Systemic Collapse: The Basics

[littlebabyjesus]

The trouble is, first you have to solve the political problem of proposals like that making e.g. property speculators with money to spend on political lobbying, deeply unhappy.

I'll give that a proper read later. At a first skim, there are interesting parts, but I think it is quite telling that it uses as its example of a city 'ruralising' a rather small town of 30k. What about cities with 1/2 million? Or cities with 20 million?

The example of Cuba is interesting, and the ubiquity of various urban food-growing schemes there is a good example of how necessity causes small-scale solutions to be found that have the cumulative effect of solving large-scale problems (a lot of what was done in Cuba was done informally - hungry people working out how to grow their own food, basically). But the cities in Cuba are still there. And the high-density areas are still there.

It is an interesting idea, though. Here in the UK, farmers are giving up because small farms simply don't make enough money nowadays. People living in towns could be taking over the farms in their areas, taking part shares and working on the farm one or two days a week in return for a share of the crops. I'd love to see that kind of thing rolled out on a meaningful scale. A future in which most people of working age are also part-time farmers would be a rather attractive one for many people, I think. I'd certainly give up a day a week to farm work, and I think it would thoroughly healthy both physically and mentally for many people who have otherwise sedentary jobs.

 

[elbows]

It is beyond me how you can be aware of data such as this and assert that there is some residual doubt about the immediacy of the problem. It contains everything thing you need to evaluate the magnitude and timing of the issue.

From our many previous arguments over the detail it does not surprise me that you don't understand my point about immediacy. Heres a clue - you mention a skill base acquired in the 1970's, and yet it is quite clear in hindsight that ways were found to postpone things in a manner than allowed grotesque consumption to resume for quite a long time after that decade. Likewise, in the decade since I first became very keen on the issues, I have not yet actually needed an allotment in order to survive. This should not be used by me as an excuse to become complacent, but neither should I ignore the fact that this is a long drawn out thing, and that I would run the risk of losing all credibility if I chose to simply ignore things such as the latest desperate measures to get more gas & oil out of the ground that have merged in this last decade. If I recall correctly you didn't even like me using the phrase 'long emergency', and I really have no idea why.

Since you claim to learn from others, I wonder why so have so seldom been prepared to budge an inch here. Has your stance evolved in the years you have posted here? I recall vividly that you asserted with much certainty that this years decline in UK north sea oil production will be worse than last years rather hefty decline, and you were not interested in my questioning of this. Rather the waters were muddied in a manner that left me unsure whether you were simply wrong, or whether we were talking at cross purposes. And its not as if I went so far as to claim the opposite, that production would definitely increase or decline at a less steep rate this year, I just discussed the detail of why it is not possible to claim with certainty that the decline rate will increase every year, especially given the number of factors that can affect production in a given year.This doesn't change the overall picture of decline, but it does make a lie of certain specific claims.

 

[elbows]

One might for example, argue that reducing urban population density over a period of decades along the lines of Folke Gunther's 'ruralisation' proposals is a sensible step.

See e.g. http://www.unicamp.br/fea/ortega/energy/Folke.pdf

The trouble is, first you have to solve the political problem of proposals like that making e.g. property speculators with money to spend on political lobbying, deeply unhappy.

Looks good, its got energy slaves and phosphorus in it, and the idea that sustainability for 100 years is not worth the name, so I shall attempt to read the rest of it now.

 

[Falcon]

From our many previous arguments over the detail it does not surprise me that you don't understand my point about immediacy. Heres a clue - you mention a skill base acquired in the 1970's, and yet it is quite clear in hindsight that ways were found to postpone things in a manner than allowed grotesque consumption to resume for quite a long time after that decade.

In the 1970's, the Club of Rome forecast the onset of depletion of critical resources in the early 21st Century. It is the early 21st Century. We are experiencing the early stages of depletion of critical resources. This is not postponement - this is a forecasted event manifesting itself. An event doesn't become less significant because it was forecast 30 years ago rather than 30 minutes ago.

