My long term, in depth research has persuaded me that a low energy economy is almost certainly inevitable in the near-ish future. Such a low energy economy will result from two major factors -- a decrease in energy availability as fossil fuels become more scarce and deliberate decarbonization efforts. Renewable energy can't possibly replace the 84% of global energy which is fossil energy use in the relevant time frame (relevant from both standpoints, resource scarcity [and price] and deliberate, voluntary decarbonization. The relevant time frame is the ten year period we're presently in. Every change which matters will have to occur in that time frame -- at least to a vast extent.
My research has also revealed to my satisfaction that a low carbon economy will not be an urban economy. At least not to the extent of urbanization which we now have. It will be an increasingly rural economy, with smaller towns and villages rather than vast urban areas without much access to land within walking and bicycling distance. Urban economies are luxury dependent economies, not needs based economies. As GDP and GWP inevitably contracts (somewhat dramatically) in a low energy intensity economy, people will not be spending on non-necessary goods and services. So jobs in cities will become increasingly scarce. Many will have no choice but to leave the cities for smaller towns and villages with ample nearby land for food growing. Food growing at the local scale will be the primary economic activity of a majority of people in the not-so-far future. That and attending to basic needs like shelter, shoes, clothing, medicine/health care.
Cities will not disappear, but they will largely empty out -- because they will not be economically viable. Smallter towns, villages and rural areas enable what I call "community self-provisioning" of basic needs, such as food. Self-provisioning is usually understood in terms of a family or household provisioning their own food (the emphasis is on food, generally) through gardening, small farming, fishing, foraging, hunting.... Obviously, all of this is outside of a money economy. Well, this is how sensible people in the future will organize around food -- outside of a money economy. But, increasingly, this cooperative non-market sharing will include whole village-scaled neighborhoods, not just households and families. Everyone (all who are able bodied) contributes in some way to community self-provisioning. All share what is produced into the community, without need for turning food into a commodity for sale in a market. Food becomes (mostly) gift, not a market "good" for sale.
Those who love cities can choose, for a while, to try and make cities which are more ecologically and socially functional. This will be a severe challenge as cities begin to empty out and the economies which have held them together begin to fray around the edges. There are things in and about cities worth preserving. But future cities will be very, very different from current cities. This is not a guess. It's as near to a fact as we can get. This is because industrial civilization cannot possibly be sustained. Some parts of it can be sustained, enough to provide bicycles, shovels, basic hand tools, cookware. Necessary items. Not a lot of expensive luxuries.
This is the conceptual framework we will require if we are to respond to the challenges ahead, which are coming very soon indeed.
This can be the opening of the dialogue we have discussed over email. Feel free to cut and paste it into a file, so we can start.
We have exchanged on this before. I also am skeptical about our ability to replace fossil fuels with renewables under business as usual assumptions, and agree we need to reduce energy consumption. The fact that fossil fuel consumption has continued to increase even as renewables are entering the picture is the evidence for this. Though the energy we do use will have to come from renewables. Of course, replacement of fossil with electrified alternatives already significantly reduces energy use, since electrified transportation and heat pumps are substantially more efficient. That said, unless we change the structure of society, and the dominant operating language of the growth and profit imperative, in ways that reduce overall material throughput and stress on ecosystems, we are going to increase ecological overshoot and intensify the momentum to collapse.
But we disagree on the role of cities. A dense urban environment is inherently more efficient than spreading out across the landscape. Multifamily buildings use less energy than individual structures. Getting around by walking, biking and transit is far easier. If we go into collapse due to energy shortages, it will be suburbs, exurbs and rural areas that suffer the most. In terms of food production and transport, the food miles that use the most energy are use driving to and from the store. What about urban/suburban food production? It is interesting to note that the city which is perhaps the closest to the collapse scenario you envision, with loss of jobs, Detroit, is also a place with some of the most interesting models in urban agriculture. Yards and vacant lots hold much potential. It is also easier to exchange food and other necessities when neighbors are close by.
So how will people in more dispersed communities connect with each other? Bikes, horses? Vehicles will have to be electrified or run on biofuels produced from local sources. And if there are vehicles it suggests there will be centralized production somewhere. I note my friends in rural areas so a helluva lot of driving. What is it like where you live in Taos?
