How not to play the game

It’s been more than a year now since the theme of “green wizardry” became central to the posts here on The Archdruid Report, and I’ve pretty much covered the first two of the three themes I mean to discuss before it becomes time to shift the conversation elsewhere. We’ve discussed organic gardening and its associated arts, and we’ve discussed homescale energy production and conservation. At this point, before we go on to the third leg of the tripod, which used to be called “recycling” thirty years ago and deserves a more robust name now, I’d like to step back for a moment and talk a bit about strategy.

To understand the way this works, it’s going to be necessary to look at some of the least welcoming features of that future, and that in turn is going to require a look back at a vision of history I first sketched out here years ago, and developed in more detail in the pages of my book The Ecotechnic Future. That look is going to require close attention to some of the least pleasant features of where we’re headed as a society. Unwelcome as that may be, it can’t be avoided, for it’s precisely as a response to the more troubling dimensions of our future that the strategy I have in mind has its place.

The fast version of the take on the future I want to discuss divides it up into four overlapping phases or periods, labeled according to the basic modes of economic production that predominate during each one. The first of these, the one in which most of us grew up and to which nearly all current political, economic and social thought is attuned, is abundance industrialism. This is the phase in which the supply of goods and services available to people in the world’s industrial nations by and large increases with each passing year. Yes, I know, it’s heresy to suggest this, but my take is that what drove that increase was not the growth of human knowledge, or any of the other comforting mantras offered by the publicists of science and industry over the last century or so. Rather, what drove it was simply an exponential increase in consumption of the Earth’s finite reserves of fossil fuels.

With the arrival of geological limits to fossil fuel production, we enter the second phase, scarcity industrialism. This is the phase in which the supply of goods and services available to people in the industrial nations peaks and begins to contract. According to mainstream economic doctrines, that can’t happen, which may be one of the reasons why we’ve become so good at ignoring it. Few people notice, for example, that most of what’s for sale in supermarkets is a little smaller and a little more shoddily made with every passing year, while the price stays level or creeps upwards; few people talk about the disappearance of scores of once-common services – try to get a perfectly good shoe with a worn heel repaired in most American cities nowadays – or think about the way that municipal services always seem to contract while the cost always seems to expand.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-06-29/how-not-play-game

local, modest, self sustaining cooperative communities. He answers his own argument, grim enough as it is, by pointing to monasticism as his example. Fortified, uniform communities of sense on mountaintops or(initially) wastelands no one wants in the crumbling Dark Ages without. He might have mentioned the Amish except there is a population growth question there and perhaps the ideological unity is too unpalatable because so close at hand.

In any event gone are the times, even with climate changes like mini Ice Ages, when physically this could guarantee survival of isolated communities. The means and knowledge of the outside fury can be much more threatenting than the less mobile, small population civilizations of the past.

It still is an idealist, small community, very small minority solution to Shangri-La in place made more difficult by more severe completely global crises than the past could dream of. We are still left with the dilemma of getting the mega society to change and mostly we have experience to tell us even despair is a waste of time. The same elements that trap the global village within dying global empires, the current progress and shared knowledge of this willfully Dark Age of greed have to fight- globally- for change. Salvation in place within chaos is an even dimmer hope despite the broader more intelligent, more simple tech, possibilities of doing so, because the mega collapse threatens all life on the planet, at least human life and the current state of the biosphere.

Historical analogies are repeated with exact consistency and relevancy. The problem is they will not bear repeating any more. Either we will be left with beseiged slivers of highly(possibly unsustainably) stressed, no so ideal, non-growth, scattered communities and some remnant of the human nature of the post Ice Age "surge"- or nothing at all.
The incubation of saved knowledge and a thread of advanced global communication might take us to the next stage- or not.

Humanity does not have its act together. Lifeboats may not have a destination. Turning whole civilizations progressively Amish without tyranny is in every way beyond the vision of total optimists. Of course, what he offers must be tried by as many sane grass roots communities as possible. On the large scale revolution itself must change. Revolutions are happening but the depressing aftermath is the actual war.