Likewise, in the decade since I first became very keen on the issues, I have not yet actually needed an allotment in order to survive. This should not be used by me as an excuse to become complacent, but neither should I ignore the fact that this is a long drawn out thing, and that I would run the risk of losing all credibility if I chose to simply ignore things such as the latest desperate measures to get more gas & oil out of the ground that have merged in this last decade. If I recall correctly you didn't even like me using the phrase 'long emergency', and I really have no idea why.

A practical definition of "Peak" is "the best it has ever been". What you are arguing is that in the ten years prior to the best it has ever been, up until the moment of it actually being the best it has ever been, you did not require an allotment (it would have been highly surprising if you had) and that the most important thing was not that it might take a decade or more to acquire the skills to undertake such an enterprise, but the good wishes of those who's notions of social conformity proscribe such an undertaking. Interesting.

Since you claim to learn from others, I wonder why so have so seldom been prepared to budge an inch here. Has your stance evolved in the years you have posted here?

Hilarious. I am regularly treated by those who are strangers to the idea of intellectual progress with quotations from my earlier years when I was a card carrying Conservative. I am now a Marxist (or, at least, a sympathiser to certain Marxist theories, to the extent that I understand them). To some, altering the political views settled on as an adolescent is taken as a sign of intellectual infirmity, demonstrating that you just can't win.

I recall vividly that you asserted with much certainty that this years decline in UK north sea oil production will be worse than last years rather hefty decline, and you were not interested in my questioning of this. Rather the waters were muddied in a manner that left me unsure whether you were simply wrong, or whether we were talking at cross purposes. And its not as if I went so far as to claim the opposite, that production would definitely increase or decline at a less steep rate this year, I just discussed the detail of why it is not possible to claim with certainty that the decline rate will increase every year, especially given the number of factors that can affect production in a given year.This doesn't change the overall picture of decline, but it does make a lie of certain specific claims.

I recall much uncertainty about the difference between spot decline and underlying trend. It is a matter of unalterable fact that the UK underlying decline rate will undergo irreversible increase, and we know this with certainty because the discovery rate has collapsed and that is the critical determinant and predictor (the same process by which we can accurately anticipate the global depletion rate). You have a habit of fixing on details which are often not germane to the argument, and it is possible this was the case - I can't recall.

 

[elbows]

In the 1970's, the Club of Rome forecast the onset of depletion of critical resources in the early 21st Century. It is the early 21st Century. We are experiencing the early stages of depletion of critical resources. This is not postponement - this is a forecasted event manifesting itself. An event doesn't become less significant because it was forecast 30 years ago rather than 30 minutes ago.

The problem is that wasn't how the issue was usually presented or dealt with then, although personally I have been operating under the presumption that the more permanent forms of government were looking at the issues in those terms then, just as they started twitching about population levels and some other related mattes then too.

But for the masses, and to drive an immediate response, it was presented more an acute energy crisis caused mostly by political factors, and whilst some of the solutions did involve some permanent adjustment of energy efficiency and fuel type in a few areas, the rest was left untouched as soon as oil price & developed world availability returned to levels that could support the present system. 'The good life' was a silly but probably inevitable first step when it came to propaganda, but despite everything from recycling to climate change it has not progressed far beyond greenwashing since.

A practical definition of "Peak" is "the best it has ever been". What you are arguing is that in the ten years prior to the best it has ever been, up until the moment of it actually being the best it has ever been, you did not require an allotment (it would have been highly surprising if you had) and that the most important thing was not that it might take a decade or more to acquire the skills to undertake such an enterprise, but the good wishes of those who's notions of social conformity proscribe such an undertaking. Interesting.

Actually what I've been trying to do for the last decade is prepare, both psychologically as well as with skills etc. Much of my emphasis has not been on the individual however, since the way societies as a whole react to this stuff is rather important and can easily overshadow personal efforts. This is one area where I have not seen too many hopeful signs, which is in great part why I am very keen not to fuck the credibility of the discussion by making errors about immediacy. Shouting 'there is no time to lose' is very sane in my book, but its not the same thing, and again it runs risks that could set public thinking back by many years if they manage to prop things up for longer than posts like yours tend to suggest. We already see signs of this as it applies to peak oil, and I refuse to ignore it, whistle at the same time not changing my basic stance.

