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Posted on January 6, 2025 | 107 Comments
Happy new year.
I’m pretty deep in book-writing mode at the moment, and therefore unlikely to have much to offer here for another couple of months. But I thought I’d put out an open comment post inviting readers to debate a few points and questions, which I will then shamelessly plunder as material for my book.
So … I’ve been a regular visitor at my wonderful local bookshop Hunting Raven recently, buying various forbidding non-fiction titles by way of background research for my own book. One of the staff asked jokingly if I ever just settled down with a good thriller – to which the answer is no, not really. The closest I’ve come lately to switching off from writing about a dark age future is reading dystopian climate-change novels. Partly because fiction seems to do a better job than social science.
Most recently, I’ve read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge. And so to my first question: any recommendations for other must-read climate novels?
**Spoiler alert ** Butler’s book, like a lot of dystopias, basically projects a civilizational breakdown scenario that strips people of almost everything they have and then puts a motley group of them together on the road to see how they fare. To which the answer in Butler’s book along with most others of this genre is ‘not too well’.
It’s plausible that in a rapid social collapse situation there’d be a lot of grim violence, but I’m not entirely convinced by Butler’s take – especially her view of extreme drug-addled violence directed by the worst-off of the have nots against everyone who’s a bit better off. I found Markley’s book more plausible in its emphasis on violence largely being shaped in the form of collective politics. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I can’t say I was a massive fan of his descriptive writing about extreme violence. There’s only so much I want to read about exactly what a bullet or a knife can do to a human body. Still, a lot of his political imaginings are very interesting. It’s a real doorstopper of a book, which very much held my attention, albeit alas with a hugely disappointing ending. Perhaps I’ll discuss it in another post, if anyone’s interested?
Anyway, it strikes me that there’s quite a modern, Hobbesian view at work in much of this cli-fi genre: without the modern state to hold things together, the argument runs, people naturally lapse into a brutal war of all against all, with a side of ‘eat the rich’ sentiment. I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Interested in any views!
A few other points. Amalgamating Butler’s and Markley’s books in terms of how individual US states or parts thereof fare, I’d suggest it goes something like this:
Southern California (for which, read LA) – not good
Northern California – not good, mostly because of the southern Californians heading there
Oregon, Washington – better, on account of managing to keep the Californians out
Kansas – not good, because of bad politics. But I want to know about the farming and the water!
Illinois (for which, read Chicago) – could be worse
Ohio – the best of a bad lot. Cleveland even gets to be the US capital. But oof! watch out for the ‘patriot’ militias
Eastern seaboard states – move inland folks … and even then, not great
New England – no information available. Views, anybody?
Florida – Hey, where did it go?
There are some regular commenters on this site who I know live in some of those places, so I’m especially interested in your thoughts.
Talking of US states, I’ve become slightly obsessed with Sporcle’s no outlines minefield quiz which I’ve been doing regularly to empty my mind between bouts of writing. My current personal best is all fifty states in 1 min 15 seconds. If writing this book achieves nothing else, it’s at least conferred in me an unerring feel for US political geography, which I’m sure will prove useful somehow.
Anyway, moving on, another question – how do you see future collapse scenarios working out in terms of race and racism? Butler’s book seems to say ‘pretty much the same as now’. Markley’s says ‘quite a lot worse than now’. Then there’s a book like Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello, suggesting things in the United States will turn into a race war that white folks will win as soon as the proverbial hits the fan.
Yet another question. I’ve come to the view that the present global economy is built on an unstable edifice of way too much footloose capital, and this alone is likely to prompt economic collapses and meltdowns. I’m not therefore too convinced by ideas like Modern Monetary Theory or neo-Keynesian stimulus packages. But I’m interested in all views and recommended readings – preferably short ones … no more blockbusters for me at this stage in the writing game.
Finally, going back to the US breakdown scenarios, I’m also interested in how these questions might pan out, with the relevant local adjustments, in Britain and mainland Europe. In Markley’s book, far-right racist parties control a lot of Europe for a while, although not so much in Britain. The best British cli-fi book I’ve read is Rosa Rankin Gee’s Dreamland, where a far-right party does take power. Also, don’t go to Margate.
And with those words of sagacious advice, I close this present post and will see you when I see you. But please do send me your answers to my various questions above and I will work them up into an elegant piece of long-form non-fiction.
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I think this is a good starting point
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/
I’m listened to The Deluge while milking the goats and working away in the market garden and can recommend.
Will add The Parable.. to the list.
I think that Dr Tim Morgan might have useful things to say about the economics of the next few years…
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Thanks
Hanno
Richard Murphy?
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
I got booted off Richard Murphy’s blog.
I got a bit frustrated with his arguments before then though.
I pointed out that “growth” could not be perpetual to which he replied “we don’t do degrowth here”!!!
I’m a believer in the MMT description of the present banking system but…………. it doesn’t work in an economy that is shrinking.
And shrink it must, as fossil fuels ARE the economy, and we have reached peak oil.
I wouldn’t be so hasty.. I know Hickel coauthored a piece in Ecological Economics which appeared to bridge the gap, but I haven’t dug into it deeply yet. Out of order for RM to rule out degrowth tho.
Kansas doesn’t get much rain and has severely overdrawn its aquifer and continues to do so. The eastern ~third of the state has more surface water, so it’s in better shape. Increasing heat and drought is only going to make their water situation worse though.
A bunch of topsoil has also washed away over the decades due to irresponsible plowing
I hugely enjoyed Claire North’s “Notes from a Burning Age” a few years ago, and it does deal with war and violence without, I think, being too explicitly gory; I’d say it’s more of a spy novel than a thriller, and fairly solidly into a low-energy solarpunk future.
Some of Margaret Killjoy’s stories might be cli-fi but I can’t remember, off the top of my head, which ones. Her recent novel The Sapling Cage is definitely in the realms of fantasy but does deal with issues of energy scarcity/density. It’s YA Crossover and accordingly simplistic in its portrayal of various approaches to governance and societal structures but I daresay you wouldn’t like the Tax Knights either; and it does go into issues around violence and self-defence. But Killjoy’s popular history podcast “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” more explicitly discusses, along the way, some common objections and responses to anarcho-socialism; her approach has influenced me a lot in the last few years.
If you haven’t read Ursula LeGuin’s classic “The Dispossessed” then you really must; it isn’t cli-fi, exactly, but it does succeed in asking some fairly serious questions about anarchist governance during resource scarcity.
I hear a lot of “when supply chains collapse people go feral and destroy one another, we’ll need to maintain law and order through force” from people who benefit from holding some power in the current regime. I hear a lot of “when disasters happen most people actually try to help one another” from anarchists who are trying to encourage pro-social behaviour. My instinct is that it’s somewhere between the two. My experience in working with people who are undergoing their own personal catastrophe is that the “people step up and help each other” model is closer to the truth than the other, but that constructive support of communities undergoing traumatic events requires more resources than simply meeting their material needs. Our soup kitchen guests are generally helpful and kind to one another, but they are also struggling, and some quite understandably have difficulty with emotional regulation; this very occasionally results in a “violent outburst”. In one, a guest.uprooted a rosebush; in another, a guest knocked over a paschal candle, which was broken. Those are the only two incidents I have heard about in five years, but I am not directly involved in the public-facing work of the soup kitchen on a week in, week out basis.
I note that during the earlier stages of the current SARS pandemic it was mutual aid groups doing most of the work of helping one another, and it was the state prematurely organising schemes that would “help businesses” (such as Eat Out to Help Out), wasting huge amounts of cash on inadequate PPE, and generally messing things up. Then eventually they told us to evaluate the risks for ourselves, and pretty much immediately took away any of the reasonable data we could use to do so.
The response after hurricane Helene in the US this past autumn also involved mutual aid groups and ordinary citizens doing what they could to help one another out in pretty grim situations. I think at one point a train of pack mules was involved.
But something that does concern me is that a lot of informal or voluntary mutual aid work, especially when undertaken in the face of immediate and urgent need, results in burnout. Energy descent combined with climate catastrophe and whatever economic disruption lies ahead will involve those short sharp shocks, but also quite a lot of long grinds. I wonder whether our current society is spiritually prepared for the long grinds. We in the wealthy West are generally bad at being inconvenienced or encountering discomfort, and while I am not in the “endure pain to make yourself stronger” camp, I do think there are a lot of people who need building up if they are going to endure hardship.
I’m white and so in some ways probably not the best person to comment on how racism fits into all of this, regardless of my best intentions, but I will say that white supremacy is, sadly, alive and well. Perhaps it isn’t surprising in an economic system where so many people are treated as objects that we so easily objectify one another. I can’t imagine this not interacting with What Happens Next, and I feel like there’s not much for it except to decide to be better than that. My understanding of racism is as a fear-of-other thing, and there’s certainly plenty of that rhetoric in the mainstream media these days, along with a sort of “eugenics lite” attitude which proposes that only the fit should survive in a world of constrained resources (ignoring the work of biologists who have pointed out that group selection is a thing: that is, groups of animals that cooperate with one another have better survival rates than those who do not, so individual “survival of the fittest” narratives are often bunk as well as endorsing social murder. Lots of this around clinically vulnerable people and COVID, sigh.) Walter Bruggemann has written on the theology of the scapegoat — I can’t remember which of his many books — but it might be worth having a sift through. (And his “Finally Comes the Poet” is excellent anyway and you should read it.)
Regarding individual US states, it’s probably worth looking at which areas have lots of Amish, and which have lots of Mormons, and which still have indigenous nations living in a way where they can practice both their traditional subsistence skills and tribal governance systems. I’d say similar for Canada. It might be interesting to think about how much of this is due to geology and how much is due to historic resistance to colonialism. If we’re going to lose cars and we can’t rebuild the railways then presumably river transport gets a whole lot more important. If we’re going to keep having storms, river transport gets a whole lot more dicey. And of course some of the rivers that used to be important for transport have now been dammed for hydro.
In Europe it’s worth looking at the geology too… are the cantons of Switzerland a better governance model generally, or only in the mountains? What is it about the Basque regions that has enabled them to basically stay Basque? What are the contrasts and connections between, say, Catalan or Scottish nationalism movements and UKIP/Reform/whatever Farage is up to next?
And it’s worth looking at historic trade routes. There was that huge Bridgewater canal breach (near Manchester) on New Year’s Day — see https://youtu.be/yP5-IzWTQ44?si=EbTN4d3rMgnlB_5e for a boat-dweller’s perspective on the whole thing and some pretty good drone footage, and maybe don’t live in a floodplain if you can help it. The Hanseatic League was a powerful geopolitical force in its day, and we hear almost nothing of it now. Further south, my impression is that the Mediterranean is important for shipping even now, but this seems like it might become more prominent.
Maybe there is something to be said for the confusion of order with peace, here. Violent regimes can be quite orderly but that doesn’t make them.peaceful.
Reading Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield right now…and there are definitely many real world examples of people coming together around mutual aid orgs during crises. The “law of the jungle” view of the future is definitely not a given.
One key point I’m noticing is that these mutual aid orgs sprung out of previously existing connections forged by activists during another (related) fight. In Greece after the Crisis, and New York after Sandy, anti-austerity activist networks reactivated to provide material support to eachother.
Shows the benefits of activism may go beyond whether the cause wins or loses, but sustaining energy for this kind of cooperation is difficult, networks fade fast.
Activist burnout is definitely an issue. It’s certainly something we think about a lot at church (where we’ve been doing forms of mutual aid for a long long time, as well as less helpful “aid”, sigh.)
Aside from reading the reviews I’ve steered clear of eco-doom fiction as eco-doom seems to be the cloud that engulfs us any way, and life is thriller enough for me.
That said, you might want to consider this title, which walks a different path than the kind of descent into degraded, lawless barbarism that most cli-fi books seem tread:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/02/under-the-eye-of-the-big-bird-by-hiromi-kawakami-review-when-humans-dont-come-first
It’s probably more sci-fi than cli-fi per se, but with all this talk of Smart Dust fogs, cyborg soldiers and genetically-modified low-methane cows, I’m sure it will provide fertile ground for new nightmares you may not have considered.
From the review:
“the novel’s real concern is not with the particularities of the worlds it depicts, but with the ways in which human nature and society shift and alter as our bodies and minds change.”
And:
“In Narcissi, cloning blurs the notion of individuality in ways that challenge grammar (“We turned fifteen, and the shortest me quickly grew taller”); in other stories people learn to enter and inhabit the minds of others, with catastrophic results.”
And finally
“In its final stages, Under the Eye of the Big Bird bends back on itself, suggesting that this far-flung future may also be the past, or at least that the ending it conjures may in fact be a new beginning. As it does so it offers a powerful corrective to the assumption of human primacy, instead reminding us that we are not the endpoint in the process of evolution, but simply one link in a much longer chain.”
There – saved you from reading the review!
