This article by Pål Steigan was originally published here. Translated by Graham Healey.

The paintings of goatherds and farm animals amongst the ruins of infrastructure and temples from classical Rome are like pictures of people moving among the remains of a high-tech civilisation that they no longer have the ability to match. The city of Rome had at its height a population of a million people. That required a very advanced infrastructure for water and food supply, transport, goods delivery, trade and so on. The city was, at the time, the foremost example of a building materials industry, that had the capacity, and level of competency, to deliver the enormous amount of building materials that such a city required.

When the empire collapsed, the infrastructure was no longer maintained. The aqueducts broke down and towns and cities lost their water supply. Roads and bridges deteriorated and were not repaired. Goods transport and trade was reduced from a surging river to a quiet brook. 1200 years after its days of glory Rome was a ruined town with a population of less than 10.000.

The Etruscans, and later the Romans, had drained swamps to increase food production. Thereby they also removed malaria. But when the empire broke down, the drainage ditches were no longer maintained and malaria returned. It wasn’t until the 1930’s, after the fascists came to power, that the swamps were drained again and malaria disappeared from Italy again.

The ’empire’ of today is extremely vulnerable

We, who live in a a time when another empire shows many of the same tendencies towards disintegration that the Roman empire had towards the end, have all reason to give it some thought.

The Roman emperors mixed more and more lead in the silver coinage (denarius), so that eventually there was almost  no silver left. That was the hyperinflation of the time. Roman citizens no longer wished to fight in the army, so the army became based on mercenaries. The word soldier comes from this. A soldier was someone who received money to fight (solidus – gold coin). In order to pay the soldiers more money had to be minted. The empire’s wars were expensive and the empire was large, so the problem was solved by minting coins that were ever more worthless.

The world is dominated today by the American empire. It affects everything about global production, the money system, world trade, agriculture, the energy system and so on.

The empire passed it’s high watermark around 1971. That is when USA gave up the gold standard. After that the empire’s growth was built on printing more and more paper money, and now digital money. But the empire is also based on the rest of the world accepting these symbols as the real thing. US wars in the 21^st century are largely financed by selling American government securities to China, in other words on China lending money to the American state.

The globalized production and trade system is finely tuned to deliver goods and components just-in-time. Norwegian meat production for example is dependent on a boat arriving at Fredrikstad with soya from Brasil once a month. If the boat did not arrive there would be a full-blown crisis in  Norwegian meat production.

When the so-called horse-meat scandal broke in 2013 the Financial Times showed how the European trade and transport systems for meat work.

Slaughterhouses are capital intensive and energy demanding, and therefore there are fewer and fewer slaughterhouses delivering to a more and more global market. The margins are paper thin, so they cut corners wherever they can.

The big supermarket chains want to buy the cheapest food raw materials available at any one time. Their brokers are continually on the phone to make best wholesale purchases. FT quotes professor Karel Williams at the Manchester Business School, who explains how refrigerator trucks queue up in front of the slaughterhouses in the Netherlands at the end of the week, with the drivers having no idea where they are going until the last minute. Each broker has 10-20 slaughterhouses he buys from. One week he buys from one place and the next week from somewhere else. The deals are made at the last moment for the driver to get his delivery orders. “We have a continual European trade where animal parts are driven around in 40-ton trailers.”

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation – UN) says that there are something like a quarter of a million edible plants that could be cultivated. But humanity has become dependent on just 3% of them.

The worlds food supply is dependent on 150 plant species. Three quarters of all energy we get from plant food comes from just 12 of them. Competition and the need to increase production has resulted in a drastic reduction in genetic diversity. The system also demands more and more energy, minerals and rare raw materials at an exponentially increasing rate.

This makes today’s empire extremely vulnerable. Agriculture may well experience crises similar to the Potato Famine that hit Ireland in 1847, when a million people died of starvation. It is easy to imagine how devastating and dramatic it will be.

