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Posted on May 26, 2024 | 39 Comments
To say there are now a series of interlocking and difficult worldwide crises that we must somehow navigate our way out of is hardly news. To say that we might fail to navigate our way out of them and therefore face societal collapses of some kind is a little more unorthodox, but isn’t exactly a bombshell. Even the British Government has just launched its own prepping website.
In this and the next couple of posts, I’m going to draw on some interesting recent writings that try to discern the navigational direction, and test the waters for the price of failure, in the context of these various crises. So perhaps the ‘C-wrecked’ of my title could reference ‘crisis’ or ‘collapse’. Actually, that’s not what I have in mind, but I’ll get to that.
What better title to begin my journey than Michael Albert’s Navigating the Polycrisis (MIT Press, 2024)?
Sombre content aside, there’s an awful lot I like about Mike’s book (disclosure: I’ve met him a couple of times and chatted with him about the state of the world. He generously included me in his acknowledgments and references, but endorsements from this site aren’t earned that easily).
One thing I like is that Mike’s not afraid to talk about societal collapse. I’ve discovered to my cost that doing so can easily make you vulnerable to ridicule in public debate, but Mike brings well-informed scholarly rigour to the possibility.
He also touches on the point that while collapse scenarios may be no-go in everyday media chatter, this isn’t so in the semi-clandestine worlds of corporate, military and security service forecasting. People in those worlds probably know things the rest of us don’t, so it might be wise for us to catch the echoes. Toward the end of the book, Mike conjures up some nightmare scenarios involving an unholy mix of AI, robotics, biotech and state militarization/securitization, which few people including me have probably taken seriously enough in their futurology.
On this matter of futurology, Mike laments the fact that academic scholarship is too wary of it, and too siloed within its specialisms at this critical point in world history when we need multidisciplinary perspectives on how to navigate the world to come. I take comfort for my own writing in a couple of aspects of his thinking here.
First, it’s easy to blunder when you step into unfamiliar areas of knowledge, opening you up to essentially bad faith arguments that your mistakes or lack of expertise disqualifies your entire perspective. Not necessarily.
Second (memo to self), I think Mike’s analysis blows away an objection often levelled at my advocacy for a small farm future along the lines of “Okay, but how are you going to implement that? Nobody wants to farm any more. Really, how’s the transition to a small farm future faring?”
While it’s not true that people don’t want to farm any more, the honest answer to how the transition to a small farm future is faring is “Very badly so far, thanks”. What I took from Mike’s book is that the transition to sustainable neoliberalism or global eco-socialism or ecomodernist solutionism or pretty much every damn route that people have pointed to as a way out of the polycrisis is also faring pretty badly. Mike does a pretty good job of avoiding the conceit that there’s some golden path leading us to a bright future. Instead, he shows us a world of trade-offs, happenstance and uncertain political gambits. I’m not convinced that worlds of potentially +2.5 or even >+3oC global warming he mentions are likely to retain as much of their present structure as he sometimes apparently supposes, but I’ll leave that thought there.
Another strong feature of the book is Mike’s ability to think in terms of whole systems, and their often bafflingly complex feedback loops. So, to pick an example that’s recently been burning hot in the comments section of this site, a full transition of the global economy in its present form to renewable energy may not be possible, even if it’s technically feasible (which it may not be…) due to complexities like sunk investments and price volatilities in fossil fuels, the reliance of renewable energy on fossil-fuelled pump-priming at a time when the net energy returns and flows of fossil fuels are declining, and on political pushback as these chill winds blow across the wider economy. Mike covers a lot of such feedbacks with impressive clarity and detail – refreshingly, without claiming to know how they’ll play out.
One such uncertainty is that even if ‘the world’ weathers the polycrisis with some success, it may be that ‘the West’ or Global North doesn’t, ceding political and economic primacy to other power centres. I’ve just started reading Peter Heather and John Rapley’s book Why Empires Fail: Rome, America and the Future of the West that bears on this point, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they have to say. Bottom line I think is that a lot of people will effectively be facing collapse scenarios even if the world system as a whole doesn’t collapse.
Anyway, back to Mike’s book: another good feature is the way he takes culture, ideology or what he calls ‘the existential crisis’ seriously in their independent influence on biophysical issues.
I don’t think he develops quite such a nuanced analysis here as he does with the more biophysical issues, often invoking what I see as a slightly questionable duality between ‘progressive’ responses to the polycrisis and the pushback of ‘far right populism’.
For sure, that polarity is real in a lot of places, but I think it draws its force from a wider crisis which raises questions about the desirability of the eco-socialist ‘Marshall Plan for the Earth’ that Mike seems broadly to favour, involving strong state control of capitalist economic forces in concert with popular ‘red-green’ activism from below.
I hope to explore this further in future writings. In brief, I don’t think you can simply invoke governments or the state as an essentially autonomous force, capable of solving or compounding the problems of the polycrisis. Existing state structures (the ‘Westphalian’ model of an international system of sovereign nation-states, and indeed the whole underlying cultural conception of state sovereignty) are a fundamental part of the polycrisis, and this applies to states in both socialist and capitalist garb.
This objection may be unfair in that Mike’s focus is on near-term events over the next few decades, and the ‘Westphalian’ state system is unlikely to disappear over that timeframe. But it might have been good to go a bit more ‘meta’ than invoking a mere ‘poly’-crisis for which there may be solutions if decisionmakers can thread the needle deftly enough. To invoke another terminology, perhaps the polycrisis involves super wicked problems to which there are no solutions within present global political cultures.