Back to ancient violence and humans in situations that put them in an ineluctable drift towards barbarism, while The Road always gets mentioned, if you haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West’, then I think it’s worth a shot, though as it’s a blockbuster you might want to dip in after you’ve finished your current work and are soaking up the sun on the back of the royalties on a hot and isolated, curiously unpolluted beach somewhere:)
On the racism question, Nate Hagens’ recent talk with Jeremy Grantham (How the toxicity crisis could cause the next economic crash) touched on declining birth rates’ impact on capitalism-as-usual, wherein Grantham made the point that anti-immigration countries that often simultaneously encourage their own citizens to have more babies, may soon, Grantham forecasts, face a situation whereby they’ll be glad to pay migrants to enter their workforce just to keep their national economies afloat. In a country with a govt. that unceasingly depicts immigrants as the barbarians at the gate while offering money for housing and seven-seater cars to couples – heterosexual, mind you – willing to have at least three babies, I thought Grantham’s was an interesting and plausible near-term forecast.
Simon H
I guess stories about people biting chunks out of eachother rather than people getting on and cooperating with eachother, are better sellers.
After all, people seem to like to watch TV dramas about serial killers (of mainly women or children) as a form of entertainment. I’ve never understood the appeal?????
So, I don’t really bother with cli-fi dystopian “porn”. I’m not convinced it’s helpful for predicting the future.
Having said all that………. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was a chilling tale. But on reflection, I decided that it was an unrealistic premise.
Violence is certainly front and centre glorified, in western media at least, from the get-go – think of the battles of Tom and Jerry, Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, goodies and baddies – and for all ages that does seem to be the main course, with little nuance beyond ‘good’ battling ‘evil’. Bloody shame, especially when you try to steer your kids’ consumption in more interesting and thought-provoking ways. But pulp has its place at the table, for better and for worse, and suspected insidious affects aside I wouldn’t dismiss the ability of people at any age to see straight through it. Example, my experience of kids who enjoy the antics of John “Get off yer horse and drink yer milk” Wayne is that they enjoy it precisely because his character is larger-than-life ridiculous. There’s a laughable side to pretty much everything, thank god.
While I’m not sure I’d re-read The Road or Blood Meridian again (though I might if in some dystopian future that’s all I find lying around), at the time they spoke to me and I could slip into those written worlds quite (un)easily, whereas my wife says she can’t abide that lack of quotation marks in McCarthy.
I mention Blood Meridian because it speaks of older, documented (to us dystopic… who decides?) violence, notably scalping and similar ‘trophy taking’ that humans have engaged in through time immemorial. The uneasy question there is, when push really comes to shove, are we somehow now above all that? The uneasy answer is, though hard to get your head around so to speak, of course we are not.
(Slight aside having tandemed through 17 contiguous US states from Vermont to California: cities’ motorists were often rough, rowdy and prone to verbally ganging up on us, rather like a pack of dogs, so to be avoided on a bike, though we only took that lesson to heart after Memphis; behaviour from other road users on minor country roads, though usually deserted, could also give you the heebie-jeebies that you’re not from around those parts, are you boy? My conclusion here is that rubbing shoulders with our black, white, whatever skin-tone brothers and sisters won’t pose as big a problem as ‘the other,’ the incomer, the out of towners who enter any community, especially one trying to get on its feet, i.e. not racism but xenophobia. Maybe this also goes back to our culture, raising young to fear strangers?
Regarding The Road, the bit that stays most vividly in my memory is when the father and son chance upon a deserted home that happens to have a stash of tinned food and a bottle of Coca-Cola down root cellar, which on reflection puts me in mind of Joe Clarkson’s place on Hawaii, with its working off-grid set-up, stash of replacement PV panels, tools and hearty soil, or for that matter any such place that might offer a gift to those to come. So even in the most dystopian schlock horror the reader can probably draw some pointers for taking the fire forward. That said, I should probably plump for Bonsall’s Through the Eyes of a Stranger next, even though the title is unnervingly similar to Charles Manson’s song Through the Eyes of a Dreamer.
I haven’t read it (yet), but Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice sounds interesting.
Here’s a review: https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2419200.html
Also, I’ve been in a conversation elsewhere about the relative merits of using fossil fuels for different use cases: clearly it’s one thing to use diesel to do landscaping (i.e. terraforming) to construct a small farm system such that in future it will be workable with human-scale labour rather than machine-scale, and another thing to use diesel for farm chores with the expectation that diesel and the tools it runs will always be around to use, and yet another to use diesel in the manufacture and transport of fripperies that nobody needs (the sarcastic example given was “inflatable BBQs” and it illustrates very well the over-production of late stage neoliberal capitalism).
Of course, the conversation devolved into general ways of approaching and dealing with All This, and I think two points from that discussion may be salient here:
1) The potential effects of any of my actions are infinite, because time is infinite. My ability to model and predict the effects of my actions is finite, because I’m a human being with a brain that evolved in the context of modelling complex social interactions in groups of a certain size and I only have so much porridge in between my ears to do it with. This means there will always be guesswork and there will alwyas be compromises. Additionally, consequences of my actions will vary hugely by context: digging a well in a landscape with a high water table is very different from one in an arid area, ditto tree planting and tillage and so on and so forth.
Given these limitations, it is easy to get overwhelmed and bogged down in thinking about what to do next. One way to handle that tendency is to work out some core principles for shorter-term objectives that seem reasonably likely, and stick to them. So: I don’t know where I will be living in ten years, and I don’t kno what global supply chains will look like in ten years, but I know that if I’m still alive in ten years I will want to eat food; I will want to drink water; I will want to have good and mutually supportive relationships with the people around me; I will want to know I have done my best not to make things worse. So it behooves me to learn to grow the food I like to eat (or learn to like to eat the food I grow), to learn a bit about how to source and treat water to make it (relatively) safe for human consumption, and to invest in relationships with people who are likely to come with me if I move as well as building the skill of getting to know and live well alongside my neighbours., and to do this without relying too much on the worst of the fossil shortcuts: single-use plastics, fossil-based fertilisers, and industrial poisons.
That’s a lot for anyone to try to focus on while also surviving the current system, but the good thing about it is that any progress in these areas is better than nothing. Some food is better than none; some clean water is better than none; having some friends is better than none; using less plastic is better than using more, and so on. I lean generalist but it’s worth pointing out that not every single person has to choose food as the thing they know they’ll need. There are people who know far more than I do, and have way more experience than I do, at building shelters out of natural, truly renewable materials. I’m sure I’ll be glad of that if I’m in a situation where I need to stay warm and dry. I’m okay at mending and I can spin a bit, knit a bit, crochet a bit, weave a bit — but someone who isn’t me is out there, learning to make entire suits of clothing starting with the sheep/nettle/flax/whatever. We don’t need everyone to make cloth any more than we need everyone to manage woodlots or everyone to grow food or facilitate pastoral listening or compose music. We probably do need everyone to pick some kind of work that is locally useful, even at a small, “hobby” scale, and get reasonably good at it.
2) There is a lot of funding going toward industrial research which seeks particular technological solutions to problems. But innovation at its heart doesn’t come only from naming a highly-specific outcome, trying to predict exactly how to get there, and then doing that. Innovation comes from creative experimentation; from trying stuff just to see what happens; from play. Even the highly-planned industrial research required someone to think “I wonder what happens if we do this?” and then try it and observe the consequences. It often looks like One Weird Trick For Putting Electricity Through A Wire To Get Light And/Or Heat (using an incandescent lightbulb as an example), but it’s not One Weird Trick, it’s actually the result of tens of thousands of iterations of “hey, what if….?” and finding that the answer to most of them is “…well, nothing…” and coming back the next day to try again, to play around some more. This innovation, this play, is part of what makes us human, and I think perhaps it is part of why people recoil so much at anti-technosolutionist ideas (though there are lots of other reasons too). Personally I have no objections per se to finding and using technology to solve problems: an axe, a pencil, fire and wheels are all “technology”, after all. One of the biggest issues with the techno-solutionism might be that of finding something that works in one context, and then trying to get funding for applying it to all contexts: finding an interesting technique, and either believing that it is One Weird Trick, or grifting to get other people to believe it.
In order to play we need a certain amount of safety. We need to know that failure won’t destroy us. But all play does carry some risks. We are running out of time, for all the reasons you elucidated in ASFF — and that means big risks are, well, riskier. But there is little to be lost in a hundred thousand unassisted human-scale experiments in growing food and restoring waterways and producing textiles. Should those experiments, should that play, draw on the knowledge we already have, both scientific and more traditional? Yes, absolutely: if I were going to build a barn the very first thing I would do is look at the barns that are already standing. And I would be lying if I said that growing food with hand tools and minimal inputs always feels like play. Later today I’ll be moving compost around with a fork to make way for this year’s hotbeds, and I’m pretty sure that will feel like work, I’ve already been putting it off because it’s cold outside and I’m tired after a difficult week and a more difficult weekend.
But… my ability to seriously screw things up for the rest of the ecosystem using a fork is much more limited than it is if I use a rototiller or construct a concrete dam. And ultimately I grow food because I do enjoy it. I do get annoyed when people who tried to grow tomatoes once and found it too much like hard work write off my efforts as “a nice hobby” but it absolutely does count as play. I might even have found/created a new common bean variety without really trying to (I should write it up properly, but basically by working out what I was growing the year I saved the seed from, I think I have an F1 cross between ‘Cosse Violette’ and ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’ — I will be planting out the probably-F2 this year to see what I get, as well as the rest of my suspected F1 seeds; the yield from that one plant was quite a bit higher than from my other beans but that’s perhaps to be expected of an F1.) That doesn’t make it unimportant: rather, that it is play is part of what makes it so important.
And maybe part of how we shift to a better system includes spending more time playing around in the woods/the water/the prairies/whatever and less time Trying To Save The World.
—
I’m not quite sure how this all relates to violent social meltdown, after writing all that. Maybe street protests as a form of play are worth looking into.
I love this Kathryn. There is a book, I think it’s called Homoludens which argues that we are defined by play, rather than sense or ‘sapiens’. This idea challenges the notion that big brains, or computers, can ‘work everything out’, which is the ruling narrative. More than that however, is its everyday, everybody, enjoyment of living. I’m also with you on how much we can ever ‘save the world’ or ‘feed the world’ in Monbiot’s case, and that these small actions, only ever acknowledged by ourselves, plants and animals and a handful of others is the best, and more than enough.
The only way we will feed the world is by putting feeding our neighbours ahead of making a profit.
There’s no reason for this to be incompatible with play, though.
I totally agree, methods to govern the commons is how we learned to share the toys.
I read Braiding Sweetgrass recently. (As suggested to me by my daughter)
Really enjoyed it’s message. We can all make little steps.
Kathryn. I also agree that we all don’t need to “know it all”. We all have different skills to offer. What people really need to do is connect.
How is the composting coming along, John?
Hi Kathryn.
The composting experiment has been useful.
I’ve decided that mine isn’t big enough. It’s 900mm x 1000 x 1200mm.
Joseph Jenkins’ one in his book, is 2.5 times bigger in volume.
I think that the mass of mine isn’t big enough to keep the high temperatures for long periods.
I’ve read somewhere, that for the thermophilic decomposition to be effective, size matters. (Those plastic “composting” bins that you get in a garden centre aren’t big enough to get true composting going)
Any advice by commenters here, gratefully received!!!
I’m getting up to the high 40°c for a few days but then it starts to drop. (I’m after those pathogen killing temperatures. 50°c+ for at least 24 hours)
Will try and negotiate a bigger bin for the garden with my partner for the spring. (Got to pick the right time to have the discussion. Difficult, when my true motives are a secret 🙂 ). Thinking of making the next one from stainless steel mesh. More expensive than pallets but future proof and a it might be a good investment whilst it’s still available (and whilst I can afford it!!!)
I think that the biochar works as a replacement for the sawdust in a composting toilet, which is good to know.
Upgrading my biochar retort to a stainless steel one. Hopefully going to get that finished this month.
@Kathryn
Just come across this video on a biochar retort.
It’s different to the ones I’ve been making but in some ways is simpler. Only needs one barrel. Mine needs two.
https://youtu.be/JIrgNosdRFE?si=U37vQGalmnIGvnVi
Manda Scott has written ‘Any Human Power’ a ‘thrutopian’ novel, haven’t managed to get onto to it yet.
We’re on the end of ‘Tombland’ that does a good job of depicting Kett’s Rebellion that was sparked by the promise of reparations for the enclosures being illegally and violently actioned in the Tudor period. It was similarly thought of as End Times, a great upheaval. The organisation of the rebellion was itself a rebuttal of the idea that ‘people’ could not govern themselves, but needed the aristocracy to ‘order’ them. The CJ Sanson novels are in general a meditation on the mindset of the aristocracy and the growing confidence of the people as the bible becomes readable and the revolutionary, or true reading, of the gospels becomes clear to all. The basis of the Common Wealth emerges here, and our present understanding of the world, however flawed and deluded, is founded in the brave failures of these attempts. Its a matter of how we acquiesce. I won’t be, will you? Building solidarity, and the reasons to do so will emerge, the question is with what.
