Transition seems so easy we could teach it to school kids. But will theory meet practice in a rapidly changing world? Photo: Transition Dorchester.
When we talk about what will be the next economy, it’s easy to get excited about a local bakery or a payment-in-kind system that circumvents The Man.
Skill-swapping, gardening, knowing your neighbors – these are brilliant and vital parts of a hopeful future. But all the warm and fuzzy feelings we get from sharing bran muffins in the local town hall can sometimes obscure rather than highlight the reality of the situation we’re in.
What I hope to do is paint an honest picture of what I see coming.
1. We won’t move to a new economy until this one has run its course.
The majority of all banks are functionally insolvent, as are the majority of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) governments.
But nobody shows any sign of blinking. There’s too much tied up in the growth system for a revival-style awakening.
If the ineffectiveness of this system becomes apparent to the public only over a period of years, as has happened, there wont likely be enough impetus to move towards an alternative.
If, however, there was a catastrophic interruption, probably characterized by the sovereign default of one or more wealthy industrialized nations, combined with what John Michael Greer calls hyperstagflation—meaning a period of wild inflation coupled to a shrinking economy—that kind of dramatic collapse would definitely spur personal action and government policy.
But the ability to implement changes would be limited by the resources and funds of the willing parties.
2. Without current oil, talk of a renewable energy economy is utter nonsense.
Indium is one of the rare earth metals, 98% of which is exported to the world’s manufacturers from China.
It’s dug out of the ground with oil, processed with oil, transported with oil, transformed into solar panels and LCD screens with oil and shipped to end users with oil where it’s wrapped in plastic made from oil and mounted on shelves made of oil so that workers who got to the shop using oil can sell the panels to customers who arrived using oil.
The only mature renewable technology that we have right now is solar power. And even that, while brilliant for low-level daytime electricity and water heating, is not globally scalable in an oil-depleted world still wed to business-as-usual.
Biofuels on the other hand are a joke. They’re either a short-lived love affair or a global catastrophe, depending on the length of our flirtation.
The only biofuels produced at an industrial scale are corn-based, and corn, as we all know, is a global food staple. In 2009, the US used 26% of its corn crop to make ethanol. The 2011 output might reach 40%.
Not only is this dangerously short-sighted in a food-dependent world, but it’s also unsustainable. Corn is grown using intensive fossil fuel inputs. Even if the entire US corn crop was turned into ethanol without any external inputs, it still wouldn’t begin to cover domestic liquid fuel usage.
Hence, joke.
3. Transportation will not likely exist in its current form much longer.
Depending on the depletion curve, businesses solely relying on the affordability of oil for their profit margin (such as the airline and trucking industries) will either be reduced to functioning only for the purpose of subsistence or may go out of business altogether.
Commercial aviation is already only viable because of government largesse. In a future of economic restraint and oil price escalation, commercial consumer flight is completely irrational and uneconomic.
To give you an idea of how behind the times we are in the UK, in the budget announced recently, our Chancellor of the Exchequer announced he would levy a passenger duty on private aviation for the first time ever.
That’s right, we’ve had private aviation in Britain for the best part of a century and it’s never been taxed, even while fuel and passenger duty on normal public aviation went up every six months to a year.
Not to mention that a post-peak oil world in which private aviation is even legal seems insane.
For what it’s worth, I’d much rather all that oil be turned into the sanitary products, medicinal packaging and hypodermic delivery cylinders that we really need for health care rather than blown out the ass of a JP Morgan-branded Gulfstream jet.
Diesel-intensive trucking is in the same fix.
The EU recently presented plans for the majority of supply chains to be run by rail and waterway by 2050. The upside is that at least there seems to be a growing awareness of the energy decline problem and a rational approach to a solution. The downside is that idyllic rural living which is so sought-after now will be untenable unless you’re completely self-sufficient.
But if you’re not connected by rail or waterway, you’ll be out in the cold.
4. The power structure will look after itself, not you.
In the event of a serious supply freeze, say an uprising or civil war in Saudi Arabia or Iran, only three tiers of oil usage will receive any kind of due diligence from the authorities: government, military and high-end corporate.
The rest of us will be on rations if we’re lucky. Not even the ambulances will run if the oil is needed by the power companies, the White House and the Marines.