Finally, I would caution against an anti-urban bias deep in US of American culture. We have long seen cities as dens of corruption and idealized rural life. But the cities provide the greatest opportunities for human exchange, while social realities in many rural areas are far from ideal, as socioeconomic indicators prove. In addition, more people on the landscape stresses ecosystems, leaves less space for wildlife and other species. I believe a sustainable future must include a substantial urban element.
While it is true that under current conditions, rural Americans (Let's use America as our example here) drive a great deal more, per capita, than urban dwellers, and so burn more fossil fuels than urban dwellers per capita, this would not be the case in the future scenario I'm proposing, predicting, and even advocating for. You must know that rural dwellers drive more because they're having to cover more miles for shopping, work, etc., as contrasted with urban dwellers. This would not be the case if rural dwellers had wholly functional ecovillage design in their rural ecovillages -- which means everything they need would be within walking and bicycling distance. Cars would not be necessary for ordinary, everyday life. In transition, an ecovillages could have a small fleet of cars which can be only occasionally (and minimally) borrowed for unique and special occasions, but not daily.
It's true that multi-family housing is generally more energy efficient than stand-alone single family dwellings. But ecovillages type dwellings can be designed and constructed to be very energy efficient by making use of passive solar space heating, solar water heating, passive cooling, and on and on. There is also no reason why a village cannot choose to employ the very same architectural design which, in having more shared walls and ceiling/floor space, is incorporated into the design.
But the key to what I wrote, above, is that the future energy intensity level will necessarily be a good deal less in places like the USA than it is at present. And that means the economy will necessarily shrink. And that means cities will have fewer jobs, thus requiring a more agrarian mode of economy.
Community self-provisioning of food is a great deal more challenging in a low energy urban environment, anyway, due to the proportion of asphalt, concrete, buildings and houses relative to soil usable and accessible for food growing.
A cities go, Detroit (which you mentioned) is unusual, in that at present there is an enormous amount of intra-urban land for food growing. This is rare in American cities, in terms of the relative proportions of such land to built environment.
I'm not "anti-urban". I'm just being realistic about the relation of land access to low energy economies / economics. A very low energy economy, which is almost certain to be our near future, almost certainly cannot be mostly urban, for reasons I have explained. Those who cannot walk to a community farm (or extensive gardens) from their homes will not be able to self-provision food in community. There will not be many jobs. So how will they eat?
I repeat. There will not be many jobs to be had in cities in a low carbon economy. And there will be no full replacement of current energy levels with "renewables".
As for the idea of using heat pumps at a gigantic increase in rates of use, what about the embodied energy in manufacturing all of these... and the solar panels and wind turbines to run them? Won't this take us way, way beyond our already used up "carbon budget"? (It's shocking how little embodied energy is considered in the general public's thinking about energy matters! Truly shocking!)
I'm predicting that if nearly everyone doesn't die in a mass catastrophic collapse scenario, then almost everyone in the future will live in some form or another of ecovillage, whether these ecovillages are retrofitted in what is now suburbia (see the book, Retrosuburbia), urban areas (as in parts of Detroit, to one extent of ecovillages design or another) or rural areas. Even cities can have ecovillages for neighborhoods, but it's MUCH easier to create a low energy economy in a rural area than an urban one.
Whether future people live in ecovillages won't be a simple matter of lifestyle preference. It will become necessary for basic livelihood!
First, your vision of ecovillages has a lot of attraction. A lot of people seem to have this vision, including these folks in my part of the world. https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/brad-smith/ You’ve probably read this. It is reminiscent of peasant villages in the feudal era or the contemporary global south. The idea of a village surrounded by fields worked in common resonate with something primal in the human experience, going back to indigenous reality. I think to the extent people can realize this vision, build practical models, we will be ahead.
The practical difficulties are apparent. First, land and the cost of it. Unless there is complete collapse of the civil order, there will be issues of deed and title. The financial difficulties of land acquisition are regarded as one of the major reasons the ecovillage idea has not spread further, though I have been supplied with some good examples I plan to cover in the future. So to mesh our visions a bit, public banking not driven by profit but social and ecological goals could supply a financial basis for ecovillage creation in both rural and metropolitan areas.