It is to be of absolutely no doubt that the current aristocracy will use every lever at their disposal to maintain the elite control they believe they have. I’m not a fan of the Hemingway/Faulkner school of real manly fiction pedalled by the Road geezer, and find the whole thing laughable, but sadly it’s greatly admired as realistic and falls in lock step with the elite narrative. Its funny how it echoes the aristocratic narratives of about Kett’s rebels, the horror with which the ‘gentlemen’ viewed this self governance, and the violence with which they reacted to these fever dreams. I guess I’m saying we need to be careful of dreaming up these soulless futures, or giving credence to those that have (made money from it). I am mildly done with the whole edifice of canonised culture, ‘art and literature’, which has clearly not been on the side of the Earth. Saying that, ‘Ridley Walker’ is more my thing.
It will of course be messy and I think we will have to leave the false security of the professional managerial classes, the symbolic capitalist jobs in general, which have done a bad job of managing or defining what might be a good way to go. They could never describe or understand the emotional and spiritual nuances of our world anyway. The sting in the tail is will they?
The more we can draw people into the skills of provisioning from the land, the more chance we have to sever the false ties of status, race and religion.
Violent social meltdown is the bogeyman of the authoritarian structures enacting violent social meltdown.
If we do agree on the short, medium and long term of the social and physical world then it literally cannot get any worse (manly fantasies aside).
Chris, I share your skepticism towards Modern Money Theory and the notion that governments can create growth by creating money. I believe they are based on a misunderstanding of how the economy works and has its root cause on the increasing abstraction of economics. First land and labour were seen as the essential components (although land often just as “rent”. Then capital entered the game, but capital was initially tangible and real. After a while, capital got confused with “money” and money itself is now a commodity through the financialization of the economies.
I am deep into an own book project on the economic aspects of the ecology crisis and my tentative idea is that we need to look more into what economic growth really IS. My belief is that there is still a fundamental and strong link between nature and “the economy” and that the discussion about decoupling, ecological footprints etc. need to leave the statitical correlations and start to look at the value creation process and its materiality.
Alternatively, just skip economics and money as they are but abstractions….
It’s energy that is the “real” economy.
Money is just a claim on the material things that energy can bring into being.
It’s fossil fuels that created the modern world.
Before then, growth was virtually non existent and slavery (human energy) was the driver of civilizations.
I was lucky enough to meet Octavia Butler in London in 2001. She signed my copy of the sequel to Sower — Parable of the Talents.
Recommendations: I love the 1994 anthology ‘Future Primitive’ edited by Kim Stanley Robinson. This concerns what we might call ecological futures, with some cracking short stories. My favorite one is “Bears discover Fire” by Terry Bisson. Many of these stories are like visions as opposed to plans, but there’s a good if dated reading list at the back. I’d also recommend John Crowley’s Engine Summer. (His fantasies are my favorite books, but this is relevant to the topic). Most recently I’ve read John Lanchester’s young adult novel the Wall, about a huge wall around a post-sea level rise Britain.
On the subject of ecological SF, I’d recommend the non-fiction book Green Planets edited by Gerry Caravan for a series of relevant essays. There is also an excellent, comprehensive annotated bibliography of eco SF in the back.
Hmmmm .Well the US South west is a gonner when electricity stops , Arizona, NM and west TX all rely on pumps , water can be 500 foot deep , the towns / cities used to be nothing more than villages before electric pumps appeared so there will be mass exit as things get bad . ( in 1900 the population of Las Vegas was 19 ) .
The financial environment is as bad as the 1920’s accept there is no cheap oil to kick start it , the EU is vomiting suicide as its revenue earning corporations move overseas to where they find cheap energy at the moment , tax revenues across the EU are falling , “the honest sorcerer” and the” conscience of sheep ” are both good round ups of the European economies , the USA is in for a bout of economic constraint , the fed government wants to cut $ 2 trillion in spending for the simple reason they can no longer print their way to prosperity , the drill baby drill mantra is fantasy , there are few places left that can make any difference , its probably just a loss making endeavor the USA has peaked , perminantly .
Multiculturalism , well these cultures have rubbed along for over a 1000 years they never melded they fought long and hard for dominance IMHO that will continue with defeat to one side or the other , you can only have peace when BOTH sides want peace .
Well, I’ve read a bunch of this kind of future fiction, and there is definitely a broad range.
“Deluge” seemed technologically plausible, but I wasn’t so sure of the sociology/politics. I don’t remember the ending.
“Parable of the Sower” is powerful, and not really realistic about the drug dystopia, as you say, but it was written during the urban crack-cocaine era, which was a real thing.
“Notes from a Burning Age” I remember reading and liking, and don’t remember anything else.
“Moon of the Crusted Snow” dealt with the problem of intrusion by outsiders into isolated refuge communities.
John Crowley’s “Engine Summer” is one of my favorite books, but not technologically realistic about the future, I don’t think.
“Ridley Walker” is perfect, but probably not much help…
I’m with Joel about “…real manly fiction pedalled by the Road geezer, and find the whole thing laughable…”
Cormac McCarthy is for boys who grew up loving John Wayne, and still can’t figure out why he was ridiculous.
I liked Will Bonsall’s “Through the Eyes of a Stranger” as a model for a Small Farm Future that might work in New England, but I have no idea if history might bend such that it could actually happen.
My current favorite author in this vein is Premee Mohamed with “The Annual Migration of Clouds” and “We Speak Through the Mountain”. Both of which are suitably short.
Gunnar: “…a fundamental and strong link between nature and “the economy”…“ Yes. I agree with you about the unreality of MMT, but here in the US, much about our daily lives is unreal, so why should the “economy” have any grounding in anything tangible? For instance, my largest expenses are for insurance, taxes and telecommunications. How real is that?
But in a smaller society, it gets real fast. Material needs to be picked up and carried around. I think it’s useful to think about how a forest lives with our human economy. When we convert a tree to wealth, it ends up dead. And this is by far the major direction of the flow. Almost never does anything exit the economy and benefit the forest. The major exit from the economy is in the form of trash.
I’m actually a little bit optimistic about racism in the middle of the US. There is a long, and fairly well documented history of the upper classes consciously using racism to divide and rule the lower classes here. What I see on the streets among the people who are truly struggling, is that they don’t sort themselves by race, no matter the racist narratives that might be going around.
As for Kansas, yes, the majority of the state has never supported a sustainable fixed population, only the eastern quarter. Climate change will make that less likely. Rainfall is the main limit, but still, don’t build your house in the floodplain.
@Eric F
“When we convert a tree to wealth, it ends up dead.”
True, but………. things die in order for other things to live. Whether that is a plant or an animal.
Braiding Sweetgrass delves into the morality of taking from nature.
Exactly. So it all comes down to keeping our ‘economic’ scale at the appropriate level.
But we ARE nature. Or part of nature. If only we actually believed and acted as if. If we truly lived in the flow-cycle of nature, we would be wealthy enough, but much less able to hoard wealth to ourselves and press unequal advantage.
Maturity though, takes quite a while, I guess…
I did enjoy this short story, though I suspect it’s a bit inaccurate on the food front:
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/
Further thoughts on a dystopian future………….
If we are heading for a collapse, then the “wild west” bit of the collapse could be over in under a year!!!!
Fighting will only buy you so much time and it will be short lived. Eventually people are going to have to grow stuff.
Yep there is a military report that says if the grid collapsed in the USA they expect 90% mortality in the first year .
90% mortality within a year.
Sounds plausible.
If food production plummets due to a lack of fossil fuels, I’m not sure enough people will learn how to grow food quickly enough to fend off starvation.
90% mortality is the estimate of Caribbean and Central American deaths after the Spanish arrived. (Though for other reasons than a lack of food)
It’s happened before.
For collapse related fiction do not overlook Margaret Atwood’s Madd Adam trilogy – Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAdam
The rooftop gardeners were the ones that survived the bottleneck, I see them as akin to Chris’ small farm futures.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I see mentioned in the comments, yes! It makes you rethink what is an invasive species, what is an indigenous species.
Perhaps it can be said that the former is merely a highly successful species that tripped into an ecological space voided of diversity by human actions, the latter is merely who or what has taken root in the current space.
Oh look, humans, tripped into an ecological space voided of diversity by previous humans – are we not the ultimate invasive species?
I do agree with other comments though, that the violence depicted in collapse related fiction is overdone, history tells us that generally localised responses to disaster involve people just helping each other out. As Nate Hagens repeatedly says, we are a social animal, so are wired to co-operating within our small tribes.
I think the fear of this violence is used by corporate entities to prevent or reduce abilities of locals to assume control of their destinies. Because that diminishes the corporate entities power (and income streams).
Someone mentioned the Honest Sorcerer’s blog and Tim Watkins’ Consciousness of Sheep blog – both highly recommended.
Back when the kids were getting YA novels from the library, I was impressed by the realistic-seeming day-to-day scenarios in “Life As We Knew It”, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. This is global Disaster Fiction (Die-Fi?) about the aftermath of an asteroid knocking the moon closer to the Earth, causing tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, affecting the climate and food production, shutting down the grid of course, and resulting in increasing starvation, etc.
It doesn’t go in the direction of “people naturally lapse into a brutal war of all against all”. As I recall, the small town residents largely hunkered down while they could. There was some looting from the closed businesses, and black markets and bartering, but usually not predation from the occupied households until the last person living at a house died.
There were some interesting social situations around food. And starvation seemed gradual and often only a secondary cause of death, with people progressively reducing their self-imposed daily rations as their food stocks dwindled, making their weakened bodies more susceptible to death from illnesses such as influenza. Die-Fi indeed.
On books………
I really enjoyed Earth Abides by George R Stewart.
It’s not exactly cli-fi, more post-pan-fi, but has some interesting things to say on how people adjust post-modernity.
Predicting what a post collapse world may look like………one thing’s for sure, it will be localised.
People will be experiencing collapse locally. A person’s world will “shrink” considerably.
A place like the USA will cease to exist as an entity without fossil fuels to keep everyone connected.
Same goes for Somerset. What is happening in Minehead will be very different to what is happening in Frome. And neither place will really know what is going on in the other.
Geography will dictate what is possible and that is so variable from place to place.
What will Somerset look like when the water pumps are no longer draing The Levels????
Where am I going to get fresh water? What crops can I grow? What materials are there close by, to build shelters with? Sanitation? Who else will be near to me and what skills/knowledge will they have?
So many unanswerable questions.
Flexibility/adaptability will be key.
Lots of practical skills.
Lots of knowledge.
Lots of social skills.
Positive mindset.
Then there is the psychological effects of all the change……………..
For one alternative ecomodernist vision, check out ‘Finland’s 6G vision for 2030’ on yt – I guess a lot of it works through implanted nanotechnology, so it’s amusing the actors in this ad still wear glasses.
For where light gets dark, in my opinion, here’s an interesting short clip taken from a recent academic conference in Buffalo concerning available technology whereby light (read lasers) can be used to control the expression of specific genes, laser arrays to control neurons, and nanotech tools to create nanoscale in-body antennas to facilitate much of this. I advocate broadening the scope here to include dystopian non-fiction, even if at first the subject matter seems indistinguishable from magic.
https://rumble.com/v655u3m-371467426.html?e9s=src_v1_upp
Some really great comments here, thanks. And lots of good book recommendations. Some I’ve already read – in fact there’s even a blurb from one C. Smaje on Manda Scott’s book – but many I haven’t and will try to follow up. Though I regret I’ll only have a chance to look at a few before I’ve finished my book.
Actually, one problem I have is that I read too many books, which makes it harder to write them. To be a better writer I somehow need to learn how to both remember and forget what I’ve read.
I’m interested in furthering the discussion on modern monetary theory and its various ‘let’s pretend…’ or ‘the emperor has no clothes…’ endpoints.
Thanks to John B’s references to Richard Murphy and Nick Hanauer. Two people who IMO have a lot of smart things to say and a much better grasp of detail than me while at the same time being utterly deluded and with their heads deep in the sand.
Just to be clear, I don’t doubt that there may be pitchforks coming, but not always well directed ones, and rarely from the poorest of the poor.
I like the discussion on play. The Davids Graeber & Wengrow are quite good on play in human history – both farming and politics as forms of play. Violence can also be a form of play. Fun for the player but not usually for the played.
Also the related discussion on humour and the laughableness of John Wayne, Cormac MacCarthy etc. Political power never laughs but is laughable … until it isn’t. Nazism is both the most laughable and unlaughable politics I know.
