Image above: part of ad by Bennett Chevrolet-Cadillac in Ontario, Canada. Note they were a Chevy-Olds dealership until Olds disappeared in 2004.
From http://www.bennettchevolds.com/en/info/promos/house.spy?categories=new,used,service,parts,bodyshop,specials
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years.
GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans.
The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM.
Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
ONE:
Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
TWO:
Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
THREE:
Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
FOUR:
Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
FIVE:
For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
SIX:
For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
SEVEN:
Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
EIGHT:
Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
NINE:
To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
One hundred years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long.
We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window along Highway One.
And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
see also:
Island Breath: The end of the affair 5/30/09
Island Breath: Wishes, Hopes and Fantasies 5/25/09
Goodbye, GM...
SUBHEAD: Michael Moore - Ten Steps Obama Should Take for the Future of GM
By Michael Moore on01 June 2009 in MichaelMoore.com
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
Image above: part of ad by Bennett Chevrolet-Cadillac in Ontario, Canada. Note they were a Chevy-Olds dealership until Olds disappeared in 2004.
From http://www.bennettchevolds.com/en/info/promos/house.spy?categories=new,used,service,parts,bodyshop,specials
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years.
GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans.
The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM.
Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
ONE:
Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
TWO:
Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
THREE:
Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
FOUR:
Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
FIVE:
For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
SIX:
For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
SEVEN:
Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
EIGHT:
Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
NINE:
To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
One hundred years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long.
We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window along Highway One.
And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
see also:
Island Breath: The end of the affair 5/30/09
Island Breath: Wishes, Hopes and Fantasies 5/25/09
Image above: part of ad by Bennett Chevrolet-Cadillac in Ontario, Canada. Note they were a Chevy-Olds dealership until Olds disappeared in 2004.
From http://www.bennettchevolds.com/en/info/promos/house.spy?categories=new,used,service,parts,bodyshop,specials
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years.
GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans.
The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM.
Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
ONE:
Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
TWO:
Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
THREE:
Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
FOUR:
Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
FIVE:
For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
SIX:
For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
SEVEN:
Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
EIGHT:
Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
NINE:
To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
One hundred years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long.
We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window along Highway One.
And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
see also:
Island Breath: The end of the affair 5/30/09
Island Breath: Wishes, Hopes and Fantasies 5/25/09
Tightrope Without a Net
SUBHEAD: We’re all vulnerable and the nets will be desperately needed.
By Sharon Astyk on 01 June 2009 in Casaubon's Book
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/01/on-a-tightrope-without-a-net
Image above: Painting by Mark Bryan. From http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/the_ballerina.html
The sum total of today’s news adds up to “the continuing story of the destruction of our protective safety nets.” GM’s bankruptcy is the lead, of course, one that constitutes an utter disaster for millions of people - unemployed workers who are unlikely to find new manufacturing jobs before their benefits run out, states swamped with benefits claims, elderly pensioners facing disaster, and the oridinary fall-out for towns, cities and states that will lead, later to deeper cuts of the nets that were designed to catch people when they fall.
Then there’s California - among its major cuts, California stands to cut the poison control hotline, benefits for the disabled, school funding, health care for working class people and children, access to state parks, and almost everything else you can imagine. The cuts will fall heavily on the backs of the elderly, the already poor, the disabled and children, as always - people with minimal political constituencies will bear the brunt of this.
And again, there’s more to come - California is already threatening to take money out of towns and cities - areas already hurting, already failing to sell municipal bonds. For the 47 states facing budget shortfalls, the trajectory is pretty clear - the federal government screws the states (by pouring its money into Wall Street, not helping people meet basic needs), the states sue the towns, and you get screwed all three ways - with fewer services, higher tax burdens and life on a tightrope without a net to catch you when you fall. California is the beginning, but not, unfortunately, the end.
So far, most of us have no idea what life without a net is like - what happens when the federal government can no longer subsidize the stripped unemployment funds? What happens in the cold parts of the country when low income heating programs are stripped? What happens to the elderly, the disabled and the sick? What happens as public resources are stripped, damaged and destroyed?
One thing I think it is important to observe is that we have chosen our present situation in large measure. As of this point, the US has actually spent four-trillion dollars on bailouts, almost all of it to large corporations, and committed another ten-billion. That money could have supported the people directly - now we are asking “how will we fund national health care?”
Well, we spent the money, folks - and not on you. If the concern was lending, the government could have loaned. If the concern was keeping auto workers working, the government could have provided work and enough income to get along, or incentives for them to make new businesses. No matter what your feelings about big government, we’ve got it - and at every level we could have spent less and done more without pouring money into the coffers of people who were skimming most of it for themselves - legalized skimming, but skimming nonetheless. It is the culmination of the insane “rising tide lifts all boats” notion under which globalization was born - if we just make the rich richer, maybe a tiny bit will leak down to those who aren’t rich. And as we keep finding, not much leaks down.
What’s facing us is a tidal wave of suffering - and the anger, and political conflict that accompanies it. The UN is warning that unrest is brewing all over the world will be desperately needed - the BBC reports that we’re facing massive repression, as human rights at all levels hit the backburners, and the anger that repressive and destructive governments agenda. The unrest that accompanies this worldwide may well change things beyond recognition.
The project for all of us is to maintain what we can, to meet needs that we can, and to triage our safety nets and provide what resources we can. That’s why I was so pleased to read about Rob Hopkins’ and Richard Heinberg’s nascent discussion of using Transition to provide some kind of resources for people dealing with the present crisis. I think that as a basic principle, we can’t talk about “addressing peak oil and climate change” unless we actually have something to offer the victims of peak oil and climate change - placing these events always-already in the future, as though we had time and leisure is, I think, alienating, and being unable to respond immediately to realities risks tarring adaptive movements as irrelevant. I keep saying it, and will keep saying it - the things that we need to prioritize in responding to our collective crisis are precisely the things that people already care about most - any movement that does not focus on the human priorities of meeting basic needs will not succeed.
At the neighborhood and community level, we need each other more than we ever have. The safety nets that are gone are going to have to be replaced with…us. In an essay I wrote a while back, I observed that the public safety nets were still holding, but that eventually they would crumble - and in many states, they are doing so now. What I wrote then now has to be put into practice,
“Think of poverty as a fall out a window. Right now, there is a layer of safety net that catches a majority of people, although by no means all. But what’s under those? What happens if the traditional nets break? We need those nets not only because protecting others from hunger, cold and suffering is the ethical thing to do, and not only because, as they say, the life you save may soon be your own, but because all of our personal security depends on our community security. In hard times, crime rates go up, and people get angry. Brooks is right to anticipate a movement of angry and frightened people, and when people are angry and frightened, we’re all vulnerable.
In a rational society, there are more layers to break your fall, and we’re going to need them. First, there are formal structures at the community level - if your town never needed a food pantry because people could drive to the neighboring city, now is the time to propose it at your church, school or other possible site. Think about ways you could adapt existing infrastructure - could the schools start distributing extra school lunches to the needy after the day is over? Could your school establish a backpack program, sending food home for the weekend with the neediest kids? Could you start a local gleaning program, or a senior lunch program? If you have these structures, but they are struggling, what can you do to reinforce them? Can you make another donation? Start a fund drive? What about setting up a bulletin-board system to bring families struggling to keep their homes together with people who need housing. There are a thousand good ideas - yours is probably one of them.
The next layer is the neighbor and community layer. I know we all worry about looking like busybodies, but now is the time to start looking in on your neighbors, and offering to help. The way to do this is to talk to people, even before it looks like they need anything. That way you’ll know if your elderly neighbor can no longer afford to drive to get her medication and you can offer to pick it up, or if a neighbor is out of work and might be glad to get a day’s pay helping a friend of yours winterize her house.
Being neighborly, and also gentle and nonjudgemental is how you are going to know if someone in your neighborhood has no food in the pantry. For every person who signs up for aid and accepts help, there are several who will rather go hungry than take institutional charity - but who will gladly come over and share a meal with their neighbor, or do you a favor and take that loaf of bread that you’ve got no where to store.
One of the most important things we can do is when we do spend money these days, spend it in our communities if at all possible. I know most of us aren’t going to be buying a lot of holiday gifts, but every dollar you can pass on to a neighbor, a local farmer or a local business that enriches your community is one that makes everyone more secure. So maybe hire the out of work neighbor to plant and tend a garden for your sister, or give your best friend a farmstand gift certificate.
Finally, there’s family, or the people who function like one. Those are the people who are standing there with their arms out at the base of your fall, and are prepared to risk something to catch you. These are the people you can depend on when you have no place to go or no food in the pantry. And as long as you have food and a place to sleep, try hard to be that person for close friends and extended family. In fact, try hard to extend out the circle if you can a bit - there are a lot of vulnerable people out there who could use a hand up. You don’t have to take in everyone, or treat everyone like family, but if each of us expands the category of people we will not allow to fall to the ground by one or two, well, there’s hope for us yet.”
Today, June 1, 2009, is the day the nets broke. Let’s get to securing the lower levels, because they will be desperately needed, and we each of us depend upon them.
see also:
Island Breath: Do we plan for emergency? 6//2/09
Image above: Painting by Mark Bryan. From http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/the_ballerina.html
The sum total of today’s news adds up to “the continuing story of the destruction of our protective safety nets.” GM’s bankruptcy is the lead, of course, one that constitutes an utter disaster for millions of people - unemployed workers who are unlikely to find new manufacturing jobs before their benefits run out, states swamped with benefits claims, elderly pensioners facing disaster, and the oridinary fall-out for towns, cities and states that will lead, later to deeper cuts of the nets that were designed to catch people when they fall.
Then there’s California - among its major cuts, California stands to cut the poison control hotline, benefits for the disabled, school funding, health care for working class people and children, access to state parks, and almost everything else you can imagine. The cuts will fall heavily on the backs of the elderly, the already poor, the disabled and children, as always - people with minimal political constituencies will bear the brunt of this.
And again, there’s more to come - California is already threatening to take money out of towns and cities - areas already hurting, already failing to sell municipal bonds. For the 47 states facing budget shortfalls, the trajectory is pretty clear - the federal government screws the states (by pouring its money into Wall Street, not helping people meet basic needs), the states sue the towns, and you get screwed all three ways - with fewer services, higher tax burdens and life on a tightrope without a net to catch you when you fall. California is the beginning, but not, unfortunately, the end.
So far, most of us have no idea what life without a net is like - what happens when the federal government can no longer subsidize the stripped unemployment funds? What happens in the cold parts of the country when low income heating programs are stripped? What happens to the elderly, the disabled and the sick? What happens as public resources are stripped, damaged and destroyed?
One thing I think it is important to observe is that we have chosen our present situation in large measure. As of this point, the US has actually spent four-trillion dollars on bailouts, almost all of it to large corporations, and committed another ten-billion. That money could have supported the people directly - now we are asking “how will we fund national health care?”
Well, we spent the money, folks - and not on you. If the concern was lending, the government could have loaned. If the concern was keeping auto workers working, the government could have provided work and enough income to get along, or incentives for them to make new businesses. No matter what your feelings about big government, we’ve got it - and at every level we could have spent less and done more without pouring money into the coffers of people who were skimming most of it for themselves - legalized skimming, but skimming nonetheless. It is the culmination of the insane “rising tide lifts all boats” notion under which globalization was born - if we just make the rich richer, maybe a tiny bit will leak down to those who aren’t rich. And as we keep finding, not much leaks down.
What’s facing us is a tidal wave of suffering - and the anger, and political conflict that accompanies it. The UN is warning that unrest is brewing all over the world will be desperately needed - the BBC reports that we’re facing massive repression, as human rights at all levels hit the backburners, and the anger that repressive and destructive governments agenda. The unrest that accompanies this worldwide may well change things beyond recognition.
The project for all of us is to maintain what we can, to meet needs that we can, and to triage our safety nets and provide what resources we can. That’s why I was so pleased to read about Rob Hopkins’ and Richard Heinberg’s nascent discussion of using Transition to provide some kind of resources for people dealing with the present crisis. I think that as a basic principle, we can’t talk about “addressing peak oil and climate change” unless we actually have something to offer the victims of peak oil and climate change - placing these events always-already in the future, as though we had time and leisure is, I think, alienating, and being unable to respond immediately to realities risks tarring adaptive movements as irrelevant. I keep saying it, and will keep saying it - the things that we need to prioritize in responding to our collective crisis are precisely the things that people already care about most - any movement that does not focus on the human priorities of meeting basic needs will not succeed.
