Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A new report has just been published which ought to provoke a Copernican revolution in dominant conceptions of renewable energy and of sustainability more generally. The message may not be one that environmentalists want to hear, but it is one that we must all take very seriously, or risk having our good intentions dedicated to goals that cannot actually solve the very real environmental crises that we face.
If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production. As an approximate rule-of-thumb, each kilocalorie ingested by Americans consumes 10 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and prepare….But much like household energy, we control what we stick in our mouths, and can make energy-conscious choices that result in substantial reductions of energy consumption. I now call myself a flexitarian, a term acknowledging that my body is a flex-fuel vehicle, but also that I need not be rigid about my food choices in order to still make a substantial impact on the energy front.
In 1984 Fritjof Capra had the bright idea of founding the Elmwood Institute, an ecological think thank. In 1992 I undertook to morph our newsletter into a quarterly journal. In the inaugural issue, on “redefining wealth,” the editor’s letter used the metaphor of the cornucopia to discuss emerging challenges. What is so startling, 20 years later, is that while some of the challenges are now more familiar, they remain far from being met. Perhaps part of resilience is having different goals.
If the Netherlands is in economic trouble it is clear that no European country is safe. This, I assume, is why we are finally hearing some serious debate about whether cutting, cutting and cutting again is the best way to deal with an economic crisis. Even those in the financial markets, who lobbied for the deficit rules and bid up the cost of government borrowing in one European country after another, are beginning to feel nervous. After all, stable legal and political systems are essential to their profit-making activities. But whether their short-termist destabilisation of whole national economies and a whole currency area can be reversed once they see its risks to their own positions remains to be seen.
The truth is that the English still believe that their bank manager is at his desk, drinking sherry, umming and aahing about their overdrafts. In fact, he has long since been replaced by risk software. That’s our national failing. It is endearing in a way, but it’s also dreadfully frustrating. Because it means we’re stuck in the oldest fantasy about money that there is. We imagine that it’s real. And in some ways, this is the source of the crisis in the euro-zone as well. In England, our politicians never argue about this issue — who creates money, where it comes from, what it means — for the reasons I say. But in America, it’s always been the heart of political debate.
Rather than cover what the way down will be like in this post, I wanted to share my thoughts on what one important aspect of life might be like once we reach “down”. That is, the time after decline is finished, when the fossil fuels are gone and society is running almost completely on renewably sourced energies. I explore how peoples’ behaviors may change once they are driven by flow-limited energy sources rather than storage-driven sources in the post carbon world? Flow-limited sources cannot be controlled and stored easily so society will be more effective if it adapts to the rhythm and availability of energy.
It’s a small story. These are all small stories. You might not know they are happening or take much notice of them. But if you were curious, you would discover how that lettuce came to be growing in such an unlikely neighbourhood; why everyone in the carnival was wearing clothes made of rubbish; why the elders of the village were teaching the young people to plough; why Joel Prittie, ex double-glazing salesman, knocked on 1100 doors in the rain in Manchester. If you pulled these stories together, you would notice they all had a common thread. That’s the moment you realise it’s a big story. The story in fact. The story of how people are coming together in the face of difficulties and making another kind of future.
That’s the story of Transition 2.0.
The Deepwater Horizon was all about peak oil. And climate change. And economic collapse. How soon we forget.
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
Each year in April, the Goldman Environmental Prizes are awarded to six activists, one from each of the six inhabited continental regions. This year’s winners have overcome tremendous odds and threats to their lives to lead effective protests and carry out brilliant strategies. The inspiring winners give me hope that, on the economic front, we can energize an enormous protest movement in the United States.
Considering the fundamental changes in human civilization that are forecast for the coming decades, are these urban-rural migrants the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, or just exceptions to the prevailing rule? And what role can these urban-rural migrants potentially play in supporting ecosystems and fostering resilience?
The truth is we really don’t know how to truly manage a cooperative economy successfully on a national or regional scale yet. If anything, we should be learning from the experiences in the global south to help clarify what might work here, but we should also be sensitive to our own unique cultural situation. What worked in Kerala, or Porto Alegre, or Mondragón may not work automatically in the U.S. We also need to be willing to critically evaluate those experiences. The design of “the next system” is, in my opinion, still to be worked out.