In short: when this system collapses, it will, just as in the Rome empire, experience the collapse of much of the critical infrastructure. It will simply not be possible to feed as many people as before. The result can be widespread starvation disasters to an extent that humanity has never seen before. There are 37 megacities in the world today and the largest of them have over 30 million inhabitants. If there is a breakdown in water supply, or energy or food delivery, then such cities will become uninhabitable.

Food and water are fundamental. Without food and water we cannot live. But many of our systems are also extremely dependent on oil and rare earth minerals that there are less and less of. When this system collapses, it could easily have dramatic consequences. The example of the Roman empire shows that it might well take a long time before anything else takes its place.

It is easy to show that today’s growth based capitalism is living on borrowed time. It is a long way from being robust or sustainable. On the contrary it is very vulnerable and unstable. This is one of the reasons that it is necessary to work towards replacing the system as soon as possible and learning how to run society in a healthier and more sustainable fashion.

Globalists of right and left bemoan the fact that people turning their back on the globalism they have preached for decades. They are turning instead to populist politics and are so “reactionary” that they want to preserve their nation states, local production and more. But it is the globalists who are playing Russian roulette. It is their system that has made us so extremely vulnerable. To ensure food-security and viable local communities, to restore the broken metabolism between society and nature, is what is truly progressive. That is the future, and we need to urgently get rid of the empire and it’s economy of spongers and freeloaders.

If we don’t then perhaps landscape painters in a few hundred years time will be painting goat-herders grazing their animals under the twisted remains of skyscrapers and motorway bridges.

The post It hurts when empires fall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Tolfa is hosting the italian-norwegian study center, Centro studi italo-norvegese di Tolfa. The town also hosts the Norwegian writer and political activist Pål Steigan, who is running one of the best blogs about current Norwegian society and international affairs. He calls himself a communist, but I see him now as a commoner as he is supporting a kind of bottom up democratic model.

The Commons is a regime for managing common-pool resources that eschews individual property rights and State control. It is a system of governance that relies on common property arrangements that tend to be Commonsself-organized and enforced in complex and sometimes idiosyncratic ways (which distinguish it from communism, a top-down, State-directed mode of governance whose historical record has been unimpressive). – David Bollier

Model of a self-organized bottom-up society, where small cooperative groups are the foundation for the state as a whole. Every resilient system is organized this way.

What makes Tolfa unique is that 95 percent of the surrounding land is owned as a commons, the town is mostly consisting of a resilient traditional architecture of integration (there are a few anxiety-inducing corbusian apartment blocks at its outskirts), and it has a perfect population size for participating local democracy.

Problem
Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5000-10,000 persons.
Solution
Decentralize city governments in a way that gives local control to communities of 5,000 to 10,000 persons. As nearly as possible, use natural geographic and historical boundaries to mark these communities. Give each community the power to initiate, decide, and execute the affairs that concern it closely: land use, housing, maintenance, streets, parks, police, schooling, welfare, neighborhood services. – Christopher Alexander

From what I’ve understood the ongoing slow collapse of industrial society has hit Tolfa hard, making them open for new solutions. With the towns unique position this situation should be taken for an opportunity to turn something bad into something good, making Tolfa an example for the commons and cooperative solutions for Italy, Europe and the world.

I therefore encourage commoners and permaculturists all over Europe to turn their eyes to Tolfa. Seeing the vast meadows and greenery surrounding Tolfa in the above video, just imagining what possibilities there might be for food forests and permaculture. And imagining all the possibilities for cooperation as a result of the towns traditional street network.

Pål Steigan has told he has some ongoing initiatives for strengthening the local economy of Tolfa, from what I understand these are in a commons spirit. He might be a key person for transforming Tolfa into an inspiration and a hub for the commons movement in Europe.

Unfortunately the Wikipedia article covering Tolfa is miserable. The article covering my town was just as bad, but over the last months I made 40 photos for upgrading it. I hope someone can do the same for Tolfa?

This was a small introduction to Tolfa and the huge possibilities I think lay latent there for realizing the commons paradigm in Italy and Europe.

The post Tolfa in Italy: A Future Hub for the Commons in Europe? appeared first on P2P Foundation.