Also highly fascinating in retrospect in terms of what has changed since the 2008/9 financial meltdown.
]]>I’d encourage anyone interested to have a look at Larry Quick and Fred Presley’s work at the Resilient Futures Network where they are putting all of this theory into practice on live projects in the United States and Australia.
]]>Vinay Gupta:
It’s a total waste of time doing this stuff in the developed world. There are highly functional, highly capitalized established alternatives with total political support: there’s just no freaking way to really effect deep transformation here. People don’t want deep transformation in culturally significant numbers: they want to be told that what they are doing now is OK and, as soon as their cars are electric and the power comes from plastic solar panels, it by and large will be. At least until the soil dies.
In the developing world, however, where people are dying on the streets for lack of sanitation and livelihood, all of this makes massively more sense. People need solutions, right the hell now, and they’re dying at the rate of roughly 36 million a year for the lack of them – more than half of all human death is death from poverty as far as I can tell from the WHO numbers.
http://guptaoption.com – Soft Development Paths kinda puts this into context – 4+ bn people who have no realistic path to a better life, and need one, and it’s going to be based around distributed infrastructure because there’s just no other model that stands any chance of working without depriving them of food security by herding them together into unstable cities where the first global economic hiccup will starve them to death where they stand.
And, yes, we came close to that this year with the whole biofuels price spike. If the banks go down, and they are headed that way according to a lot of finance guys, it could be *vastly* worse on the urban poor than anybody has modeled yet.
I realize this isn’t quite the positive message that folks might want to hear, but it’s deeply realistic and grounded in solid numerical thinking. With cheap solar, and yes, we do have it now, the western lifestyle in it’s current form can be made pretty sustainable – not perfectly so, but mostly – and that’s going to remove a lot of the need for radical adaptations in how society functions. The place where the radical change is needed and possible is the developing world, where people are dying at a vast scale, and in ways which clean energy alone is not going to fix.
Carbon emissions are yesterday’s unsolved problem. Now we know how to solve the problem profitably and conveniently: nanosolar and the rest of those cheap solar companies put the solution on the table already. Production needs to scale from 1GW a year of panels to maybe 1000 times that. But that’s a standard industrial scaling problem for what must be a very, very profitable business, and at that point… trust me on this, CO2 is not going the big issue. 40% of the human race’s CO2 emissions are coal, and as soon as we get better battery technology, the same basic solution will take out oil as batteries displace gasoline and diesel.
The only rational action on CO2 at this point is to accelerate this transformation. Nothing else really matters.
In terms of intentional communities, I *absolutely* recommend a visit to:
Let me finish with a quote from, ahem, St. Milton Friedman:
We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis. –Milton Friedman
Now, much as we malign Milt for things like, I dunno, his collegial letter to Pinochet and much that has been done in his name, there is a damn good point here: change is easiest in times of crisis. But you have to accurately identify the crisis: it’s not in the cozy homes of the developed world, it’s in the ghettos and especially the villages, where well over half of the human race struggle and die in ways that these simple approaches to community resilience could prevent. That is where the crisis is, and that’s the opportunity to transform lives.
Look to the poor, thats where the revolution will happen.
Vinay
]]>(Dave refers to his book at http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/finding_the_sweet_spot:paperback)
Everybody wants to change the world, as the song goes. This decade seems to be the “decade of design”, since everyone seems to believe that proper design is the solution to all the world’s problems. While I am in total agreement with John Robb’s and Jeff Vail’s forecast, and ideas, I share the view of John Gray (“Straw Dogs”) that imposed or even urgently-suggested design solutions will not work.
These days I’m involved in two major initiatives: One to create model “Natural Enterprises” that are community-based, socially responsible, egalitarian, environmentally sustainable, and self-sufficient (my book on this — link below — has just been published); and the other to create model Natural (Intentional) Communities — that demonstrate a better way to live. So a collection of Natural Enterprises within each Natural Community, networked together, creates a Natural Economy.
I’ve spent a huge amount of time researching both subjects and getting involved in the IC movement. And I’ve learned that there are lots of good models out there, and explanations of the design and principles that have made them good. And I’ve also learned that nobody cares. At one point I thought the situation just wasn’t desperate enough, and that when the industrial economy and civilization society collapses people will be grateful for such well-designed, tested and well-thought-out models of a better way to live and make a living.
But they won’t. History demonstrates that we don’t follow good models, any more than, when they were the fad in the 1990s, we employed “best practices”. These things are fun to design and think about and talk about, but it is not human nature for people to create things this way. We start from the context we know (as flawed as it may be). That means that, when civilization falls, we will see communities all over the world trying different experiments based not on brilliant blueprints from groups like us, but on what they know and believe.
The best we can hope for is that, if we start now creating some models, ourselves, humiliatingly small, ignored models that actually work, then those with experience of these models will know to recreate them after civilization’s collapse. If we’ve done our work well, not on the design table but on the ground, learning from our design failures, then those models will thrive and our descendants and those who’ve lived with us will thank us.
It is likely that the majority will instead try to recreate what they remember, what failed, and they will likewise fail. They won’t read us, they won’t listen to us, no matter how articulate and brilliant and proven our ideas.
If we really want to develop resilient communities, let’s do it. Let’s organize some people who know and care about this and wotk together to design and build something that should work, and then learn from it so that, with some ciontinuous refinements, it does work.
We don’t need another theory, another design. We need people who will start work, now, to build the model that will enable the survivors of the crash to create something that is reslient, and not repeat the mistakes they should have learned.
If we do that, together, our greatest lesson will be how utterly ignorant we are, even now, of what is really needed, and how astonishingly much we’ve forgotten that must be relearned.
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