Then there are cultural realities. I like to joke that most of the hippie back to the land communities out of the 70s wound up in court. There’s actually some truth to that. It would be a worthy work to track ones that remain to this day. Twin Oaks seems to be one. https://www.twinoaks.org/ In western culture, particularly in the U.S., we are enculturated to be self-seeking individuals. Many communal experiments have faltered on egotism, especially of self-serving leaders. Perhaps necessity will drive us together. I think many people, struggling to keep up with the necessities of individuated life, paying the rent, owning a car, buying the groceries, would find a more communal life attractive.
All that said, I still think you are are underplaying the transformative potential of cities. One of the origin points of bioregionalism, Planet Drum, staged a green city visionimg process back in the 80s. http://sustainablecity.org/document/green.htm I was on a panel with Peter Berg of Planet Drum later. Regarded as one of the progenitors of bioregionalism, he told of how he was a back to the lander but concluded that all these efforts would be in vain unless cities were transformed. They would consume the countryside.
If we have an energy crash, there will be a lot of land opened up in cities by conversion of streets and parking spaces. Here is a valuable resource on land consumed by parking in cities. https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/4162455-paved-paradise-maps-show-how-much-of-us-cities-are-parking-lots/ in terms of jobs, people thinking about degrowth have identified a lot of low-energy jobs in terms of people serving people. Then there is the question about all the embodied carbon, energy and resources in existing buildings. In an energy-carbon-resource constrained world, can we afford to throw them away? Better to have mass rehabilitation for super-energy-efficiency and energy production, both passive and active, putting gardens on rooftops where possible. A lot of jobs there.
You ask about embodied carbon of heat pumps and renewables. I think we reach a point where it becomes a self-replicating cycle of renewables producing renewables and electrified equipment. Don’t ask me about carbon budget! We don’t have one. We are over the line, and will need to dramatically reduce fossil emissions and mobilize nature to absorb carbon. I think we will need direct regulation to reduce carbon emissions to open up some space to make low-carbon alternatives. It’s all a very difficult needle to thread, but we have to try.
I do think we might have some different scenarios for energy descent. I perhaps see a more gradual curve than you, which maintains more options, such as some longer-distance transport of food. If we go into a radical collapse scenario, it will be a Mad Max world, where any ecovillages had better have arms or they will be plundered by the roving gangs. In the broadest sense, I am looking for ways to avoid that, and mass death it implies. We need to begin building options at all levels today to steer the most gentle path to the future possible. That’s why I focus on building the future in place.
I'm hard at work at the moment, and so haven't got the time to adequately address all of your points here, Patrick. But I'll have more to say on these soon!
For the moment, I want to say that my relative expertise is in the Three E's, energy, economy and ecology as they relate to one another, as entangled aspects of a whole system. Most people do not have such relative expertise, and simply don't know how to conceive of these three in a fully integrated framework. This includes the supposed professional experts, which are usually only expert in one of the Three E's, and not integrated into a holistic transdisciplinary framework.
I KNOW that any reduction of fossil energy at the levels necessary to avert utter climate catastrophe would involve a proportionally concomitant reduction in GDP / GWP. And there is no way to have a rapid renewable energy transition which doesn't result in a rapid increase in greenhouse gases -- rather ironically. Almost all of the energy we now use is fossil energy, and it is fossil energy we'd apply (now, today) to building such technological devices and infrastructure. There is no magic in it. We COULD NOT rapidly and dramatically build these devices and infrastructure on renewable energy. This is not a guess. It's a bold fact.
If I had time to explain it here and now, I could basically demonstrate to you why urban flight (partial, not total) is almost certainly inevitable in the face of lower net energy in the total economy of any "developed world" nation. If energy shrinks by half, as it must, then urban jobs will shrink by at least that amount. It's just how this stuff works, and all of the Triple E experts know it, just as I do.
