar calamities. A certain amount of indifference or detachment is definitely helpful, including indifference to suffering. Possibly the most important characteristic of a survivor, more important than skills or preparation or even luck, is the will to survive. Next is self-reliance: the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness lack of support from anyone else. Last on the list is unreasonableness: the sheer stubborn inability to surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from one’s comrades, or even force.

Those who feel the need to be inclusive, accommodating, to compromise and to seek consensus, need to understand the awesome force of social inertia. It is an immovable, crushing weight. “We must take into account the interests of society as a whole.” Translated, that means “We must allow ourselves to remain thwarted by people’s unwillingness or inability to make drastic but necessary changes; to change who they are.” Must we, really?

There are two components to human nature, the social and the solitary. The solitary is definitely the more highly evolved, and humanity has surged forward through the efforts of brilliant loners and eccentrics. Their names live on forever precisely because society was unable to extinguish their brilliance or to thwart their initiative. Our social instincts are atavistic and result far too reliably in mediocrity and conformism. We are evolved to live in small groups of a few families, and our recent experiments that have gone beyond that seem to have relied on herd instincts that may not even be specifically human. When confronted with the unfamiliar, we have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed underfoot: a pinnacle of evolution indeed! And so, in fashioning a survivable future, where do we put our emphasis: on individuals and small groups, or on larger entities – regions, nations, humanity as a whole? I believe the answer to that is obvious.

19. “Collapse” or “Transition”

It’s rather difficult for most people to take any significant steps, even individually. It is even more difficult to do so as a couple. I know a lot of cases whether one person understands the picture and is prepared to make major changes in the living arrangement, but the partner or spouse is non-receptive. If they have children, then the constraints multiply, because things that may be necessary adaptations post-collapse look like substandard living conditions to a pre-collapse mindset. For instance, in many places in the United States, bringing up a child in a place that lacks electricity, central heating, or indoor plumbing may be equated with child abuse, and authorities rush in and confiscate the children. If there are grandparents involved, then misunderstandings multiply. There may be some promise to intentional communities: groups that decide to make a go of it in rural setting.

When it comes to larger groups: towns, for instance any meaningful discussion of collapse is off the table. The topics under discussion centre around finding ways to perpetuate the current system through alternative means: renewable energy, organic agriculture, starting or supporting local businesses, bicycling instead of driving, and so on. These certainly aren’t bad things to talk about it, or to do, but what of the radical social simplification that will be required? And is there a reason to think that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does. Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?

20. Better living through bureaucracy

There are still many believers in the goodness of the system and the magic powers of policy. They believe that a really good plan can be made acceptable to all – the entire unsustainably complex international organisational pyramid, that is. They believe that they can take all these international bureaucrats by the hand, lead them to the edge of the abyss that marks the end of their bureaucratic careers, and politely ask them to jump. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to stop them. Let them proceed with their brilliant schemes, by all means.

21. Simpler approaches: investment

There are far simpler approaches that are likely to be more effective. Since most wealth is in private hands, it is actually up to individuals to make very important decisions. Unlike various bureaucratic and civic bodies, which are both short of funds and mired in social inertia, they can act decisively and unilaterally. The problem is, what to do with financial assets before they lose value. The answer is to invest in things that will retain value even after all financial assets are worthless: land, ecosystems, and personal relationships. The land need not be in pristine or natural condition. After a couple of decades, any patch of land reverts to a wilderness, and unlike an urban or an industrial desert, a wilderness can sustain life, human and otherwise. It can support a population of plants an animals, wild and domesticated, and even a few humans.

The human relationships that are the most conducive to preserving ecosystems are ones that are in turn tied to a direct, permanent relationship with the land. They can be enshrined in permanent, heritable leases payable in sustainably harvested natural products. They can also be enshrined as deeded easements that provide the community with traditional hunting, gathering and fishing rights, provided human rights are not allowed to supersede those of other species. I think the lifeboat metaphor is apt here, because the moral guidance it offers is so clear. What has to happen in an overloaded lifeboat at sea when a storm blows up and it becomes necessary to lighten the load? Everyone draws lots. Such practises have been upheld by the courts, provided no-one is exempt – not the captain, not the crew, not the owner of the shipping company. If anyone is exempt, the charge becomes murder. Sustainability, which is necessary for group survival, may have to have its price in human life, but humanity has survived many such incidents before without descending into barbarism.

22. Gift-giving as an organising principle

Many people have been so brainwashed by commercial propaganda that they have trouble imagining that anything can be made to work without recourse to money, markets, the profit motive, and other capitalist props. And so it may be helpful to present some examples of very important victories that have been achieved without any of these.