Mike seems ultimately a bit more ‘optimistic’ than me that the present global order will somehow find a way to tiptoe around the cliff-edge of collapse, but he provides plenty of well-evidenced grounds for caution on that front, while considerably enriching the field of debate. At the end of the book, he usefully names seven ‘world system pathways’ which maybe I’ll discuss more fully at some point: breakdown, neofeudalism, volatile techno-leviathan, stable techno-leviathan, ecomodernist socialism, fortress degrowth and abolitionist ecosocialism.
I’m an advocate for another possibility, which requires yet more word soup to classify: a small farm future, or agrarian localism, or distributism, or maybe civic republican agrarian populist left libertarianism (CRAPLL for short). I think crap’ll probably happen eventually, but most likely as a kind of creeping, wild and weedy margin that slowly engulfs the other scenarios Mike mentions. It will have to bide its time before it takes centre stage. So not really a world system pathway, more a post-world system possibility.
Maybe the small role I can play is to articulate what this emerging agrarian localist world might look like as best I can, particularly in relation to eco-socialism. I’m somewhat sympathetic to eco-socialism, but I fear eco-socialists often don’t really understand farming and farm societies, or nature, or the production of local livelihoods, and are therefore at risk of repeating the mistakes made by their (non-eco) socialist forebears.
This underlines a point that Mike takes pains to emphasize, and I think he’s right: which of the world system pathways we or our descendants experience in the coming decades is going to be determined more by politics than by anything else. Some of them also depend a bit on the progress of new technologies – but still mostly on the politics.
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post. At the moment, as I said earlier, those politics aren’t looking great. But the political field is shifting as rapidly as the technological one. If Mike’s worst case pathway of breakdown comes to pass, I think a lot of people will be experiencing a small farm future, but not in a good way. The challenge is to build a politics that delivers a better one.
On that note, I put ‘optimistic’ in scare quotes above, because there’s an odd aspect to this kind of language in debates about the poly-crisis – namely that preserving the world system in something like its present form is a worthy goal.
I can get a little way behind the argument that, with the state of the world as it now is, an absence of high-tech patches to the existing world system would mean a lot of people are going to have either no future or a very miserable one, so let’s not knock techno-fixing too much. But it rarely seems to figure in such arguments that there’s a wide range of options between, for example, our ~600 exajoule energy present and a zero exajoule energy future. Mainstream futurology seems entirely geared to maintaining (indeed, growing) the ~600 exajoule present, rather than making do with less. That ~600 exajoule present isn’t an especially pleasant present for a lot of people (and other organisms), and I’m not convinced there’s any reason to suppose that an even higher-energy future will be better for them, even if the energy sources are cleaner. In fact, probably the opposite.
Here’s where I’ve found the next book on my list, Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (2023, Zer0 books) informative.
Anthony uses John Boorman’s perceptive-yet-preposterous 1974 sci-fi actioner Zardoz as a foil for a wide-ranging argument about the ideologies (and pathologies) of our present modernist culture. His book isn’t an especially easy read unless you’re well-grounded in social theory and philosophy, but he nails a lot of points exceptionally well, uncovering the hidden and surprising genealogies linking the older modernisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the supposedly new and ‘disruptive’ tech-bro space of present times (Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest might work as a more accessible introduction to some similar ideas).
I can’t do justice to the richness of Anthony’s analysis, but here are a few points which overlap with issues I’ve raised in my own writing:
I learned a lot from Anthony’s discussion of this last point. It’s stronger than my exploration of similar themes in Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, which prompted the (hyperbolic) ridicule of one ecomodernist antagonist. But I think here we get close to the root of the antipathy between (eco)modernism and its others – critical Aquarianism, Romanticism, neo-Luddism, neo-agrarianism, call it what you will. Each of the two considers the other a kind of death logic, and itself as an engaging vision of human life, without comprehending the alternative view in the mirror of its other.
Are there bridges across this divide? People have asked me in discussions of my Saying NO… book if there’s room for middle ground between ecomodernism and agrarian localism. Maybe. I’m not sure what it would look like, but I don’t set myself implacably against every totem of modernist ‘progress’. I agree with Anthony when he says that human reason is defined by acts of judgment, by drawing lines and setting limits (p.61). My starting offer for a critical-Aquarian-ecomodernist blend might be to aim near-term for, say, a 300 exajoule solar-powered world, with that energy flow shared more or less equally across humanity. How about it?
For his part, Anthony wonders if we can “exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions—utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth, secular immortality, and total control—in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises without sliding into … reactionary antimodernism” (p.54). Echoing the title of Dougald Hine’s excellent book At Work in the Ruins, he thinks it’s “only after the “future” and among the ruins that we will build our necessarily imperfect utopias” (p.12) and argues that “as opposed to the monoculture of capitalist modernity, ancient human history is a polycultural quilt of traditions that we must reinvent … after modernity. Postmodernism in this sense is a radical traditionalism” (p.60).
Those statements work for me as foundations for my own project, and I’m interested to discuss their numerous implications – even with critics, though probably not with the kind of critics apt to dismiss them as examples of bucolic fantasy or death-cultism.
