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An open letter to Richard Heinberg

by Paula | 30 May 2009 | permalink | comments [12]
Tags: relocalization, peak oil

Mr. Heinberg,

I read with great interest the email exchange between you and Rob Hopkins, posted at Hopkins’ website on May 27. You bring up a number of interesting points which I would like to address.

You open the conversation thus:

Now, the reason we all see it necessary to transition away from fossil fuels is that if we don’t, dire things will happen. But what if it’s actually too late to prevent some of those dire things from happening, and they occur during our Transition period and process?

Indeed, what if they do? Mr. Heinberg, I fear your epiphany is too little, too late.

Back in 2005/2006, when I was still publishing Adaptation, I tried repeatedly to raise this very warning flag. It was obvious to me then that the effects of peak oil would be felt by individuals on the ground as a financial catastrophe and that this would almost certainly bring long-term preparations to a screeching halt. In Will Fear of Money Destroy Preparations? I wrote:

My personal great concern over collapse is the economic hardship that awaits us all, and that is even now peering over the horizon. We will all face economic problems much sooner than we will face blackouts; we will lose our jobs and our homes long before the lights go out.

Addressing these issues is, for me, priority. They also require discussing economics, markets, and money. Each time I attempted to broach the subject on the mailing lists, I was generally ignored, or occasionally met with hostility. I tried to establish a separate mailing list to keep economic issues off the main lists so as not to offend anyone. No one joined.

In time I began to get the picture. The subject of money was taboo among the list participants, so taboo that it was beyond discussion even in the context of a massive planetary die-off.

Back in 2005/2006 there was still plenty of money and time to spend on community-level mitigation against the financial emergencies now plaguing the developed world. The analogy I used then was that we should be building a sliding board down the cliff and worry about planting a garden at the bottom later. What the relocalization movement has been doing all along is trying to build a sustainable garden at the bottom of the cliff without realizing their efforts aren’t going to spare anyone splatting their guts out as we all go over the edge together. But no one wanted to hear it. The comments at the end of the link to my article are pretty typical of the response I got.

It’s probably too late now to build a sliding board. And I have heard no reports of relocalization/transition efforts being of any use to people who’ve lost their jobs, their retirement savings, who find themselves under crushing debt.

You went on to say:

Obviously, what Transition and PCI have been advocating (community gardens, local currencies, etc.) are in fact at least partial solutions to these very problems, but so far we have discussed them in terms of proactive efforts to keep the problems from happening, or to build a better world in the future. Should the growing presence of these problems affect how our solutions are described (to the general public, to policy makers, or among ourselves) and/or how they are implemented?

My own feeling is that the growing presence of these problems should cause you to jump up like your pants were on fire and quickly start brainstorming ways to phase national currencies out of community-level economic networks; and, to replace them with something more stable that will naturally become obsolete during the decades it will take permaculture consciousness to become the norm.

You continued:

I think the best way for me to continue the conversation would be to respond to specific points you [Rob Hopkins] made.

“Is it possible to design a bottom-up emergency response plan that is effective?”

If not, then I think that we (that is, those of us who desire to see an orderly, decentralized transition process) may be in danger of being written off as irrelevant at some point — perhaps in just a few months’ time.

There is already a significant subset of peak oil aware people who wrote off relocalization/Transition Towns a long time ago. Personally, I rarely try to keep up with developments because I don’t see how either is of immediate value.

You wrote:

I think communities are going to be left mostly to their own devices, once the efforts of national governments begin to fail — and fail they will. So how will communities get by? Who will help them organize their response to an almost complete economic shut-down, so that families still have food, water, shelter, sanitation facilities, work, and health care? I think anyone who can offer tangible help will be regarded with some respect.

You mean no one at PCI or TT has thought about these things until now? This is really… gosh, this is bad news. Relocalization has missed the mark even more profoundly than I thought.

You wrote:

It’s worth asking: What is Transition actually capable of doing to respond to an unprecedented economic crisis? In the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it.

. . .

If what we are proposing to do can only succeed if we have a decade or so of “normal” economic conditions during which to grow our base, train more trainers, and deploy our methods, then . . . it may indeed be too late. But if we can adapt quickly and thereby strategically help our communities adapt, the result may be beneficial both to communities and to those who are organizing Transition efforts.

. . .

As you say, many people will be focused on questions like:

“how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on.

If we can address people’s very real economic concerns, we will be offering tangible benefit. What are some strategies for saving money? Get family and friends to move in with you. Find ways to cook with less fuel (solar cookers are only one of many strategies there), use less water (gray-water recycling with or without re-plumbing your house), ditch your car, share stuff, repair stuff, make stuff. How to live happily without x, y, and z. How to live more happily and healthily than ever on a fraction of the income.

The big question on everyone’s mind is: How can I get by once I’ve lost my job (or now that I’ve lost it)? Learning how to raise capital and form cooperative ventures that benefit the community (and are therefore worthy of community support) could be a life-saver. Also: how to set up barter networks, how to make community currencies work for you.

Mr. Heinberg: Nowhere, once, in this entire exchange, is even a tiny mention of engaging the business community to help.

I can’t speak to what goes on in England, but Mr. Heinberg, you have got to get your people to engage with the small business community here in the U.S. No one knows short- and long-term scenario planning and prioritization like a small business owner. No one knows how to work with limited or no funds better than an entrepreneur who’s bootstrapped a venture into profitability. No one can design and execute a resilient economic network like a sole proprietor; no one can figure out how to squeeze return on investment — monetary, energy, time, or otherwise — better than someone who has to measure these things for herself on a weekly basis. The things with which you now seem to be wrestling are everyday fare for a small business owner.