There are countries in Eastern Europe (Romania for one) where for the past several years ambulance drivers have forced patients to pay for gas to get to the hospital. And that’s with a national health service.
For a country as atomized as the US, the result of a rationing environment would be civil unrest and local violence on an unprecedented scale.
The so-called Strategic Oil Reserve of the US is a sham and would be zapped in a matter of weeks, even with rationing. The end result would be a state of emergency and troops on the street to keep the peace. But even those troops would need oil.
And in that scenario, I believe that rolling hills quietly growing cabbages, disturbed only by the call of the songbirds at dusk, will simply not happen.
The urban dispossessed and the local disenfranchised will want a piece of the new pie, and there will be precious little effective state control over whether they take it from you or not.
5. The land ain’t what it used to be.
If the depletion curve is softer and gives us a nice, gentle slope towards a different way of doing things, then that time will be consumed with typical government subsidies for dangerous sidetracks like nuclear power, shale gas fracking or fusion. Otherwise known as Corporate Socialism.
The British government, with no consultation, just gave the go-ahead for a shale gas fracking operation in Lancashire. The plans for the American fields are to keep going, full steam ahead, and hang the consequences. By the time we arrive at a point where any kind of drilling or fracking is either uneconomical or downright impossible, who knows how much of the water table will be poisoned?
As Fukushima continues to wheeze radioactive particles over what was one of Japan’s most productive regions, we can only take away the message that even counting on the land to offer up the food we are driven enough to cultivate on it seems cornucopian.
The cesium that has been released has a radioactive half-life of 30 years.
And as budgets are slashed, companies struggle harder than ever to make a profit, workers lose their collective rights and job security and the energy we need to run the necessary safety and redundancy systems becomes increasingly expensive and scarce, how many more nuclear reactors will let us down?
Agriculture is over in the OECD countries. We’ve used every inch of land that we possibly can. Yields are falling.
It takes 11 times the land area of the Netherlands to supply that country with food and absorb its waste.
Even if you discounted the CO2 absorption, you still have a land area orders of magnitude larger than the country in question. That doesn’t even take into account how utterly exhausted our soil is by the years of intensive monocropping and the fertilizer-pesticide double whammies.
And who’s to say that the land will even be available for you to use when push comes to shove?
With all the focus on revolutions and unrest in the Arab world, we shouldn’t forget that there was a military coup in Madagascar last year because the government sold half the arable land in the country to Daewoo, a Korean corporation, so that they could grow food for foreign export.
Similar land grabs are happening all over Africa, from Ethiopia to the Sahel. China is signing long-term supply contracts for oil and grain at an incredible rate and, as a result, this huge exporter ran a trade deficit for the first time ever last year.
In this era of corporate consolidation and government capitulation, especially with all the rhetoric about “efficiency,” it’s not beyond the pale to consider the idea that agribusiness will be engaged to run all food production operations in order to ensure maximum throughput.
Laws such as the pending Food Safety Modernization [sic] Act (S510) in the US, which disproportionately affects small-scale farming operations by burdening them with onerous regulations and requirements and also places all food production facilities within the US under the ultimate jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security in the event of “an emergency,” show us that there’s really no iron-clad guarantee that growing your own food is even a viable option in the long-term.
Unless the central governments fall apart…
6. This is the transition. We’re in it now.
More people every year. Less energy, fewer jobs, higher prices.
Big business is consolidating and merging to survive the crisis. Nations are mortgaging their great-grandchildren’s future labor to shore up a system that’s quickly becoming unable to supply even austere levels of social care.
If we had started building a renewable energy infrastructure when Carter was the President of the US and beige was still sexy, we might have made it. But we didn’t.
We traded in fireless cookery, knitwear and board games for McDonalds, IPhones and velour sweatpants with “Bitch” embroidered in sequins on the backside.
This transition will be characterized by unrest as people become disillusioned and then angry with their leaders and their systems.
It will show itself economically in sudden upheavals in markets and national finances. The end game, if there is enough oil to go around and not enough for any one country to fight anyone else over, will be rationing, martial law, curfews and authoritarian rule by surviving political and business interests enforced by the military.
If there’s enough oil to make it worth fighting over, we may find ourselves in an even more unsavory bind, and if the oil crunch comes faster and deeper than we can handle, everything will just fall apart faster.