You're invited to join me in this process I just began today in a post on Deep Transformation Network.:
Deep Dive: Energy
I'm undertaking some "deep dive" research concerning the role of energy in our present metacrisis / polycrisis. And I'm going to begin my deep dive with reading Carbon Civilization and the Energy Descent Future, by Samuel Alexander and Joshua Floyd.
This book is widely available in print at various book sources, but can also be downloaded for free as a PDF file here. (Just put $0.00 in for your price.)
You're invited to read this book with me and to discuss its contents in the "comments" below. We will address the Introduction and chapters in the order they appear.
This deep dive research and learning process will continue with other books and text resources when I/we have worked through the opening book in the series. You can go along with me here, if you wish -- or end your engagement with this material with the initial book. It's up to you.
I don't know why we can expect people to live in "evovillages" in the future. Why wouldn't they live in dystopian urban slums like those that ring Jakarta, Lagos, Karachi, etc? After all, the average urban dweller in those places occupies a very small carbon footprint, although their exploitation and inmiseration facilitates the persistence of the vastly larger one of their oligarchs. So why wouldn't our own oligarchs catch on and embrace the same model? (Indeed, perhaps they already have!)
Certainly there is the risk that, instead of living in ecovillage-like conditions in the future, most people would live in slums which resembleJakarta, Lagos, and Karachi. But they would not do this if they had the alternative option of living in an ecovillage-like situation. I'm assuming we will revolt against the system which would put us in slums, or keep us trapped in the status quo until the Earth is dead.
Retrosuburbia is coming to suburbia, whether we do it deliberately in advance of "collapse" or have it imposed on us by circumstances beyond our influence or control.
Something similar can be said about cities and towns of all scales.
As David Holmgren wisely points out, suburbia is better suited to implementing a retrofitted ecovillage type of design in suburban neighborhoods than is the case in cities. Why? The typical land lot per residence is MUCH larger than dense urban settings. That means people can walk out their front and back doors into the permaculture gardens which supply the bulk of the food folks are provisioning for themselves.
Seems to me that the collapse of large cities is inevitable because they require so much power--to get up to the 47th floor, and to bring food in. Al the talk about jobs and commuting time is based on current reality. In the future reality, resources and energy will be very scarce, so bullshit jobs, and indeed most jobs will be GONE--quite possibly even money will be gone. Food is the thing that is much easier for rural and even suburban sites than urban ones, and food is the thing we will all still need when a nice new dress or imported fruit or the latest gadget are things we remember, things we get only in dreams.. And in that scenario, the obstacle of the high cost of land, lack of deeds, will also be problems we remember from the bad old days--I quote Dmitri Orlov from a conference some years back:" In a time of collapse, no government will enforce the rights of absentee owners."
Yes, we also need shelter, and a way of warming it in winter and cooling it in summer, but often old methods will work fine. There are already extra housing units in cities; if as James and I predict, there is a mass flow to rural areas in search of food, there will be a problem in that many farm areas have LESS housing than 50 years ago--as farmers gave up and left, their housing deteriorated. But new farmers will just have to build with what's available, often earth, cob, which is widely available and very low cost, but labor intensive.
But of course, all of this depends on the speed and trajectory of collapse, which is impossible to predict.
Call me a doubting Thomas, but I am suspicious of the conceit that a social "movement of movements" drawing on the same kind of decentralized model of economic "Brownian motion" as the one that forms the basis of capitalism itself can somehow overcome the very problems as the latter produced by its own spontaneous operations in the first place.
Interesting observation. I guess I have to ask what are the prospects for centralized movements. In the 60s we saw a lot of great leaders shot down, and concerted disruption through Cointelpro. Decentralized movements are harder to cut off. Also to be noted is that I lay out ways for movements growing in many places to connect with each other and assemble a greater whole, while at local and regional levels community congresses provide a place for coalescence and coherence. I am all for movement at any scale we can achieve, and would not abandon efforts at any level. But I also believe we need to gain traction, and it is at local and regional levels where we have the most prospects.