At the neighborhood and community level, we need each other more than we ever have. The safety nets that are gone are going to have to be replaced with…us. In an essay I wrote a while back, I observed that the public safety nets were still holding, but that eventually they would crumble - and in many states, they are doing so now. What I wrote then now has to be put into practice,
“Think of poverty as a fall out a window. Right now, there is a layer of safety net that catches a majority of people, although by no means all. But what’s under those? What happens if the traditional nets break? We need those nets not only because protecting others from hunger, cold and suffering is the ethical thing to do, and not only because, as they say, the life you save may soon be your own, but because all of our personal security depends on our community security. In hard times, crime rates go up, and people get angry. Brooks is right to anticipate a movement of angry and frightened people, and when people are angry and frightened, we’re all vulnerable.
In a rational society, there are more layers to break your fall, and we’re going to need them. First, there are formal structures at the community level - if your town never needed a food pantry because people could drive to the neighboring city, now is the time to propose it at your church, school or other possible site. Think about ways you could adapt existing infrastructure - could the schools start distributing extra school lunches to the needy after the day is over? Could your school establish a backpack program, sending food home for the weekend with the neediest kids? Could you start a local gleaning program, or a senior lunch program? If you have these structures, but they are struggling, what can you do to reinforce them? Can you make another donation? Start a fund drive? What about setting up a bulletin-board system to bring families struggling to keep their homes together with people who need housing. There are a thousand good ideas - yours is probably one of them.
The next layer is the neighbor and community layer. I know we all worry about looking like busybodies, but now is the time to start looking in on your neighbors, and offering to help. The way to do this is to talk to people, even before it looks like they need anything. That way you’ll know if your elderly neighbor can no longer afford to drive to get her medication and you can offer to pick it up, or if a neighbor is out of work and might be glad to get a day’s pay helping a friend of yours winterize her house.
Being neighborly, and also gentle and nonjudgemental is how you are going to know if someone in your neighborhood has no food in the pantry. For every person who signs up for aid and accepts help, there are several who will rather go hungry than take institutional charity - but who will gladly come over and share a meal with their neighbor, or do you a favor and take that loaf of bread that you’ve got no where to store.
One of the most important things we can do is when we do spend money these days, spend it in our communities if at all possible. I know most of us aren’t going to be buying a lot of holiday gifts, but every dollar you can pass on to a neighbor, a local farmer or a local business that enriches your community is one that makes everyone more secure. So maybe hire the out of work neighbor to plant and tend a garden for your sister, or give your best friend a farmstand gift certificate.
Finally, there’s family, or the people who function like one. Those are the people who are standing there with their arms out at the base of your fall, and are prepared to risk something to catch you. These are the people you can depend on when you have no place to go or no food in the pantry. And as long as you have food and a place to sleep, try hard to be that person for close friends and extended family. In fact, try hard to extend out the circle if you can a bit - there are a lot of vulnerable people out there who could use a hand up. You don’t have to take in everyone, or treat everyone like family, but if each of us expands the category of people we will not allow to fall to the ground by one or two, well, there’s hope for us yet.”
Today, June 1, 2009, is the day the nets broke. Let’s get to securing the lower levels, because they will be desperately needed, and we each of us depend upon them.
see also:
Island Breath: Do we plan for emergency? 6//2/09
Do we plan for Emergency?
SUBHEAD: Richard Heinberg and Rob Hopkins debate and cogitate planning for emergency.
By Heinberg and Hopkins on 27 May 2009 in Transition Culture
http://transitionculture.org/2009/05/27/to-plan-for-emergency-or-not-heinberg-and-hopkins-debate/
Image above: Planning for emergency and confronting disaster by the Salvation Army. From http://www.birminghamsalvationarmy.org/default.aspx?id=24
At the Transition Network conference, Richard Heinberg gave an online presentation looking at the concept of Emergency Planning for Communities, something he initially unveiled at Findhorn last year. You can see his presentation here.
For a while now, Richard and I have been discussing the tension between longer term planning for resilience and the more immediate and pressing responses demanded by sudden and rapid change. It is still an ongoing discussion, but we thought now, with Richard’s presentation, it would be a good time to open up the conversation for your thoughts. What follows is the series of email exchanges we have had since late last year.
One of the fascinating discussion points at the conference between those in the US and those in the UK, revolves around the degree of vulnerability people feel. When Naresh and Sophy returned from delivering Transition Training in the US, one of their observations was that, as a country with no free healthcare and little in the way of social services and benefits, life feels much more fragile there, and the sense that things could all fall apart tomorrow much more palpable.
Translating Transition to the US context can be, some of those present were saying, a bigger challenge because of that. Is the US being overdramatic, or the UK lulled into a false sense of security? Does putting emergency planning at the forefront of Transition risk losing more people than it engages? Is it possible to build resilience in the middle of a crisis? There are just some of the questions that arise from these exchanges. Anyway, we throw this open, and welcome your thoughts based on the discussions below.
Dear Rob,
Let me start by saying that I am not proposing any specific change in the public Transition written materials or trainings, merely a private strategic discussion among those at a high level within the movement.
Image above: Planning for emergency and confronting disaster by the Salvation Army. From http://www.birminghamsalvationarmy.org/default.aspx?id=24
At the Transition Network conference, Richard Heinberg gave an online presentation looking at the concept of Emergency Planning for Communities, something he initially unveiled at Findhorn last year. You can see his presentation here.
For a while now, Richard and I have been discussing the tension between longer term planning for resilience and the more immediate and pressing responses demanded by sudden and rapid change. It is still an ongoing discussion, but we thought now, with Richard’s presentation, it would be a good time to open up the conversation for your thoughts. What follows is the series of email exchanges we have had since late last year.
One of the fascinating discussion points at the conference between those in the US and those in the UK, revolves around the degree of vulnerability people feel. When Naresh and Sophy returned from delivering Transition Training in the US, one of their observations was that, as a country with no free healthcare and little in the way of social services and benefits, life feels much more fragile there, and the sense that things could all fall apart tomorrow much more palpable.
Translating Transition to the US context can be, some of those present were saying, a bigger challenge because of that. Is the US being overdramatic, or the UK lulled into a false sense of security? Does putting emergency planning at the forefront of Transition risk losing more people than it engages? Is it possible to build resilience in the middle of a crisis? There are just some of the questions that arise from these exchanges. Anyway, we throw this open, and welcome your thoughts based on the discussions below.
Dear Rob,
Let me start by saying that I am not proposing any specific change in the public Transition written materials or trainings, merely a private strategic discussion among those at a high level within the movement.My reasoning is simple: Transition has a very positive and optimistic face, which is extremely attractive and the main reason for its success. As you know, better than anyone, its goal is to envision a desirable post-fossil fuel future and then backcast incremental local steps for the achievement of that future.
Now: the reason we all see it necessary to transition away from fossil fuels is that if we don’t, dire things will happen. But what if it’s actually too late to prevent some of those dire things from happening, and they occur during our Transition period and process?
Obviously this is not an academic question. We are seeing a truly frightening financial collapse—partly resulting from this year’s high oil prices—unfolding before us. The world has changed very significantly in the past few months, so much so that the shift is difficult to overstate, even though its direction and implications are still revealing themselves. My question is: should the Transition movement ignore this new fact-on-the-ground, address it as just a bump or pothole along the way, or take it very seriously as (1) a potential challenge to the Transition program if people feel that their optimistic efforts are being overwhelmed by catastrophic economic conditions including closure of local businesses and loss of jobs and funding by key organizers; (2) a potential opportunity both to grow the movement and to offer tangible help to people in genuine need; or (3) both of the latter?
If it is to be seen as (2), an opportunity, what might that mean in terms of public messaging, trainings, etc.?
My own view is that organizations like ours can help by providing inspiration (as Transition certainly does, probably to a much greater extent than PCI), as well as by helping to solve real problems. I would guess that in the near future solving problems will become more of a priority than it has been up to this point, simply because the number and scale of problems that individuals and communities will be confronting will snowball.
Whether we like it or not, those of us who have put ourselves forward in the public eye as having answers will be looked to for practical solutions to very basic problems like homelessness, unemployment, hunger, decaying infrastructure, lack of heating fuel, lack of capital, and bank failures.
Obviously, what Transition and PCI have been advocating (community gardens, local currencies, etc.) are in fact at least partial solutions to these very problems, but so far we have discussed them in terms of proactive efforts to keep the problems from happening, or to build a better world in the future. Should the growing presence of these problems affect how our solutions are described (to the general public, to policy makers, or among ourselves) and/or how they are implemented?
Again, this is only meant to be a conversation opener. We’re all figuring this out as we go along—at least I am!
With all best wishes, Richard.
January 9th 2009.
Dear Richard,
Happy New Year to you. I have been giving your email some thought over the last couple of weeks and wanted to respond with some feedback. I agree with you that some element of Emergency Planning (which feels like a more appropriate term to me) is vital, but I wonder whether it is something that either falls completely outside of the work of Transition groups or, while connected, has somehow to be kept clearly distinct for the reasons below.
To begin with, that kind of emergency response work is usually done by local authorities, or in the US by groups like FEMA. It is hard to figure out how one would come up with a community response plan that would be more effective, or able to mobilize what they are able to mobilize, than what they could do. I haven’t tried to find out who is responsible for that in Totnes, but I suspect that whoever it is would not be entirely welcoming of well-meaning approaches from us offering to input some Transition flavoring.
At the root of it is the old bottom up/top down question. Is it possible to design a bottom up emergency response plan that is effective? At present, in the event of an emergency, in theory at least, the government agencies swing into action, organizing water, energy, food and so on (although of course Katrina is an example of exactly the opposite happening, but what would a pre-planned community response in New Orleans have looked like?).
Of course this raises fascinating questions, as I suppose in a few years a community fully engaged upon energy descent would be far better at dealing with emergencies than “the authorities” - and in the past bottom up emergency planning worked superbly in the anarchist led communities during the Spanish Civil War. Having said that, those were communities which were already, and explicitly, united around a common vision; ie more like communities already meaningfully engaged in energy descent than the current early adopting transition initiatives.
I think about this in terms of the principles of Transition. Does Emergency Planning lead to increased resilience? Maybe yes, but maybe not. Tends to be peoples’ last consideration in times of panic. The priority turns to short term survival. We are already seeing in the Ukraine people felling trees left, right and centre in order to keep warm, and Ireland during the Famine had barely a single tree. Short term emergencies tend to move people away from resilience, something that, it seems to me, can only really be created in a longer term, intentionally designed way. On the other hand, does that mean that principles of resilience should be put to one side in an emergency? While the answer to that must be no, I’m struggling to see what one does with the resulting tension.
In terms of ‘Inner and Outer Transition’, I think this creates a huge challenge. There are very few people who can really delve into the nitty gritty of emergency planning without feeling deeply despondent.. there are a few grizzled doomers who would thrive on it, but how to create a meaningful community process of planning emergency responses without breeding powerlessness on an unprecedented scale is hard to imagine. There may be a need for working out how to do trauma counselling on a huge scale, training a team of people to support the freakouts that would happen, but again, on that scale it needs the Health teams and the NHS.
In terms of subsidiarity, emergency planning is something that has almost always come from the top down. I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on what an effective bottom-up response might look like. Wouldn’t bottom up responses to emergencies, almost by definition, be actions which emerge rather than follow a pre-determined plan? The piqueteros in Argentina appeared as a result of dire need/emergency, but not because of a previous plan. It may well be that within a TI a few people who are so inclined might write such a thing, but I can’t see it being something many people would choose to engage with.
I feel that absolutely key to all of this is the fact that, in terms of visioning, there isn’t a positive potential outcome to use to inspire and engage people. Transition is very deliberately designed to be non-threatening, to be inviting and engaging. It could be argued that emergency planning is the opposite. The danger is that if the vision becomes collapse next week, that the Transition group becomes seen as a survivalist cult, and loses people. It is hard enough for us to engage and work with our local authority here, and we are presenting ourselves to them as rational, positive thinking people with ideas they need, answers to questions they aren’t asking yet, although no doubt we are still seen as fringe players. If we were to take a very doomy position, and invite them to prepare for meltdown next week, I suspect we would find it far harder to find a way into them.
I think the question for me is more around how does one ’speed up’ an EDAP. Most of the work in one tends to focus on their first few years, and if it is written properly it should really engage that kind of input. For example, if we want to have food gardens in place in time for an emergency, the same obstacles still exist to their creation now that exist in an EDAP. It is about designing things that are viable in one economic context that will also be viable in another entirely different one. It is a big job, but those gardens aren’t going to appear by magic, they need to be planned, created and maintained. Same with woodfuel, local markets and so on.
With all best wishes, Richard.
January 9th 2009.