Libya supplies 2% of the world’s oil and NATO troops are strafing it as I write this.
Upheaval in Egypt and Tunisia, attrition in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, rumblings in Iraq, Iran, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. Even the famously polite cheeseheads in Wisconsin stormed their state capitol for weeks and recently, a judge threw out Governor Walker’s anti-union bill for the third time.
The Chinese have a curse, which translates as “May you live in interesting times.”
In conclusion
I think we all accept the Transition Equation: Community = Resilience = Good. What I’ve tried to do is point out the cracks in a sloppy, ideological transition rather than a hardy, pragmatic one.
It’s too easy to lose track of how big a part of our best laid plans still rely on the chimera of the fossil fuel economy. When it comes to building a local community around reliable supplies of equitably shared resources, frequently the more we look into it, the more it falls apart.
As Dmitry Orlov is fond of saying, we seem to go to any length to avoid simply getting by with less. Even ardent environmentalists talk with shining eyes about a future of hybrid cars, smart meters and nuclear power.
Continuing our current enterprise by other means is not the same as changing the entire meaning and trajectory of our cultural narrative. If we’re going to make it over the hump, we need to be honest about what the future really holds and how we can face it, armed with a tight-knit community of like-minded individuals and a willingness to dig deeper than the window box.
–Mike Freedman, Transition Voice
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Thanks Mike for a sobering post. I must admit when we planted our community orchard as an initial gesture to help feed ourselves locally, I wondered about how the initial community spirit would cope if things get really bad, or would people start hoarding. One other point that comes to mind, is the prospect of displaced people who are desperate from the word go.
Thank you for a well written article and something useful to share.
I think Mike’s raised some important realities that are critical for the success of the transition movement. While we definitely need to work from a place of idealism and imagination, we must also be pragmatic.
What struck me was this >> ‘I believe that rolling hills quietly growing cabbages, disturbed only by the call of the songbirds at dusk, will simply not happen. The urban dispossessed and the local disenfranchised will want a piece of the new pie, and there will be precious little effective state control over whether they take it from you or not.’
There is no way the transition/sustainability equivalent of a gated community is going to be able to pursue life as intended if all around is chaos and desperation.
I’m gratified by the responses. Thank you for reading.
@Robin – It’s worth noting that although personalities change under extreme conditions, the glue of a community can only be a positive influence in times of change like the ones we face in the future. Even if some people “snap” under the dire circumstances, being surrounded by familiar, complementary individuals rather than anonymous, aggressive competitors can only help. Also, if the situation arises where people come to rural areas looking to get their hands on food or shelter, that indicates that the type of mobility we take for granted now won’t be possible. If things are bad enough in the cities that people are driven to the countryside by hunger or desperation, not only will it be harder for them to get anywhere genuinely remote, but the community that awaits them there will be standing guard. Simply put, if the state of play is bad enough to require that you stand your ground, you won’t be off for a weekend in Vegas anyway – you’ll be sitting on the porch watching your carrots.
Sharon is absolutely right though – kicking people out of the lifeboat will not be an option, both as a practical matter because of sheer numbers and, more importantly, because you do not preserve a human society by inhumane means.
I live in the London Borough of Lewisham, population 262,000 with a density of 7700 per square kilometre. If my local supermarkets don’t get deliveries for a week, my fellow residents will not be quietly lining up at the cemetery – they will be scared, helpless and angry. There is just no way of feeding 262,000 people in this dense an arrangement without the economies of scale that we have become so reliant on. When those economies fail at the macro level, my neighbours will have nowhere to turn other than on each other. Extrapolated outwards towards the country, the hungry people of Lewisham will be no more at fault for hunting far and wide for sustenance than the villagers of Kent will be for fending them off. In a survival situation, with all human lives of equal value, this is the bitterest of conundrums. Will a community that survives by refusing hungry people be any better than what we have now (or for that matter any different)? Will a community that shares perish or survive? How are those decisions taken? In places like the UK, where self-defence is more severely punished than violent crime, how do communities draw their boundaries and police them?
In a way, I don’t envy the responsibility that inhabitants of transition towns have taken on themselves – in a true crisis, having nothing seems almost preferable than having something to lose, perhaps even something that has to be defended with violence.