Yes, agree that fear of violence in the absence of state power is often a tool of state power … as often is violence itself. It’s possible to create huge empires with premodern tech, usually through a mix of extreme exemplary violence (you can’t be violent everywhere but if you scare people enough you don’t have to be), co-opting local elites & (usually religious) legitimacy.
Though I guess there’s also the King’s Peace.
…so the question before us now is not whether it’s possible to assemble large low-tech empires (we know it is) but what happens when a large high-tech empire crumbles (we don’t know…)
On ‘scalping’ etc. I’m reminded of the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s writings about headhunters in the Philippines with whom he did research in the 1960s. Their practices had been repressed for their savagery, but in their view they merely represented the capriciousness of life, whereas they couldn’t understand the industrialised savagery of the Vietnam War
The advantage IMO of fiction & cli-fi is that at least it’s willing to venture into speculative collapse futures in ways that scholarship & non-fiction generally isn’t, but yes it’s often inevitably unconvincing in one way or another. But that’s okay in that it helps sharpen one’s own thinking?
In terms of how short-lived the collapse period is, that surely depends. I’d predict that some people will live in plenty while others in desperate want – pretty much as at present, only amplified. But I think it’s always good to ask where the food is coming from and who’s producing it, which a lot of cli-fi doesn’t do convincingly.
I love Eric’s ‘when we convert a tree to wealth it ends up dead’. I’ve found myself writing quite a bit about woodland management on my holding in the present book – something along the lines of ‘when we use a woodland as a source of necessary ongoing inputs some of the trees end up dead, some of them end up living longer than otherwise, and some new trees get planted’. Hence exactly the difference between capitalism and a living economy/planet?
I know that (relatively) low-tech empires have existed for a long time. I have some questions about this which I’m hoping others here might be able to answer, because I am sure no historian.
Is that a thing humans do in all contexts, or is it something that can arise only when there is some kind of availability of sufficient stored exogenous energy to give one group of people an advantage over another?
One of those forms of stored exogenous energy is grain. With enough stored grain you can feed an army; without it, your army isn’t going to fight for you any more. With enough grain you can get 20000 slaves to build a pyramid (or whatever); with enough energy, you can meet other needs (water, shelter, clothing) more easily, and keep a large enough stock to survive a siege or mount an attack. The form of energy we currently use most is fossil fuels, though we refer to our economy in terms of currency instead. Have there been wood-based empires? Not empires where people use a lot of wood, but empires where wood is the primary store of political power? Fish-based? Fruit-based? Water-based?
Secondly, do empires arise when grains/coal/whale oil/petrol/whatever energy sources exist, or do empires rely on growth in energy to maintain their control?
If empire relies on growth in energy to maintain control then we could see a situation where those who hold the most power continue to amass even more, and the rest of us become even more precarious, until the bottom falls out. What does the bottom falling out look like? I’m not sure, but it’s probably not good. Or we might arrive at some kind of political place where limits on inequality make degrowth tolerable, if unpleasant. Or the rich might eventually figure out that they can’t eat money and they can’t eat oil and maybe it’s time to learn how to do something else… but honestly when I start talking about that I veer into religion pretty fast. (He hath put down the mighty from their seat.)
If empire relies on stored energy, but not growth in production, a lot depends on whether we’ve messed the climate up too much for grain agriculture, or on whether there is some other form of energy (wood?) that can play a large enough role in political power for empires to exist.
If empire relies on growth in stored energy then all bets are off, I think.
Without large amounts of energy, other needs are harder to meet and other materials and services become very, very much more valuable. Water here is so very cheap that I don’t actually know what I pay for a litre that comes straight from my tap. The price of clean, treated tap water in a situation of energy scarcity would be much more even somewhere not experiencing water stress. Food, too, is much cheaper than it would be in a situation of energy scarcity, and while some of that is because we don’t pay the farmers anywhere near enough and we heavily discount the environmental damage of industrial monocrop farming, some of it is because fossil fuels are cheap enough to throw at the problem of producing grains in a more and more variable climate. It is much cheaper to send an email or a text message or write a blog comment than to pay a human or group of humans to move a physical piece of paper from London to Somerset, even with the energy of servers and data centres taken into account.
I think it’s difficult to predict what happens on a civilisation-wide scale in a sharp energy decline, but I’d be interested in historical examples of energy decline if anyone has any.
I maintain that despite this, or perhaps because of it, it’s a very good idea to start at the other end: how will I meet my basic needs and those of the people around me?
@Kathryn
Edo Japan (there I go again about Edo Japan) had an economy based on wood and charcoal.
I know it’s not an empire as such but……….. aren’t countries little empires? Japan had lots of civil wars before the Edo period “united” the country.
Cuba post 1990s, would be a modern example of a country suffering/coping with energy decline.
Sri Lanka, at present, is also going through the same, as it can’t afford to import as much oil as it’s infrastructure requires.
There was a Sri Lanka guy blogging on what’s happening there, but I can’t remember what the the blog is called.
@Kathryn
I also read somewhere that the time of Charles II was the most “global” that the world could get, without the use of fossil fuels.
Sailing ships, international commerce etc. But also slavery and exploitation.
I’m not sure how sustainable it was though?
Hi Chris —
On monetary theory, have you read Jem Bendell’s Breaking Together? There’s a chapter on both the money system and economy.
BTW new podcast just out with me talking about techno-fixes, manufactured food, agrarian localism etc here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/27K0Do9ESZoMTnVDDdHE24?si=627b00b135dd48a2&nd=1&dlsi=c59c78c92f6e4fbe
It might also be worth mentioning the idea of the ‘thrutopia’ as opposed to utopia or dystopia, coined I think by Rupert Read. In other words, how we get there. Or get somewhere.
This is a good example of MMT and how I see the financial economy working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHQCjFebIf8
It’s all a bit out of date though. As, without abundant (and ever increasing) fossil fuels, the economy, as we know it, crease to exist.
The basic argument (or one of them) is, why does a government need to “borrow” the very thing that it has a monopoly on creating? And, how does money get into the economy in the first place, for the government to borrow it back?
But money is useless, if the resources aren’t available to spend it on.
Equally, if you want to build a bridge and you have the architects, civil engineers, construction workers, materials and the know how, then the idea that you don’t have the money to build it is kinda silly.
The problem isn’t that we haven’t got the money. Governments can create as much money as it likes. The problem is that we don’t have the materials.
Bingo.
@Kathryn @John
Interesting questions Kathryn. I’d love to jump in but … other pressures. It can be useful to think about how political structures get driven by political relationships sui generis rather than necessarily being fuelled by material resources, at least in the first instance. For example, stored exogenous energy wouldn’t be the most elegant explanation for the Mongol empire, except perhaps via a convoluted argument about horses.
Same with the Vikings … who, bizarrely, are looming quite large in my present book project. Although eventually you get a self-reinforcing cycle in situations like that, based on waterborne trade and slavery.
Talking of which … John writes “It’s fossil fuels that created the modern world. Before then, growth was virtually non existent and slavery (human energy) was the driver of civilizations.” Partly agree & partly don’t. I wrote a post about this a while back. I’d argue that the modern world really was created by debt, seaborne trade & slavery. Slavery was largely missing from premodern Europe in the half-millennium preceding modernity, whereas it’s been a constant companion of capitalism & modernity. But I guess I can agree that ‘slavery was the driver of civilizations’ inasmuch as it’s been associated with imperia and centralized power structures – hence civilization isn’t always quite what it’s cracked up to be. The other side of this is that small-scale owner-occupied farming tends to be a lot more efficient and energy-amassing than large-scale slave systems… Hence the importance of thinking about politics, and not just energy.
On MMT, it does seem to rest on the notion of industrial undercapacity, and I don’t think that’s where we’re at – perhaps another way of making John’s point about shrinking economies. And problems with inflation … as Walter mentioned here recently, a lot of very difficult micromanagement. Also problems for countries without high monetary sovereignty – i.e. most outwith the OECD? I guess the giant state-led stimulus package involved doesn’t sit well with me politically … or ecologically.
What do you make of this article?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002318
Combining MMT with degrowth is trying to thread a very difficult needle economically, and even more so politically. Can’t say I’m convinced!
I am also not so convinced by MMT + degrowth, but these are quite comlex issues, I just wrote a piece on the decoupling debate which tries to give a bit more perspective on the issues. Still need some more homework on that though.
https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/decoupling-what
A side note, I just read the Unified Theory of Economic Growth by Oded Galor. Quite amazing how economist try to fit everything WITHIN economics. He manage to make a case that there is an opitmal genetic diversity for humans, it should not be too low as for Native Americans and not too high as for SS Africans. The optimal is ———the American, what a coincidence!
Hi again, I looked a bit more into the article by Olk et al. I fail to understand the link between MMT and most of the policies they propose, most of them can be implemented regardless of the money creation system. As they correctly point out it is the productive capacity of the economy -not money – that determines what can be done or not done. It seems to me that there are not so much new “investments” needed for a transition. It is rather reducing investments and redirecting those that are made. Most countries have an annual investment rate of around 20% of the GDP. That is more than enough to redirect most of the investments. For sure there are some major issues around energy, water and sewage systems which would require a lot of funding for a greener transition. But in a degrowth scenario substantially less is required than in a growth scenario. Maintaining social welfare on a lower but reasonable level in a degrowth scenario would also not need MMT.
I believe that degrowthers and MMT alike are not sufficiently versed in the realities of production. The suggestion that we could all work much less is based on the idea that you keep the current industrial society and just work less. But the current industrial society is based on a concept of efficiency which is also driving growth. If you take that away, things will not be the same. And as we both know a simpler way doesn’t mean less work. Less wage labour perhaps, but that is another story alltogether.
The problem with MMT or the debt based “money” that banks create as loans, only works if the economy is expanding.
It’s growth in the economy that allows for the payment of interest on a loan. Without those interest payments, banks stop functioning.
In a degrowth situation, as the material economy shrinks, the amount of money in the economy must also shrink. If not, runaway inflation will destroy the value/purchasing power of money.
So a government that creates then spends money into the economy, (MMT) will need to remove even more money (than it creates) via taxes.
All very authoritarian for those of a conspiracy persuasion.
The problem is that money is a means of exchange as well as a store of value.
In degrowth, the means of exchange will still be necessary, but the store of value will need to stop.
I can see a rationing coupons system becoming the norm. The basics of life being acquired through rationing books, with a limit on an individuals consumption just above the threshold of need.
But again……..very “central control” and against individual liberty.
On a local level, tally sticks might make a comeback 🙂
My (admittedly rudimentary) understanding of the Mongol empire is that it was more of a sort of federation than a top-down hierarchical thing, and that part of the reason for its success was indeed a period of relatively good weather for pasturing horses. Horses are quite an amazing way to get energy from grass if you have the expertise to work with them, but I agree that it’s a stretch to count them as stored exogenous energy. They do, however, require an ongoing energy investment.
So perhaps it’s worth thinking about whether a distributed/federated power structure that uses food energy can in fact work quite well, if it has sufficient technical prowess. I’m not sure how the Vikings might fit into that.
It is absolutely true that political power structures are, well, politically powerful. But an awful lot of empires seem to fall apart when there’s a change in material conditions, even if that change in material conditions was brought about by the politics of the time. I suppose the question is whether the powerful are powerful because they are inherently powerful or because they are willing and able to use their resources to control (or attempt to control) others in some way.
Where this gets interesting, I think, is the extent to which the potential to do this is enough to bring about compliance. I initially included a bunch of stuff in this comment that, on reflection, is more personal than I want to share in public, but suffice to say that I have abundant observed experience of someone not leaving an abusive spouse despite serious damage to their and their children’s wellbeing. For many victims and survivors of abuse, the stories their abusers tell them (about how hard it would be to leave, how incompetent they are, how the abusers would still find them and hurt them) seem true, despite material conditions.
So perhaps political power is partly a matter of the stories we are told (and repeat to one another) about How Things Must Be, or the trade-offs of compliance with power structures. Those trade-offs are real because the powers do command real material resources, do shape material reality; but where there are changes to the status quo of material reality, that can undermine existing power structures.
Further to this:
In an abusive family all may appear calm and peaceful to an outside observer. An abuser might not consider themselves violent, either, but rather may believe they “have to” hurt people in their family to maintain order or control.
When we talk about violent social meltdown it’s important to remember that the current social order is exploitative and abusive; violent, even. The poverty I see in my work at church is often a pretty direct result of violence, particularly when we are feeding asylum seekers. The cleaner at my church is doing a little better than the soup kitchen guests: she has a master’s degree, but fled the Ukraine with her family. The enclosures were not peaceful; the forest I try to walk in most days only escaped (further) enclosure because of massive public protest,including things like setting fires.