Dear Richard,
Happy New Year to you. I have been giving your email some thought over the last couple of weeks and wanted to respond with some feedback. I agree with you that some element of Emergency Planning (which feels like a more appropriate term to me) is vital, but I wonder whether it is something that either falls completely outside of the work of Transition groups or, while connected, has somehow to be kept clearly distinct for the reasons below.
To begin with, that kind of emergency response work is usually done by local authorities, or in the US by groups like FEMA. It is hard to figure out how one would come up with a community response plan that would be more effective, or able to mobilize what they are able to mobilize, than what they could do. I haven’t tried to find out who is responsible for that in Totnes, but I suspect that whoever it is would not be entirely welcoming of well-meaning approaches from us offering to input some Transition flavoring.
At the root of it is the old bottom up/top down question. Is it possible to design a bottom up emergency response plan that is effective? At present, in the event of an emergency, in theory at least, the government agencies swing into action, organizing water, energy, food and so on (although of course Katrina is an example of exactly the opposite happening, but what would a pre-planned community response in New Orleans have looked like?).
Of course this raises fascinating questions, as I suppose in a few years a community fully engaged upon energy descent would be far better at dealing with emergencies than “the authorities” - and in the past bottom up emergency planning worked superbly in the anarchist led communities during the Spanish Civil War. Having said that, those were communities which were already, and explicitly, united around a common vision; ie more like communities already meaningfully engaged in energy descent than the current early adopting transition initiatives.
I think about this in terms of the principles of Transition. Does Emergency Planning lead to increased resilience? Maybe yes, but maybe not. Tends to be peoples’ last consideration in times of panic. The priority turns to short term survival. We are already seeing in the Ukraine people felling trees left, right and centre in order to keep warm, and Ireland during the Famine had barely a single tree. Short term emergencies tend to move people away from resilience, something that, it seems to me, can only really be created in a longer term, intentionally designed way. On the other hand, does that mean that principles of resilience should be put to one side in an emergency? While the answer to that must be no, I’m struggling to see what one does with the resulting tension.
In terms of ‘Inner and Outer Transition’, I think this creates a huge challenge. There are very few people who can really delve into the nitty gritty of emergency planning without feeling deeply despondent.. there are a few grizzled doomers who would thrive on it, but how to create a meaningful community process of planning emergency responses without breeding powerlessness on an unprecedented scale is hard to imagine. There may be a need for working out how to do trauma counselling on a huge scale, training a team of people to support the freakouts that would happen, but again, on that scale it needs the Health teams and the NHS.
In terms of subsidiarity, emergency planning is something that has almost always come from the top down. I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on what an effective bottom-up response might look like. Wouldn’t bottom up responses to emergencies, almost by definition, be actions which emerge rather than follow a pre-determined plan? The piqueteros in Argentina appeared as a result of dire need/emergency, but not because of a previous plan. It may well be that within a TI a few people who are so inclined might write such a thing, but I can’t see it being something many people would choose to engage with.
I feel that absolutely key to all of this is the fact that, in terms of visioning, there isn’t a positive potential outcome to use to inspire and engage people. Transition is very deliberately designed to be non-threatening, to be inviting and engaging. It could be argued that emergency planning is the opposite. The danger is that if the vision becomes collapse next week, that the Transition group becomes seen as a survivalist cult, and loses people. It is hard enough for us to engage and work with our local authority here, and we are presenting ourselves to them as rational, positive thinking people with ideas they need, answers to questions they aren’t asking yet, although no doubt we are still seen as fringe players. If we were to take a very doomy position, and invite them to prepare for meltdown next week, I suspect we would find it far harder to find a way into them.
I think the question for me is more around how does one ’speed up’ an EDAP. Most of the work in one tends to focus on their first few years, and if it is written properly it should really engage that kind of input. For example, if we want to have food gardens in place in time for an emergency, the same obstacles still exist to their creation now that exist in an EDAP. It is about designing things that are viable in one economic context that will also be viable in another entirely different one. It is a big job, but those gardens aren’t going to appear by magic, they need to be planned, created and maintained. Same with woodfuel, local markets and so on.
I find it hard to see how the things that would actually lead to increased resilience could be done any faster, short of actually being in that emergency scenario by which time, in some ways, it is too late to do that effectively. Say the UK’s gas is shut off tomorrow, leading to a speeding up of the current economic troubles… not too much in the way of meaningful gardening to be done in Totnes in January.. Would be at least June before much is produced. An EDAP would be looking for triggers for rapidly speeding up the numbers of people growing food, other institutions that could help, identifying potential growing land and so on. It is hard to see how it might be done any faster.
Finally, there are lots of other organisations, community groups and so on, who don’t engage at the moment, but who would in an emergency. I think the EDAP creates a template for how they might be invited to direct their energy. So, my feeling is that the creation of Emergency Plans is something that could either happen in parallel with the EDAP process, or could be the work of a separate group. I think it would shift public perception of the work of that initiative away from it being seen as a positive, forward looking and inclusive thing, to being a doomer cult, the embodiment of what everyone always suspected environmentalists were all about in the first place. It certainly has an important role, but perhaps it is something that just happens discretely…
Finally, turning to your explicit question:“My question is: should the Transition movement ignore this new fact-on-the-ground, address it as just a bump or pothole along the way, or take it very seriously as (1) a potential challenge to the Transition program if people feel that their optimistic efforts are being overwhelmed by catastrophic economic conditions including closure of local businesses and loss of jobs and funding by key organizers; (2) a potential opportunity both to grow the movement and to offer tangible help to people in genuine need; or (3) both of the latter?”
I think we clearly can’t ignore it or view it as a bump or pothole - and my gut feeling is that it is (3), the combination of challenge and opportunity. It may be though that the truth is that the opportunity is that the emergencies coming towards us will serve to demonstrate the need for transition more than anything else.
Thank you for having raised this issue, which is absolutely vitally important. On re-reading the above, I’m not sure that we’ll get to a completely clear answer, but I look forward to your further thoughts with great interest. It might be worth looking at the idea of publishing this exchange of emails on Transition Culture, and/or elsewhere, as I know it is a subject of conversation elsewhere. There is, for example, an interesting thread on the Transition Network forum exploring this.
Rob
February 2nd 2009.
Dear Rob,
Many thanks for your thoughtful reply to my earlier letter about Transition and emergency planning. I think the best way for me to continue the conversation would be to respond to specific points you made.
“Is it possible to design a bottom-up emergency response plan that is effective?”
If not, then I think that we (that is, those of us who desire to see an orderly, decentralized transition process) may be in danger of being written off as irrelevant at some point—perhaps in just a few months’ time. As you point out: during an emergency, people are much less interested in long-range plans and much more focused on satisfying immediate needs. The emergency is unfolding, and it is not going to be transitory. So as people deal with survival issues, how can their collective efforts trend toward sustainability?
“In the past bottom-up emergency planning worked superbly in the anarchist-led communities during the Spanish Civil War.”
This is an encouraging example to think about, even if—as you note—circumstances are very different now. In fact, I think communities are going to be left mostly to their own devices, once the efforts of national governments begin to fail—and fail they will. So how will communities get by?
Who will help them organize their response to an almost complete economic shut-down, so that families still have food, water, shelter, sanitation facilities, work, and health care? I think anyone who can offer tangible help will be regarded with some respect.
“Does Emergency Planning lead to increased resilience?”
As you say, emergency planning doesn’t necessarily lead to greater resilience, but on the other hand I don’t see how a society can be resilient without it, especially when there are so many crises looming.
“I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on what an effective bottom-up response might look like. Wouldn’t bottom-up responses to emergencies, almost by definition, be actions which emerge rather than follow a pre-determined plan?”
Yes, but such responses are likely to emerge more quickly and effectively if a few folks within the community begin running scenario exercises ahead of time, identifying community resources and thinking about how those might be mobilized. Such efforts could in fact be crucial to preserving societal coherence.
And this is what I fear most, frankly: the loss of societal coherence. If that goes—if we are each on our own, competing for food and drinkable water—then we have lost the game. This is what Orlov is talking about in his five stages of collapse (www.energybulletin.net/node/40919): it is social and cultural collapse that we must avoid if at all possible. We are seeing financial and commercial collapse now, and the beginnings of political collapse in many nations. How far down the chain are we going to go? Can we interrupt the process at some point by creating more cultural coherence? Transition is in fact creating more local cultural coherence—we’re on the right track!—but is it enough, and of the right sort?
“I find it hard to see how the things that would actually lead to increased resilience could be done any faster, short of actually being in that emergency scenario by which time, in some ways, it is too late to do that effectively. Say the UK’s gas is shut off tomorrow, leading to a speeding up of the current economic troubles… not too much in the way of meaningful gardening to be done in Totnes in January. Would be at least June before much is produced. An EDAP would be looking for triggers for rapidly speeding up the numbers of people growing food, other institutions that could help, identifying potential growing land and so on. It is hard to see how it might be done any faster.”
Fair enough—we’re all working as hard as we can, going as fast as we can go. But maybe there are unseen opportunities here.
In the beginning of your letter you point out that, “that kind of emergency response work is usually done by local authorities, or in the US by groups like FEMA. It is hard to figure out how one would come up with a community response plan that would be more effective, or able to mobilise what they are able to mobilise, than what they could do. I haven’t tried to find out who is responsible for that in Totnes, but I suspect that whoever it is would not be entirely welcoming of well-meaning approaches from us offering to input some Transition flavouring.”
I think you might be surprised. The few emergency response folks I’ve talked with are frankly very worried. A lot would depend on the manner in which they were approached. If they sense that we are merely pushing an agenda, they are likely to be quite hostile. If we appeal to a shared interest in addressing real looming problems, there is likely to be at least some openness to collaboration. These are the “adults” in the community, people who are taking responsibility in ways that aren’t always fun or rewarding, but are doing things that need to be done for everyone’s sake. I’d like to think that we are in the same category (though I wouldn’t rule out the “fun” part).
Moreover, emergency response officials aren’t the only ones who are worried: my guess is that Community Resilience campaigns undertaken right about now (with cheerful smiles, holding garden implements, but acknowledging that the economy is falling apart and that we have to act fast) might garner even wider support and interest than Transition is already doing.
“Finally, there are lots of other organisations, community groups and so on, who don’t engage at the moment, but who would in an emergency. I think the EDAP creates a template for how they might be invited to direct their energy. So, my feeling is that the creation of Emergency Plans is something that could either happen in parallel with the EDAP process, or could be the work of a separate group. I think it would shift public perception of the work of that initiative away from it being seen as a positive, forward looking and inclusive thing, to being a doomer cult, the embodiment of what everyone always suspected environmentalists were all about in the first place. It certainly has an important role, but perhaps it is something that just happens discretely…”
If there is no looming emergency and you are planning for one, people may call you a doomer. When the emergency is palpable and undeniable and everyone is filled with a sense of urgency, then people may call you a realist—if you can describe what is happening accurately and point to solutions in a helpful way. Much depends on one’s tone of voice. This is the source of much of Obama’s attraction: he has earned the nickname “no-drama Obama” because he’s so unflappable. At this point, no one is going to call us doomers for engaging in disaster planning unless we have shrill voices and are buying up all the ammunition in town. A calm voice with a realistic yet helpful message will get you a long way these days.
Maybe, as you suggest, aspects of the disaster-planning/EDAP process need to be discrete, but at this stage I think the existence of such a process is more likely to be a drawing-point than a put-off. I agree that the EDAP is already a helpful template in guiding existing groups to pitch in to address crises, though perhaps that could be more explicit.
“I think we clearly can’t ignore [the economic crisis] or view it as a bump or pothole—and my gut feeling is that it is (3), the combination of challenge and opportunity. It may be though that the truth is that the opportunity is that the emergencies coming towards us will serve to demonstrate the need for transition more than anything else.”
Yes, I agree completely. Yet somehow I still think there is more we could be doing. I understand: in the past two years Transition has taken off like a rocket; if it’s working, why screw with it? Perfectly sensible. At the same time, I have to underscore my sense that what we are seeing unfolding in the world right now will change just about everything. And everyone will have to adapt to survive—Transition (and Post Carbon Institute) included. I’m looking for both a plan to save the community, and a plan to help our efforts remain relevant and perhaps become much more so.
It’s worth asking: What is Transition actually capable of doing to respond to an unprecedented economic crisis? In the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it.
But who does have the ability to do that work in the context of a vision of what needs to be done also to solve the longer-term crises of climate change and resource depletion? For whatever reason, Transition is appearing on the world scene at the right time, it is viral, and it has a positive, hopeful face that people respond to. It needs to keep that positive, hopeful visage, but perhaps it also needs to be perceived as being responsive to changing circumstances. If what we are proposing to do can only succeed if we have a decade or so of “normal” economic conditions during which to grow our base, train more trainers, and deploy our methods, then . . . it may indeed be too late. But if we can adapt quickly and thereby strategically help our communities adapt, the result may be beneficial both to communities and to those who are organizing Transition efforts.