In particular, Open Source software, which used to be somewhat derisively referred to as “free software” or “shareware”, is a huge victory of the gift economy over the commercial economy. “Free software” is not an accurate label; nor is “free prime numbers” or “free vocabulary words”. Nobody pays for these things, but some people are silly enough to pay for software. It’s their loss; the “free” stuff is generally better, and if you don’t like it, you can fix it. For free.

General science works on similar principles. Nobody directly profits from formulating a theory or testing a hypothesis or publishing the results. It all works in terms mutuality and prestige – same as with software.

On the other hand, wherever the pecuniary motivation rises to the top, the result is mediocre at best. And so we have expensive software that fails constantly. (I understand that the British Navy is planning to use a Microsoft operating system on their nuclear submarines; that is a frightening piece of news.) We also have oceans full of plastic trash – developing all those “products” floating in the ocean would surely have been impossible without the profit motive. And so on.

In all, the profit motive fails to motive altruistic behaviour, because it is not reciprocal. And it is altruistic behaviour that increases the social capital of society. Within a gift-giving system, we can all be in everyone’s debt, but going into debt makes us all richer, not poorer.

23. Barter as an organizing principle

Gifts are wonderful, of course, but sometimes we would like something rather specific, and are willing to work with others to get it, without recourse to money, of course. This is where arrangements made on the basis of barter. In general, you barter something over which you have less choice (one of the many things you can offer) for something over which you have more choice (something you actually want).

Economists will tell you that barter is inefficient, because it requires “coincidence of wants”: if A wants to barter X for Y, then he or she must find B who wants to barter Y for X. Actually, most everyone I’ve ever run across doesn’t want to barter either X for Y, or Y for X. Rather, they want to barter whatever the can offer for any of a number of the things they want.

In the current economic scheme, we are forced to barter our freedom, in the form of the compulsory work-week, for something we don’t particularly want, which is money. We have limited options for what to do with that money: pay taxes, bills, buy shoddy consumer goods, and, perhaps, a few weeks of “freedom” as tourists. But other options do exist.

One option is to organise as communities to produce certain goods that the entire community wants: food, clothing, shelter, security and entertainment. Everyone makes their contribution, in exchange for the end product, which everyone gets to share. It is also possible to organise to produce goods that can be used in trade with other communities: trade goods. Trade goods are a much better way to store wealth than money, which is, let’s face it, an essentially useless substance.

24. Local/alternative currencies

There is a lot of discussion of ways to change the way money works, so that it can serve local needs instead of being one of the main tools for extracting wealth from local economies. But there is no discussion of why it is that money is generally necessary. That is simply assumed. There are communities that have little or no money, where there may be a pot of coin buried in the yard somewhere, for special occasions, but no money in daily use.

Lack of money makes certain things very difficult. Examples include gambling, loan sharking, extortion, bribery and fraud. It also makes it more difficult to hoard wealth, or to extract it out of a community and ship it somewhere else in a conveniently compact form. When we use money, we cede power to those who create money (by creating debt) and who destroy money (by cancelling debt). We also empower the ranks of people whose area of expertise is in the manipulation of arbitrary rules and arithmetic abstractions rather than in engaging directly with the physical world. This veil of metaphor allows them to mask appalling levels of violence, representing it symbolically as a mere paper-shuffling exercise. People, animals, entire ecosystems become mere numbers on a piece of paper. On the other hand, this ability to represent dissimilar objects using identical symbols causes a great deal of confusion. For instance, I have heard rather intelligent people declare that government funds, which have been allocated to making failed financial institutions look solvent, could be so much better spent feeding widows and orphans. There is no understanding that astronomical quantities of digits willed into existence and transferred between two computers (one at a central bank, another at a private bank) cannot be used to directly nourish anyone, because food cannot be willed into existence by a central banker or anyone else.

25. Belief in science and technology

One accusation I often hear is that I fail to grasp the power of technological innovation and the free market system. If I did, apparently I would have more faith in a technologically advanced future where all of our current dilemmas are swept away by a new wave of eco-friendly sustainability. My problem is that I am not an economist or a businessman: I am an engineer with a background in science. The fact that I’ve worked for several technology start-up companies doesn’t help either.

I know roughly how long it takes to innovate: come up with the idea, convince people that it is worth trying, try it, fail a few times, eventually succeed, and then phase it in to real use. It takes decades. We do not have decades. We have already failed to innovate our way out of this.

Not only that, but in many ways technological innovation has done us a tremendous disservice. A good example is innovation in agriculture. The so-called “green revolution” has boosted crop yields using fossil fuel inputs, creating generations of agro-addicts dependent on just one or two crops. In North America, human hair samples have been used to determine that fully 69% of all the carbon came from just one plant: maize. So, what piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil fuel inputs?

I think that what makes us likely to think that technology will save us is that we are addled by it. Efforts at creating intelligent machines have failed, because computers are far too difficult to program, but humans turn out to be easy for computers to program. Everywhere I go I see people poking away at their little mental support units. Many of them can no longer function without them: they wouldn’t know where to go, who to talk to, or even where to get lunch without a little electronic box telling what to do.