It is easy to get caught up in the threat to my own privilege and (modest) wealth posed by violent social disorder. I would like the fences at the allotment to continue to work. I would like not to be deported. I would like not to be targeted for my sexual orientation or my neurotype. I would like to continue to mostly be able to go about my life in relative physical safety, cycling around East London alone after dark, not worrying about my bank account contents just being gone one morning, and so on. Additionally, having experienced traumatic childhood abuse I am concerned that a sufficiently disorderly and violent social meltdown could traumatise or re-traumatise very many people at a time when capitalism has taken away many of our social mechanisms for mourning, healing and recovery. I also worry, with some justification, that violent revolution often leads to a bit of a “different boss, same shit” situation: the people who are charismatic and strategic enough to come out on top in a revolution aren’t always good people who will ensure that power is never wielded violently.
I don’t yet know what my responses are to this predicament, beyond what I’m already doing. But it’s important not to fall for the convenient lie that the current system is neutral, or that the violence inherent within it is somehow justified.
Slavery was largely missing from premodern Europe in the half-millennium preceding modernity,
Are we limiting this to chattel slavery? Is Rome not included in premodern Europe?
Slavery has a well deserved dark history. And I agree with most of the opinion expressed here concerning the value of slave labor to those capable of imposing slave holding throughout history. Indeed slavery still exists today – though with less societal acceptance. On a spectrum from chattel slave to totally independent freeperson there is also the indentured servant, the serf, and those in a debtors prison. Individual agency follows along this spectrum, so there is some wiggle room – but there is something in comparing a slave revolt to a labor strike.
Humans have a long history of abusing each other, and European history of all ages doesn’t seem exempt to me.
Where do you start to de grow ? which part of the ” economy ” is chosen , Germany seems to be closing down heavy industries , chemicals and car production , where the replacement of taxes will come from is the question , maybe the NGO’ s will loose funding first , it is certain that useless spending will have to cease . The same goes for the UK , a country that can’t make steel can’t make anything . hell I read this week Starmer want to build large numbers of houses yet the UK can’t make enough bricks or cement to build them without imports including the brick layers .
The USA is on the verge of austerity , aiming for $2 trillion from the budget , whole departments look like they are losing funding , there is huge duplication of departments , education for a start , every state has its own department they don’t need or want fed control . there are literally thousands of alphabet agencies thriving on federal gov
largesse .
MMT , I don’t understand , even Sweden tried it and gave up . imho its a backdoor way of trying to stimulate the economy .
The western world has borrowed heavily from the future to pay for today’s bills , without growth of at least 2% per year those bills can never be repaid , only thru inflation as the US is doing by printing money ( sic) to pay the interest on the debt is the USA hoping not to collapse .
@Diogenese10
MMT is an explanation of how governments finance actually works, not a suggestion of how it could.
“Where do you start to de grow ? ”
The first to go will be the discretionary sector (non essentials). Hospitality, pubs, hotels, restaurants, music venues/events etc. This is already happening.
There is far too much “money” in the economy for the available goods. So the financial system will crash/re-aline with the material economy. The value of shares, pension funds etc will drop.
As this process continues, things that we see as an essential at the moment, will become a “discretionary” such as owning a car. Hot water on demand. Eventually even electric lighting will become too expensive for most.
Yep and everyone involved will be unemployed , no taxes to pay unemployment benefits , the great depression on steroids . no government will stand and will be lucky to keep their heads . chaos !
Diogenes10
The MMT understanding of tax is that it doesn’t fund government spending directly. Tax removes/destroyes money from the economy which allows a government/treasury to create (and spend) more. Otherwise, without tax, you would get inflation.
Equally, the national debt, is really just a savings account.
The big (but not the only) problem the UK has, is that it can no longer meet it’s energy needs from within it’s own territory.
Back in the day, all the material requirements to start the Industrial Revolution could be found under the ground in the UK. Coal, iron, copper, tin etc.
Then we went abroad and appropriated other country’s resources.
This is no longer the case. We hit peak coal in 1912 and North Sea oil in the 1990’s.
We have to buy our oil on the international markets now.
But……what do we sell/export in return?
We no longer manufacture stuff competitively.
The City of London launders money. We have legacy tourism and we sell off the “family silver” (public utilities and alike) to foreign investors.
All to create a demand for ££££.
But these options are finite.
Once the demand starts to drop, then the £ becomes weaker. We then have to hand over more ££££ for a barrel of oil.
Once we can no longer afford to import oil, the economy unravels quickly.
The UK economy is on the brink and will tip over long before the effects of climate change take effect.
Its not only oil Its food . I remember the UK pound buying $5 , in my lifetime its lost $3.75 , the US dollar is no paragon of virtue either when Nixon took it off the gold standard it was worth around $18 a ounce , now its $2600 ish , when exporters decide they will not accept the UK sterling in payment the shtf . The $ used to be the currency of trade involved in 90% of all transactions now its below 60 % and falling . That is why BRICS is happening fewer countries want payment in dollars or pounds or the euro . no government has managed to print its way to prosperity ( or in Rome’s case replacing silver coins with copper ) Rome also taxed its farmers into oblivion , farmers greeted the barbarians that removed the grasping hand of Rome from
them . The question is who will replace the hand of Westminster ?
@Diogenes10
Food is probably THE most important energy source of all.
Sunlight turned into sugars.
I’ve been reading alot of Musa Al Garbi’s substack, his review of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was fun to read – it seems Orwell was an early critique of eco – socialist – modernity being pedalled back then. Orwell’s call for ‘Justice and liberation’ is echoed by Graebers call to ‘Care and Freedom’. Al Garbi’s project is a bracing and rigorous process of humility, not unlike your own, I can see why you got on to it. Thank you for the link.
One of insights that emerges is the act of humility itself, a question of ones limit of judgement and foregrounding the workaday issues – again he will be at home here on the SFF blog.
I think the problem with books like The Road is that they are the fantasies of old white men, where as the descendants of peoples who have actually experienced that kind of violent ending of worlds come up with “Braiding Sweet grass’ or ‘Sand Talk’. There is a something to be said for the power of imagination, on every other ‘future’ website it comes up like a bad penny. I’m with Kathryn as in there is a larger power that will unseat the mighty, and in this expansive sense, the nazis and all political violence is nothing.
To expand; there is a difference between the violence (of men) and the actions of the ‘natural world’, the power of which far out weighs the so called powers concocted by men.
We were watching ‘The Promise ‘ last night, the first Hollywood depiction I’ve seen of the Armenian genocide. I recommend it. Here we see a world descend into violent social meltdown with no apparent energy or economic levers, just good old religious nationalism. Whenever, Alice and I are faced with this obtuse violence by men (evil?) Alice is steadfast in her resolve, to resist and to die trying. That even if we and our children are to die, then so be it, this is inevitable. These grotesque ideologies are ultimately built on fear and they will come and go. Whatever is left, even if it is only billionaire bunkers, they will have to contend with the realities of provisioning themselves from the earth and building life sustaining relationships with fellow human and more than human life to do so.
It’s as if there is no escape from pro sociality for the violent psychopaths!
MMT is a description of how a fiat monetary system works (the one we have in most countries right now). It is not a set of policy recommendations. So it cannot be ‘a stimulus package’. @ChrisSmaje, which source says otherwise?
MMT-ers point out that the government, as a monopoly issuer of the currency, is not financially constrained. Therefore austerity policies being sold to the public by governments are often a false choice. As long as there are unutilized resources in the economy (like unemployed people), the government has the ability to hire them. It is true that if the population shrinks, and there is full employment, the economy runs too hot, and spending starts to drive up prices continuously, governments might have to increase taxes or run budget surpluses and remove spending power from the economy. Therefore a statement like ‘it doesn’t work in an economy that is shrinking.’ is not really applicable, it just requires governments to enact different policies.
I am a big believer strategies to increase community resilience and taking activities out of the monetary economy, like David Holmgren talks about in his RetroSuburbia work, but as long as we have governments that levy taxes on the population, we have deal with their money (or tax credits), and if we want a more equitable or sustainable economy we have to expose the politics for what they are, an unwillingness, rather than government saying it can’t spend because there is no more money.
I can recommend Warren Mosler’s short book: Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy
https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Seven-Deadly-Innocent-Frauds-of-Warren-Mosler.pdf
There is a free online lecture series coming up organized by Modern Money Lab out of Australia which I can recommend:
Economics of Sustainability lecture series
https://modernmoneylab.org.au/events/
Last year’s talks were all great, for example Joshua Farley’s presentation on Ecological Economics and MMT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ1ppkIUfq4
Thanks for that Chris. You’re right that ‘stimulus package’ was sloppy language on my part.
I’m no economist, but if we take MMT merely as a description of how monetary systems work (aren’t all monetary systems fiat systems ultimately?) then it seems to me bang on. But where you write “governments might have to increase taxes or run budget surpluses and remove spending power from the economy” then it surely does become a set of policy recommendations?
The crunch comes for me here: you write “a statement like ‘it doesn’t work in an economy that is shrinking.’ is not really applicable, it just requires governments to enact different policies”. Maybe, but I think wrapped up in that ‘remove spending power’ is the need for the economy to shrink massively in terms of the size and speed of material circulation, and stay shrunk. And that might ultimately involve the end of governments as such, and hence some different ways of construing money.
But I agree that “as long as we have governments that levy taxes on the population … we have to expose the politics for what they are, an unwillingness, rather than government saying it can’t spend because there is no more money”.
As I understand it, during times of a gold standard, the government was restricted to how much it could spend, based on how much gold it had. So this was not fiat currency, because the governments had promised a certain convertibility. Of course this was very often abandoned or suspended, but since 1971 we haven’t gone back to a gold standard.
What MMT-ers often say is that the understanding that the government’s checks can’t bounce and that government spends first and taxes second, increases the policy options. If inflation is caused by excess demand (e.g. people are spending too much money and are bidding up prices everywhere) and it is causing problems, then governments can decide if, when and how to remove this spending power. This is of course politics. The only policy proposal that MMT-ers make is that the government has the responsibility to create full employment. And since the government has unlimited tax credits, it can choose to hire all the unemployed and pay them a salary, if the private sector doesn’t want them. If you are living off the land and are self-sufficient, you may not need or want a job, but you would also not be considered unemployed.
I agree with you that we will inevitably end up reducing the amount and speed of material circulation, either by choice or accident. This is exactly what MMT-ers are trying to point out, what matters is the real resources (labour and materials). The money is just the unit of account (like centimeters). The goal should not be to shrink the economy in terms of money, but in terms of natural resources used. It’s not the amount of money in the economy that we should focus on, but whether it’s being spent and on what. If it just sits on some billionaire’s bank account and they don’t spend it, it doesn’t use resources.
In the film: Finding the Money, with Stephanie Kelton (which I highly recommend) she mentions the John Maynard Keynes book from 1940, titled ‘How to Pay for the War’. Which is mainly about how to minimize inflation. Policies include deferred spending, price caps, and rationing. Basically telling people to only buy what they need, in order to free up the resources for the war effort.
For me the concept of Victory gardens is also very interesting, as it was clear from the posters and communication around them, that in order to free up resources for the war effort people were encouraged to grow a big part of their own food. If we would cast that in sustainability or degrowth goals, the same policies could be encouraged, only this time the posters would say: ‘we need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground: grow a garden.’
https://www.offgridweb.com/survival/surviving-total-collapse-the-balkan-war/
Fiction is all well and good , Selco lived thru the Yugoslavia civil war survived and now teaches others how to survive a real SHTF collapse .
With respect to promoting MMT as a description of how economies function, the big problem is that it ignores the central fact of money creation: that governments do not have a monopoly on issuing their currencies. (They could do, but do not actually exercise it.) What they do have is a monopoly on guaranteeing the status of issued currency as legal tender for payment purposes. In most economies, commercial banks create something like 97% of the currency in circulation by making interest –bearing loans, a process confirmed by the Bank of England’s monetary analysis directorate in the BoE’s quarterly journal: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf. The article also asserts that most university teaching on this topic is erroneous.
This is not just a nerdish technicality, though it might well appear so until one looks further into it. The implications and consequences for everyone’s socioeconomic reality, probably for everyone’s ecological future, are huge, & go back a long way. It was pioneered in the 1690s when a newly formed private consortium called the Bank of England, (which was not nationalised until 1947), agreed to loan the English crown £1.2 million to defray military spending, & in return were granted the right to issue their own promissory (credit) notes as legal tender. It was in fact a licence to print money, & was such an evidently clever wheeze for the issuers that it spread internationally, kicking off a long historical process whereby private banks have increasingly created & charged interest on nations’ money supplies. The process is detailed in Michael Rowbotham’s classic Grip of Death, which focuses on the British experience & sterling, & Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt in relation to the US & the dollar.
