The relocalization of the means by which people acquire stuff is an inevitable consequense of the energy descent we will soon be facing. As I've said before, it is to be a time to reassess the value of everything we currently possess and use on a daily or weekly basis in order to determine what is to be kept and what is to be chucked. People, by and large, value things differently. This is what the free market is supposed to do by allowing consumers the power to vote with their wallets. This is certain to be the case as the individual decisions are made to buy or not to buy. With this in mind, it is also necessary to point out that collective decisions are needed to guide or to even coerce some people into recognizing that there are, or can be, particular measures of quality. That is, these decisions are made within perameters determined by groups of people that, ideally, have some qualities in mind.
The impossible situation, by any measure, is the attempt to maintain the throw away consumer economy. The reigning values which define this way of life are disposability and convenience. What has brought this about, and why it has made sense for upwards of half a century, is that it's aim was financial efficiency above all else. To be sure, it was seen as an enhancement to people's quality of life but as the half century after it's implementation has passed, we can see the fatal errors in this way of thinking. These errors are visible in the costs that are now being borne and will continue to be borne by everyone as resource constraints enter the stage. This will mean that resource efficiency and conservation will trump financial efficiency and convenience.
Two qualities I would offer, as have many others, for us to embrace to guide our decisions as the old, high entropy economy falls to ruin are durability and resilience. Things that are durable last a long time. We must design the things we use with longevity in mind as it is a sure way to reduce the materials required for the manufacture of the same thing that wears out more quickly. A question we could ask is; How can I use this thing, a broom for example, for five times longer than I might have if I were to get a new one because I am sick of the color or it has worn out because the company which manufactured it used the cheapest materials avaiable. Durability is low entropy i.e., long-lasting. Fashion is the market of personal preference. This can be very easy to manipulate for the purpose of profit and drives our current throw-away system.
Resilience describes a system able to withstand shocks. Cars can have resilience but I'm talking about societal resilience. What has happened since the advent of the throw-away consumer society is that people have forgotten the basics of what people one hundred years ago generally understood. Primarily, it is the urban culture that is least resilient in this regard. The skills the inhabitants learn and that are useful in the urban environment are those most dependant on the system run on fossil fuels. Here, the complexity of channels would have value, rather than the complexity of scale that we see in a Wall Mart system. Efficiency would give way to redundancy so that folks could rely on multiple sources for goods and that surpluses in one area can relieve deficits in others.
I will explore these qualities of society further as I go to a discussion of ideas like steady state economics, no-growth societies and other like notions.
Great post.
ReplyDeleteI do understand the special vulnerability of cities to a resource-constrained future, but I wonder two things:
1. Cities have been around for a long time. What is different about cities today that makes them especially vulnerable to hard resource constraints?
2. To what extent does the high density of city dwellings mitigate the dependence of the average city dweller on fossil fuels?
Thanks, uh, Nessy, These are good questions that have a lot that goes into forming an adequate answer. There's a good podcast on Ecoshock radio about resilient cities and the scientific view of them. Click on the link and look for Dr. Bill Rees. "What if can do can't?" is the title. He'll refer to some visuals in the presentation but you can get along just fine without them.
ReplyDeleteOr click here:
http://www.ecoshock.org/DNcities.html
The biggest difference between industrial era cities and pre-industrial ones is just sheer size I think. Rome at it's biggest was only 1 million people and now that's podunk. The scale of the material resources needed to build, repair stuff, and to feed the inhabitants at the current per capita use in a modern large city requires mammoth trade systems that need the available cheap energy to function. Otherwise, I don't know if there's any other difference besides scale. It's just that the size of a particular city must conform to the available resource base. Rome had Egypt and Libya to feed itself. New York has flyover land.
Modern cities are also built for the automobile. This enables cities to be bigger but it also makes them especially vulnerable to fossil fuel constraints. The denser the city, the less of a problem this is. The per capita carbon footprint of a New Yorker is 1/3 that of a Kansan, which just means they use less energy. Tall structures are generally only possible because of electricity. Who wants to climb 100-odd stories to look at the view off the Empire State Building, or climb ten stories every day just to go home? Probably, going over six or seven stories in 18th century London wasn't very practical. So we're even more dense (physically, not mentally)than ever. That would mean a huge negative aspect to cities as we've constructed them over the last century in terms of their functionality without quite expensive things like elevators and public transport. So, yea, now you got me thinking. The design of the cities will have to change, especially in places like here in the Twin Cities which has about 2/3 of the people living in far-flung suburbs. These are the least practical arrangement to live in. I suspect they'll have to rethink that whole freeway-box store system. Even if you ride a bike it takes a long time to get a gallon of milk.
The last thing I can think of that's different about cities now is their placement. Because of the global system of trade, and the relative cheapness of it, cities don't have to rely on local ecology to support themselves. Places like Phoenix and Las Vegas would make no sense in a world before fossil fuels and air conditioning and 10,000 mile caesar salads. I should post some links on cities. But Bill Rees has very interesting ways to thik about cities. Another fellow is James Howard Kunstler.