Another author to mention is Carwyn Graves, who’s recently published the superb Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape. On the face of it it’s a very different kind of book to Mike’s or Anthony’s, but complementary in numerous ways – not least in its implicit message that workable versions of Anthony’s “radical traditionalism” may be closer to hand than some of us might think, for example in what remains of historic Welsh landscape management, and what could be rebuilt out of it.
But I’ve written more than enough words already for one blog post, so I will come to Carwyn’s book – and the mysterious question of C-wrecking – in my next one.
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There’s something at the edge of my mind here that I can’t quite articulate about material conditions affecting politics and novice versa and how our conversations get all tangled up when we think we are talking about one but are actually talking about the other.
I’m probably among the more optimistic of commenters here when it comes to renewable energy, insofar as I think it’s probably plausible to build enough renewables for some lighting and telecoms (including he manufacturing implications), but I am pretty cynical about how that will be distributed. But even in a very equal distribution scenario that would be a huge change to the economy and probably still necessitate some form of agrarian localism.
More in the next few days.
Vice versa, not novice versa. Autocarrot is not particularly virtuous….
I don’t see how anybody can look around at the speed of the denial of the reality of the Covid pandemic and think there is any eco-modernist strong state solution in our future. If there, we are all going to be riding unicorns to work.
And I agree there is a strong split between those who embrace the often sad and dirty materiality of this mortal coil, and those who are afraid of it, and actually seem terrified of death.
More people thinking about the probability of any sort of ecomodernist future is a good thing.
There can’t be infinite growth, never mind exponential infinite growth. The cost of replacing or retrofitting everything for the renewable (rebuildable ?) energy transition will take more resources than exist. It is really hard to pay current expenses with promises of
future savings.
The political powers that be are not going to be able to pivot to any system that isn’t growth based. Without growth, existing debt becomes worthless. It is possible that every government would say ‘money is just a fiction, don’t worry about it’. But I don’t think that would happen. Imagine the US defaulting on its debt. Bad things would happen all around the world. Bribes and campaign contributions would dry up. Chaos ensues.
More people thinking that commuting by unicorn or flying cars (!) ain’t going to happen opens door to think about alternative futures. Maybe we don’t need phones that tell us the next new throwaway thing that we need to buy. Maybe a house with less than 3000 square feet would be okay. Does any one really need a 400 horsepower pickup truck so big that you can’t see over the hood ? A good psychotherapist is much cheaper. Selling expensive stuff grows the economy…
Living within your means doesn’t have to suck. Planning ahead makes it easier to have a good life.
As someone living with two other adults in 720 square feet I can’t quite imagine what 3000 square feet would be like! More than the entire house, for each of us?!
It *would* solve some of my produce storage issues, though.
I think some of them think there is an eco-modernist strong corporation solution. COVID also demonstrates this as a bad idea, at least to me.
The really sad thing about it is that COVID, while serious and worth avoiding because of the risk of long-term illness, has a relatively low case fatality rate — nothing anywhere near something like smallpox or measles in an unvaccinated population. It has a very clear mechanism of transmission that was obvious by summer 2020. And… we still messed it up horribly.
I also think there is a lot of nuance between “afraid of death” and “embracing materiality”. I’m one of the most conscientious people I know with regard to COVID protocols, not because I am particularly afraid of getting it but because:
a) I don’t want to pass it on to anyone else, and the easiest way to ensure that is to not get it myself
b) the risk analysis for that works out in favour of simple interventions
c) the interventions that work for COVID also mean I have not had a cold or ‘flu since February 2020 and it turns out my health is much, much better when I don’t get three or four bad colds per year. (Like, I no longer need any asthma medication levels of better.) This in turn increases my quality of life and my productive capacity.
But people see me wearing a mask and assume I am afraid of death, because when they wore one it was because they were afraid. It almost seems as if some people they are just as offended about any change to their lifestyle in light of what we know about airborne disease transmission as they are about driving less or not eating blueberries in December.
I’m a sucker for word games. Is the answer Capitalism (not The answer, you understand)?
Community wrecked, perhaps?
I attended a charcoal-burning workshop over the weekend, helping to chop 6 cubic metres of oak into pieces roughly the right size to build a pile, or ‘clamp’ (boksa, in Hungarian), which had a roughly 4.5m diameter base and was around 2 metres high. Making charcoal was ‘a thing’ in this area around half a century ago, fuelling the furnaces and blacksmiths’ workshops back in the day. Long before the pile was lit and the smoke had drifted down into the village a few old hands showed up and talked about the old days. One tale in particular caught my ear as I’d been thinking of that phrase ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, and in a way this oral history helped me briefly dispel this failure of the imagination.
So, two former charcoal-burners walk up to a charcoal-burning workshop, and start chatting. One related how, where he grew up, the land was not great for growing food so the men made quicklime and sold it. He said his grandfather would load a wagon with the lime and travel all of 50 miles out to the Hungarian Plain to sell it. He said his grandfather would set off early Saturday morning to get back a week later, selling on the way but mainly exchanging for corn, flour and other things needed to raise a family. I just thought I would relate this as often the refrain came up, “there was no money”, and knowing the terrain I could imagine the journey, slow and steady, out among the sweep-pole wells, the dark, fertile soils.