These are all big successes for maize plants and for iPhones, but are they successes for humanity? Somehow I doubt it. Do we really want to eat nothing but maize and look at nothing but pixels, or should there be more to life? There are people who believe in the emergent intelligence of the networked realm – a sort of artificial intelligence utopia, where networked machines become hyperintelligent and solve all of our problems. And so our best hope is that in our hour of need machines will be nice to us and show us kindness? If that’s the case, what reason would they find to respect us? Why wouldn’t they just kill us instead? Or enslave us. Oh, wait, maybe they already have!

26. The need to evolve

Now, supposing all goes well, and we have a swift and decisive collapse, what should follow is an equally swift rebirth of viable localised communities and ecosystems. One concern is that the effort will be short of qualified staff.

It is an unfortunate fact that the recent centuries of settled life, and especially the last century or so of easy living based on the industrial model, has made many people too soft to endure the hardships and privations that self-sufficient living often involves. It seems quite likely that those groups that are currently marginalised, would do better, especially the ones that are found in economically underdeveloped areas and have never lost contact with nature.

And so I would not be surprised to see these marginalised groups stage a come-back. Almost every rural place has its population of people who know how to use the local resources. They are the human component of the local ecosystems, and, as such, they deserve much more respect than they have received. A lot of them can’t be bothered about fine manners or about speaking English. Those who are used to thinking of them as primitive, ignorant and uneducated will be shocked to discover how much they must learn from them.

27. Beyond planning

So what are we to do in the meantime, while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It’s no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and ageing prematurely, so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn’t seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humour are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren’t funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html

By Tom Leonard in Flint, Michigan
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

The government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

“The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America.

“Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.

Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

“Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said.

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution “defeatist” but he insisted it was “no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html

By Tamara Giltsoff
http://www.psfk.com

In the first part of my article on Post Consumerism, I touched on the drivers of the “Citizen Renaissance,” as Jules Peck coins it. My hypothesis is that there are emerging citizen values, and a shift away from consumerism towards citizens who are actively engaged in behaviors of business, the decisions of government and of involved in communities of interest. In this second part, I attempt to outline the market need and opportunity, and some examples that attempt to address post consumerism. The insight, indicators and market needs of the post consumer era are outlined:

The challenge for markets, and marketing, is to look beyond the current product-obsessed industrial paradigm of value-creation and selling ‘consumption as a way of life’ to understand new types of ‘citizen needs’ and ways of generating value and loyal relationships with customers/stakeholders. It provides an opportunity for start-ups, brands or even NGOs to influence civilization or provide tools for civilization to do the influencing and local-problem solving itself—outsourcing innovation to local communities and people.

Post-consumer marketing and innovation is inherently more democratic and grassroots because it engages people in the decision-making or value-creation (sometimes people are the product or service). I’ve just read about a proposal for a new community fund in the US, managed by the Corporation of National and Community Service, to do exactly this—giving local-problem solving a boost. It is authorized by Edward M Kennedy “Serve America Act,” an expansion of opportunities for all Americans to serve communities, and it may be worth up to $50 million.

Here are some green shoots of citizen-enabling agencies, movements, platforms, tools, products and services:

Enabling Movements and Advocacy

The people behind GetUp.org (the largest political organization in Australia), Avaaz.org (the world’s largest political community) and GlobalZero.org (an international movement on nuclear weapons led by 100 world leaders), known as “Purpose Campaigns,” are dedicated to building platforms for advocacy and social movements. The groups are now working with brands to harness advocacy and engagement around important movements such as health care reform or new clean energy markets and energy independence.

Citizen Engagement

Examples of platforms or initiatives already in action that are engaging citizen around issues such as climate change, government decision-making and rescue plans, or grass-roots innovation:

•    Transition Towns, a platform for UK communities to come together and respond to challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change. The movement is spreading globally.
•    US Skunkworks for Innovation, a local innovation fund managed by US Corporation for National and Community Service to address global issues with grass-roots solutions. This sort of fund would likely support things like Transition Towns.
•    Mastercard and The Eden Project: 
Mastercard is launching what it describes as its first CSR themed campaign—“The Big Lunch”—a partnership with The Eden Project in the UK. It is a ‘social cohesion scheme’ aimed at getting the whole of the UK to sit down with their neighbors on the street to have lunch, according to Marketing Week. The initiative has already been praised by the UK Secretary of Communities.
•    Craiglist for Service: 
Craig Newark’s idea to engage citizen actions that can be ‘sold’ or traded via his listings platform. His focus is on civic engagement, grass-roots democracy, volunteering or pooling cash to fund initiatives.
•    Serve America Act and Serve.gov provide a platform for those who want to fully engage by supporting Americorps and figure out how to better help America. A new community innovation fund is planned for this act.
•    Social Innovation Camp, a UK experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age that brings together talented software developers and designers with social innovators to build web-based solutions to real social problems. It is a self-organized version of the community innovation fund described above.

