Michel Bauwens wrote:

it would be nice if you could discuss this,
http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5473, for our blog

it has a neat list of job we should loose, vs. job we should gain …

nice fodder for meditation,

That essay on voluntary simplicity,
“A Message to the Nearly Converted”,

http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5473
while very interesting making lots of excellent points about modern society, has some of the same issues in its proposed solutions that the one on local agriculture has, or another one posted to the open manufacturing list about someone living in a cave that I commented on in this thread:
“True Post Scarcity Practitioner”
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/fc612c10352908ef/1121a6f118f1440b

First off, in this essay, there is some mention in passing about someone raising their own chickens and building a coop. We do that too. It takes a lot of materials to build a coop for a few chickens, and chickens can devastate a small yard pretty quickly. While chickens don’t require much labor day-to-day, building a coop and fenced yard (to prevent predation) does take a lot of labor. And to periodically cleaning a coop takes some labor, and a bunch of wood chips from somewhere, and water. It is cheaper and easier to buy organic eggs in a store if this is not something that is fun for you otherwise (although, granted, if you treat the chickens well, they will likely have a better life at your home than in even organic farms). Anyway, I use that as one example of a throwaway item where the proposal is both using both more labor and more physical resources in an alternative lifestyle than using network resources. There may be good reasons to have your own chickens in some situations (including for eating slugs in your garden), but using less resources is unlikely to be one of them in most cases (unless you are content to let many die from predation and do not overwinter them as we do).

Anyway, as in the cave essay, the person pointing out problems with the mainstream lifestyle may be quite correct, like negative externalities of pollution. But, rather than reject all advanced technology, which seems implicit in part of the essay (but not all, as I mention later) an alternative strategy is just to improve our high tech processes. We can rethink how we make things so they are more recyclable, or we can improve our energy supply with more renewables like solar or wind so we have the energy to recycle even a mixed waste stream easily by a plasma separation process, or we can improve robotics and automation so they can separate out a mixed waste stream to reduce energy consumption for recycling at lower temperatures. Anyway, there are essentially high-tech approaches that we know how to do (or could if we tried). The fact that we don’t try much reflects a basic market failure based on not accounting for external costs. A few laws about accounting for such external costs might improve recyclable packaging, for example, and do more for the environment that buying in bulk in plastic tubs.

Here is a core part of that essay: “Let me give you an example of our old ways coming to an end. General Motors just went bankrupt. Residential developers of suburban sprawl and mega-malls are going bankrupt too. Why? Because our economy is part of the finite planet Earth and we have reached some hard limits. Oil production is in decline and this means GM can’t keep building Hummers that will fill garages in dwellings miles away from work and schools and basic goods and services. Ecological debt yields financial ruin. Ways of life fade away.”

There is some truth there, including on changing ways of life, but overall it is wrong in some ways too. General Motors went bankrupt because of bad management, bad product design decisions, an inflexible infrastructure, the lack of a national health care system paid for by taxes, and a union philosophy that focused on jobs for union members as apposed to a basic income for all humans and actively resisting reducing working hours through innovation. There is a mention of peak oil theory and hard limits there, but the fact is, we have just as many iron molecules today as we did a hundred years ago (ignoring a few we sent to the moon). We are not running out of iron — just perhaps the ores we are used to using to get it. If we can’t bother to mine our landfills, that is just stupid. On energy, the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil. We could run big Hummers on synthetic fuels from coal (at an environmental cost and a health cost) or we could run them on green fuels from algae, or we could run them electrically from solar and wind power. We have lots of choices (even if Hummers are generally silly cars to own, dangers to themselves and other vehicles, promoted in part because of a silly tax policy allowing certain “trucks” to be expensed by businesses quickly but not cars).

While the essay is right that collectively we are trashing the planet, and that consuming less slows this, ultimately it is a failed philosophy, because slowing your descent into a volcano still leaves you falling into a volcano, just more slowly. If you consume at half the typical US standard, or even one tenth (and I’d expect that family is at half), that is still a slow motion disaster. I have little doubt the author would use advanced medical care in hospitals if the author’s family needed it, or that the post was written using a computer and the internet, or that the essayist owns a car or truck, or that their house has synthetic materials in it, and so on. Until we have more comprehensive recycling and improved design, consuming less doesn’t help in the end. It may even hurt in some ways, because people may think they have solved a problem when they haven’t, and they may be disengaging from an economy they could help out in some other way (like demanding and choosing greener products or laws to regulate pollution and other external costs of manufacturing). And the general doom and gloom about peak oil and catastrophe just adds to that, when we already have solar and wind technologies that are claimed to be cheaper than coal.