Re the origins of capitalism, can we trace them to the accumulation of financial power in the Northern Italian cities, Venice, Milan, Genoa? Moving on to Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London? With the ultimate expression being the royally charted trading companies of The Netherlands and Britain, and the invention of the joint stock ownership enterprise with limited liability? It seems capitalism has highly centralized origins, in very specific places and institutions. And it has a long-term tendency to ever greater levels of centralization in monopoly, oligopoly, and increasing concentrations of wealth, as we see today. Can we see decentralization, with communities gaining greater power to invest in and direct their own development on a democratic basis, as an alternative? That is the proposition with which I am working.
Many people are starting to work towards this assumption as it seems to be the only option left to us. The XR movement in the UK (Just stop oil etc) is working on The Humanity Project now which is aiming to bring this concept to people.
Of course you are right that capitalism absolutely requires a massive amount of "dirigisme" on a world scale to sustain itself, a fact that the famed socialist scholar Leo Panitch convincingly emphasized, especially in his best known book, "The Making of Global Capitalism". These "exogenous" policing efforts are similar at an international level to the role that armed police play at the domestic level in a major US city, for example, ie, policing required social boundaries to ensure the smooth flow of transactions.
I have found Panitch illuminating. I have not read this particular work, but his analysis of the global financial power of the U.S. has been valuable to my understanding of global geopolitics and the current efforts toward dedollarization,
We have watched the even more spectacularly rapid implosion and cooptation of Digital Age "decentralized movements" than their 20th predecessors, as Vincent Bevins discusses in his recent book. Touting themselves as "post ideological", "neither left nor right", "nonhierarchical", etc, they were no match for their munificently well funded, militaristic, and semi-astroturf corporate and state backed opponents.
I am aware of the Bevins book and what it says. Let me draw some distinctions between what I am proposing and a couple of the perceived failures. First, Occupy. It had no leadership structure, really no program. It did leave us with the enduring meme of the 1% v the 99%, though it really is more like the 10% v. the 90%. So it came and went. Then, Black Lives Matter. We saw the uprising in 2020, and reforms in a few cities. Again, BLM put issues on the table but did not sustain an enduring organizing effort, and there have been rollbacks. What I am advocating is a sustained organizing strategy based in places. It seeks to create unified agendas for place-based change through Community Congresses engaging current movements, to give them a common basis for action with enduring organizing strategies. It aims to build successful models that can be transmitted laterally to other places, and into broader jurisdictions. It accumulates power that can ramify to national levels. It embodies what is known as municipalism, but seeks to build connections that deal with issues that cannot be readily addressed at the municipal level, such as militarism, which I wrote about in the piece. It also seeks to give a politics to the bioregional movement, now re-emerging, beyond self-organized actions in civil society. Again, I am genuinely interested in your views on how we organize to deal with the convergent crises we face. I am not advocating dropping anything we do, only giving it a new coherency in focus on place.
I don't have any highly prescriptive answers, but I would just say we shouldn't hastily jump to kneejerk rejection of certain useful features and lessons from past "failures". Leninism and democratic centralism, for example, were "failures" over a seventy year timeline, yet that timeline was also marked by astonishing successes of the sort which most historically counter hegemonic movements can scarcely dream of!
Finally, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, historic reverses and setbacks are to be expected, and the working class will have to sustain multiple "failed revolutions" before the final twilight of capitalism arrives and passes!
I think about the dialectic between centralized and decentralized quite a lot. Certainly one has to be impressed by China’s ability to marshal resources to rapidly build a nationwide high speed rail system and smart grid capable of handling mass renewables, and to conduct an industrial policy that has put them far in the lead in solar, wind and EVs. The forced industrialization under Stalin - I see you’ve written about that - made it possible for the Soviets to defeat the Nazis. Both these nations had histories of centralized development that preceded their revolutions, the Trans-Siberian railroad, the great waterworks of China. I have a theory that revolutions don’t change the fundamental political culture of a country so much as build on it. I am primarily writing and thinking about the US experience, which has a more dispersed pattern of development, and how that might be leveraged to address crises inadequately addressed at the national level. How to develop economies based on the common good where we live, and develop a latticework connecting them that ultimately provides a basis for broader change. To draw out the communitarian strain in US political culture. I don’t throw out the centralized approach. Ideally, climate disruption should be calling for centralized approaches on a global scale! But we’re not seeing that to anything close to the necessary degree. What gives people practical courses for action, that keeps them from falling into despair, when action at a national level is so blocked by big money interests? I think current labor organizing going on in the service sector is important, but it’s still wages and working conditions unionism. If we can get at transformative change in the current US context, I think it has take root in specific places before it spreads out further.