For me I guess it provided a sepia snapshot of a communist/pre-capitalist(?) life from which to envisage – overreaching myself again – a post-capitalist one. But my imaginary palimpsest gets shot down later when I relate what I’d heard, with common reasons I struggle to refute: we can’t all live like that now/there are more of us now/we’re obligated into the system now/we don’t live among people who farm, make cloth, etc etc now. Crestfallen, I didn’t argue. I have one friend seriously attempting a post-capitalist route. He says he finds it exhausting (I got the impression more mentally than physically, or else both in equal measure) because you are constantly being tugged back by modernity, people’s attitudes and assumptions, your own family, everything, like trying to keep several spinning plates going, all while trying to break old ground.
The way to.live among people who farm/make cloth/make tools/etc now is… to be one of those people.
Minimalism of gardening tools and techniques. How to feed yourself without horsepower from draft stock or tractors. How to incorporate solar/ batteries with small electric tools that can leverage caloric yield.
A weedwacker, an electric wheelbarrow, and lots of compost.
So these tools are currently available but the techniques in leveraging their power is only hobby level attempts by aging hippies like me. 5.8kW solar array
Annually the farm generates 8,500kWh of solar/ battery electricity and uses 500kWh from grid. Electric tractor, wells, freezers , A/C , and almost all farm electric use from solar. No ICE tractors , compost for fertility.
There are electric chainsaws and tools to help make your compost pile although I just pay a local landscaper to dump his oak leaf / chips . Kinda cheating but the ground loves oak leaf mold.
Anyway if we are looking to have both small farms and gardens with less and less power to utilize from fossil fuels I am hoping maybe small solar electrics has tricks we just haven’t learned yet, or nobody is watching what already is readily available but still involves lots of human effort, work, sweat. Still though if you gardened with a shovel and hoe fifty or sixty years ago these tools are garden miracles.
Bruce
There is some question about whether it will be possible to manufacture the small electric tools without a fossil-based industrial society.
I think it might — but this probably depends on a number of factors.
I used the electric strimmer today, and have an electric chainsaw, drill, water pump, and lawnmower that use the same batteries. The electric secateurs take a smaller battery and are probably the tool I use most often — certainly at the Soup Garden I use them to reduce prunings down to woodchips, which is very very slow compared to a woodchipper but also much, much quieter. (Yes, as much as I have saved on vegetables I have probably spent on tools, at the same time as I am also trying to figure out what I would do differently if I didn’t have those tools. The electric secateurs are the ones that get used at every single garden I tend, and I would replace them in a heartbeat if they broke — though I would, of course, try to get them mended first.)
Woodchips are probably hard to do with low power electricity. I can’t remember which post we were discussing it on, but I was thinking making biochar out of prunings and then breaking that up might be easier. There’s no reason the electric secateurs couldn’t be charged from a solar panel, but using them to make any appreciable quantity of woodchip does take quite a long time.
@kathryn and Bruce.
Apologies if this was posted here before but this article on the global bottleneck that is microchips, is a real eye opener.
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/book-review-of-chip-war-and-the-fragility-of-microchips/#more-15320
I have gardened without any power equipment and I have run a commercial scale vegetable garden and vegetable stand with a diesel tractor . I think there is some middle ground and electrics is a big step down in horsepower so it kinda gets you ready for totally manual methods and some training in technics to avoid applying endless horsepower. Chris showed some interest in some changes in our expectations of how much power we are custom to using, or worse what we think we are entitled to.
Things break, back up plans may never be used and working out how we power down isn’t usually a pursuit of monied classes.
@Bruce
Agreed re: electrics as a middle ground. There isn’t anything I use them for that couldn’t be accomplished with non-powered hand tools — it would just take that much longer.
Societal Collapse.
What does it mean? What does it look like?
I guess we all have our own versions of what that might look like.
For me, Societal Collapse is the point when people realise that there isn’t really any consequences to their actions. That laws can no longer be enforced. This combined with dwindling resources, especially food, creates a very scary set of circumstances.
And whilst all this is going on we all are going to have to learn a whole new skill set.
How is “justice” going to be administered in a SFF.
If we every get to the point when I actually need to compost my own poo or make a biochar water filter because water no longer comes out of my taps, then on a societal level, we will all be in a very bad place.
The mental health implications for people, as things start to crumble, is an often ignored aspect.
The impacts on the indigenous population of Cuba when the Spanish arrived must have been devastating. I have read accounts, that the population just “gave up”. Waited around to die as everything they valued had been destroyed by the Spanish.
For all of us living with modernity, the impact of decline, is mentally as challenging as for those Cubans.
Just maintaining a birth/survival rate of 2.1 will be challenging.
I find it helps a lot to think of collapse as unevenly distributed in both time and space. I am less worried about chaos in terms of people’s behaviour, though, perhaps because I am already part of local community mutual aid networks. That isn’t to say that bread riots couldn’t happen; more that riots and other such events tend to be short-lived even when things are very dire.
Currently, use of our soup kitchen and food bank is the highest it has ever been — even more than during the height of pandemic restrictions. For our guests the catastrophe has already arrived.
It’s also worth looking at situations where people did need to start producing much more food and other commodities locally in a bit of a hurry. Britain’s WW2 victory gardens, and things like the Land Girls programmes didn’t entirely alleviate hardships — but they did at least help. Cuba during the Special Period is also an example of a very rapid shift to local production, though again not without downsides.
None of this is to say I’m completely unworried! But the way things get done now is that people do them, and this will also be true in a post-capitalist world.
