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Discussing transitions

by Paula | 20 November 2008 | permalink | comments [1]
Tags: peak oil, transition towns

There’s quite an interesting conversation going on this week between John Michael Greer and Rob Hopkins regarding the value of the Transition Towns movement.

I mostly disagree with Greer and rarely read his blog anymore but he makes a good point this time:

The value of the [Transition Towns] movement can’t be known for sure until we see how Transition Towns weather the end of the industrial age. Since that process promises to unfold over decades or even centuries, any conclusions based on today’s experiences are tentative at best, and it also needs to be remembered that a monoculture of paradigms is just as deadening as any other kind.

I’m happy to see someone in the peak oil scene offering some kind of critique about the direction of prevailing post-peak strategies. But I think Greer misses the larger point, as does the whole of the visible peak oil movement: any plans made now for any desirable future will almost certainly be crushed out of the starting gate by financial issues. There is no “transition” if transitioners can’t cough up the cash to continue paying everyone who will continue demanding money until law enforcement is so decimated it can no longer enforce property law — and that, to be sure, is going to take quite some time.

This blind spot among post-peak planners has been stuck in my craw since the earliest days of my peak oil awareness. Everyone’s looking to the future, after everything falls apart. But between now and then is an economic depression like no one’s ever seen — and that means no money. The implications of no money on transition and relocalization efforts are enormous. No money equals no location. All the property required for relocalization is subject to taxation, mortgages, and rents, and without money to pay these all the efforts that have gone into a town, farm, urban garden, or what-have-you are for naught.

Those on the forefront of post-peak planning carry on as if everyone’s property holdings will remain unscathed for the foreseeable future; I can only guess they have never had the experience of no money and therefore cannot imagine being evicted from their transition/relocalization projects. From my perspective, relearning low-energy lifestyles is the very least of anyone’s worries. The urgent problem is not 2021; it is 2009, 2010, 2011. The next 5-10 years are the prerequisite weed-out class for the 2021 upper-level seminar, and yet not only is no one discussing it, the subject is actively and sometimes vehemently suppressed whenever it crops up.

No relocalization effort can succeed if it doesn’t address the issue of how to hang on to its locations through hyperinflation and/or hyperdeflation. Where is the money going to come from to pay the rent or mortgage? Even if land and buildings are owned outright, where is the money going to come from to pay the tax man? Many think no money is an unmitigated good — will it still be an unmitigated good when law enforcement shows up with firearms and a very different opinion?

It is worth considering that getting evicted from one’s property is not an effective relocalization strategy. I desperately wish someone would consider it.

Relocalization and transitioning to a low-energy society are going to require a high level of business acumen to, first of all, generate enough money in the coming years to fend off confiscation of farms, lawns, urban gardens and the like; and second, to operate simultaneously in the collapsing economy as well as whatever economy is emerging at the local level. This is a very, very tall order and certainly not one that can be achieved by ignoring it. I have pretty much zero confidence that any of the current crop of post-oil “visionings” will survive to actualization.