Hilarious. I am regularly treated by those who are strangers to the idea of intellectual progress with quotations from my earlier years when I was a card carrying Conservative. I am now a Marxist (or, at least, a sympathiser to certain Marxist theories, to the extent that I understand them). To some, altering the political views settled on as an adolescent is taken as a sign of intellectual infirmity, demonstrating that you just can't win.

I am not one of those people, and I don't understand how I could sensibly modify my position by taking their stupid attitudes into account.

I recall much uncertainty about the difference between spot decline and underlying trend. It is a matter of unalterable fact that the UK underlying decline rate will undergo irreversible increase, and we know this with certainty because the discovery rate has collapsed and that is the critical determinant and predictor (the same process by which we can accurately anticipate the global depletion rate). You have a habit of fixing on details which are often not germane to the argument, and it is possible this was the case - I can't recall.

I may be prone to this, although I try to salvage something by linking my droning on about the devilish detail to some broader points whenever I can. My memory of your desire to acknowledge uncertainty does not match what you have said, but I do not wish to make matters worse by retreading this ground again.

 

[elbows]

The trouble is, first you have to solve the political problem of proposals like that making e.g. property speculators with money to spend on political lobbying, deeply unhappy.

I've now read the whole thing, very good, cheers for that link.

I think the biggest problem we face with this and other details of transition is that the political problems and economic pains associated with such a shift are not exactly solvable. Only events themselves seem weighty enough to enable such a shift to happen. This seems pretty clear from the examples of Cuba and North Korea, necessity was the mother of invention. And even then we see that North Korea didn't grab the opportunity to the extent necessary to ensure maximum survival of population, and yet even then their government structures managed to survive. This may be a good example of why we should not assume that even severe collapse of important aspects of our system will automatically be enough to send us scurrying in the right direction, and why imagining that collapse will give us a very large vacuum to build something new in may be a big mistake.

 

[Dr Jon]

We are mostly rediscovering a skill base that was acquired in the 1970's when people took this stuff seriously, then forgot it again.

Yeah.

This is exactly what people like John Michael Greer have been saying for some time now:

http://www.greenwizards.org

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Well, I wasn't so much pushing Folke's ideas (although I think he often has a lot of interesting things to say) so much as illustrating the point that what makes sense in sustainability terms (granting for the moment that his proposition does) is very likely to face extremely challenging opposition within our present political and economic status quo. It's by no means obvious how it would be politically possible to do something like that on a scale which would have the desired effects.

No doubt a few moments thought will supply many other examples of existing political and economic power structures standing in the way of the sort of initiatives that might be necessary to arrive at a sustainable society.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> And even then we see that North Korea didn't grab the opportunity to the extent necessary to ensure maximum survival of population, and yet even then their government structures managed to survive. <snip>

Yep ...

Paging LLETSA ...

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Living in cities is generally a pretty energy-efficient way to live, though. I think more or less the opposite to this. Population is growing and it is urbanising. And it is largely through that urbanisation that population will eventually level off. No good throwing all those people back into the countryside. No, the challenge will be to develop better cities, and that probably won't mean spreading those cities out even more. When there are, say, 9 billion people in the world, only a small proportion of those will be needed to grow food. Sure, more urban food growing may be desirable, but eco-friendly, energy-efficient apartment blocks will be the answer for many if not most of the people living in cities.

Energy efficiency is only one dimension of sustainability though. Just one of the system of constraints.

Clearly he's also aiming at what he thinks a considerable potential (grey bit of graph below) for energy saving in our food systems too

... but, integration of nutrient recycling and food systems is also a key factor driving the ecological design choices that paper proposes.

See e.g. http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/guenther.htm

http://www.holon.se/folke/lectures/Ruralisation-filer/v3_document.htm

 

[littlebabyjesus]

This may be a good example of why we should not assume that even severe collapse of important aspects of our system will automatically be enough to send us scurrying in the right direction, and why imagining that collapse will give us a very large vacuum to build something new in may be a big mistake.