Check out Christian Parenti's "Radical Hamilton". Don't kid yourself: from electrification, to transportation, to modern computing and telecommunications, the modern North American economy was a state sponsored project through and through. It's only bourgeois reactionary propaganda that has clouded over its real history.
Btw: Trump's daddy made his fortune building federally financed housing projects. So when Trump talks about being against "socialism", he's really only using it as a fancy code word for "being too nice to Black people", since "socialism" seems to have worked well for his kin pre-1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
Capitalism was only really possible -- at least the kind of capitalism we have now, and as we have known it from within the whole capitalist-industrial epoch -- within an energy intensive economy similar to the economy which we had throughout the 20th century, especially its latter half (which continues in this century).
That level of energy intensivity must end now for two reasons. 1. EROEI shrinking, resulting in near term fossil fuel prices shooting into the stratosphere. (With no realistic hope of renewable replacement in the present ten year period.) 2. Burning fossil fuels is destroying the viability of the biosophere, and must be phased out as rapidly as possible.
If we have fossil energy, as we must, over the next handful of years, capitalism will end. Period. Full Stop.
Anyone who doesn't know what EROEI is should "Google" it and learn.
Hi Patrick,
Re: the military, it has a huge impact on our environment which is never talked about. Here's an article about that. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/
Yes, absolutely true and a whole other angle to this. Looking forward to Abby Martin’s upcoming movie on the topic. https://youtu.be/YX3aAnGwmLo?si=HWr6vof-hyODpGzp
My long term, in depth research has persuaded me that a low energy economy is almost certainly inevitable in the near-ish future. Such a low energy economy will result from two major factors -- a decrease in energy availability as fossil fuels become more scarce and deliberate decarbonization efforts. Renewable energy can't possibly replace the 84% of global energy which is fossil energy use in the relevant time frame (relevant from both standpoints, resource scarcity [and price] and deliberate, voluntary decarbonization. The relevant time frame is the ten year period we're presently in. Every change which matters will have to occur in that time frame -- at least to a vast extent.
My research has also revealed to my satisfaction that a low carbon economy will not be an urban economy. At least not to the extent of urbanization which we now have. It will be an increasingly rural economy, with smaller towns and villages rather than vast urban areas without much access to land within walking and bicycling distance. Urban economies are luxury dependent economies, not needs based economies. As GDP and GWP inevitably contracts (somewhat dramatically) in a low energy intensity economy, people will not be spending on non-necessary goods and services. So jobs in cities will become increasingly scarce. Many will have no choice but to leave the cities for smaller towns and villages with ample nearby land for food growing. Food growing at the local scale will be the primary economic activity of a majority of people in the not-so-far future. That and attending to basic needs like shelter, shoes, clothing, medicine/health care.
Cities will not disappear, but they will largely empty out -- because they will not be economically viable. Smallter towns, villages and rural areas enable what I call "community self-provisioning" of basic needs, such as food. Self-provisioning is usually understood in terms of a family or household provisioning their own food (the emphasis is on food, generally) through gardening, small farming, fishing, foraging, hunting.... Obviously, all of this is outside of a money economy. Well, this is how sensible people in the future will organize around food -- outside of a money economy. But, increasingly, this cooperative non-market sharing will include whole village-scaled neighborhoods, not just households and families. Everyone (all who are able bodied) contributes in some way to community self-provisioning. All share what is produced into the community, without need for turning food into a commodity for sale in a market. Food becomes (mostly) gift, not a market "good" for sale.
Those who love cities can choose, for a while, to try and make cities which are more ecologically and socially functional. This will be a severe challenge as cities begin to empty out and the economies which have held them together begin to fray around the edges. There are things in and about cities worth preserving. But future cities will be very, very different from current cities. This is not a guess. It's as near to a fact as we can get. This is because industrial civilization cannot possibly be sustained. Some parts of it can be sustained, enough to provide bicycles, shovels, basic hand tools, cookware. Necessary items. Not a lot of expensive luxuries.