Obama is telling Americans that the economy is going to get much worse before it gets better. He was elected on a platform of hope, but he’s dishing out some pretty grim forecasts these days. I want him to succeed, but I fear that circumstances will overpower his ability to respond.
You’re likewise a hopeful, unflappable public figure, Rob, and people love you for it (as well as for other qualities—your ability as a writer, your humor, and more). I suspect that there are a lot of folks out there waiting to see how the Transition message will evolve in response to changed circumstances. But I shouldn’t presume to speak for them; I am really just stating my own thoughts here.
The emphasis of my own work will change from here on. I know I gained whatever notoriety I have on the basis of my gloomy writings about Peak Oil, but that may be a near-dead issue for the time being. I won’t leave it entirely behind (energy is ultimately where it’s at and I still have a book and some other publications on energy issues coming out in the next few months), but this year I intend to focus primarily on identifying efforts taking place in communities around the world that (1) address basic human needs in the context of economic collapse (2) are replicable and/or scalable, and (3) set us on the path toward sustainability. In fact this will also be the main focus for Post Carbon Institute for the foreseeable future, as we expand our Fellows program. I hope that what we come up with as a think tank will be immediately useful to Transition initiatives everywhere.
I’m confident that in our partnership we will be able to do some really useful work. I realize that my suggestions are vague. Maybe overt disaster planning is just not practical at this stage (it may well be too late, and we may well not have the capacity), and maybe all that can come from this is a some new messaging that acknowledges the dire circumstances and that promises that useful ideas for responding to communities’ burgeoning problems will be forthcoming.
In any case, I’m delighted to be working in collaboration. I have nothing but admiration for what the Transition Network has accomplished so far. May those accomplishments grow!
Best wishes always, Richard
February 4th 2009.
Dear Richard
Thanks so much for your considered and fascinating response. I’m delighted you feel happy for this exchange to be made public, as I think it will be of great interest to people. As you say, things are moving so very fast, it is fascinating to observe. I was very interested to hear you say that you feel that peak oil is in danger of becoming a non-issue… would it be fair to say that some of the peak oil community, in an understandable effort to communicate the implications of peaking, didn’t communicate clearly the possible implications of peak demand being reached before peak supply? I still find it a very useful lens to help people view things through, but as you say, we have to stay nimble and on our toes, as the economic situation is what is most clearly in peoples’ faces.
I feel that your last email actually gave me a certain ‘Eureka’ moment. As you state, Transition “is working, so why screw with it?”, but at the same time, as you put it, “in the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it”.
Yet what Transition groups have done most powerfully in my experience is at least start to weave into their communities a powerful web of connections and links that weren’t there before. It has developed a language and an approach that is as accessible to Councils and businesses as it is to teachers, activists and estate managers. This, I think, has been one of the things that is most powerful about it. In Totnes for example, were the shit to hit the fan tomorrow, TTT now knows the best gardeners, the best people at teaching it, who are the main landowners, who are the local funders, and so on, so the drawing together of those pieces is far easier than it would have been before. This is highly valuable, and is perhaps one of the key contributions, alongside the awareness raising work..
My Eureka moment comes from thinking about how to best combine the need to build resilience as well as the need to build the ability to better respond in emergencies. As you know, the Transition idea emerges from a background in permaculture and bioregionalism, although permaculture training (and I write this as a teacher of many years) tends to assume a gentle transition in its perspective. While it offers an invaluable set of thinking tools, its longer term focus on ‘permanence’ perhaps doesn’t lead to a sufficiently appropriate set of tools. For example, teaching sheet mulching with vast amounts of cardboard and compost may not be the best approach for people faced with turning a football pitch into allotments.
Were a training, presented in the Transition way, i.e. positive, empowering, visionary, yet intensely practical, to be developed and rolled out though Transition groups, this could be a very useful tool. It could pull together the best from bushcraft training (but without the excessively survivalist flavour), the best from bioregional studies (i.e. how to read where you are, what is home, what is the nature of where you live), the best of appropriate technology (how to build simple yet effective tools and then how to use them), biointensive horticulture (most amount of food from smallest amount of land), traditional allotment gardeners (growing food with what you’ve got), and also emergency response organisations (how to organise amid chaos, how to prioritise based on situations).
Indeed, it could also create a very dynamic interface between emergency response organisations, green groups, Transition, education providers, probation/youth offenders services, and a range of training providers, among others. Perhaps even the Army (now there’s a sacreligious thought!!). What would be important would be that it would move beyond the usual crowd that go to such courses. It would draw as much from the work of activists such as Catherine Sneed, engaging young men who have been in trouble, as it would the usual permaculture course-going public.
Such a programme, which could become core in schools and colleges, would start to create a team of people who would be ‘on call’ for this, and who could undergo regular additional training. My friend who is a fireman did his core training but then has to do regular top-up trainings. Perhaps then a key part of the EDAP is looking at how that training could be developed and then rolled out, as well as how it might be funded. The key aspect of it, as with all of this, is tone. If it is presented as an emergency response force training, I don’t think it would be as effective as if it was Transition Teams or something. It would be great to get some marketing/advertising bods on board with it, to really focus the presentation and the language. I think Chris Martenson’s Crash Course was designed with some of this in mind. There is also a fascinating area of overlap in terms of working with young men, and menswork, which is a vital thing to look at too in all this.
I think that such a training, if properly designed, could run alongside the regular work of Transition initiatives, and run alongside the EDAP process, while at the same time generating useful insights for that. It builds on the positive slant of this. I do wonder though, thinking of my family and neighbours, just how much this kind of approach would engage people, given that many people will respond to the developing economic situation by thinking “how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on. In that regards, the Transition awarness raising stuff it clearly vital alongside this.
In that sense, one could still have a Transition emergency preparedness group, if there were people keen to do such a thing, but Transition Network could design and pilot such a training that could then be rolled out through the network. The EDAP would be doing the longer term resilience building, while at the same time training and mobilising a group who would be of use in both scenarios. This would, as you say, create more “adults” in the community, but in a sense of maturity rather than paranoid survivalists. Key, as you say, in maintaining ’societal coherence’.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. The field we are exploring here is so vast and wide, it is hard to pin it down to particular things, but for me I feel that the above maybe offers one way of building on what is best about Transition while at the same time developing a practical and relevant side to accompany the awareness raising work and the networking that combines to create the EDAP.
If you’re interested in looking in more detail at how to develop this line of thinking, perhaps we could fix a time to have a telephone or skype conference, with me and Peter and Ben over here? If it seems to be fruitful, perhaps we could look at running a workshop on it at our conference on 24/5/6 April, with you attending electronically?
With very best wishes, Rob
February 4th 2009
Rob,
I love your idea. At New College (R.I.P.) we always offered experiences in backpacking, camping, and primitive/appropriate technology alongside our heady course work in anthropology and social critique. It’s what many of the students came away remembering best. It gave them a sense of basic mammalian competence that took the edge off of the grim information we were imparting. The key will be to offer skill-building experiences that are both inviting/fun and relevant to the kinds of practical challenges people will be facing.
As you say, many people will be focused on questions like, “how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on.”
If we can address people’s very real economic concerns, we will be offering tangible benefit. What are some strategies for saving money? Get family and friends to move in with you. Find ways to cook with less fuel (solar cookers are only one of many strategies there), use less water (gray-water recycling with or without re-plumbing your house), ditch your car, share stuff, repair stuff, make stuff. How to live happily without x, y, and z. How to live more happily and healthily than ever on a fraction of the income.
The big question on everyone’s mind is: How can I get by once I’ve lost my job (or now that I’ve lost it)? Learning how to raise capital and form cooperative ventures that benefit the community (and are therefore worthy of community support) could be a life-saver. Also: how to set up barter networks, how to make community currencies work for you.
The design of such a course will be easiest if we get together three or four people who have complementary skill-sets and who are already teaching many of these things. The Voluntary Simplicity people have some of this down; also the appropriate technology folks; the primitive tech folks; the co-op venture folks. Now that I think of it, it might take more than three or four “experts.” But maybe there are those like Chris Martensen who are already aggregating these skills. It would not be so good to initiate a course design process that requires months and months of work and lots of investment, given that time and money are in short supply. The key is to synergize existing resources. As you know from the success of Transition itself, if it’s the right idea at the right time, circumstances will conspire to help.
Richard
Rob
February 2nd 2009.
Dear Rob,
Many thanks for your thoughtful reply to my earlier letter about Transition and emergency planning. I think the best way for me to continue the conversation would be to respond to specific points you made.
“Is it possible to design a bottom-up emergency response plan that is effective?”
If not, then I think that we (that is, those of us who desire to see an orderly, decentralized transition process) may be in danger of being written off as irrelevant at some point—perhaps in just a few months’ time. As you point out: during an emergency, people are much less interested in long-range plans and much more focused on satisfying immediate needs. The emergency is unfolding, and it is not going to be transitory. So as people deal with survival issues, how can their collective efforts trend toward sustainability?
“In the past bottom-up emergency planning worked superbly in the anarchist-led communities during the Spanish Civil War.”
This is an encouraging example to think about, even if—as you note—circumstances are very different now. In fact, I think communities are going to be left mostly to their own devices, once the efforts of national governments begin to fail—and fail they will. So how will communities get by?
Who will help them organize their response to an almost complete economic shut-down, so that families still have food, water, shelter, sanitation facilities, work, and health care? I think anyone who can offer tangible help will be regarded with some respect.
“Does Emergency Planning lead to increased resilience?”
As you say, emergency planning doesn’t necessarily lead to greater resilience, but on the other hand I don’t see how a society can be resilient without it, especially when there are so many crises looming.
“I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on what an effective bottom-up response might look like. Wouldn’t bottom-up responses to emergencies, almost by definition, be actions which emerge rather than follow a pre-determined plan?”
Yes, but such responses are likely to emerge more quickly and effectively if a few folks within the community begin running scenario exercises ahead of time, identifying community resources and thinking about how those might be mobilized. Such efforts could in fact be crucial to preserving societal coherence.
And this is what I fear most, frankly: the loss of societal coherence. If that goes—if we are each on our own, competing for food and drinkable water—then we have lost the game. This is what Orlov is talking about in his five stages of collapse (www.energybulletin.net/node/40919): it is social and cultural collapse that we must avoid if at all possible. We are seeing financial and commercial collapse now, and the beginnings of political collapse in many nations. How far down the chain are we going to go? Can we interrupt the process at some point by creating more cultural coherence? Transition is in fact creating more local cultural coherence—we’re on the right track!—but is it enough, and of the right sort?
“I find it hard to see how the things that would actually lead to increased resilience could be done any faster, short of actually being in that emergency scenario by which time, in some ways, it is too late to do that effectively. Say the UK’s gas is shut off tomorrow, leading to a speeding up of the current economic troubles… not too much in the way of meaningful gardening to be done in Totnes in January. Would be at least June before much is produced. An EDAP would be looking for triggers for rapidly speeding up the numbers of people growing food, other institutions that could help, identifying potential growing land and so on. It is hard to see how it might be done any faster.”
Fair enough—we’re all working as hard as we can, going as fast as we can go. But maybe there are unseen opportunities here.
In the beginning of your letter you point out that, “that kind of emergency response work is usually done by local authorities, or in the US by groups like FEMA. It is hard to figure out how one would come up with a community response plan that would be more effective, or able to mobilise what they are able to mobilise, than what they could do. I haven’t tried to find out who is responsible for that in Totnes, but I suspect that whoever it is would not be entirely welcoming of well-meaning approaches from us offering to input some Transition flavouring.”
I think you might be surprised. The few emergency response folks I’ve talked with are frankly very worried. A lot would depend on the manner in which they were approached. If they sense that we are merely pushing an agenda, they are likely to be quite hostile. If we appeal to a shared interest in addressing real looming problems, there is likely to be at least some openness to collaboration. These are the “adults” in the community, people who are taking responsibility in ways that aren’t always fun or rewarding, but are doing things that need to be done for everyone’s sake. I’d like to think that we are in the same category (though I wouldn’t rule out the “fun” part).
Moreover, emergency response officials aren’t the only ones who are worried: my guess is that Community Resilience campaigns undertaken right about now (with cheerful smiles, holding garden implements, but acknowledging that the economy is falling apart and that we have to act fast) might garner even wider support and interest than Transition is already doing.