@Kathryn
Without trying to sound too “down”, your soup kitchen may have seen an uptake of need, but it still is able to run because modernity is still functioning.
But when water no longer comes out of the taps………..that’s a whole nother story.
Here in Britain, the real marker of decline seems to be the national obsession with potholes. 🙂
To add my bit to the obsession. Our street is a dead end road with lots of expanding pot holes. It’s pretty low priority for the Council to repair (which is fair enough).
I wonder how long before people on the street, give up on the Council and just go to the builders merchants, buy a bag of tarmac and fill the holes themselves????
You might enjoy this, John:
https://www.thepotholegardener.com/
(But seriously, the increased weight of electric vehicles and resulting increased wear-and-tear on roads is one of the reasons I think electric cars are kindof silly, rather than the magic bullet some people seem to think they are.)
In pre-modern times, things also got done because people did them. That sounds too flippant, and on one level it is, but while we cannot control the conditions in which we find ourselves, we can usually make some decisions about how to respond. Those decisions will of course be constrained by limits of time and energy and so on, but they are still decisions.
Water contamination requiring frequent boil advisories or additional filtering seems more likely to me in most areas of the UK than the taps running dry. In the meantime it would be nice if we stopped using drinking water to flush nutrients into the sea — though I have heard of someone using their toilet cistern as a leaching vessel for foraged acorns, which I would be much less happy about with a greywater system.
@Kathryn
Thanks for the pot hole gardener link.
Maybe that’s what I should do with ours 🙂
At present, tap water relies on water being pumped from low to high using fossil fuels. I can see water for tower blocks being particularly vulnerable.
But yes, perhaps a biochar water filter should be nearer the top on my “to do” list.
@John
You could put tiny gardens in potholes, yes. But you could also go for cement filler with messages embedded in it in glitter paint:
GROW FOOD
WALK MORE
SHARE SEEDS
and so on.
Re: water pumping — yes, that’s a concern, but it’s not a “fossil fuels will disappear overnight” situation. If pumping rather than quality is the issue I would expect it to revert to things like “there will be water, but only for 6 hours/day” before just stopping. That’s a separate issue from water restrictions due to drought, of course — those are usually put in place to prevent a “not enough water to go around” scenario by forcing severe limitations on consumption, and my understanding of how they usually work in the UK involves standpipes and/or trucks with bottled water.
It doesn’t ever hurt to know how to build a filter. It also doesn’t hurt to have enough containers around to store a few days worth of drinking water. And a water butt for saving rainwater is a really obvious thing to have if you have a garden… I wouldn’t use it for drinking except in very dire circumstances (most of the recycled plastic water butts aren’t technically food grade), but it beats using tap water on vegetables.
“The mental health implications for people, as things start to crumble, is an often ignored aspect.”
I think that is very true. Kathyrn had a list of broken things a while back. I think we have all seen it. I think there is a general sense that something is wrong but people can’t put their finger the problem.
People are powerless in so many aspects of modern life. They work hard and play by the rules but life isn’t working out. Just like industrial agriculture was supposed to feed the world, but it gutted the food system and impoverished farmers, worldwide. Capitalism has raised the standard of living for so many. While making a very few very rich and the consumption that drives the system is actively destroying the ability of the planet to sustain us.
People can’t imagine that the rules of the system are the problem. But they know something is not right. That conflict takes a toll on people’s mental health.
Chris;
I struggle when the discussion gets in to all the “isms” vying for dominance or the best explanation for what ails us. Maybe a glossary page here so we are all taking the same meaning when these terms are so frequent in your discussion of books I have not read.?
Regarding which path the poly crisis will resolve toward, I think energy decline will take some options off the able. As the EROEI falls below some threshold, some argue that there is a tipping point at which the complexity cannot decline slowly, but will drop quickly. Much technology can only continue if the supply chains and and supporting systems are all intact. Too many are prone to single point failure collapse. Covid gave us a small taste of that.
There is the further complication that money chasing the best return globally seems to have an agency of its own, with no nation or nation state collective able to rein it in. Geopolitics is still going strong, but this new “disembodied force of greed” is a strong player with its own agenda.
So, I still come back to your supersedure scenario. All manner of responses, local and on the fly will happen of necessity as central control declines. This means self provisioning and self governance in all its messy varieties, and just hope you are in a spot that can do both adequately.
I read two pieces today that are relevant , the first was from the copper miners that stated that to replace the world the world would need as much copper by 2050 that has been dug out from the dawn of time until 1980 , it basically can’t be done .
The other was a report that between 75% and 80% of the MET office thermometers are inaccurate by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius , the USA is probably as bad , I know that in brown wood the weather station is now within 6 feet of a brand new shiny corigated iron hangar and on the south side of it , and three days a week it states ” light rain ” simply because that’s when the sprinkler system waters the grass , thats NOAA weather radio for ya !
” No one wants to farm ” yup but everyone likes to eat .
Collapse is already here , look at US west coast cities , they have become just like Calcutta , when , not if the welfare money runs out riots will become endemic , here in TX TB leprosy and a assortment of other tropical deseases are making a comeback .
Yup no one needs a 400 hp pickup , they are for the posers ,too fragile to be worked hard , 150 hp is ample to pull a trailer with 14 cows in it .
As for energy TX is already warning of shortages at around 7 pm when the sun goes down , without AC a lot of TX will empty , Here today 250 miles from the nearest big city its 92_degrees F with humidity of 80% giving a real feel of 110 degrees , you
sweat just standing still !