Is a big mistake, imo, always. It is easier to get where you want from here than from a post-apocalyptic place. Collapse of certain aspects of the financial system can be progress as they work against our interests anyway. Collapse of other systems is clearly not progress. Things getting worse is just that, things getting worse, making the journey to a better place a longer one.

That piece of bernie's is interesting. I'm not quite sure of the point of the North Korea comparison, though. Human-made famines have occurred in many times and places, and that is a clear example of one. But I don't think there are lessons for anyone else to learn from NK, except that mad quasi-theocratic totalitarian regimes are a bad thing.

 

[elbows]

That piece of bernie's is interesting. I'm not quite sure of the point of the North Korea comparison, though. Human-made famines have occurred in many times and places, and that is a clear example of one. But I don't think there are lessons for anyone else to learn from NK, except that mad quasi-theocratic totalitarian regimes are a bad thing.

But are there many other examples of famine thats in part due to the buildup and then collapse of petro-agriculture?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

But are there many other examples of famine thats in part due to the buildup and then collapse of petro-agriculture?

I can't think of one. But the famine and societal collapse that happened in North Korea in the 90s happened because the regime let them happen. The regime failed completely, and of course flatly denied to its own people that it had failed. Cuba's not a very free place, but it is far freer than NK. I lived in Cuba in the late 90s and there were frank discussions of some of the problems there - the practical problems (although some things remained off-limits of course). Castro himself came on tv to talk at length about it. The particular year of hunger in Cuba, 1992, was not a taboo subject. In NK, the official line was that everything was going to plan in the Socialist Paradise. It's a mad place - the one place that has fulfilled Orwell's dystopian nightmare.

But that's a bit of a side-issue. It's a thought-provoking piece, and one I'm going to absorb a bit more before passing judgement on it. My immediate worry about it would be that it isn't a model that can be applied to large cities.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

But are there many other examples of famine thats in part due to the buildup and then collapse of petro-agriculture?

That's certainly a big part of why those particular examples are interesting. There's also a direct political implication though. See e.g.

http://libcom.org/library/contradictions-green-revolution-cleaver

http://libcom.org/library/food-famine-international-crisis-harry-cleaver-zerowork

But the working class is not passive before capital's possession of this power. It too is concerned with agriculture as an industry-both the technical aspects of food production, since it is a sector in which many of us are forced to work, and the quality and price of the product, since we all must consume it. In agricultural areas, the working class struggles to control food production in a variety of ways, including the fight for land; for parity, higher wages, and better working conditions for agricultural wage-laborers; and even for the direct appropriation of crops.

For urban workers, the issue of control means the power to determine the quantity and quality of output and consumption-a fact which points away from the usual notion of physical access to the means of production. The urban worker demands steady availability, high quality, and low price not only through consumer boycotts and ecology protests, but also in wage demands and direct appropriation through daily shoplifting and periodic looting.

The very existence of agriculture as a distinct industrial sector is an element of these struggles between the classes. For capital, the division of labor most basically serves as a division that weakens the working class, and that division begins with the separation of rural workers (food producers) from urban workers (food consumers).

The fundamental power of food for capital is the power to force the working class to work to get it.

When people start talking about reorganising food systems on a global scale, in this case for the purposes of increasing food security, resilience and sustainability, they are doing something inherently political.

 

[Falcon]

The trouble is, first you have to solve the political problem of proposals like that making e.g. property speculators with money to spend on political lobbying, deeply unhappy.

Unruh characterises the present situation as that of "lock-in", i.e. one in which technology, society, and governing institutions have co-evolved in such a way as to develop self-reinforcing barriers to change which inhibit policy action even in the face of observable energy and food security and climate instability risks.

Under these conditions, he argues, you have three options: do nothing while treating the symptoms, alter bits of the system while preserving overall system architecture, or replacing the system entirely. The latter has almost no historical precedent at societal scale, but is conceivable: for example, decentralisation of generating capacity is technically possible, if highly disruptive; likewise rurifying current urban populations.