This is the conceptual framework we will require if we are to respond to the challenges ahead, which are coming very soon indeed.
This can be the opening of the dialogue we have discussed over email. Feel free to cut and paste it into a file, so we can start.
We have exchanged on this before. I also am skeptical about our ability to replace fossil fuels with renewables under business as usual assumptions, and agree we need to reduce energy consumption. The fact that fossil fuel consumption has continued to increase even as renewables are entering the picture is the evidence for this. Though the energy we do use will have to come from renewables. Of course, replacement of fossil with electrified alternatives already significantly reduces energy use, since electrified transportation and heat pumps are substantially more efficient. That said, unless we change the structure of society, and the dominant operating language of the growth and profit imperative, in ways that reduce overall material throughput and stress on ecosystems, we are going to increase ecological overshoot and intensify the momentum to collapse.
But we disagree on the role of cities. A dense urban environment is inherently more efficient than spreading out across the landscape. Multifamily buildings use less energy than individual structures. Getting around by walking, biking and transit is far easier. If we go into collapse due to energy shortages, it will be suburbs, exurbs and rural areas that suffer the most. In terms of food production and transport, the food miles that use the most energy are use driving to and from the store. What about urban/suburban food production? It is interesting to note that the city which is perhaps the closest to the collapse scenario you envision, with loss of jobs, Detroit, is also a place with some of the most interesting models in urban agriculture. Yards and vacant lots hold much potential. It is also easier to exchange food and other necessities when neighbors are close by.
So how will people in more dispersed communities connect with each other? Bikes, horses? Vehicles will have to be electrified or run on biofuels produced from local sources. And if there are vehicles it suggests there will be centralized production somewhere. I note my friends in rural areas so a helluva lot of driving. What is it like where you live in Taos?
Finally, I would caution against an anti-urban bias deep in US of American culture. We have long seen cities as dens of corruption and idealized rural life. But the cities provide the greatest opportunities for human exchange, while social realities in many rural areas are far from ideal, as socioeconomic indicators prove. In addition, more people on the landscape stresses ecosystems, leaves less space for wildlife and other species. I believe a sustainable future must include a substantial urban element.
Hi Patrick -
While it is true that under current conditions, rural Americans (Let's use America as our example here) drive a great deal more, per capita, than urban dwellers, and so burn more fossil fuels than urban dwellers per capita, this would not be the case in the future scenario I'm proposing, predicting, and even advocating for. You must know that rural dwellers drive more because they're having to cover more miles for shopping, work, etc., as contrasted with urban dwellers. This would not be the case if rural dwellers had wholly functional ecovillage design in their rural ecovillages -- which means everything they need would be within walking and bicycling distance. Cars would not be necessary for ordinary, everyday life. In transition, an ecovillages could have a small fleet of cars which can be only occasionally (and minimally) borrowed for unique and special occasions, but not daily.
It's true that multi-family housing is generally more energy efficient than stand-alone single family dwellings. But ecovillages type dwellings can be designed and constructed to be very energy efficient by making use of passive solar space heating, solar water heating, passive cooling, and on and on. There is also no reason why a village cannot choose to employ the very same architectural design which, in having more shared walls and ceiling/floor space, is incorporated into the design.
But the key to what I wrote, above, is that the future energy intensity level will necessarily be a good deal less in places like the USA than it is at present. And that means the economy will necessarily shrink. And that means cities will have fewer jobs, thus requiring a more agrarian mode of economy.
Community self-provisioning of food is a great deal more challenging in a low energy urban environment, anyway, due to the proportion of asphalt, concrete, buildings and houses relative to soil usable and accessible for food growing.
A cities go, Detroit (which you mentioned) is unusual, in that at present there is an enormous amount of intra-urban land for food growing. This is rare in American cities, in terms of the relative proportions of such land to built environment.