( I would really miss my rototiller )
Thanks for the comments – a very interesting array, as usual. Perhaps in a harbinger of the future, my internet connectivity is currently extremely patchy, so I’ll just respond briefly only to a few points.
Apologies for being so mysterious, Simon. Originally I wrote ‘C-wrecked’ as a single post, but it was too long. So you’ll just have wait for the denouement. ‘Capitalism’ is close … but no cigar. Of the obstacles your colleagues gave to a non-capitalist world I think “we’re obligated into the system now” is the most important, but systems can fracture – more quickly than people often think. More on that anon, I hope.
Hence it’s good to see Bruce, Kathryn & others discussing ‘middle ground’ options. Informative, thanks. A discussion that really needs amplifying in mainstream discussions, I believe.
To John’s point about collapse being when people realise that there isn’t really any consequences to their actions, IMO such scenarios are usually relatively short-lived and localised. But the alternatives aren’t always pleasant. Again, this is a theme I hope to explore more soon.
Steve C, apologies for the excess of ‘isms’. Perhaps it’d be a good idea for me to write a glossary. If anybody would care to pitch in by nominating the most bamboozling ‘isms’ in this or other posts, I could draw up a list. Regarding the point about the disembodied agency of money, I think that’s right and it’s what undermines so much possibility for building local resilience. But as per my comment about system breakdown above, I think it can change quite rapidly.
Thanks Diogenes for the examples. A long debate has been running recently under my older ‘solar panels’ post about mineral futures among other things. I may try to get my head around it a bit more and write something about it again soon, so references always welcome. Compared to the upbeat tone of Eclipse in that debate, this from Tom Murphy seems like an appropriate note of doom on which to end this comment:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-05-22/growth-or-scale/
@Chris
Thanks for the link.
I like Tom Murphy’s stuff.
Ditto re Murphy – useful to give that one a thorough read. It’s Consumption, isn’t it? 🙂
I wonder if Anthony’s idea of ‘reactionary antimodernism’ is the kind of action that’s being criminalised to the point that it’s a luxury few could slide in to?
I favour the subtler radical alternatives pointed to, after modernity (how long is that now?). But he’s right that technology, forever foisting and creeping into my bubble, isn’t neutral but partisan. Taking apart the master’s house with the master’s tools seems to be a popular ‘work-around’ in neo-Luddite spheres, and there’s always ‘try to ignore it’, but short of an energy shortage I’m unsure whether awkwardness towards the main stream of modernity, even being the change you wish to see, is up to the job, though I don’t see an alternative. The idea of a democratic solar energy rationing is an imperfect utopia par excellence!
I suppose whether any one type of resistance is “up to the job” depends on whether you’re aiming for a total (totalitarian?) replacement of the status quo with something better at any cost, or a patchwork of diverse groups of people attempting to live out a pre-figurative liberty from the constraints of the current hegemony while attending to and thriving within biophysical limits, so that when (not if) the current hegemony is no longer viable, there are some other ideas around. (And crop diversity, and skill, and so on. A peasant culture, in other words; or better yet, many peasant cultures, each appropriate to their context.)
The latter is, perhaps, more difficult to do, just as it is more difficult to grow a hundred edible species in my garden than two. (A quick mental count brings me to at least
eighty this year, but I am probably missing
some out; that doesn’t count the various
species I forage, and it refers only to species and not to cultivars.)
That said, the all-encompassing nature of the currently dominant, extractive system means that even quite small acts of resistance or re-wilding or re-creation are worthwhile. A patch of flowers for pollinators and a pile of sticks for beetle habitat in a garden are not enough to keep this planet habitable by humans; growing vegetables in the churchyard for a soup kitchen is not going to throw off the dynamics of corporate greed and enclosure that lead to the need for the soup kitchen in the first place; my refusal to drive a car, or Chris’s refusal to fly, don’t protect either of us from others’ uses of fossil fuels, or even our own. But neither are any of these things pointless, and we certainly won’t keep a habitable planet, reverse enclosure, or get off of fossil fuels if we don’t do these things. There is no One Weird Trick to save the world, there is only doing the work, but tiny refugia are still refugia.
I have been mentioning refugia a lot recently, and thinking of them almost as a human-inclusive counterpart of the wildlife refuges or wildlife habitats we so much like to protect. There is much in the ecological conservation efforts of the last century or so that turns out to be not so smart; I first heard about the idea of controlled, low-temperature fires as part of forest management in 1995, and yet nearly thirty years later the practice is still so rare that wildfires are becoming the norm instead. But one concept that is gaining some ground, and which I think may be relevant to the idea of human resistance/re-wilding/refugia, is that of wildlife corridors. In other words, how do we connect together even the tiniest pockets of pre-figurative liberation?
I like the idea – thread the needle, start sowing together the patchwork quilt. Make it beautiful, a funky heirloom, and maybe welcome abandoned gardens with open arms.
I can see a patchwork of well to do city folk buying parcels of land, alongside enlightened farmers and concerned Lords and Ladies, each bringing their own idiosyncratic view to a mish mash of rewilding, regenerative, permaculture and organic practices. Increasingly (and presently) this turns on the an a rag tag army of volunteers whose own securities are beginning to demand attention, as in, they want a piece of it!