“Finally, there are lots of other organisations, community groups and so on, who don’t engage at the moment, but who would in an emergency. I think the EDAP creates a template for how they might be invited to direct their energy. So, my feeling is that the creation of Emergency Plans is something that could either happen in parallel with the EDAP process, or could be the work of a separate group. I think it would shift public perception of the work of that initiative away from it being seen as a positive, forward looking and inclusive thing, to being a doomer cult, the embodiment of what everyone always suspected environmentalists were all about in the first place. It certainly has an important role, but perhaps it is something that just happens discretely…”
If there is no looming emergency and you are planning for one, people may call you a doomer. When the emergency is palpable and undeniable and everyone is filled with a sense of urgency, then people may call you a realist—if you can describe what is happening accurately and point to solutions in a helpful way. Much depends on one’s tone of voice. This is the source of much of Obama’s attraction: he has earned the nickname “no-drama Obama” because he’s so unflappable. At this point, no one is going to call us doomers for engaging in disaster planning unless we have shrill voices and are buying up all the ammunition in town. A calm voice with a realistic yet helpful message will get you a long way these days.
Maybe, as you suggest, aspects of the disaster-planning/EDAP process need to be discrete, but at this stage I think the existence of such a process is more likely to be a drawing-point than a put-off. I agree that the EDAP is already a helpful template in guiding existing groups to pitch in to address crises, though perhaps that could be more explicit.
“I think we clearly can’t ignore [the economic crisis] or view it as a bump or pothole—and my gut feeling is that it is (3), the combination of challenge and opportunity. It may be though that the truth is that the opportunity is that the emergencies coming towards us will serve to demonstrate the need for transition more than anything else.”
Yes, I agree completely. Yet somehow I still think there is more we could be doing. I understand: in the past two years Transition has taken off like a rocket; if it’s working, why screw with it? Perfectly sensible. At the same time, I have to underscore my sense that what we are seeing unfolding in the world right now will change just about everything. And everyone will have to adapt to survive—Transition (and Post Carbon Institute) included. I’m looking for both a plan to save the community, and a plan to help our efforts remain relevant and perhaps become much more so.
It’s worth asking: What is Transition actually capable of doing to respond to an unprecedented economic crisis? In the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it.
But who does have the ability to do that work in the context of a vision of what needs to be done also to solve the longer-term crises of climate change and resource depletion? For whatever reason, Transition is appearing on the world scene at the right time, it is viral, and it has a positive, hopeful face that people respond to. It needs to keep that positive, hopeful visage, but perhaps it also needs to be perceived as being responsive to changing circumstances. If what we are proposing to do can only succeed if we have a decade or so of “normal” economic conditions during which to grow our base, train more trainers, and deploy our methods, then . . . it may indeed be too late. But if we can adapt quickly and thereby strategically help our communities adapt, the result may be beneficial both to communities and to those who are organizing Transition efforts.
Obama is telling Americans that the economy is going to get much worse before it gets better. He was elected on a platform of hope, but he’s dishing out some pretty grim forecasts these days. I want him to succeed, but I fear that circumstances will overpower his ability to respond.
You’re likewise a hopeful, unflappable public figure, Rob, and people love you for it (as well as for other qualities—your ability as a writer, your humor, and more). I suspect that there are a lot of folks out there waiting to see how the Transition message will evolve in response to changed circumstances. But I shouldn’t presume to speak for them; I am really just stating my own thoughts here.
The emphasis of my own work will change from here on. I know I gained whatever notoriety I have on the basis of my gloomy writings about Peak Oil, but that may be a near-dead issue for the time being. I won’t leave it entirely behind (energy is ultimately where it’s at and I still have a book and some other publications on energy issues coming out in the next few months), but this year I intend to focus primarily on identifying efforts taking place in communities around the world that (1) address basic human needs in the context of economic collapse (2) are replicable and/or scalable, and (3) set us on the path toward sustainability. In fact this will also be the main focus for Post Carbon Institute for the foreseeable future, as we expand our Fellows program. I hope that what we come up with as a think tank will be immediately useful to Transition initiatives everywhere.
I’m confident that in our partnership we will be able to do some really useful work. I realize that my suggestions are vague. Maybe overt disaster planning is just not practical at this stage (it may well be too late, and we may well not have the capacity), and maybe all that can come from this is a some new messaging that acknowledges the dire circumstances and that promises that useful ideas for responding to communities’ burgeoning problems will be forthcoming.
In any case, I’m delighted to be working in collaboration. I have nothing but admiration for what the Transition Network has accomplished so far. May those accomplishments grow!
Best wishes always, Richard
February 4th 2009.
Dear Richard
Thanks so much for your considered and fascinating response. I’m delighted you feel happy for this exchange to be made public, as I think it will be of great interest to people. As you say, things are moving so very fast, it is fascinating to observe. I was very interested to hear you say that you feel that peak oil is in danger of becoming a non-issue… would it be fair to say that some of the peak oil community, in an understandable effort to communicate the implications of peaking, didn’t communicate clearly the possible implications of peak demand being reached before peak supply? I still find it a very useful lens to help people view things through, but as you say, we have to stay nimble and on our toes, as the economic situation is what is most clearly in peoples’ faces.
I feel that your last email actually gave me a certain ‘Eureka’ moment. As you state, Transition “is working, so why screw with it?”, but at the same time, as you put it, “in the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it”.
Yet what Transition groups have done most powerfully in my experience is at least start to weave into their communities a powerful web of connections and links that weren’t there before. It has developed a language and an approach that is as accessible to Councils and businesses as it is to teachers, activists and estate managers. This, I think, has been one of the things that is most powerful about it. In Totnes for example, were the shit to hit the fan tomorrow, TTT now knows the best gardeners, the best people at teaching it, who are the main landowners, who are the local funders, and so on, so the drawing together of those pieces is far easier than it would have been before. This is highly valuable, and is perhaps one of the key contributions, alongside the awareness raising work..
My Eureka moment comes from thinking about how to best combine the need to build resilience as well as the need to build the ability to better respond in emergencies. As you know, the Transition idea emerges from a background in permaculture and bioregionalism, although permaculture training (and I write this as a teacher of many years) tends to assume a gentle transition in its perspective. While it offers an invaluable set of thinking tools, its longer term focus on ‘permanence’ perhaps doesn’t lead to a sufficiently appropriate set of tools. For example, teaching sheet mulching with vast amounts of cardboard and compost may not be the best approach for people faced with turning a football pitch into allotments.
Were a training, presented in the Transition way, i.e. positive, empowering, visionary, yet intensely practical, to be developed and rolled out though Transition groups, this could be a very useful tool. It could pull together the best from bushcraft training (but without the excessively survivalist flavour), the best from bioregional studies (i.e. how to read where you are, what is home, what is the nature of where you live), the best of appropriate technology (how to build simple yet effective tools and then how to use them), biointensive horticulture (most amount of food from smallest amount of land), traditional allotment gardeners (growing food with what you’ve got), and also emergency response organisations (how to organise amid chaos, how to prioritise based on situations).
Indeed, it could also create a very dynamic interface between emergency response organisations, green groups, Transition, education providers, probation/youth offenders services, and a range of training providers, among others. Perhaps even the Army (now there’s a sacreligious thought!!). What would be important would be that it would move beyond the usual crowd that go to such courses. It would draw as much from the work of activists such as Catherine Sneed, engaging young men who have been in trouble, as it would the usual permaculture course-going public.
Such a programme, which could become core in schools and colleges, would start to create a team of people who would be ‘on call’ for this, and who could undergo regular additional training. My friend who is a fireman did his core training but then has to do regular top-up trainings. Perhaps then a key part of the EDAP is looking at how that training could be developed and then rolled out, as well as how it might be funded. The key aspect of it, as with all of this, is tone. If it is presented as an emergency response force training, I don’t think it would be as effective as if it was Transition Teams or something. It would be great to get some marketing/advertising bods on board with it, to really focus the presentation and the language. I think Chris Martenson’s Crash Course was designed with some of this in mind. There is also a fascinating area of overlap in terms of working with young men, and menswork, which is a vital thing to look at too in all this.
I think that such a training, if properly designed, could run alongside the regular work of Transition initiatives, and run alongside the EDAP process, while at the same time generating useful insights for that. It builds on the positive slant of this. I do wonder though, thinking of my family and neighbours, just how much this kind of approach would engage people, given that many people will respond to the developing economic situation by thinking “how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on. In that regards, the Transition awarness raising stuff it clearly vital alongside this.
In that sense, one could still have a Transition emergency preparedness group, if there were people keen to do such a thing, but Transition Network could design and pilot such a training that could then be rolled out through the network. The EDAP would be doing the longer term resilience building, while at the same time training and mobilising a group who would be of use in both scenarios. This would, as you say, create more “adults” in the community, but in a sense of maturity rather than paranoid survivalists. Key, as you say, in maintaining ’societal coherence’.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. The field we are exploring here is so vast and wide, it is hard to pin it down to particular things, but for me I feel that the above maybe offers one way of building on what is best about Transition while at the same time developing a practical and relevant side to accompany the awareness raising work and the networking that combines to create the EDAP.
If you’re interested in looking in more detail at how to develop this line of thinking, perhaps we could fix a time to have a telephone or skype conference, with me and Peter and Ben over here? If it seems to be fruitful, perhaps we could look at running a workshop on it at our conference on 24/5/6 April, with you attending electronically?
With very best wishes, Rob
February 4th 2009
Rob,
I love your idea. At New College (R.I.P.) we always offered experiences in backpacking, camping, and primitive/appropriate technology alongside our heady course work in anthropology and social critique. It’s what many of the students came away remembering best. It gave them a sense of basic mammalian competence that took the edge off of the grim information we were imparting. The key will be to offer skill-building experiences that are both inviting/fun and relevant to the kinds of practical challenges people will be facing.
As you say, many people will be focused on questions like, “how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on.”
If we can address people’s very real economic concerns, we will be offering tangible benefit. What are some strategies for saving money? Get family and friends to move in with you. Find ways to cook with less fuel (solar cookers are only one of many strategies there), use less water (gray-water recycling with or without re-plumbing your house), ditch your car, share stuff, repair stuff, make stuff. How to live happily without x, y, and z. How to live more happily and healthily than ever on a fraction of the income.
The big question on everyone’s mind is: How can I get by once I’ve lost my job (or now that I’ve lost it)? Learning how to raise capital and form cooperative ventures that benefit the community (and are therefore worthy of community support) could be a life-saver. Also: how to set up barter networks, how to make community currencies work for you.
The design of such a course will be easiest if we get together three or four people who have complementary skill-sets and who are already teaching many of these things. The Voluntary Simplicity people have some of this down; also the appropriate technology folks; the primitive tech folks; the co-op venture folks. Now that I think of it, it might take more than three or four “experts.” But maybe there are those like Chris Martensen who are already aggregating these skills. It would not be so good to initiate a course design process that requires months and months of work and lots of investment, given that time and money are in short supply. The key is to synergize existing resources. As you know from the success of Transition itself, if it’s the right idea at the right time, circumstances will conspire to help.
Richard Shattered and Shuttered
SUBHEAD: A day trip to Canada from upstate New York and the lessons learned in Watertown.
Image above: A view riding through east Watertown NY. From http://www.city-data.com/city/Watertown-New-York.html
The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan, "what's good for General Motors really is good for the USA", then destiny was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free -- while I made a drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.
You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an H.P. Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they're supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers.... Even though I've seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country -- the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock -- I've never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.
The most striking feature is how all the things once so "modern," all the roadside business enterprises designed along "space age" motifs -- the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations -- all teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything about where America is at.
Much of what existed before the space age is not even there anymore, bulldozed decades ago in our haste to erase pre-drive-in living, as if it branded us a lower life-form than, say, our arch-enemy, the Soviets. I've wondered for many years what Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date -- and there it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill.The most horrifying part of the trip was the old city of Watertown, a short hop shy of the Canadian border.
All that industry is gone now, apparently, and all that's left of the town's economy is whatever it gets from nearby Fort Drum, the giant US Army installation. Nineteen year old soldiers-in-training are not so impressed by Olmsted parks and the civic embellishments dreamed up by timber magnates, bankers, and the owners of piano factories. The humanity visible on the downtown streets of Watertown looked like extras who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot -- semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos, and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville's Pequod. You passed by groups of them on the streets and wanted to make sure the car's doors were locked.
Image above: Scene in downtown Watertown NY. From http://www.city-data.com/city/Watertown-New-York.html
At the heart of the old town, everything possible had been done to erase the vestiges of pre-automobile living. I suppose this is because the first thing many young army recruits did until fairly recently was buy a car. If having to join the army (because there are so few other jobs) buys you a ticket to The American Dream, then getting a car is the consolation prize -- even if you have to make four years of "easy monthly payments" on it.