It’s now the broad global standard, & has established ubiquitous debt, owed by the majority to a small minority, as the main (slave) driver of economic activity. Although it would take much more space to go into it at all thoroughly, one of the most significant consequences is that since indebtedness of one kind or another is structurally inevitable for most people, the only way to reduce your debt load is to offload it onto others, which entrenches competition & leads to a relentless search for maximum turnover – aggregated as the need for infinite growth. The money-as-systematic-debt mechanism is the basis of trickle-up economics, as distinct from the myth of trickle-down.
The centrality of debt in this account tallies with your suggestion, Chris, that debt along with maritime trade & slavery have been the makers of the modern world. Money created at will from nothing tangible, & issued as debt-bearing loans, could outfit merchant adventurers in their searches for extractable profits in far-flung lands, & would also impart extra reason to be ruthless about it, since failure would leave the adventurers in debt to the financiers. Although initial colonial capitalistic extraction, e.g.in Madeira & the Caribbean, predated the bank-created money method, it is arguable that the subsequent development of capitalism was to a considerable extent driven by the new financial technique.
Since MMT chooses to ignore bank creation of the money supply, & describes governments as operating a sovereign money system, it is forced into strange convolutions to explain how exactly they manage to direct the process by spending & borrowing. MMT advocates ignoring bond market pressures whilst retaining the need for government borrowing from bond markets. If what Joseph Huber has called “banks’ neo-feudal privileges of money creation” are recognised for what they are, there is the potential for bringing about a genuine sovereign money system, in which governments legislate to remove the banks’ privilege & actually generate the money supply, free from built-in debt at point of issue. It could utilise a universal basic income scheme as one way to introduce supply, in addition to public service provision, & utilise tax both to bring about further redistribution & to remove excess money if needed. Again, this is rather simplistically summarised, for reasons of space. Given the vast vested interests involved, there is no reason to regard this as particularly likely to be implemented, but it is entirely possible in principle & at least serves to clarify vision.
It seems to me that money created as debt functions as a locking mechanism, ensuring increasingly feudal levels of wealth appropriation by a few, & making a variety of socially & ecologically disastrous behaviours statistically certain. A different method of creating & distributing money would not be a silver bullet, but would make further changes at any rate possible. Of course, if you anticipate the breakdown of national governments it’s rather less relevant, but I suspect the aftermath of that would be a warlord version of neo-feudalism & not so much of an upsurge in local democracy, so I’ll look to monetary & other reforms in the first instance.
Thanks Chris H and Chris N for those comments on MMT – it’s fascinating stuff. If I have time I might try to write up a few notes and publish them on here in the hope you two and others might weigh in further … but I’m up against it at the moment! Greatly appreciate your input though.
Chris N mentioned author Ellen Brown, who has written much about public banks, which might be considered another local light in a dark age of global capitalism.
This past week she posted an article about the example of the Bank of North Dakota, “founded in 1919, when North Dakota *farmers* rose up against the powerful out-of-state banking-railroad-granary cartel that was unfairly foreclosing on their farms”, and today is “the only state-owned bank in the nation”, and has been called “the nation’s safest bank”.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
“North Dakota is staunchly conservative, having voted Republican in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. So how is it that the state boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation? Has it secretly gone socialist?
No. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) operates on the same principles as any capitalist bank, except that its profits and benefits serve the North Dakota public rather than private investors and executives. The BND provides a unique, innovative model, in which public ownership is leveraged to enhance the workings of the private sector. It invests in and supports private enterprise — local businesses, agriculture, and economic development – the core activities of a capitalist system where private property and enterprise are central. Across the country, small businesses are now failing at increasingly high rates, but that’s not true in North Dakota, which was rated by Forbes Magazine the best state in which to start a business in 2024.
The BND was founded in 1919, when North Dakota farmers rose up against the powerful out-of-state banking-railroad-granary cartel that was unfairly foreclosing on their farms. They formed the Non-Partisan League, won an election, and founded the state’s own bank and granary, both of which are still active today.”
https://ellenbrown.com/2025/01/15/beating-wall-street-at-its-own-game-the-bank-of-north-dakota-model/
A quote from the Ellen Brown article, about how banks create money, and how public banks can use this power:
“Like private banks, a publicly-owned bank has the ability to create money in the form of bank credit on its books, and it has access to very low interest rates. But the business model of *private* banks requires them to take advantage of these low rates to extract as much debt service as the market will bear for the benefit of the bank’s private investors. A *public* bank can pass low rates on to local residents and businesses. It can also recapture the interest on local government projects, making them substantially cheaper than when funded through the bond market. The BND’s profits belong to the citizens and are generated without taxation, lowering tax rates.”
https://ellenbrown.com/2025/01/15/beating-wall-street-at-its-own-game-the-bank-of-north-dakota-model/
The state owned bank is a good way to go, but current North Dakota economic success might have more to do with the large oil and gas production of the Bakken.
As with much wealth based on extraction, it is a mixed blessing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom
@Chris (S)
MMT and the murky world of central bank reserves is indeed a fascinating subject but………… It is a story of yesterday but not a story of tomorrow.
Whether it’s the BoE/Treasury or private banks that create money is irrelevant going forward.
Neither works in a degrowth situation. The total amount of money in the economy will constantly need to shrink as the economy of material “stuff” is constantly shrinking.
Central banks might be able to navigate this shrinkage, but private banks most certainly can’t. Interest bearing loans don’t work (on aggregate) in a contracting economy.
@Chris Smaje
However………if you want to go further down the MMT rabbit hole, this article is a good description of central bank reserves and how they function/relate/interact with private bank created money…………….and why it has been set up this way.
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/10/the-peoples-money-part-1.html
@Chris Smaje
The book Modernising Money by Andrew Jackson & Ben Dyson has a good chapter (chapter 1) on the history of banking and how we got to where we are now.
I’ve got a copy you could have, if you are interested.
Hi Chris N,
Banks are ‘agents of the government’, with which he means they have received the legal power to create money to serve public purpose. All banks, private or public, are dangerous because of this power and need to be strictly regulated. I believe more than they currently are.
MMT says that government is the monopoly issuer of the currency (whether politicians know it or not is another matter) as they tell the citizens what they have to do to get it. E.g. one soldier gets an annual salary of 50k. Taxes drive the demand for that currency. When the Euro-zone countries decided to switch to the Euro, from one day to the next all tax liabilities were in Euro, and all government salaries were in euro. And the new currency was valid. The Eurosystem governments bought the money supply (digital and cash). There was no more use for the banks to make new loans in Lira or Marks, as there were no more taxes payable in those currencies.
You write ‘the need for government borrowing from bond markets’.
Governments don’t need to borrow from the bond market, they choose to offer bonds for sale (again, whether they know it or not). During Covid much of the spending was not through bond issuing. In fact we could do without government bonds alltogether (it’s one of the proposals we degrowthers could advocate for, and really piss off the rich). Warren Mosler calls interest on bonds ‘basic income for people who already have money, in proportion to how much they already have’.
https://warrenmosler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/How-to-Deep-Six_Bin-Off-the-Financial-Sector-DRAFT.pdf
@Chris H
I agree with all that.
Tax is the real driver of money. It creates the demand for the currency.
Try paying your taxes in anything other than the national currency (or not paying it at all) and see where it gets you.
Tax is also a way of nudging the public into certain behaviours.
Increased taxes on diesel cars v reduced taxes on electric ones.
High taxes on cigarettes to “incentives” people to give up.
etc etc……..
Hi Chris H & John Adams,
MMT has to assert that banks are “agents of the government”, in order to support the (to my mind risible) proposition that governments currently run sovereign money systems. It is hard to see what real public – as distinct from oligarchical – purpose is served by allowing commercial banks to levy interest, in effect a hire charge, on almost all circulating money. When the euro came in, the relevant governments agreed to mandate use of the euro to replace francs, deutschmarks, etc., but did not in practice act as issuers: commercial banks continued to take the predominant role by switching the denomination of their loan accounts to euros.
I of course agree that governments don’t essentially need to offer bonds for sale, as long as they are prepared to take responsibility for creating the necessary money themselves, which in most circumstances they are not. They appear to be hypnotised by accepted theory based, as the Bank of England article pointed out, on fallacious premises. It’s certainly a good question why governments have historically been so intensely relaxed about borrowing at interest when they don’t fundamentally need to. One part of the answer may be that the individuals who have been in government have usually come from the social classes which have done rather nicely out of the wealth pyramid consequent upon the money-as-debt arrangement. Other possible parts of the answer would take too much space to go into here.
It’s also undeniable that quantities of circulating money should ideally correspond to the volume of exchanged goods and services. Reducing the quantities in a degrowth scenario would be entirely feasible, were a (genuine) agency of government to generate supply. Under the present dispensation, money created as interest-bearing loans does not remain in circulation indefinitely; as loan repayments are made, the principal is progressively cancelled out & disappears from the system, with only the interest remaining as increased bank capital. New loans are constantly needed to maintain a given level of supply. This keeps the banks in profitable business, (when they don’t get too clever by half with derivatives), & allows their profit calculations/lending decisions to determine fluctuations in supply – recessions or whatever, bust & boom for everyone else’s economy. Tax could fulfil the quantity regulation function, in a democratically accountable way, in a real sovereign money system.
In relation to arranging generation of central bank reserves, the evidence seems to be that the process is typically commercial bank-led. In the interests of maintaining system stability, reserves are frequently made available on demand to support commercial bank liquidity, rather than because the government cunningly & arcanely arranges it through bond sales: a theory which strangely mixes & matches endogenous & exogenous views of money.
Re John Adams’ comment, I’d say that tax is only one driver of money. The primary driver is that individuals & businesses find themselves in an already totally monetised set of economic relationships, which they cannot opt out of, the result of millenia of economic history. Admittedly, that may have started with temple taxes in the fertile crescent. Developing from David Graeber’s account in “Debt, the First 5,000 Years”, it looks as though money was originally, & has usually been since, a means for oligarchic accumulation. (Graeber elegantly demolishes Adam Smith’s theory of money as a natural development from barter.) We could, however, change that.
@Chris Noakes
Tax is key to a currency being universally accepted as the means of exchange.
If we all have to pay tax, and that tax is in £s. Then we all will accept £s as payment for goods and services, because we know that everyone else will also accept it.
I could print my own money and try and spend it into circulation, but no-one would accept it, as they would not be confident that someone else would accept it as payment.
The government’s ability to set taxes in £s creates the stability and demand for the currency.
Unfortunately I can’t demand taxes to be paid in my own printed money:(
On the flip side, while I cannot use them as currency, nobody tries to claim income tax on my potatoes…
The trick is to earn enough currency to meet your tax obligations and make some contributions to local economies while not being so dependent on that currency that you starve if you lose your job. It’s not an easy thing to do, though.
@Kathryn
Keep your potatoes secret. Keep them safe 🙂 !!!!!
Currency/money is a useful means of exchange between strangers who may never meet again. Tax creating the “trust/demand” in the currency.
The exchange of money also allows for the “contract” to be closed/finalised. Both parties can walk away.
Relationships of credit and debt, such as tally sticks, means an ongoing commitment from both parties to eachother.
If however, you are exchanging with someone you deal with on a local level on a regular basis, then informal arrangements can be made. I have friends in various construction trades that swap time/hours of labour with eachother rather than exchanging money.
Your spuds could be exchanged for some plumbing work at a local level, but you might find it hard to get Pimlico Plumbing to come and fix a tap for potatoes.
(I would though, if I was local to you)
P.s. I’m sure you know all this already! I’m not trying to lecture, just adding more context.
Tax is not an irrelevant factor, & may even seal the deal, but what it’s relevant to is enforcement of the government mandate for a currency to be legal tender. It does not demonstrate anything one way or the other about who actually creates the money supply.
Hi Chris N,
I agree with you that most banks are currently doing things that they should not be allowed to do. But as public/private partnerships they get their banking license from the government. And if the regulator doesn’t like the management of a bank they are able to change it. Of course there is all sorts of interests going on there, but as long as we the public remain uniformed, we can’t do much to influence it. I would be interested on your opinion of Warren Mosler’s proposals for the banking system, as he used to run a (small) bank himself:
https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Proposals-for-the-Treasury.pdf
Yes it’s true that a lot of the money supply comes from money the banks create, but the banks can only create money when someone applies for a loan and if the bank believes the chance of repayment of the loan is 98%. If in a recession people start paying back loans, money disappears from the economy, and if banks don’t want to issue new loans because the risk of default is too high, then the only place the money can come from to stop this downward spiral is from the state.
Regarding interest, banks need to charge interest because some loans they make can go bad, and assessing risk is difficult. One could argue that with the closing of local banks estimating credit worthiness by banks has become worse, as bigger banks no longer know or care as much for the people & businesses they are making loans to. The interest rate they charge (say 2-3%) comes on top of the interest rate set by the central bank. So if the central bank would keep the interest rate at zero, we would see lower interest rates for bank loans. You can see this clearly in Japan, where the central bank has had a 0% interest rate policy for the last 30 years.