Collaborative Networked Business Models

Example business models that put citizens at the core of value creation and actors in the delivery of the service itself. Citizens and their needs ARE the assets of this type of business model:

•    Zopa, a marketplace where people lend and borrow money to and from each other—a peer-to-peer lending platform—that sidesteps the banks. It’s exemplary in this era of failed financial services and financial corruption, and a sign of emerging citizen empowerment.
•    Hello Health: the old fashioned model of doctor services built on a powerful social media platform shared by doctors and patients alike. Patients and their data plus doctors and their knowledge are all actors in the system of health, each taking an active and ongoing role. The model encourages both doctor and citizen to become vested and active participants in maintaining good health.
•    Freecycle: the Freecycle Network is made up of 4,739 groups with 6,694,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. An exchange of value and movement created solely by citizen engagement.

Advancing Social Status

The School of Life: billed as a cultural apothecary for the mind, The School of Life sells ideas and inspiration, from evening courses to curated holidays, secular sermons to psychotherapy. Here’s a report on it at Monocle.

New Social Tools

Meet-Up: the world’s largest network of local groups and one of the leading citizen engagement tools – enabling active citizen groups to self-organise and come together around interests. See it in use at the Social Innovation Camp.

http://www.psfk.com/2009/06/post-consumerism-emerging-needs-and-market-opportunities.html

By Tamara Giltsoff
http://www.psfk.com

It was recently suggested by Barack Obama that we should borrow and spend less and save more, not rebuilding the economy on the same sand but instead lay a new foundation for prosperity. It’s not the message consumers, this country, or the rest of the world is used to, particularly in a recession.  For instance, after World War II, amidst the depression, retailing analyst Victor Lebow suggested that “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.” In the 1950s President Eisenhower’s council of economic advisors also stated “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods”.  And after 9/11 President Bush told us “To go out and shop”.  The story is told wonderful here .

American society and much of the developed world absorbed this powerful messaging which built on the idea of ‘consumption as a way of life’, from an industry that was designed to do this, and citizens all around the world became transformed into ‘consumers’. Jules Peck discusses this shift in his draft book Citizen Renaissance and also in his latest article in The Ecologist.

Now, the bubble has begun to burst, and things are changing. The perfect storm has developed to catalyze a post-consumer paradigm: economic collapse coupled with overwhelming environmental challenges; failing social infrastructure (particularly in the US) yet paradoxically an ever-expanding network and digital democracy that is enabling a new social wealth. I wouldn’t go as radically far as to say that our values have shifted over night and we no longer seek wealth and the ability to own what we want, but I am suggesting this as the best answer to health, happiness and a strong economy has been/is being radically challenged.

Here are some example drivers of this change and the “Citizen Renaissance”, as Peck has coined it:

Citizen needs

•    Loss of faith in the corporation and the promise of borrowed wealth have challenged the established model of consumption and the relationship between consumer and producer. Consumers are looking to government, and NGOs, to intervene, protect their assets from corporate misadventure and govern this relationship. Governments have become critical to rebuilding economies AND shaping and governing the impact of business.

Greater advocacy and citizenship.

•    Climate change, environmental issues and health-related concerns have exposed the lack of accountability from corporations and consumers. Consumers are looking to government, NGOs and corporations, as well as themselves, to participate and engage in critical change.

Post-consumer sentiment

•    According to Worldchanging.com a new poll from the Pew Research Center has found that the recession is altering our perceptions of what we truly need. The depressed market, bank balances and the increase in price of commodities such as oil and food over the last year has changed societies relationship with consumption.  It’s no longer possible or sensible to consume like we did; it’s also becoming socially un-cool to over-consume and own-BIG.

Political advocacy

•    Job losses in the highly depressed global economy and, in the US, failing healthcare, education and public transportation has led to highly vested public interest in government expenditure, the Stimulus Package and corporate rescue plans. The jobless and the employed are highly engaged in political decision-making and the direction of stimulus.

Participation

•    Access to the network is enabling greater participation in business models and the supply chain, transforming the industrial producer-consumer model. Consumers are increasingly vested in the direction of corporations, a product or campaign, or indeed ARE the stakeholders of the company – coming together as part of a cooperative or collaborative business model to create shared value.

The implication for brands and corporations cannot be ignored because the nature of the producer to consumer relationship is fundamentally changing. I will seek to explore this challenge and give some examples of where I see example new models of value creation emerging in Part II of this article.

http://www.psfk.com/2009/06/post-consumerism-from-an-era-of-spend-to-emerging-citizen-values.html