Very little of the town's physical history was left standing, and most of it stood in isolation, devoid of context, awaiting the next parade of the front-end-loaders.
What was left of "the action" had shifted to a ghastly franchise strip along the Route 3 connector to I-81. This stretch of highway was clearly where all the money had gone since, say 1976, though mostly to the pavement itself and its heroic furnishings of signage, light poles, multiple turning lanes, and curb cuts. The buildings were little more than packing crates with a few plastic doo-dads stuck on. You had to wonder if all this stuff would ever see another iteration of repair and restoration. I doubt it.
Burger King was doing some kind of promotion in its Watertown huts and the marquee in their several parking lots proclaimed -- I swear to God -- "Ask us about our Angry Burger." WTF? Is the rage of lumpen America so repressed now that it can only be expressed in menu items that turn people into hulking four-hundred-pound monsters?
It was, I'm sad to say, a relief to cross the border out of my own country. Once you got off the main highway of Canada, 401, along the north side of Lake Ontario, the landscape presented a disturbing contrast to what you saw on the American side. Unlike the slovenly, failing farms of New York State, the farms of Ontario looked successful and prosperous. The barns did not tilt at weird angles and the roofs were intact.
The farm houses were freshly painted and the grounds generally not strewn with the sort of dingy plastic effluvia Americans like to deploy around their dwellings to give the impression of plentitude. You wondered: how did all the IQ points below the Great Lakes somehow migrate over to the Canadian side? Had they invented some kind of quantum spirit vacuum, run perhaps on dark matter, that sucked all the vitality out of their neighbor-to-the-south? (If so, maybe Canada should take over our dreary duties in Central Asia.)
All this was occurring against the background of General Motors looming bankruptcy, an epochal moment in US history, like losing a limb or a loved one. The US Government has decided to drive a Chevrolet off the cliff Thelma and Louise style. We were heading there anyway, so why not make the trip in air-conditioned comfort, with plenty of room for all the family members, and on-board video entertainment for the little ones. In fact, it may not be the bankruptcy of GM itself that will amaze and appall the other nations of the world, so much as the US government's pretense that the company can return to health in just a little while and pay back all the money that the citizenry has allowed to be sucked into its black hole of losses.
My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way. The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange place. Maybe Mr. Lovecraft had it right.
By James Kunstler on 1 June 2009 in Kunstler.com - http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/shattered-and-shuttered.html
The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan, "what's good for General Motors really is good for the USA", then destiny was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free -- while I made a drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.
You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an H.P. Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they're supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers.... Even though I've seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country -- the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock -- I've never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.
The most striking feature is how all the things once so "modern," all the roadside business enterprises designed along "space age" motifs -- the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations -- all teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything about where America is at.
Much of what existed before the space age is not even there anymore, bulldozed decades ago in our haste to erase pre-drive-in living, as if it branded us a lower life-form than, say, our arch-enemy, the Soviets. I've wondered for many years what Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date -- and there it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill.The most horrifying part of the trip was the old city of Watertown, a short hop shy of the Canadian border.
Named after the many falls located on the Black River, the city developed early in the 19th century as a manufacturing center. From years of generating industrial wealth, in the early 20th century the city was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. Residents of Watertown built a rich public and private architectural legacy. It is the smallest city to have a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated landscape architect who created Central Park in New York City. -- WIKIPEDIA
All that industry is gone now, apparently, and all that's left of the town's economy is whatever it gets from nearby Fort Drum, the giant US Army installation. Nineteen year old soldiers-in-training are not so impressed by Olmsted parks and the civic embellishments dreamed up by timber magnates, bankers, and the owners of piano factories. The humanity visible on the downtown streets of Watertown looked like extras who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot -- semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos, and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville's Pequod. You passed by groups of them on the streets and wanted to make sure the car's doors were locked.
Image above: Scene in downtown Watertown NY. From http://www.city-data.com/city/Watertown-New-York.html
At the heart of the old town, everything possible had been done to erase the vestiges of pre-automobile living. I suppose this is because the first thing many young army recruits did until fairly recently was buy a car. If having to join the army (because there are so few other jobs) buys you a ticket to The American Dream, then getting a car is the consolation prize -- even if you have to make four years of "easy monthly payments" on it.
Very little of the town's physical history was left standing, and most of it stood in isolation, devoid of context, awaiting the next parade of the front-end-loaders.
What was left of "the action" had shifted to a ghastly franchise strip along the Route 3 connector to I-81. This stretch of highway was clearly where all the money had gone since, say 1976, though mostly to the pavement itself and its heroic furnishings of signage, light poles, multiple turning lanes, and curb cuts. The buildings were little more than packing crates with a few plastic doo-dads stuck on. You had to wonder if all this stuff would ever see another iteration of repair and restoration. I doubt it.
Burger King was doing some kind of promotion in its Watertown huts and the marquee in their several parking lots proclaimed -- I swear to God -- "Ask us about our Angry Burger." WTF? Is the rage of lumpen America so repressed now that it can only be expressed in menu items that turn people into hulking four-hundred-pound monsters?
It was, I'm sad to say, a relief to cross the border out of my own country. Once you got off the main highway of Canada, 401, along the north side of Lake Ontario, the landscape presented a disturbing contrast to what you saw on the American side. Unlike the slovenly, failing farms of New York State, the farms of Ontario looked successful and prosperous. The barns did not tilt at weird angles and the roofs were intact.
The farm houses were freshly painted and the grounds generally not strewn with the sort of dingy plastic effluvia Americans like to deploy around their dwellings to give the impression of plentitude. You wondered: how did all the IQ points below the Great Lakes somehow migrate over to the Canadian side? Had they invented some kind of quantum spirit vacuum, run perhaps on dark matter, that sucked all the vitality out of their neighbor-to-the-south? (If so, maybe Canada should take over our dreary duties in Central Asia.)
All this was occurring against the background of General Motors looming bankruptcy, an epochal moment in US history, like losing a limb or a loved one. The US Government has decided to drive a Chevrolet off the cliff Thelma and Louise style. We were heading there anyway, so why not make the trip in air-conditioned comfort, with plenty of room for all the family members, and on-board video entertainment for the little ones. In fact, it may not be the bankruptcy of GM itself that will amaze and appall the other nations of the world, so much as the US government's pretense that the company can return to health in just a little while and pay back all the money that the citizenry has allowed to be sucked into its black hole of losses.
My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way. The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange place. Maybe Mr. Lovecraft had it right.
Hawaii Space Tourism
SOURCE: Koohan Paik (kosherkimchee@yahoo.com)
SUBHEAD: The HI State DBEDT, the US military and private speculators have another hair-brained idea.
Posted by Damon Tucker on May 26, 2009 on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwTtxcxRW8g&eurl=http%3A%2F%2F
Image above: still from YouTube video illustrating rocketplane on way to space.
Source Comment: This is sick. Shades of the Superferry all over again. ...and we wonder why we're broke. I couldn't stomach watching the whole thing yet, but if they're talking Kona - this is just what we need to go along with the vog ... more jet fuel burned in the air over Hawaii. Just great!
A video about rocketplanes and space tourism with R Representatives Angus McKelvey and Gene Ward Ph.D. Guests John Strom, VP of Business Development Enterprise Honolulu and Jim Crisafulli, Director of the Office of Aerospace Development, Strategic Industries Division, DBEDT/State of Hawaii.
Editor's Conclusion:
The gist of this project is to bring launching into "space" as a tourist operation to Hawaii. The proposal is to use corporate jets carrying rocket engines to lift as many as six passengers to 350,000 feet elevation. This all done from existing commercial airports.
Apparently several states have applied for spaceport licenses from the FAA.The military is a partner in this effort in Hawaii (as they were in the Superferry). Do they have an interest in turning commercial airports into spaceports?
Image above: still from YouTube video illustrating rocketplane on way to space.
Source Comment: This is sick. Shades of the Superferry all over again. ...and we wonder why we're broke. I couldn't stomach watching the whole thing yet, but if they're talking Kona - this is just what we need to go along with the vog ... more jet fuel burned in the air over Hawaii. Just great!
A video about rocketplanes and space tourism with R Representatives Angus McKelvey and Gene Ward Ph.D. Guests John Strom, VP of Business Development Enterprise Honolulu and Jim Crisafulli, Director of the Office of Aerospace Development, Strategic Industries Division, DBEDT/State of Hawaii.
Editor's Conclusion:
The gist of this project is to bring launching into "space" as a tourist operation to Hawaii. The proposal is to use corporate jets carrying rocket engines to lift as many as six passengers to 350,000 feet elevation. This all done from existing commercial airports.
Apparently several states have applied for spaceport licenses from the FAA.The military is a partner in this effort in Hawaii (as they were in the Superferry). Do they have an interest in turning commercial airports into spaceports?
The End of the Affair
SUBHEAD: Why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.
By P.J. O’Rourke on 30 May 2009 in The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203771904574173401767415892.html
Image above: 1964 Pontiac GTO. The first American mass produced "muscle car"
The phrase "bankrupt General Motors," which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as "Mom’s nude photos." And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Ballad of the King’s Jest," in which an Afghan tribesman avers:
Image above: 1964 Pontiac GTO. The first American mass produced "muscle car"
The phrase "bankrupt General Motors," which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as "Mom’s nude photos." And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Ballad of the King’s Jest," in which an Afghan tribesman avers:
Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.Insert another "power" after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass. Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy "1 horse-power." In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower. Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called "guy on horseback",or Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose the capitalization and the dictionary says, "insouciant and debonair; marked by a lofty disregard of others’ interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed and arrogant and supercilious." How cool is that? Then there are cowboys—always cool—and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue plus the proverbially cool-handed "Man on Horseback" to whom we turn in troubled times. Early witnesses to the automobile urged motorists to get a horse. But that, in effect, was what the automobile would do—get a horse for everybody. Once the Model T was introduced in 1908 we all became Sir Lancelot, gained a seat at the Round Table and were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens (at drive-in movies). The pride and prestige of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man. And woman, too. No one ever tried to persuade ladies to drive sidesaddle with both legs hanging out the car door. For the purpose of ennobling us schlubs, the car is better than the horse in every way. Even more advantageous than cost, convenience and not getting kicked and smelly is how much easier it is to drive than to ride. I speak with feeling on this subject, having taken up riding when I was nearly 60 and having begun to drive when I was so small that my cousin Tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and operate the accelerator and the brake with his hands. After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next. Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our foray the Buick’s speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full gallop on a horse. Delete what you’ve seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly a kid who’d never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier deck. Thus cars usurped the place of horses in our hearts. Once we’d caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights, well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss. Then we got married and moved to the suburbs. Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was 40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom’s job was 40 miles from Dad’s job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from both. The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away. We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way. But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat. But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie. We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor. I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail? And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located. The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool. America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates. Among certain youths—often first-generation Americans—there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders or Honda "tuners." The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity’s embrace. Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters with murals of Che. I myself have something old-school under a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t bicycles. There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I’m going downstairs to put a bullet in a V-8. Note by Juan Wilson: Born in October 1963 as a $295 option package, the Pontiac GTO put a 389-cubic-inch V8 in a Pontiac Tempest body -considered a "compact car" in its day. As the song by Ronny and the Daytonas goes:
Little GTO, you're really lookin' fine. Three deuces and a four-speed you gotta a 389. Listen to her tachin' up now, listen to her why-ee-eye-ine. C'mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO. You oughta see her on a road course or a quarter mile. This little modified Pon-Pon has got plenty of style. She beats the gassers and the rail jobs, Really drives 'em why-ee-eye-ild. C'mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO. Gonna save all my money and buy a GTO. Get a helmet and a roll bar and I'll be ready to go. Take it out to Pomona and let 'em know, That I'm the coolest thing around. Little buddy, gonna shut you down, When I turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO.The GTO is considered to be the first factory-built "Muscle Car." The GTO was produced from 1964 through 1974, when high insurance rates and emissions regulations forced the reducing its legendary horsepower down to a meager 200 h.p.
Local Economic Jumpstart
SUBHEAD: How to make it with less, share more, and put people and the planet first.
By Sarah van Gelder in Summer 2009 of Yes Magazine
http://yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3501
Image above: The bounty available at a Hawaiian farmer's market.
AT HOME
Rent out a room in your home, or swap space for gardening, child or elder care, or carpentry.
Buy less so you can buy higher quality. Buy from companies that “internalize” costs by passing along to you the cost of living wages, low carbon footprints, or organic production.