Now, there are lots of ways that essayist is doing good stuff, or at least the soccer mom they cite who went greener. They feel better. Their kids are happier. They are likely eating better. They may have more personal security. And so on. And they are reducing the unaccounted for external costs of the mainstream US way of life. I don’t want to discourage that kind of change. I applaud that, both for the personal happiness and for making a statement, same as I applaud the enlightened person experimenting with living in a cave.

But I’m suggesting it does not get at the core of fixing unsustainable aspects of our society the way that, say, solar energy research or wind farm installation does. But they do list related jobs in that list of jobs to gain, each of which is about improving our networked infrastructure, so obviously, they are promoting the bigger picture. I’m just suggesting there is some sort of disconnect between the voluntary simplicity movement (as good as that may be at reducing external costs) and the networked infrastructure transformation movement. There is an assumption they are connected, when actually, they may not be very connected, even if they may spring from the same consciousness. And, to the extent people won’t, say, raise their own chickens, I can wonder if implying they should do so may undermine the larger infrastructure transformation needs, like instead making sure egg cartons are easily recyclable or the eggs are produced by happy local chickens by peers using organic feed?

Another point from the essay: “A special class of non-governmental organization is involved in paying back our ecological debt. These are the local environmental centers. I strongly encourage you to join with them on various projects that could make the difference between a healthy versus a dystopian future. The big question I have is this: How are we going to restore and manage local watersheds and ecosystems in this new economy? For example, will a switch to renewable energy mean greater use of wood, and will that decimate the forest or be done with ecological wisdom? Might the jobless hunt for meat and will cause the local extirpation of game or be a healthy, sustained harvest. And I wonder, as people can’t afford trash disposal services will they dump in creeks and at the edge of fields more and more? Who will watch and restore the creeks and clean up the mess others leave behind?”

In the “Planet Earth” video series, a point is made near the end that the remaining large wildlife can only be conserved by people local to it, and only if they are prosperous enough to be able to do it (rather than poach to feed their families). If people retreat from the mainstream economy to let it collapse, rather than transform it into something better, in practice, we may well see more destruction of the environment. I live in one of the most rural areas in the US North East (the Adirondack Park) and there are still people who dump trash in ravines to avoid paying a $5 annual fee at the recycling center (or maybe because it is more convenient as the recycling center has limited hours?). So, I can walk a few hundred yards to see the very problem that author speculates about. A wealthier local town just would have less of that, I suspect. So, things like a basic income (Social Security and Medicare for all in the USA, not just the elderly or disabled) may be a way to salvage aspects of a networked economy to bring general prosperity, which can then lead to more respect for values beyond immediate economic survival, stuff like aesthetics or stewardship. Such values may sometimes seem to be luxuries to people out of work by an industrial complex that does not need more workers as it continues to automate and become more efficient from better design. But, many people around me already live the way the author outlines out of necessity not virtue, and they do the dumping, so that route towards poverty has the very pitfalls the author worries about. The author does not address that core issue (like brought up in 1964 in the Triple Revolution memorandum about the breaking link between jobs and a right to consume). Abundance gives us a lot more options that poverty. Voluntary simplicity is not the same as involuntary simplicity. A well-designed elegant efficient sustainable infrastructure is not the same as no infrastructure (or a poor infrastructure). A right to a share of industry you can direct to make extremely green products is not the same as making less green products at home. Sure, if the infrastructure is broken, trying to use it less is virtuous, but ultimately, the infrastructure needs to be fixed to be greener and more equitable. The author admits to this, saying: “Making the necessary changes society-wide requires engagement beyond your home and neighborhood.”

Anyway, to summarize, reducing consumption reduces negative external costs of production, but it does not eliminate them totally. Only a rethinking of our manufacturing infrastructure (and how the resulting wealth gets distributed) can fix that completely. This article seems to confuse the two, and that has been a long standing problem with the environmental movement.

–Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/