There is passion within these efforts which chimes with types of Refugia.
https://eandt.theiet.org/2024/05/16/study-finds-amount-copper-required-evs-impossible-mining-companies-produce
https://www.farminguk.com/news/beef-carbon-reduction-scheme-opens-today-for-ni-farmers_64495.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It starts .
D10 – As you probably know, the journalist Whitney Webb talks a lot about the direction carbon credits and digital currencies look to be going in.
BTW Steve L, fascinating information, thanks you.
Chris wrote “My starting offer for a critical-Aquarian-ecomodernist blend might be to aim near-term for, say, a 300 exajoule solar-powered world, with that energy flow shared more or less equally across humanity. How about it?”
Looking at energy consumption on a regional basis, there’s an awful lot of energy inequality across humanity. The current (2018) global per-capita energy consumption is an estimated 2100 koe (kilograms of oil equivalent), and the regions with less energy consumption than this average represent 79% of humanity (Asia, Latin America, and Africa).
If today’s global energy consumption was somehow cut in half (to roughly 1000 koe per capita), this would still leave room for Africa to increase its energy consumption beyond current levels, while the rest of the world’s regions would have to reduce their consumption, if all regions were to achieve the reduced global average.
Even if the present-day global energy consumption was *not* cut, and energy equality between regions was a goal, these regions would have to reduce their current energy usage to achieve the current global per-capita average: North America, Oceania, W. Europe, E. Europe, Middle East.
Historical energy consumption estimates (1820-2018) indicate at what point in a region’s history (how far back) was the region’s per-capita energy consumption equal to the present-day global average (approximately 2100 koe):
Africa — the current global average was never reached
Asia — never reached
Latin America — never reached
Middle East — reached in the 1990s
E. Europe — reached in the 1950s
W. Europe — reached in the 1950s
Oceania — reached in the 1950s
North America — reached prior to 1820 (off the chart)
World Energy Consumption, A Database, 1820-2018 (2020 revision)
Paolo Malanima
https://histecon.fas.harvard.edu/energyhistory/DATABASE%20World%20Energy%20Consumption.pdf
(especially Figure 7, page 43, from which some rough approximations were made)
I’m looking forward to sporting Sean Connery’s Zardos get up in a Small Farm Future. I’m all about growing old disgracefully!
We were at a ‘Defashioning Dorset’ event on the weekend, held on small cattle Farm, nestled under a hill Fort next to a beautiful woodland Trust wood. It was an unlikely congregation of the landed gentry, country town activists and elderly villagers, brought together by a mutual regard for natural farming, natural fibres and dyeing, and the attendant heritage crafts. We were invited by Fashion Act Now, a part of the Extinction Rebellion family who hosted a Peoples Assembly to discuss the local groups various approaches and needs. Alice offered a short talk on the Commons which was very well recieved.
All this is to say that Politics, as you say, flows from what people feel is wrong, and what they think is the right way to do it. And it will be as peculiar to a locality as anything else is to a bioregion.
The strange bedfellows fellows of this rural snap shot show that people can agree on the right ‘things’, soil health, cutting out plastic pollution, the importance of skills and a regional and local distribution of mixed farming practices. So, I agree, the binary polarisation is a fiction used to describe politics at the national and international level. I am increasingly sceptical of the use of this global systems thinking, and its ability to forecast and give insight.
Though the nation state is an enduring form of identity, and an unfortunate cipher for security, it is a double edged sword. The Co owner of the farm was a sometime advisor within Westminster, dealing with national security, and was understandably questioning about the practicality of direct democracy, but as we stressed to him, the history of our Nation was undergirded by the Commons, and our ability to negotiate at high levels, in large groups, has only recently been lost. Indeed, recently reading ‘the Moral Economy of the Middle Ages’, it seems the then new cast of ‘Villieny ‘ was brought about by the Lords of the land to protect them from litigious folk, using the new laws to bring their Lords to court!
Thanks for further comments & links & for some fine stattage, Steve.
Some interesting themes raised in the comments. I’m interested in the difference between nations and nation-states that Joel touches on. And in refugia. Perhaps historical sources tell us more about times of political and economic expansion than contraction, and the people in the refugia are somewhat lost to historical memory, but often had a decent enough time of it. Is that a feasible route in world-system core areas like North America and Western Europe? The technological powers of the state are a new dimension. But so are the core assumptions of liberal democracy.
I can see a best case scenario emerging along the lines of Joel’s reflections. Landed and wealthy people building productive patchworks, which then devolve to wider ownership relatively bloodlessly through a kind of steady class and demographic pressure from the landless. I touched on that in A Small Farm Future. Not the only way things might pan out, of course…
Zardoz-style mankinis certainly would be a form of ‘defashioning’ … The idea of a small farm future is already unfashionable enough without going down that route for peasant wear! Still, if we could all carry it off as well as Sean Connery…
the people in the refugia are somewhat lost to historical memory, but often had a decent enough time of it
I’m thinking of the Appalachian “hillbillies”; it’s difficult to assess just how decent a time of it they had, but I suspect it was probably somewhere between the caricature presented by the capitalist mainstream and the romantic ideals dreamed up by the back-to-the-land movements of the latter half of the 20th century. I suspect that there are similar dynamics around, say, the fishing communities of Newfoundland.
Is that a feasible route in world-system core areas like North America and Western Europe?