Take your money out of predator banks and put it into a credit union, local bank, or an institution like Shorebank Pacific that supports sustainable businesses.
Pay off debts. Try life without credit cards.
Downsize your home and shrink your mortgage.
Fix things. Mend clothing, repair the vacuum, fix the car—instead of replacing them. Or give them away on Freecycle.org.
Invest with passion. Know where your money is and what it’s up to. Go for a living return that builds your community. Or invest in tangible things like a prepaid college fund or a piece of land.
Shorten the supply chain. Pick the wild greens and extra fruit growing in your neighborhood. If you can’t do that, then buy direct from a farmer. If you can’t do that, then look for local produce in season at your locally owned grocers.
Support other people’s local economies by urging your representatives in Congress to cancel debts to poor countries (see http://www.jubileeusa.org/).
Find a place, put down roots, and stay put. Get to know people from other generations. Turn off the TV and talk to friends and neighbors.
Support local green businesses rather than distant energy conglomerates by insulating your house, upgrading windows, and installing solar.
TOGETHER WITH FRIENDS
Form a dinner club and hold a weekly potluck, or trade off cooking and hosting.
Dip your toe in the barter economy. Check out Craigslist’s “barter” category, and learn what WTT means (Willing To Trade). Even better, ask the guy at work who makes microbrews to trade a sixpack for a dozen of your chickens’ eggs.
Get together with coworkers and start a list of things you can do at work. For example, buy fair trade coffee, change to energy-efficient lighting, or carpool.
Start a Common Security Club in your faith community or neighborhood to help folks cope in the crisis and act together to create the new economy (http://www.commonsecurityclub.org/).
Exchange care of children and elders. Better yet, bring the generations together and support each in offering love and care to the others.
Pool funds with a group of friends for home repairs, greening projects, or emergencies.
Do home work parties. Each month, go to a different household to do major home greening, a garden upgrade, or some deferred maintenance.
Keep more people from becoming homeless by challenging evictions and occupying vacant homes.
Create a space at a farmers market to exchange or sell used clothes, electronics, games, CDs, plants, seeds, compost, and books. Encourage people to swap services, too, like haircuts, photography, or prepared dinners.
Reach out to groups that are organizing people on the frontlines of the crisis, like Jobs with Justice (www.jwj.org) and Right to the City (http://www.righttothecity.org/).
IN YOUR COMMUNITY
Link up people looking for job skills with people who can offer apprenticeships.
Start a local currency or time dollar program to help link needs and offerings, those with time and those starved for time.
Use publicly owned lands for community gardens, farmers markets, business incubators, community land trusts (with affordable housing), community-rooted grocery stores.
Hold on to the local businesses you already have. Help retiring entrepreneurs sell to employees or other locals.
Create a car, kayak, and electric pick-up truck co-op to save money and carbon, and provide access to a variety of vehicles.
Create or join a chapter of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) or similar groups. Work together to find services or products you could substitute for imported ones, local assets you can build on, and ongoing institutions that could be serviced locally.
Start a community bank, loan fund, or credit union to invest in local well-being, or encourage existing ones to rethink their lending.
Declare an end to corporate personhood in your community. Barnstead, New Hampshire did, and, more recently, three communities in Maine have done it. You can too.
Hold a weekly dinner for the hungry. Ask those who attend to help serve food at subsequent dinners. (Having an opportunity to give is important for everyone’s dignity).
Keep your energy dollars circulating locally. Launch a clean energy cooperative to install wind turbines or solar roofs, and to weatherize homes and businesses.
see also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Mana Ohana opens 4/14/09
AAEM for GMO moratorium
SUBHEAD: The AAEM call for an immediate moratorium on genetically modified foods.
By Dr. Amy Dean of AAEM on 19 May 2009
http://www.aaemonline.org/pressrelease.html
Image above: Illustration of Monsanto GMO corn by David Dees at www.deesillustraion.com
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) today released its position paper on Genetically Modified foods stating that "GM foods pose a serious health risk" and calling for a moratorium on GM foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes "there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects" and that "GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health." The AAEM calls for:
Image above: Illustration of Monsanto GMO corn by David Dees at www.deesillustraion.com
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) today released its position paper on Genetically Modified foods stating that "GM foods pose a serious health risk" and calling for a moratorium on GM foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes "there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects" and that "GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health." The AAEM calls for: - A moratorium on GM food, implementation of immediate long term safety testing and labeling of GM food.
- Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community and the public to avoid GM foods.
- Physicians to consider the role of GM foods in their patients' disease processes.
- More independent long term scientific studies to begin gathering data to investigate the role of GM foods on human health.
"Multiple animal studies have shown that GM foods cause damage to various organ systems in the body. With this mounting evidence, it is imperative to have a moratorium on GM foods for the safety of our patients' and the public's health," said Dr. Amy Dean, PR chair and Board Member of AAEM. "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions," said Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, President of AAEM. "The most common foods in North America which are consumed that are GMO are corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil." The AAEM's position paper on Genetically Modified foods can be found at http:aaemonline.org/gmopost.html. AAEM is an international association of physicians and other professionals dedicated to addressing the clinical aspects of environmental health. More information is available at www.aaemonline.org.
Reinventing the Informal Economy
SUBHEAD: Approaching a necessary transitional reality.
By Sharon Astyk on 29 May 2009 in Casaubon's Book
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/05/29/reinventing-the-informal-economy/#comments
Image above: Flea Market in Englishtown, New Jersey. From http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobjagendorf/367400736/
One of the most important things to know, I think, is that the growth we depend on (including the “green shoots” we might or might not be seeing) is always fed by taking something from somewhere else. That is, we tend to talk about growth as though it comes, magically, from nowhere - we all of a sudden wake up and realize we need VCRs and then, the VCR industry emerges, the economy grows, we move on to DVDs and Blu-ray or whatever, and on and on.
But this is not all the story. Many people who read this will be familiar with one part of the story that was left out - the energy equation. That is, all growth depends on energy as a master resource, and the assumption that energy consumption can always grow, is, well, a problem. Those of you who are peak oil aware will have seen many versions of this account, revising the classic economic assumption that we’ll just find more energy when we need it.
But there’s another piece of the story that doesn’t get told quite as often - that energy is only part of the equation. In order to grow, we have to use a lot of energy, of course, but that energy use has never come without also bringing many more people into the economy as well - while energy does reduce human labor in some ways (ie, one guy can do with a tractor what 40 guys did with horses), the net demand for human labor in growing economies is always positive - you need more and more people.
More importantly, those people have to come from somewhere, and they have been doing things that also have economic value. Think of it as a law of conservation of human energies - that is, whenever you build a new industry and create growth, you take people who have been WORKING at something, contributing something, and you shift them from one sector of the economy to another.
I realize this sounds obvious, but our society works hard to convince us that that’s not true - that in fact, the people moved into the formal economy weren’t actually doing anything important.
Think about how much energy was devoted, say to talking about “unproductive” farms in the years of industrialization, or the amount of energy people have spent convincing us that cooking is “drudgery” and should be left the corporations - of course, Mom doesn’t need to spend time cooking, she can be an administrator for SuckItUp.com, because she can open a can, and that work is mindless, boring and pointless anyway. Of course you can’t keep ‘em down on the farm after the war has taken them off to see Paree - what’s on the farm?
Because the US and other developed nations operate almost entirely in the formal economy, enormous efforts have been made, through industrialization and globalization to bring billions more people into the formal economy, where money is everything. The growth of the formal economy at the expense of the informal economy and the ecological economy has been the whole project of the last 70+ years.
Now, it is considered normal to need a lot of money for everything - everything from things once supplied by the commons (water, education in crappy school areas) to things once supplied by the infromal economy (cleaning, cooking, gardening, etc…). And since we are presently in the middle of massive deflation - a contraction of the money supply - this is already a scary and troubling situation for many people.
I wrote in "Depletion and Abundance" about the distinctions between the formal economy - the world of GDP statements, income taxes and salary and benefit equations, which constitutes about 1/4 of the world’s total economic activity; and the larger (although this comes as a surprise to most Americans, who live entirely in the formal economy and are often barely aware that the informal economy exists, much less vastly exceeds the value of the formal economy), which covers subsistence and domestic economies, criminal activities, under the table work, etc…
One of the effects of the last 70 years or so of industrialization is to pull everyone available into the formal economy. First came the farmers, black and white, many of whom did most of their work in the subsistence economy, often needing very little income. The Depression/Dust Bowl pushed many of them off their land, and World War II took them away from home, and they never went back to the farm. Whole families were moved to the cities, to serve the war effort, and their land was left behind. After the war, the future was in the suburbs, the factories, the new, more formal economy.
Next came the women of the Global North. We tend to think of this as a product of the women’s movement, a conscious choice by a generation of women to move into the formal economy, away from the drudgery of domestic, informal economy life.
And there’s a degree to which that’s true. But the story is more complex than that. First of all, women first went into the workforce during the war, and despite our vision of the 1950s housewife at home, in fact, women continued to work in rising numbers after the war years. Quite a few women never left the workforce, and still more entered the formal economy during the 1950s.
Both my husband and I had four grandmothers who worked in the 1950s and early 1960s, not because of the women’s movement, but because of their class and circumstances - two were single mothers, one divorced, one widowed, both worked at the phone company as operators. One was a recent immigrant whose household needed both incomes - she sold Fuller Brushes door to door. Another went to work in a department store to pay for college for her daughters.
Rather than viewing feminism as creating a radical break between a past in which women mostly did not work, we can see the war and the subsequent shift of laborers from the subsistence economy as a gradual progression that served to expand the formal economy, at the cost of the labor that sustained the informal one (it is worth noting that almost all “commons” are in some large measure sustained by informal economy work - volunteer efforts, for the most part, and that this was part of the destruction of the commons.)
I have argued before, and continue to argue that while the project of feminism itself is a good one, the version of feminism that succeeded and prospered was the one that served the larger goal of stripping the informal economy and the commons to feed the formal one - it was coopted from an early stage. While many feminists critqued the popular version of feminism we got, it is no accident that corporations were happy to describe domestic work as mindless drudgery, unworthy of women, even before they moved en masse into the workforce - it is no accident that Betty Friedan and Campbell’s Soup were working towads the same goals.
The same can and should be said of many of the liberation movements of the period and since - this is not a maligning of the importance of the civil rights movement - the early civil rights movement focused on access to the commons - to the public square. This is why water fountains, buses, schools and lunch counters were so important. But the later versions of the civil rights movement have emphasized not the strengthening of the commons, or investment in the many African Americans who did subsistence and informal economy work on small farms or in local economies, but in the idea that freedom and justice are tied to greater access to corporate and factory jobs and the formal economy.
Everything, in the end, is coopted by the need for growth - and growth in one part of the economy is never natural - it is stripped from ecological capital and the informal economy. That is, we do not grow, in the sense we mean - we reallocated resources from one sector to another.
In the 1990s, about as many American women were moved into the formal economy as were going to go - it has hovered around 60% for years, and this is probably something of a cap, because the minimal informal economy work never went away - while much of the work was stripped off, outsourced into the formal economy (ie, shifted from people cleaning their own toilets to hiring poorer people to do it), or simply no longer done by Americans (either it was offshored or abandoned), the reality is that someone still had to nurse the kids, do the laundry, maintain minimal civic culture, etc…
So the formal economy needed more natural resources, but since natural resource can never be separated from the people needed to use them, also more people moved from other sectors of the economy into the formal one.
The next step was globalization, the modern step-sister of colonialism. In it, millions and millions of agrarian people were moved into cities, and set to doing industrial labor. Where once they grew food, and after meeting most subsistence needs, they sold their surplus, now they work for a living and move into the money economy - which is great, as long as they’ve got money.
The problem is that rising food and energy costs (which remain high, despite deflation), and falling incomes make them vulnerable. And they make us just as vulnerable. During the last great economic crisis, more than 1/4 of the population lived in large part in the informal economy. Now, it is a minute portion of US workers - it was once possible for families in the Depression to go home to the family farm, and at least eat, even if they had little else. It was once possible for urban communities that relied on informal sector labor to support themselves minimally in some ways. It was once possible for most people to rely on the commons to provide for some needs. Most of those resources have been stripped away.
The single most significant project of the next few decades will not be dealing with “peak oil” or “climate change” or “financial crisis” - or rather, it will be all of them. Instead, it will be rebuilding the informal economies. In difficult times, the role of the informal economy cannot be overstated - for example, economists all over the world couldn’t figure out what the Russians weren’t starving en masse during the collapse of the Soviet Union - the reason is that the informal economy, as Peasant economist Teodor Shanin and others have documented, arose to take the place of the formal economy.