KiYou could look at government bonds as a savings account.
People are offered a fixed interest rate on a bond in exchange for not having access to their money for the lifetime of the bond.
Bit like having a fixed term savings account at a bank. Where you give up access to the money for a fixed term in return for a better interest rate.
Government bonds create stability in financial markets as the interest is guaranteed. Pension funds love them for just that reason.
They are the safest place to invest. Governments never miss an interest payment as they can create the money out of thin air to pay the interest.
grist for the book mill: Recently read “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony” It posits an evolution supercharger- that of cultural evolution that is robust and is passed on easily. I felt it answers a lot of questions on why our current mode of human hierarchy and in group out group behavior persists. Not hopeful for those that think we might get past violent empire cycles.
Any effort to create and preserve community and inter community norms will need to take this in to account.
The financial system is at the breaking point. MMT and other esoteric theories are beside the point. No amount of money can be exchanged for a resource that is not there. Dr. Tim Morgan over at Surplus Energy Economics does analysis of the interplay of the monetary economy and the real economy. That of energy, material, and actual real world production and consumption. reading his essays are helpful, but just read the introductory essay:
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/professional-area/
Essentially, the fuse is lit, we just don’t know how long it is. Maybe you already follow?
dystopia entertainment: Yes, climate change is the big, global symptom of overshoot, but collapse will occur much sooner than when the full impact of climate change is felt. Financial collapse will be first (unless the nukes fly).
While it has flaws, I found that “The Mandibles” painted a vivid picture of a sudden economic collapse and the quick impact on everyday living. Toilet paper!!!
It’s told from the point of view of a U.S. collapse, but these days, anyplace might be the first domino.
A fun, well written dystopia lite is “Termination Shock”. More directly dealing with potential reactions to climate change.
Thanks Steve & everyone else for recent comments. I’m butting too hard against my deadlines to be able to add much just now, but I just wanted to put something out about global financial crisis alluded to by Steve here, and also by Tim Morgan. I agree that’s likely to be the first prop to collapse. Morgan’s post lays out in general terms why that’s so (maybe he’s given more specific scenarios elsewhere? – I need to read him more…) but I’d be interested if anyone has more specific thoughts on how it might play out.
I think it’s worth considering a few things:
1) industrial mechanised monocrop fossil-driven cereal and pulse production is heavily over-financialised, so how does collapse of global finance affect cereal and pulse production? What are the knock-on effects of that?
My hunch is that it depends on exactly how collapse plays out, but one short answer is that it gets a lot harder to run a food bank or soup kitchen on cheap grains just at the point that a lot more people are thrust into having to decide between food and rent.
2) To my knowledge we haven’t discussed the role of insurance much yet here (apologies if I’m mistaken). I believe in the US there is an issue where getting a mortgage without insurance is impossible and there are areas where insurers just aren’t providing insurance — so cash buyers are buying the land fairly cheaply. This is not quite the same problem as enclosure of public land into private/corporate propertied control, but I think it does represent further consolidation of land access into the hands of the wealthy, and further transfer of land from being a means of sustenance through usufruct rights into being a store of value (possibly through rents in the form of carbon credits or similar, possibly just through buying it while it’s cheap and then waiting twenty years to sell it on.)
Economic “growth” past the sustainable capacity of the ecological base is not growth, it is a bubble. Economic “growth” that undermines the ecological base in the interests of increasing financial wealth is not growth, it is extraction. The remedy for both is healing of our relationships (with one other and with all Creation) and a re-integration of our ways of life into ecological cycles. If (and only if) we do those things, we can find out what the actual limits to growth (i.e. carrying capacity) might be. But if we do those things, we probably won’t care that much about financial growth.
3) Arguably one of the worst effects of the Reformation was the widespread legitimisation of usury. I am not suggesting, here, that the medieval system of only allowing an outcast class to charge interest on loans and having periodic violent scapegoating pogroms to let off steam would be any improvement. I believe we can do better than that. I’m not exactly sure what an economic system without usury might look like.
4) If the future is made up of what’s lying around when the present order collapses then we’d better figure some of this out fast, because the other thing that’s “lying around” at the moment is fascism. And the fascists are organised in a way the rest of us struggle with. It’s difficult not to despair in the face of this, even while I’m unsurprised. (My political surprise-o-meter started showing cracks sometime in the early teens, and broke beyond repair in 2016.)
5) Despite all of this gloom I have a good deal of hope. Our institutions are crumbling around us, it’s true. Most of my hope is connected to a sense of agency in the work I am able to do, and a sense that it’s still worth doing while the world burns. I cannot solve all problems, but I can help feed a person, I can help house a person, I can listen to someone who is nearly at the end of their rope and as a result of that listening and care it’s possible that they will also be able to help feed a person or help house a person or do some pastoral listening.
6) When you can’t buy fertiliser at any price it gets easier to stop using it. When you can’t buy pesticides at any price it gets easier to stop using them. I have never been able to afford driving lessons or a car, or at least not without taking work I would feel terrible about, and that particular set of trade-offs never made much sense to me. I am not saying that poverty is in and of itself a good thing (or that I am living in poverty now — I am certainly not, though my income is admittedly quite low). But in a society that is used to throwing money at problems, there is perhaps some creativity waiting to be unleashed when that won’t work any more.
I think many governments are slowly getting MMT and therefore another ‘global financial crisis is unlikely. COVID showed the shortest recession in recorded history, as governments abandoned (some of) their budgeting ideology. There will be countries that don’t get it and will keep on believing that austerity is the way to get to economic growth. If they don’t manage to bring down inequality in their societies, it will rather lead to more populism and social breakdown. I think it will be important for governments, national, local or even smaller communities to know how to issue a new currency, to manage the mix of public vs private activities, in order for them to deal with the climate shocks and resource limits. I could imagine if the UK keeps the current policy trajectory for much longer, Scotland will vote to leave and set up their own currency. They already have a plan for how to do it:
https://warrenmosler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Scotland-Presentation-Long.pdf
Hi Chris Holtslag, & thanks for soliciting my comments. Warren Mosler’s 2009 recommendations for the US banking & monetary system seem on the whole to be reasonable enough & in some cases distinctly radical, based on his starting assumptions. The trouble I have with them is that his initial premises are so partial as to be thoroughly misleading.
The notion of the banking system as a public-private partnership, which relieves the state of the burden of making assessments about creditworthiness for lending, does not withstand analysis. It assumes that lending will always be the primary requirement for economic activity, that there will inevitably be insufficient money available to most people & businesses to enable them to function otherwise. That state of affairs is much better explained as resulting from the fact that asymmetric indebtedness (of the majority to the banking industry) is inherent in the present system of money creation, but is not required for a monetary system to work. When almost all money in circulation is created by private banks with debt attached, people who use money are highly likely to need to take on bank loans in some form or another; in a true sovereign money system where an agency of government created the supply without debt at point of issue, that would not be so. Any public-private partnership here resides in the state’s historic collusion with commercial banks to enable this perverse method – perverse from the viewpoint of public good, if not from the perspective of the finance industry.
My suggestion is not that banks should be prevented from charging interest on loans, just that they should be limited to loaning funds from pre-existing deposits, which is obviously very far from the current practice. It should be the responsibility of an agency of accountable government to ensure that the supply of money in circulation is adequate to the volume of (sustainable!) economic exchanges. The booklet Sovereign Money, authored by Ben Dyson & others at the Positive Money organisation in a British context, is a very good start on the policy & legislative measures that would be needed.
Warren Mosler’s assertion that the 1929 crash followed from the failure of the Fed’s function as lender of last resort seems to me to be similarly partial. The Fed was created in 1913, after a highly secretive development process & a vote undertaken after most legislators had left Washington for the Christmas holidays, to support commercial banks by structurally entrenching their ability to expand their lending activities. It was not about the public interest, more about attempting to ensure that government money creation, such as Lincoln’s original greenbacks, could not be repeated. Woodrow Wilson, who signed the bill into law, later stated that doing so was his greatest regret. (Ellen Brown, writing in Global Research in 2008, has argued that the Fed is actually a private company, with private banks as its shareholders.) The requirement to adhere to the gold standard may have restricted lending options, but the more basic factor was a cowboy lending spree, 1920s casino capitalism, creating a vast share price bubble which burst. Not much learnt between then & 2008….or since?
Thanks for the ongoing MMT debate. I’m often slow to get my head around monetary matters, but I’m learning. Thanks also Kathryn for that comment. I hope to come back to some of your themes when the decks have cleared.
I’m interested in any comments on this critique of MMT by Joseph Huber: https://www.monetaryalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Huber-2019-MMT-Revisited.pdf
(Apologies if someone already posted this, my brain’s mush atm)
I found his critique to be rather incoherent and difficult to follow his logic. After reading it, I also did not really get what his main objections were.
He writes:
‘government incurring debt allegedly equals money creation’.
I don’t think MMT says this at all, so it’s a straw man argument. Mosler often says: ‘you can’t do a reserve drain, without a prior reserve add’. With this he means that the government spends first and issues bonds second. Stephanie Kelton has proposed to get rid of bonds altogether.
https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/it-turns-out-that-no-one-wants-to
Throughout the piece I sense the same fear of ‘endless’ or ‘too much’ money. He writes:
‘MMT acknowledges that limits to money creation exist due to possible inflationary implications. This, however, is treated as a rather theoretical consideration. Government expenditure is thought to
be non-inflationary …’
Besides being another straw man argument, this is I think the core of MMT: not the amount of money matters, the amount of stuff matters, and this is very much connected to inflation. I think MMT economists would say that of course government expenditure (as well as private expenditure) can be inflationary.
Huber seems to want to reform the financial and banking system. I think many of the progressive MMT economists like Kelton and Mosler would agree that they are currently parasitic to the real economy, and they have put forward proposals for their reform.
For must read climate novels I will second The Dispossessed. I would also include Always Coming Home, though whether it is even a novel is up for debate I suppose as part of it is an accompanying musical album. I would say that latter is probably about the best future we can expect, and even it might be a little optimistic about climate change.
I’ve gone back and forth about how the coming violence might look, including nearly posting a rant under a previous post here, but I don’t know if I’ve settled on an answer or if there is one. Partly after the actions of a certain Nintendo named person I noticed myself becoming briefly optimistic that violence can be directed upwards as well instead of down or sideways. For the immediate future, as I almost wrote a few months ago, I think the personal violence (is there truly any other kind? But here as meant vs state violence) will continue to be mostly incoherent until it can be coerced into a narrative by politics (and presumably become state directed). I can return to this when discussing Kansas. In terms of societal breakdown while it’s fascinating to imagine how much worse it can get, and I can imagine it getting so much worse, I am currently thinking that maybe it’s already happening? The US has a mass shooting every day and a school shooting every week on average, you just ignore them at this point it’s background unless it’s near you. Locally in the last week a man (neighbor?) a flew blocks over broke into a nearby house and drove around until he attracted enough cops to shoot him (This is not in a poor part of town). Several people have died in structure fires in cheap apartments this past year and in one investigation it was suggested that it was because residents were smoking in the outdoor staircase, never mind everything is made of cardboard and glue and still unaffordable. Traffic fatalities are continuing to climb, the route I have to navigate if I ride my bike to work transverses two of the most dangerous intersections in the city that average an accident every week between them. Maybe it’s too far to consider that a part of breakdown but if we’re considering that most action is the result of the systems we live under these must be counted. (Specifically the intersections are designed to be unsafe and nothing will be done about that). Then again maybe I’m falling into the trap of just pointing at bad things and pretending the sky is falling when it’s always been like this.
I don’t know that I would buy a future of violent drug addicts, at least I don’t really see that happening with the current homeless drug addicts, being able to cause violence seems to be associated with already having some form of power to be violent with.
I remain unsure on the Hobbesian nature of humans point. If humans were really as violent at the core as suggested then we would have torn ourselves to complete pieces already.
Briefly in regards to the monetary system, I think the current present problems as viewed through a monetary lenses are excessive financial (fictitious) capital accumulation. I don’t know if there’s an example of modern capital destruction aside from war? But from a personal perspective it’s all nonsense, my largest expense is rent and interest on a loan to acquire land not direct claims on any real resources (the shelter was built decades ago).
About Kansas. I think the sentiment expressed in regards to Kansas could be applied to many Plains or Midwestern States more broadly, are there any rural areas that are currently not on team red? But Kansas used to have it’s own sort of populism in the past so I don’t that’s precluded from happening again. As mentioned with violence I found it interesting to read that during Bleeding Kansas at the start several of the disputes started over land then turned into slavery arguments, though Jon Brown was always pretty clear god had called him to end slavery with violence. The current political map is dominated by blue cities along the Kansas river and the Wichita “metro” in the central-south along the Arkansas river one of the few red cities in the country. Rural areas completely dominate the state legislature but despite this have failed to halt the loss of population from rural cities or even out of the state. This includes the South East corner which, while slowly losing out on the corn belt to Nebraska, is still probably some of the most valuable farmland in the whole middle of the continent. The resource curse of extractive capitalism as it’s also one of the poorer parts of the state despite almost certainly being the best place in it for a small farm future.