Central to the success of any political program of change is identifying and overcoming conditions promoting lock-in. Two options - endogenous, and exogenous. He is pessimistic about the possibility of momentum for change originating spontaneously from within the system - conservative forces are simply too powerful (that's why we are locked in). More likely is some exogenous shock - a mini-crisis - sufficiently powerful to disturb a component of the lock-in (e.g. public opinion) but not so powerful as to induce collapse of the system. (The impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Cuban and SK economies would be examples).

The latter is my view of how this will pan out (if we are lucky). I expect it will be something like rolling power cuts and energy rationing as the 25% of the UK's electricity generating capacity scheduled for decommissioning in the next decade goes down without replacement, overloading the remaining infrastructure, coupled with quadrupling energy costs as conventional oil supplies fall and get replaced by unaffordable unconventionals plunging the middle classes into energy poverty and quadrupling the winter death rate. Sufficient to reveal the systemic nature of the problem and the suddenly very visible inadequacy of renewable technologies to preserve the illusion of "business as usual". Conversely, I am highly pessimistic about the possibility of arriving at such an understanding and basis for collective action through a process of rational thought and debate.

I imagine the response will be largely self organised, probably at small community level, rather than the result of some political policy change. I expect there to be significant institutional resistance to such change, from unexpected places (local councils, for example, will resist community based cashless transaction systems because it will deny them tax revenues to fund public pension schemes and public liabilities). I expect demand for resources required for sustainable living under these new conditions will exceed supply, prompting conflict. I fear organised opportunistic responses by our equivalents of Hitler's 1930's brownshirts promising to restore "business as usual" in return for power, and watch the current government's sudden enthusiasm for immigration control and preemptive draconian extensions of their emergency legislative powers for civil disorder control with a certain amount of pre-recognition.

Unruh's useful paper here: "Escaping Carbon Lock-in" (Unruh, 2002) (link)

 

[elbows]

Thats more like it. It is a delightful surprise to hear that you may be anticipating a mini-crisis that doesn't quite collapse the entire system overnight, as opposed to the more all-encompassing oblivion that sometimes seems to be the headline feature of some posts here.

Electricity & gas are areas that if you'd asked me 8 years ago I would have already anticipated us already having had at least a few shocks about in the UK by now. Instead we got Noel Edmonds warning tabloid readers of this impending doom, and a lot of crap TV news stories focussed almost entirely on high prices or Russia at various moments.

I have been watching the nuclear picture with interest to see what sort of timescale we might be looking at. Its been shifting again in the last few years, initially due to capital problems brought about by the financial crisis, but more recently due to additional problems for this industry as a result of Fukushima. My attempts to create a thread for general nuclear issues in the science sub forum were quite a failure though Im sorry to say.

Last time I looked the mood music for the nuclear industry in the UK was one of increased threats not to build any new nuclear plants unless the companies were given even juicer guarantees and subsidies. Coupled with some giddily optimistic views about gas supplies & price as a result of things like fracking, both the achievable renewable and nuclear electricity agendas seemed increasingly wobbly compared to expectations of just a few years ago.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Thing about nuclear is that the concentrations of capital involved are so massive that criminally irresponsible "lobbying" and hence, criminally unsafe plants, seem almost inevitable.

I wouldn't be nearly as nervous about nuclear if it wasn't for that phenomenon.

 

[elbows]

A lot of my safety concerns and expectations are pointing more in the direction of them postponing the closure of older plants these days.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I agree with elbows. That's a good post, Falcon. I sometimes get the impression that you feel the need for hyperbole in your posts. But you post much better without it.

 

[Falcon]

The fracking investment bubble should pop shortly - the dupes holding the sticks of dynamite are starting to understand the difference between conventional well and fracked well depletion profiles, the refracking cost, and the extent to which the crocks of shit they paid top dollar for are overvalued (sadly, many of the victims will be pensioners who took the too-good-to-be-true Ponzi schemes getting peddled on US prime time TV advertising last summer in desperate attempts to preserve their pension incomes).