Now the informal economy isn’t perfect. Unless you join the criminal parts of it, or are a natural scrounger, you probably won’t get rich off of it. But the truth is that the informal economy is more resilient (being vastly larger) than the formal economy - markets, as we all know, long preceeded “the market.” That is, human beings always have economies - they are simply not always formal. In most cases, people live partly in one, partly in the other - the formal economy is needed for the paying taxes and debts, for some projects, while the informal economy meets other needs. The more cash money you have, the less you may rely on the personal ties and subsistence labor of the informal economy, but also, the more unstable, complex and vulnerable the formal economy is (and these are the defining characteristics of modern finance), the more the informal economy is necessary - family ties take over for retirement accounts, barter when neither of you has any cash, subsistence labor replaces money labor for some people, so that you need to earn less.
I do not believe that the formal economy will disappear - but we are facing falling incomes, increasing insecurity and instability, and more and more of our formal economy incomes being used to serve enormous, and unsustainable debts. We already know that Medicare is going broke, that workers are facing high tax burdens, and uncertain futures - this is a long term problem, whether there are green shoots or not. And most of us are vastly overreliant on the formal economy.
Which means that we must rebuild the commons, and the informal economy - and that means reallocating time and resources and labor away from the formal economy - the law of conservation here requires that just as we have rapidly taken our commons and informal economy labor and placed it in the service of economic growth, we must equally rapidly begin shifting our resources to the informal economy - we need to spend more time volunteering, we need to return to domestic labor that saves us money, like gardening, mending, making things. We need cottage industries that can operate under the table, if necessary, and barter. We must take things away from the formal economy to build new commons - new water resources, new food resources, new community resources. Mostly, what we need to take is our time and labor - because we can’t do it all, to the extent we can, we need to use the destruction of the formal economy to make new and better work for ourselves in the informal economy.
Don’t think that I believe this is easy - your mortgage lender won’t take chickens, and most of us can’t pay for our day to day life without formal economy work. Which is why what we’re doing now is so very hard - most of us are trying to fit our gardening and canning and other work around our jobs, and our other projects. We’re stuck in the formal economy, unless it casts us out. But that is, I think a necessary transitional reality - again, don’t think I think it is easy, don’t think I think you aren’t tired - me too. But the truth is that if we are going to rebuild public, communal, domestic and informal economies, that time and energy will have to come from where we can spare it best - and we’re going to have to push ourselves. For some of us, time will be forthcoming when lose our jobs, or when we get enough benefit from our activities to be able to take one earner out of the equation, or when we consolidate households and resources to need fewer earners. But in a world without growth - and whether growth ends now or as we come up to absolute limits of natural resources, it is ending - we have no choice but to rebuild the informal economy.
Image above: Flea Market in Englishtown, New Jersey. From http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobjagendorf/367400736/
One of the most important things to know, I think, is that the growth we depend on (including the “green shoots” we might or might not be seeing) is always fed by taking something from somewhere else. That is, we tend to talk about growth as though it comes, magically, from nowhere - we all of a sudden wake up and realize we need VCRs and then, the VCR industry emerges, the economy grows, we move on to DVDs and Blu-ray or whatever, and on and on.
But this is not all the story. Many people who read this will be familiar with one part of the story that was left out - the energy equation. That is, all growth depends on energy as a master resource, and the assumption that energy consumption can always grow, is, well, a problem. Those of you who are peak oil aware will have seen many versions of this account, revising the classic economic assumption that we’ll just find more energy when we need it.
But there’s another piece of the story that doesn’t get told quite as often - that energy is only part of the equation. In order to grow, we have to use a lot of energy, of course, but that energy use has never come without also bringing many more people into the economy as well - while energy does reduce human labor in some ways (ie, one guy can do with a tractor what 40 guys did with horses), the net demand for human labor in growing economies is always positive - you need more and more people.
More importantly, those people have to come from somewhere, and they have been doing things that also have economic value. Think of it as a law of conservation of human energies - that is, whenever you build a new industry and create growth, you take people who have been WORKING at something, contributing something, and you shift them from one sector of the economy to another.
I realize this sounds obvious, but our society works hard to convince us that that’s not true - that in fact, the people moved into the formal economy weren’t actually doing anything important.
Think about how much energy was devoted, say to talking about “unproductive” farms in the years of industrialization, or the amount of energy people have spent convincing us that cooking is “drudgery” and should be left the corporations - of course, Mom doesn’t need to spend time cooking, she can be an administrator for SuckItUp.com, because she can open a can, and that work is mindless, boring and pointless anyway. Of course you can’t keep ‘em down on the farm after the war has taken them off to see Paree - what’s on the farm?
Because the US and other developed nations operate almost entirely in the formal economy, enormous efforts have been made, through industrialization and globalization to bring billions more people into the formal economy, where money is everything. The growth of the formal economy at the expense of the informal economy and the ecological economy has been the whole project of the last 70+ years.
Now, it is considered normal to need a lot of money for everything - everything from things once supplied by the commons (water, education in crappy school areas) to things once supplied by the infromal economy (cleaning, cooking, gardening, etc…). And since we are presently in the middle of massive deflation - a contraction of the money supply - this is already a scary and troubling situation for many people.
I wrote in "Depletion and Abundance" about the distinctions between the formal economy - the world of GDP statements, income taxes and salary and benefit equations, which constitutes about 1/4 of the world’s total economic activity; and the larger (although this comes as a surprise to most Americans, who live entirely in the formal economy and are often barely aware that the informal economy exists, much less vastly exceeds the value of the formal economy), which covers subsistence and domestic economies, criminal activities, under the table work, etc…
One of the effects of the last 70 years or so of industrialization is to pull everyone available into the formal economy. First came the farmers, black and white, many of whom did most of their work in the subsistence economy, often needing very little income. The Depression/Dust Bowl pushed many of them off their land, and World War II took them away from home, and they never went back to the farm. Whole families were moved to the cities, to serve the war effort, and their land was left behind. After the war, the future was in the suburbs, the factories, the new, more formal economy.
Next came the women of the Global North. We tend to think of this as a product of the women’s movement, a conscious choice by a generation of women to move into the formal economy, away from the drudgery of domestic, informal economy life.
And there’s a degree to which that’s true. But the story is more complex than that. First of all, women first went into the workforce during the war, and despite our vision of the 1950s housewife at home, in fact, women continued to work in rising numbers after the war years. Quite a few women never left the workforce, and still more entered the formal economy during the 1950s.
Both my husband and I had four grandmothers who worked in the 1950s and early 1960s, not because of the women’s movement, but because of their class and circumstances - two were single mothers, one divorced, one widowed, both worked at the phone company as operators. One was a recent immigrant whose household needed both incomes - she sold Fuller Brushes door to door. Another went to work in a department store to pay for college for her daughters.
Rather than viewing feminism as creating a radical break between a past in which women mostly did not work, we can see the war and the subsequent shift of laborers from the subsistence economy as a gradual progression that served to expand the formal economy, at the cost of the labor that sustained the informal one (it is worth noting that almost all “commons” are in some large measure sustained by informal economy work - volunteer efforts, for the most part, and that this was part of the destruction of the commons.)
I have argued before, and continue to argue that while the project of feminism itself is a good one, the version of feminism that succeeded and prospered was the one that served the larger goal of stripping the informal economy and the commons to feed the formal one - it was coopted from an early stage. While many feminists critqued the popular version of feminism we got, it is no accident that corporations were happy to describe domestic work as mindless drudgery, unworthy of women, even before they moved en masse into the workforce - it is no accident that Betty Friedan and Campbell’s Soup were working towads the same goals.
The same can and should be said of many of the liberation movements of the period and since - this is not a maligning of the importance of the civil rights movement - the early civil rights movement focused on access to the commons - to the public square. This is why water fountains, buses, schools and lunch counters were so important. But the later versions of the civil rights movement have emphasized not the strengthening of the commons, or investment in the many African Americans who did subsistence and informal economy work on small farms or in local economies, but in the idea that freedom and justice are tied to greater access to corporate and factory jobs and the formal economy.
Everything, in the end, is coopted by the need for growth - and growth in one part of the economy is never natural - it is stripped from ecological capital and the informal economy. That is, we do not grow, in the sense we mean - we reallocated resources from one sector to another.
In the 1990s, about as many American women were moved into the formal economy as were going to go - it has hovered around 60% for years, and this is probably something of a cap, because the minimal informal economy work never went away - while much of the work was stripped off, outsourced into the formal economy (ie, shifted from people cleaning their own toilets to hiring poorer people to do it), or simply no longer done by Americans (either it was offshored or abandoned), the reality is that someone still had to nurse the kids, do the laundry, maintain minimal civic culture, etc…
So the formal economy needed more natural resources, but since natural resource can never be separated from the people needed to use them, also more people moved from other sectors of the economy into the formal one.
The next step was globalization, the modern step-sister of colonialism. In it, millions and millions of agrarian people were moved into cities, and set to doing industrial labor. Where once they grew food, and after meeting most subsistence needs, they sold their surplus, now they work for a living and move into the money economy - which is great, as long as they’ve got money.
The problem is that rising food and energy costs (which remain high, despite deflation), and falling incomes make them vulnerable. And they make us just as vulnerable. During the last great economic crisis, more than 1/4 of the population lived in large part in the informal economy. Now, it is a minute portion of US workers - it was once possible for families in the Depression to go home to the family farm, and at least eat, even if they had little else. It was once possible for urban communities that relied on informal sector labor to support themselves minimally in some ways. It was once possible for most people to rely on the commons to provide for some needs. Most of those resources have been stripped away.
The single most significant project of the next few decades will not be dealing with “peak oil” or “climate change” or “financial crisis” - or rather, it will be all of them. Instead, it will be rebuilding the informal economies. In difficult times, the role of the informal economy cannot be overstated - for example, economists all over the world couldn’t figure out what the Russians weren’t starving en masse during the collapse of the Soviet Union - the reason is that the informal economy, as Peasant economist Teodor Shanin and others have documented, arose to take the place of the formal economy.
Now the informal economy isn’t perfect. Unless you join the criminal parts of it, or are a natural scrounger, you probably won’t get rich off of it. But the truth is that the informal economy is more resilient (being vastly larger) than the formal economy - markets, as we all know, long preceeded “the market.” That is, human beings always have economies - they are simply not always formal. In most cases, people live partly in one, partly in the other - the formal economy is needed for the paying taxes and debts, for some projects, while the informal economy meets other needs. The more cash money you have, the less you may rely on the personal ties and subsistence labor of the informal economy, but also, the more unstable, complex and vulnerable the formal economy is (and these are the defining characteristics of modern finance), the more the informal economy is necessary - family ties take over for retirement accounts, barter when neither of you has any cash, subsistence labor replaces money labor for some people, so that you need to earn less.
I do not believe that the formal economy will disappear - but we are facing falling incomes, increasing insecurity and instability, and more and more of our formal economy incomes being used to serve enormous, and unsustainable debts. We already know that Medicare is going broke, that workers are facing high tax burdens, and uncertain futures - this is a long term problem, whether there are green shoots or not. And most of us are vastly overreliant on the formal economy.
Which means that we must rebuild the commons, and the informal economy - and that means reallocating time and resources and labor away from the formal economy - the law of conservation here requires that just as we have rapidly taken our commons and informal economy labor and placed it in the service of economic growth, we must equally rapidly begin shifting our resources to the informal economy - we need to spend more time volunteering, we need to return to domestic labor that saves us money, like gardening, mending, making things. We need cottage industries that can operate under the table, if necessary, and barter. We must take things away from the formal economy to build new commons - new water resources, new food resources, new community resources. Mostly, what we need to take is our time and labor - because we can’t do it all, to the extent we can, we need to use the destruction of the formal economy to make new and better work for ourselves in the informal economy.
Don’t think that I believe this is easy - your mortgage lender won’t take chickens, and most of us can’t pay for our day to day life without formal economy work. Which is why what we’re doing now is so very hard - most of us are trying to fit our gardening and canning and other work around our jobs, and our other projects. We’re stuck in the formal economy, unless it casts us out. But that is, I think a necessary transitional reality - again, don’t think I think it is easy, don’t think I think you aren’t tired - me too. But the truth is that if we are going to rebuild public, communal, domestic and informal economies, that time and energy will have to come from where we can spare it best - and we’re going to have to push ourselves. For some of us, time will be forthcoming when lose our jobs, or when we get enough benefit from our activities to be able to take one earner out of the equation, or when we consolidate households and resources to need fewer earners. But in a world without growth - and whether growth ends now or as we come up to absolute limits of natural resources, it is ending - we have no choice but to rebuild the informal economy.
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