I don’t really understand the point of this post. Hello! Don’t we all know what we’re up against? How many times have we all been told that what we’re trying to do is nearly impossible? Now is not the time to keep saying those things, demotivating people who may just be starting to be motivated.
Now is the time to decide to be positive deviants within a screwed-up system REGARDLESS of the system. We can’t wait. The world can’t wait. You can’t wait.
Just do it. Whatever you feel you can do. Just do it. In the meantime, we can work on developing alternative economic systems, developing better biofuels, stopping land grabs around the world, and deconstructing the power relationships at play. But let’s not let it stop us! I think articles like this just serve to give people who were already thinking about not joining the movement, one more reason.
“Before a social movement can ever act collectively for a social or political purpose -that is, before it can organize and mobilize to advance some collective aims- the participants have to conceive of themselves as being part of a collective enterprise with collective power, and not simply as isolated and unrelated individuals.” – The Voluntary Simplicity Movement
Many of us are already making that transition in one form or another.
Good post. Also, Consider adding this link to your blog as, I think it would fit pretty nicely with everything else.
http://www.oil-price.net/
Glidulm — Thanks for the good suggestion. I agree that Oilprice.net would probably interest Transition Voice readers. We’ll go ahead and add it to our links.
I am uncertain as to the purpose of this piece, and its intended reaction. I fear this will shut people down, which is the last thing we need. A lot of people, in their own way, are beginning to realize fragments of the bigger picture. They haven’t pieced together “Peak Oil.” but they know something’s up.
Also, I think this piece ignores the people who are working behind-the-scenes as grassroots activists trying to experiment with renewable energy, sustainable economics, and restoring the soil – among other things. This piece assumes that literally everyone is apathetic and the only way to make it through is to have society fall apart at the seams. Although the powers that be have done an excellent job conveying that image, if you take time to scratch below the surface it’s a much different story.
Overall, it reminds me of the survivalist mentality (I am unsure whether or not that was your intent) that the Peak Oil Movement desperately needs to shed in order to stay viable.
Wow this is a depressing post. I think our major problem is going to be that our population is just too large. I don’t see that all these people can be supported when we don’t have oil for intensive farming.
That’s the point, Karen… We will not have oil for intensive farming or much of anything else at some point in the future. It stands to reason, therefore, that we need to make radical changes. There are several models for intensive food production without fossil fuel inputs, but we need to start now. We need to compost, compost, compost to build up our soils and start intensive but sustainable food production. Even if you only have a couple containers, grow food. Teach the neighbor kids how to be mini-farmers. We can, in fact, feed people w/o industrial agriculture – we just have to start doing it!
Sounds like you are feeling a lot of despair about the situation Mike. Don’t forget there are no guarantees about what the future will bring. No-one has a crystal ball. My own approach to transition has become about doing what I can, where i am with what I’ve got. Beyond that, it is my opinion that it will drive you crazy if you try to predict and prepare for all eventualities.
Yes this is without doubt depressing, but it is realistic – and brilliantly written….
‘If we had started building a renewable energy infrastructure when Carter was the President of the US and beige was still sexy, we might have made it. But we didn’t.
We traded in fireless cookery, knitwear and board games for McDonalds, IPhones and velour sweatpants with “Bitch” embroidered in sequins on the backside.’
…a sharp and unbearably poignant summary of our folly.
Before I was able to embrace the ideas of transition, I had to read stuff like this. My introduction to peak oil was lifeaftertheoilcrash.com, which left me in shock for about a fortnight. When I came out of shock, I saw that the only way forward was to take personal responsibility and become involved in collective action.
So I don’t think we can assume that sharing this sort of stuff will make people shut down. It didn’t make Rob Hopkins and his students shut down, and it didn’t make me or my husband or lots of our friends shut down. It made us wake up and take action.
One thing I try to live by is not making assumptions. As others have posted, we have no idea what the future holds. Equally we have no idea how people will react to different types of information. I used to go along with the idea that everything needs to be given a positive slant (I’m an advertising copywriter by trade, so no surprise there), but now I’m not so sure. My feeling is that trying to protect people from hard facts about peak oil is patronising. It immediately sets up an ‘us and them’ scenario – we’re clever and strong enough to handle scary information, but ‘they’ aren’t and must be protected and jollied along.