The nuclear industry knows that the government doesn't have the financial strength now to simultaneously underwrite its nuclear risk while underwriting the integrity of the financial system. Moreover, government debt is structured in such a way that large tranches of it will fall due for repayment in the next few years, colliding with collapsing north sea oil tax revenues, potentially propelling our debt payments above our income and inducing debt runaway. Maybe the government will simply pass the nuclear risk onto the public, as did for example the US government in the matter of BP's deep water environmental disaster through its liability capping legislation.

Replacing the 25% of retired generating capacity through renewables will be unaffordable - the consumer would have to fund not only the renewable capacity (still multiples of gas generation) but also a significant tranche of conventional capacity to stand idle and supply load during prolonged wind still conditions, just as domestic gas supplies collapse and the global gas price reasserts itself, driving conventional energy generating costs up. The government is planning to pull out of the EU i.e. its legal obligations towards emissions reductions under climate instability legislation, freeing it up to build cheap filthy coal capacity, but not in time.

Rationing. (Sorry - the urge for hyperbole is too strong )

 

[elbows]

I wonder to what extent the financial crisis demand destruction has delayed the need for consumer rationing. Or on a related note, to what extent rationing may be performed indirectly by pricing people out of using it rather than direct rationing.

 

[Falcon]

In a similar vein to BG's paper, you might find this interesting (I can't find it online so I've had to use a hokey file share service - use responsibly, please):

A socio-metabolic transition towards sustainability? Challenges for another Great Transformation-Haberl-2009.pdf

It asserts that a sustainable society will be at least as different to industrial society as industrial society is to agrarian society, and that a fundamental restructure rather than a bunch of technical fixes is required (it also questions the scope of eco-efficiency initiatives).

I think its useful contribution to this debate is its summary of the idea of social "metabolism" (Günther alludes to it with his image of "eating") as a means of more intuitively understanding the sustainability challenges faced by society, particularly those arising from increasing complexity. It refers to the entire flow of materials and energy that are required to sustain human economic activity (not limited to nourishment). Each level of complexity (hunter/gatherer -> agrarian -> industrial) fundamentally alters the scarcity challenges and therefore sustainability problems that each type of society must solve. (Message: complexity is incredibly expensive in resource terms, from a metabolic perspective. Technology is complex. Technology is incredibly expensive. This completely inverts the conventionally unexamined platitude that technology offers the solution to all our problems, and establishes it as a drain on our limited resources, not a source of energy resource.)

A second helpful contribution is a reminder of the difference between point and area-based energy systems, and the fundamental constraint imposed by area-based energy systems (of which agriculture and wind and solar energy up-convertors are examples). The essay is Malthusian in the sense that it acknowledges that agriculture must yield a positive EROIE and this, coupled with diminishing marginal returns to labour, sets the limit to the size and complexity of society, which hydrocarbon (a point-source energy system) has only temporarily allowed us to overcome.

Its proposals for the parameters of a stable society (actually McNetting's) are interesting and prescriptive enough to begin to envisage a holistic policy: stable production per unit of land, stable inputs of energy, economically favourable rates of return between both energy and monetary inputs and outputs, and returns to labour which are sufficient to provide an acceptable livelihood to the producers.

If that society is very different from ours, then so to are the politics of getting to it.

Anyway, I'm off to T in the Park for the day to get soaked and deafened.

 

[Falcon]

Highly apposite post from Greer this week, given the enthusiasm for technology in this forum. He discusses the peril of treating technology like magic - something which gets impossible things done, without having to know how it works:

Last Friday’s storm, again, was a useful lesson in the nature of that peril. Behind the magic boxes that keep the heat of summer away stands a huge and hypercomplex system of power plants, transmission lines, transformers, and the whole suite of services and social structures that go into keeping the system running. None of it can be dispensed with, and none of it comes cheap, but it’s only when something pops up on the far end of the probability curve and knocks the system silly that most people are forced to notice that the whole thing doesn’t work by fairy tale magic—and even then a great many of them spend their time complaining because the relevant authorities can’t make the magic pop back into being overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk from those magic beans. The slow shredding of the infrastructure that makes the magic possible rarely enters into the collective conversation of our time, and the logical consequence of that process—the statistically inevitable point at which, for each of us in turn, the magic goes away once and for all—goes not merely unmentioned but unimagined.