Peak oil is the cause of economic problems such as we are currently experiencing; economic problems manifest as financial problems, which are by definition business problems. Locking business people out of the discussion can only hurt your efforts — we have the missing pieces to make relocalization work. I can’t speak for other business owners, but almost everything you’ve discussed here is something I’ve tried to bring to the table, only to be met with hostility.

Activism can only go so far. Activism relies on donations, which in turn rely on someone, somewhere, making money from business activities. At some point relocalization must move from the activism stage to the self-sufficiency stage, generating its own income, and — if the term is to live up to its own definition — supporting relocalized economic activity in the community. I understand “no money” is an appealing vision to many relocalizers, but until national governments collapse so thoroughly that there is no longer a national currency, some amount of money will be necessary to pay taxes on the land housing permaculture gardens and the like. Money will remain a requirement for the foreseeable future; ignoring this reality dooms relocalization efforts, as you seem to be realizing at the moment.

I am certainly happy to see someone with as large an audience as you have bringing such issues to public attention. I wish you the best of luck as you move forward, and again, I urge you to engage with the small business community.

7th annual BALLE conference May 21-23 Denver

by Paula | 25 April 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: entrepreneurship, relocalization

Rising to the Challenge:
Entrepreneurs Building Living Economies
Denver Colorado, May 21-23, 2009

“BALLE” stands for the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies. They are the leading organization promoting and empowering local small businesses to aggregate their power and compete effectively against global corporations.

I can’t make this conference, but if you’re anywhere near Denver or are free to travel it is something you will want to attend.

According to the promotional email I received: “You will learn how to get money from community banks, socially responsible investors, even the government! Over $200 million in small business capital will be represented at the conference.”

More information here.

Can shipping container logic be run sideways?

by Paula | 22 December 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: relocalization, systems

The following posts have both been out for some time, but they made a synchronous appearance together in my feed reader today.

Back in February of this year, Alice Friedemann’s review of a book called The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by author Mark Levinson, was published at the Culture Change website. Friedemann’s review is scathing — not of the book so much, but rather of the whole complex shipping containers enabled. She writes:

To me, what Levinson leaves out is how this global distribution system will make it very difficult to go back to local production as energy declines. He doesn’t mention that containerization was the fastest way yet for capitalism to loot the planet and strip Mother Earth down to her hard dry skin.

. . .

Wham! Imagine what will happen when the energy crisis strikes forever, and only the military and politically connected have gasoline. It’s great that container ships carry cargo efficiently, and perhaps can be towed by giant kites (experiments are underway). But what can be shipped with inland factories scattered across several continents? How will all the bits and pieces of Barbie find each other?

With limited energy, it will be hard to go back in time, to rebuild docks and local factories plus all the other sail-based infrastructure. Humpty Dumpty didn’t just fall off the wall, where we could have glued him back, he’s been blown up, his ashes scattered around the world, and there’s not enough time or energy to put him back together again.

Then in August, John Robb cited the shipping container to illustrate the concept of a “platform,” which he defines thus: “At a high level, a platform takes related activities that are complex, unique, and variable and turns them into activities that are simple, universal, and standard.”

His definition is a bit nebulous for me, so from his shipping container illustration, I infer “platform” to mean a generic, scalable solution to some bottleneck within a system. In any event, Robb writes:

Resilient communities aren’t built through one-off projects/efforts, good will, and lifestyle changes. Instead, they are a vibrant ecosystems of activity, that are innovative, robust, and efficient. The key to growing ecosystems that exhibit these qualities is to build platforms that span everything from electricity to food to security. Here’s a short story about Malcom McLean to get your head around the idea of what a platform is (this is for my upcoming book on Resilient Communities) and why they are so powerful:

. . .

The new containerized system he [Malcom McLean] developed simplified shipping by pushing the complexity of packing and unpacking cargo to the edges of the shipping network. Second, it made interconnection with the network easy, since containers were inexpensive and of a standard set of sizes. Finally, it lowered/standardized costs, reduced theft, and limited damage.

. . .

Obviously, it didn’t end there. The advantages in speed, cost, and flexibility were so compelling that the entire shipping industry was transformed as companies, ports, and governments adopted his containerization process. By 2000, nearly 90% of the world’s shipping was accomplished using containers in support of a vast global ecosystem of manufacturers and retailers made possible by Malcom’s shipping platform.

These two posts analyzing the importance of the shipping container bring to light a contradiction. The purpose of the platform, in this case and, as far as I am able to tell, in all cases, is efficiency. But in fact, what shipping container efficiency has introduced to the world is unprecedented brittleness.

I see the need for a prefabricated, standardized relocalization package — it needs to happen ASAP, and a platform would allow that kind of rapid deployment. But would a platform then simply spread the brittleness down to a granular level, even more so than is already the case? Would duplicating the same socio-economic architecture in communities everywhere — which is what a platform would do — make all communities vulnerable to some unforeseeable weak link?

The logic of the shipping container is to increase efficiency, and therefore brittleness as a side effect. Can that logic somehow be run sideways — to reduce brittleness at an increasingly efficient rate? I can’t help but think of a very interesting fact I learned back in my intro biology class in college: healthy ecosystems work precisely because biological diversity is terribly inefficient.