This does lead to the localization aspect, asking if Kansas is a good place for climate breakdown, assuming some new politics can be salvaged, is about as good as asking whether viticulture makes sense in Cornwall by looking the Scottish Highlands. The eastern quarter of the state abuts the hardwood forests of the Mississippi valley with over 40 inches of rain while the western edges gets less than 10 inches and is probably considered desert for our purposes (and would be one but for the depleted Ogallala aquifer previously mentioned). To drive one end to the other is to begin in a world of green cottonwood, pecan, pawpaw. and oaks and end in a world of brown stubble. Where the forest stops and the grass begins has always been in flux and a matter of argument and fire but during the Dust Bowl the saying was reportedly “No god west of Salina”. This roughly coincides with the divide between humid and arid and around 30 inches of rainfall. This is about as far west as I would expect settled human agriculture in the future. Currently rainfall over the eastern US is increasing while the rest decreases and the dividing line runs pretty much right through Wichita. Unfortunately, a lot of that increase lately seems to be in winter when it is least needed so we may be looking at a shift to a more Mediterranean climate. However, being the plains frequent week long cold snaps every few years make it hard to make use of the milder winters so no olives for me yet alas. As an adaption I could imagine a shift from corn, to sorghum, to wheat (already quite prevalent but the winter wheat could be a good position to use the winter moisture), to sesame to try make better use of the water. I’m currently trying to expand my sorghum and sesame growing. The soils I have worked with are all some variation on clay. The good things I can say about it are it holds water and resists erosion. The bad things I can say about it are it holds water and I despair of working it with a horse plow. Though it’s a testament to our native prairie plants that they can still send roots over 6ft deep into it.
The cities on the Kanas River while overcrowded (though not by the standards of the modern metropolis to be sure!), will probably benefit from continued water trade as that river ends in the Missouri. The Arkansas is probably not useable for such purposes till much farther south of the state. The state as a whole is sparsely populated with 15 acres or so of arable land per person so provided the regular SFF problems of land redistribution and housing were solved there would be potential here. Now it’s not your productive rainforest land of South East England with a capacity to produce 10,000 lbs of biomass per acre, but in the drought this year I got about 3,000 lbs of hay/acre and a good year would see that double. So while the marginal yields of commercial farming may be in doubt I think the area should remain survivable for several more decades. (I assume readers of this blog understand the difference between commercial profit and actual food production for humans.)
In a completely fossil fuel free future I think my main concern would be firewood. As you go further west the trees retreat from the hills further down to just the riverbanks. Above the 30 in rainfall mark the trees will come up on their own and woody encroachment is currently a concern, the land has to be burned, grazed with goats, or mowed to keep the trees down. That said they’re not your stately trees of the eastern woodland forest but a lot of juniper and scraggly elms. Though I have observed a neglected area that managed to produce a nice collection of various oaks after decades. My own contribution to this has been to plant a few acres of former flood plain to Osage Orange, Cottonwood, and Mulberry and see if they’ll coppice.
As for past long term human occupation in the last decade it’s been established that at least one large (20,000 people?) pre-contact native city occupying the current site of Arkansas City existed. It appears to have been based around the trade of dried bison and pottery and, I haven’t seen this cited, but I would imagine corn growing on the river flood plains. Perhaps the future would have cattle and milk instead of bison in a similar role?
Hi bluejay
Thanks for this comment, there is quite a lot in it.
Regarding collapse, William Gibson wrote that the future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.
I’ve never been to Kansas. From your description I think coppice and pollard are a good way to go unless you have local indigenous people who are willing to teach you cultural burning practices (or perhaps engage in them as a service).
You might like to consider chestnut for coppice and pollard work, too, and hopniss as part of a horticultural agriculture.
I remind myself of that that quote when I think about the fact I have electricity and indoor plumbing and most people don’t and never will… but my day to day experience is based around being in a high energy, highly affluent society and so it’s hard to keep that perspective.
Unfortunately the native genocide was basically complete here. (A result of, or prerequisite for, the last land redistribution we would like to avoid in future land redistributions) Only 2% of the Kansas population is native and Kaw tribe is mostly in Oklahoma. Almost all land is privately held though there is 16,000 acre national park that does yearly burns as do the large ranches, I don’t know if the reservations burn. For my around 20 acres while burning is culturally appropriate I’m not sure of the logistics and I do want some scrub for either forage foods or to cover pollinator nectar gaps.
I did consider chestnut for coppice or food! Specifically I would have to use Chinese American hybrids but I read they’re not really tolerant of heavy clay soils that stay wet for extended periods? There is a farm a couple hours away that makes a go (such as it is) of chestnut nut cropping but they’re further north (cooler = less evaporation) get 6 inches of rain more and are on slightly better alluvial soils. So I haven’t committed to trying them on my site.
American Ground Nut was an odd one for me. I would have to try it again. I found it liked the shade, but I’m a bit short on shady spots that also have consistent moisture and don’t cycle through wet/dry in my climate.
One of the things about forest gardening you give up here is the productive understory. Aside from gooseberry I’ve found you’re much better deciding if you want to favor the trees, the shrubs or the grass/row crops in a certain spot and stick with that. We have the light for more layers but not the water I think. Though it’s frustrating to try and piece together what a healthy forest understory would look like here because though such communities would develop I don’t know of any examples in situ and I haven’t found conclusive research. We have a lot of invasive honey suckle in the role currently so clearly there’s a niche there, and poison ivy too which is a native I suppose.
I think one of the strengths of rotational coppicing (or rotational burning for that matter) is that you end up with patches of land at different stages of succession, such that some of them have an understory and some don’t. If you coppice adjacent patches sequentially then the wildlife don’t have too much trouble moving to the best habitat for them.
I really don’t have access to enough land to try it properly myself, though. I do have two hazel stools on one allotment and am establishing one on another, but that’s about as much as I can get away with, and I don’t have the resources to guerilla coppice elsewhere.
Also I think coppice and pollard don’t have to be limited to forest techniques in the sense of “dense woodland with lots of trees”; they can also be employed in maintaining e.g. oak savannah type landscapes which might be more appropriate for areas with lower rainfall.
My site plan includes adding bur oak. I’m trying to collect acorns from local trees and also want to bring in a few “improved” named varieties. Bur oak savannah overlaps with the tallgrass prairie ecosystem and might be more threatened. They’re fire resistant, can take occasionally flooding, and as one of the few trees that has a quasi-tap root they’re drought hardy too. They also make the best acorns for ease of collection and processing to flour (i.e. large, easy to crack and high in carbs instead of oil). It would break my heart to coppice them though.
@bluejay
Good luck with it!
I think most oaks live longer when coppiced or pollarded than they do when left to grow naturally; I’m not sure of the effect on nut production, but fire is another way to influence that (masting behaviour in oaks is partly related to the various weevils and worms that overwinter in fallen nuts but do not survive burning).
I think Bruce, who comments here sometimes, eats quite a lot of acorn and might have some advice on that front. (I can tell you already that he’ll recommend the Davebilt nutcracker!)
I’ll plop a comment here to try to respond to several posts in this thread.
climate roulette- I’m in the driftless area, Southwest Wisconsin. The area features old geology that didn’t get flattened by the last several rounds of glaciation, so has incised valleys, hard to go big with agriculture ( though some try!). So a good number of smallholders and fringe back to the landers.
The area has some places that would lend themselves to oak savannah, and others that fill in and maple predominates. As best they can tell, the original climax vegetation was a mottled mix of these two. In general, the info I’ve found would say this area will be a decent place for humans to hang on in the predicted future climate.
chestnuts- our land is mostly ridge top, and the soil is a bit heavy, but not clay. The trees don’t thrive, but do ok. I’m just starting to get a few nuts off the precocious ones, but a decent crop is a few years away. Hopefully I’ll live to see that. Ours are American x Chinese, some of the genetics that Mark Shepard has been working on.
We have made a big play with hazelnuts- indigenous, quick to start bearing compared to oak or chestnut, and more fat and protein than chestnut ( which will be the carbs in a future diet).
groundnuts- I need to add that to the mix. I have a lot of wooded, as well as edge, so there a lot of potential spots to get some established.
Osage Orange- I gave that a shot shortly after we bough this land, with the intent to provide hedge and coppiced firewood, but that project failed. A long story for later.
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2013/05/
I might try again.
Other plantings- We cut trails on contour through the brushy, slowly recovering wooded areas on our land, and are planting sugar maple in the interior, white oak at the edges where there is more sun. Simply speeding up the natural succession a bit. Also planted some mulberry, which have been very vigorous and precocious.
the “delicate situation”- One way to put it. Gives one pause as to whether my individual efforts toward a sustainable future may be affected. I mostly focus on what I can do here, and remember the serenity prayer, but for the first time in my life, I wrote letters to my congress reps this past week.
Understanding the underlying pressures and trends that are bringing out our worst brings little comfort.
MMT- I’ll repeat what I recently posted elsewhere on SFF, that monetary shenanigans won’t create more oil or metal ores. Governments and central banks can play games with goosing money flows, but the real economy is the real system to understand and deal with. Dr. Tim Morgan’s website covers this quite well. This post from his site covers his take on MMT.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/11/02/292-fake-it-till-you-break-it/
We will have a small farm future, but the path there is the question.
So it goes.
Osage orange coppices ok for me, but it is not nice to work with (very hard thorns), so I’d recommend protective goggles and stout gloves, even though I never bother. I read that it’s good wood for bow making, and it certainly is springy, and has a milky sap, though apparently offers the same calories as white oak when dried and used as firewood.
Glad to hear it! They’re aren’t enough people trying new things here for me to know what works much less what will in the future! The thorns were a downside as the thornless cultivator is quite expensive to procure. It makes better bows then yew if you can ever find a straight enough piece for it! It really recommends itself to me for both the high energy density and just how determined of a plant it is. I had one sapling in this last drought die, send up two new buds from the top mid summer just to have those die as well, only to try again this spring and send up a new 2ft shoot from the roots. I appears to have co-evolved with mastodon and relies on humans for it’s spread here so it won’t make too much of nuisance of itself. I’m hoping the mulberry can fill a similar role without the thorns and a little extra food.
Bluejay, thanks for that about Kansas and your other recent contributions on the site – really informative and helpful. Sorry I’m in book mode and don’t have the time to reply properly, but I appreciate your thougthful and detailed comments! …and same as ever for everyone else here …
I hope I didn’t oversell the odds here, south-central Kansas is about as far west and south as I think I would want to be given a completely free choice. But edges and margins are the future? Broadly we have the same amount of land as the island of Great Britain but you’re looking at feeding 22X the population (at the present). If we discount the entire western 2/3s of the state (and surely pastoralism would provide some calories) then we’re still up around 7X so long odds perhaps but doable.
In terms of US states my vote would probably be for western Oregon, Washington, (good rain and hydro power but watch out for the mega-earthquakes and the militias from the eastern half), and Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin. (purple states for what that’s worth, Iowa had a large grange presence historically and the other two should benefit from lake weather effects). I think Ohio and Illinois get more attention because they already have familiar metros and higher population so it’s easy to imagine a future there but with nicer weather, but if that’s the case Indiana should get thrown in as well.
If you’re looking to add a climate change overlay to your understanding of US geography ProPublica has a pretty good tool that I think was on resilience.org awhile ago:
https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
Make sure to select the high emissions scenario.
I could fault it some, for instance the focus on corn and soy to represent all agriculture yields when over-reliance on those is partly why we’re in this mess, and no model is perfect but hopefully it adds some texture to your idea of the US that gets lost just looking at political lines.
Of course, the current situation in much of the US is…. delicate.
(It was delicate before. Maybe it’s more obviously delicate now. I’m not sure most people had ‘richest man in the world does a coup’ on their bingo card. I remain concerned that the UK is next — Musk donating lots of money to Reform, and Labour doing nothing to fight the disillusionment with general politics that results in people voting that way… sigh.)
I hope everyone is doing okay, for some value of okay.
I might revive my response to newsflash 3, it got rather lengthy, but based on the US, Labour’s approach of doing nothing and not being the other guy doesn’t bode well…
I was also going to mention that current the US governing coalition could be viewed as uneasy alliance of conservative Christians who want a theocracy and see trump as appointed by god, and tech billionaires who see themselves as gods. I expected more ego clash before we got this this point though.
To feel better about the situation, well I guess musk has made the government more efficient. Instead of a long and complicated process, involving super-PACs, lobbyists, dumping money into local campaigns, burying opposition in lawsuits and running media empires billionaires will now be able to buy the government directly saving them a lot of paperwork.