- "The wrong kind of magic", John Michael Greer, 4 July 2012 (link)

 

[Dr Jon]

Nearly all our present and future problems result from this belief in the "magic" of science and technology.
Some understanding of basic science by leaders and decision makers would long ago have exposed growth-based economics for the dead end it is.
Sadly, most are either ignorant of basic science, controlled by commercial interests, or both.

Greer's post reminds me of this:

 

[Falcon]

I wonder to what extent the financial crisis demand destruction has delayed the need for consumer rationing. Or on a related note, to what extent rationing may be performed indirectly by pricing people out of using it rather than direct rationing.

Well, this is where Monbiot got confused. Increasing unaffordability should not be confused with falling demand. During the Irish Potato Famine, consumption of potatoes fell, but demand didn't. Pricing certainly acted as rationing mechanism - the people without money to buy potatoes died, bringing supply and demand back into equilibrium.

Peak oil deniers (which Monbiot accidentally now finds himself) assert that, by the same mechanism, peak oil is not a problem.

 

[Dr Jon]

Just spotted this.
Looks interesting.

Ten Billion paints a vivid portrait of a species with its head in the sand.

Anybody seen this?

 

[camouflage]

I'll give that a proper read later. At a first skim, there are interesting parts, but I think it is quite telling that it uses as its example of a city 'ruralising' a rather small town of 30k. What about cities with 1/2 million? Or cities with 20 million?

The example of Cuba is interesting, and the ubiquity of various urban food-growing schemes there is a good example of how necessity causes small-scale solutions to be found that have the cumulative effect of solving large-scale problems (a lot of what was done in Cuba was done informally - hungry people working out how to grow their own food, basically). But the cities in Cuba are still there. And the high-density areas are still there.

It is an interesting idea, though. Here in the UK, farmers are giving up because small farms simply don't make enough money nowadays. People living in towns could be taking over the farms in their areas, taking part shares and working on the farm one or two days a week in return for a share of the crops. I'd love to see that kind of thing rolled out on a meaningful scale. A future in which most people of working age are also part-time farmers would be a rather attractive one for many people, I think. I'd certainly give up a day a week to farm work, and I think it would thoroughly healthy both physically and mentally for many people who have otherwise sedentary jobs.

oh god, not another back-to-the-land movement in the offing i hopes.

 

[Falcon]

oh god, not another back-to-the-land movement in the offing i hopes.

Why - is it your sense that the current system is working perfectly satisfactorily and in no need of reform? That would be a courageous stance to take in the present day debate …

 

[Crispy]

The future holds less mechanisation of farming and therefore more people working on farms. This is unavoidable (barring some energy miracle technology)

 

[camouflage]

Why - is it your sense that the current system is working perfectly satisfactorily and in no need of reform? That would be a courageous stance to take in the present day debate …

No, but what's needed is real change, not fads. It's one thing for middle-class graduates to declare their interest in a bit of farm-work in the country of a weekend, but if working-class and under-class people for instance, living on some council estate somewhere aren't going to engage; then it really will just amount to another well-meaning fad. Anyway, plenty of room for some radical and far-reaching improvement in the current way of things before we need to rely on city-dwellers rolling up their sleeves.

I'm appalled at the amount of food and energy wasted in ways that are totally avoidable as it is.

On a related note, my partner studies product design, it's disturbing the way even now product designers are trained to consider the cradle-to-cradle principal of product design to be out-there hippy-bollocks even now. Let's continue to churn out plastic rubbish with no mind to where it ends up at end-of-life. Madness, we are like chimpanzees with an industrial-base, throwing crap about like... well, chimpanzee crap.