Only with access to land, I think. I feel like the English always have a hankering to disappear into the forest, not realising that most of it is enclosed and there hasn’t been much to disappear into for centuries.
But again — tiny refugia are still refugia. I was on Hackney Marshes today and they have log piles a little way from the river, with wide wire fences around them to keep mowers etc off and signs saying “Marshes Wildlife Refuge”. It’s such a small thing, but it didn’t just happen: someone decided it would be a good idea, someone got it past the relevant committee, someone moved the logs and put the fence up. (I was there to forage for fungi, and can report that Hackney Marshes doesn’t have much in the way of common field puffballs compared to some other sites — and I’m not telling the internet where I find those, but I’ve had three worthwhile harvests in the past week — but does have a few fairy ring champignons, which are worthwhile even though they’re tiny, because they have so much flavour.) Yesterday I was up at the Far Allotment and observed a slow worm in the small heap of woodchips by the root vegetable bed. I didn’t put the slow worm there, but I did decide that having piles of woodchips around would be a good idea, since I knew there were slow worms on-site. Closer to home but further away in time, Wanstead Flats was only saved from development by mass protests. The refugia we have now are there because of, as well as in spite of, the actions of human beings in the world.
The more of my household needs come from sustainable, local self-provisioning, the more my household itself becomes a sort of refugium from the wider, more extractive system. This cannot protect us completely, but it still provides a cushion, a space to thrive on different terms than those the extractive system would have us exist under. There are fewer ways the extractive system can force my compliance when I am enjoying fresh mushrooms, still eating squashes from the 2023 harvest and have started on this year’s strawberries and spuds. (The hungry gap is over, and the Fruit Avalanche is almost here.)
To me, this seems worth doing even though it is necessarily incomplete. I’m vulnerable now to variable weather and pest pressure in a much more direct way than I was before, and there are still many ways that the extractive system defines the terms under which I exist and separates me from the direct impacts and interactions of my own existence (alienates me from the products of my labour, maybe?). From some perspectives, I’ve traded maybe 10% of my problems for… a different set of problems, that are more physical work to deal with. Nevertheless, the extractive system doesn’t have the hold on me that it would if I weren’t growing some of my own food, and some more for others. Less of my life is legible to that system.
So I think that anyone with even a little bit of wiggle room can build miniature refugia.
The technological powers of the state are a new dimension.
I really don’t want to go down the “define the state” rabbit-hole (again), but if Hobbes is right (I think it was Hobbes?) and the power of the state is the exclusive right to use violence, then the technology is only as good as the fossil fuels powering it. (There is a reason that I think solar panels are a better use of our remaining fossil fuels than tanks and machine guns and bomber jets, but they don’t ask me.) I referred in a previous comment to what is commonly called AI as three databases in a trench coat; I stand by that comment, but I do think we should not underestimate the impact of such databases on information.
But so are the core assumptions of liberal democracy.
I mean, as we know it today — yes, that’s the case. But what we call liberal democracy is neither necessarily very liberal nor very democratic. Rich and poor alike are free to sleep under bridges, and so on and so forth. I think we can do better than this.
I think I will pass on the Zardoz outfit though.
We might all be in fur-lined Zardoz outfits one day, if we fail to make our own cloth.
Regarding Appalachian life, there are so many books out there about it and I’ve only read one, but can highly recommend it if you like oral history over the broader sweep. It’s called Alex Stewart – Portrait of a Pioneer, and I particularly remember him walking over 70 miles to find paid work, when things got really tough. For all that it’s a lighthearted account, looking back on a long life. Here’s some blurb:
Alex Stewart was a recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship Award in 1983 by the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington which recognized him as a living national treasure. Over a twenty year period of friendship the author developed a profound respect and great love for Alex Stewart, a truly remarkable Tennessee mountain character whose life epitomizes the pioneer development in America. The best of hundreds of hours of recorded conversations with Stewart are compiled into a moving portrait of this cooper, father of 13, farmer, logger, railroad man, and do-it-yourself interpreter of his rugged homeland. Because the ways Stewart tells his own stories are as important as the stories themselves, he is allowed to do most of the “talking” throughout the book. Through his own account of the people around him, Alex describes his rural life in the late 19th and 20th centuries through stories such as when he was bit by a rabid dog, when neighbor children begged for food, or how people gathered honey, made marbles, moonshine or furniture. Throughout his 94 years, Alex, who died in 1985, depended upon his own good sense to direct him and it led him through a rich and fascinating life.
Making our own cloth is really not that difficult, it’s just hard to make huge amounts of it. We currently overproduce textiles to a ridiculous degree.
Spinning enough thread or twine from nettles to keep my existing clothing in serviceable (if messy) repair for the rest of my life is actually very doable. Spinning enough to make myself some new clothing is probably harder, because I only have drop spindles, not a spinning wheel. Wool is warmer, and also much much easier to spin, so if I had access to that I wouldn’t worry about having enough clothing…. though realistically, barring any dramatic changes in size, the clothing I have today is probably sufficient to see me out, providing I keep it mended. I might have to make some socks and underwear at some stage, I guess.
Good shoes are more difficult. I get through gardening gloves like nobody’s
business, too. I would probably reserve hide
for gloves, boots and outerwear, if it came to it. Though there is probably something to be said for recycling car tyres into sandals and just wearing really thick socks with them; if we get to a point where I cannot purchase shoes at all, we aren’t going to be driving around much.