Personally, I needed to understand fully the implications of peak oil and climate change before I felt able to take action. But I also had to let go of the outcome – as I read somewhere, to stop thinking in terms of probabilities and start focusing instead on possibilities.
Hi Janet,
So you’re an advertising copywriter you say? I don’t suppose you live anywhere near Kilburn in London and fancy joining our Communications Group by any chance, do you?
We desperately need good writers in our Transition initiative.
Well said. Very sobering. We have a lot to do.
Good post! Some people here may not understand why this needs to be written, but I’ve been part of a Transition initiative (Brighton & Hove) where these kind of things needed desperately to be talked about (I’m talking in the past tense because the initiative has voluntarily removed itself from being official and is currently dormant). There was just a lot of “let’s be positive” and complete denial that anything could possibly go wrong, including when it was talking about problems within the organization itself. Not surprisingly, things didn’t work.
This post is all about avoiding what I call “secondary denial”. Primary denial is what most climate change and peak oil deniers have. Secondary denial is accepting that climate change and peak oil are happening, but denying that the consequences are going to be all that bad, and pretending that just doing a few heartwarming things are enough to make everything be fine. (I’ve heard other people call it “bargaining”.) Well, it just doesn’t work like that. We need to accept that climate change and peak oil are happening, and that these things are definitely not good news, any way you want to look at them. It’s true that we can still do a lot of stuff to make the situation better than it would be otherwise, and it’s true that it’s perfectly possible to cope with very hard blows and if you do it right, you may even be more mentally healthy afterwards than you were at the beginning. But you are kidding yourself if you are still thinking that the most likely scenario is that the situation will end up better, in objective terms (life expectancy, access to services) within your lifetime. People under twenty reading this may live to see the new sustainable order, but don’t count on it if you are over twenty.
You know what we need, a Transition political party……..?!
It’s going to be dog eat dog unless someone gets up infront of the oblivious masses and delivers the devestating news. Maybe we wouldn’t get any votes, but we would have sown the seed of knowledge.
interesting article.
i do agree that if you want (need) people to be able to provide for themselves they first need to know there is a problem.
how to give them that information with out them thinking you are a “little soft in the head”?
i do think it is possible talk of lifeboats, no oil, we are doomed is going to bring the wrong response.
no insult intended but i am very new to transition and hearing this for the first time it does sound very alarmist and makes me kinda wonder is there really any point having a house warmed by solar power and vegetables growing in my garden because the neighbours are going to be in my house and my garden helping themselves.
cooking them or turning them into smoothies will be a problem without electric. sound flippant? not trying to be-i live in an ordinary semi with oil and electric and no idea so far-at this time should the world collapse i would be among the hungry and cold.
so my answer is to attend the community resilience trainers course and make sure my neighbours know how to fend for themselves-then i can nick their carrots
i am selling the “grow your own” on the basis of not polluting the earth as no air freight is involved if you grow your own potatoes etc. much better then importing them from Egypt as does happen now in some cases-that is just so wrong!
the number of people i tell that and they ask me about how to grow your own vegetables is encouraging. i do have to direct them to you tube as my garden is not blooming but the slugs are fatter. the will is there and the information is slowly getting through. people do care and want to improve.
so although i agree with what you say and the possible outcome i think the general public (me) need information that will make them feel they are able to work to help themselves not scare them into inaction due to feeling overwhelmed.
thank goodness for Transition towns and green energy villages.
quote kenny,” You know what we need, a Transition political party……..?!” i agree i think there might be quite a few votes for transition.
i do feel there has been a lot on tv recently regarding “food miles” supporting local farmers, grow your own vegetables=even “grow your own drugs”.
i wonder what the population/land available for vegetable growing is compared to the second world war when the land girls were active and the UK was on rations.
if the population has increased, which we know it has,then so too has the work force.
i found this on “you tube” Hemp – The Environmentally Sustainable Alternative (Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxd64t6H3_4 i wonder how much truth in the food value of this?
final thought, have you heard that farmers used to keep the pigs in the room at the end of the house to provide heat?
my uncle says that’s nonsense – it was to stop the neighbours stealing them!!