I'm not "anti-urban". I'm just being realistic about the relation of land access to low energy economies / economics. A very low energy economy, which is almost certain to be our near future, almost certainly cannot be mostly urban, for reasons I have explained. Those who cannot walk to a community farm (or extensive gardens) from their homes will not be able to self-provision food in community. There will not be many jobs. So how will they eat?
I repeat. There will not be many jobs to be had in cities in a low carbon economy. And there will be no full replacement of current energy levels with "renewables".
As for the idea of using heat pumps at a gigantic increase in rates of use, what about the embodied energy in manufacturing all of these... and the solar panels and wind turbines to run them? Won't this take us way, way beyond our already used up "carbon budget"? (It's shocking how little embodied energy is considered in the general public's thinking about energy matters! Truly shocking!)
PS -
I'm predicting that if nearly everyone doesn't die in a mass catastrophic collapse scenario, then almost everyone in the future will live in some form or another of ecovillage, whether these ecovillages are retrofitted in what is now suburbia (see the book, Retrosuburbia), urban areas (as in parts of Detroit, to one extent of ecovillages design or another) or rural areas. Even cities can have ecovillages for neighborhoods, but it's MUCH easier to create a low energy economy in a rural area than an urban one.
Whether future people live in ecovillages won't be a simple matter of lifestyle preference. It will become necessary for basic livelihood!
First, your vision of ecovillages has a lot of attraction. A lot of people seem to have this vision, including these folks in my part of the world. https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/brad-smith/ You’ve probably read this. It is reminiscent of peasant villages in the feudal era or the contemporary global south. The idea of a village surrounded by fields worked in common resonate with something primal in the human experience, going back to indigenous reality. I think to the extent people can realize this vision, build practical models, we will be ahead.
The practical difficulties are apparent. First, land and the cost of it. Unless there is complete collapse of the civil order, there will be issues of deed and title. The financial difficulties of land acquisition are regarded as one of the major reasons the ecovillage idea has not spread further, though I have been supplied with some good examples I plan to cover in the future. So to mesh our visions a bit, public banking not driven by profit but social and ecological goals could supply a financial basis for ecovillage creation in both rural and metropolitan areas.
Then there are cultural realities. I like to joke that most of the hippie back to the land communities out of the 70s wound up in court. There’s actually some truth to that. It would be a worthy work to track ones that remain to this day. Twin Oaks seems to be one. https://www.twinoaks.org/ In western culture, particularly in the U.S., we are enculturated to be self-seeking individuals. Many communal experiments have faltered on egotism, especially of self-serving leaders. Perhaps necessity will drive us together. I think many people, struggling to keep up with the necessities of individuated life, paying the rent, owning a car, buying the groceries, would find a more communal life attractive.
All that said, I still think you are are underplaying the transformative potential of cities. One of the origin points of bioregionalism, Planet Drum, staged a green city visionimg process back in the 80s. http://sustainablecity.org/document/green.htm I was on a panel with Peter Berg of Planet Drum later. Regarded as one of the progenitors of bioregionalism, he told of how he was a back to the lander but concluded that all these efforts would be in vain unless cities were transformed. They would consume the countryside.
If we have an energy crash, there will be a lot of land opened up in cities by conversion of streets and parking spaces. Here is a valuable resource on land consumed by parking in cities. https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/4162455-paved-paradise-maps-show-how-much-of-us-cities-are-parking-lots/ in terms of jobs, people thinking about degrowth have identified a lot of low-energy jobs in terms of people serving people. Then there is the question about all the embodied carbon, energy and resources in existing buildings. In an energy-carbon-resource constrained world, can we afford to throw them away? Better to have mass rehabilitation for super-energy-efficiency and energy production, both passive and active, putting gardens on rooftops where possible. A lot of jobs there.
You ask about embodied carbon of heat pumps and renewables. I think we reach a point where it becomes a self-replicating cycle of renewables producing renewables and electrified equipment. Don’t ask me about carbon budget! We don’t have one. We are over the line, and will need to dramatically reduce fossil emissions and mobilize nature to absorb carbon. I think we will need direct regulation to reduce carbon emissions to open up some space to make low-carbon alternatives. It’s all a very difficult needle to thread, but we have to try.
I do think we might have some different scenarios for energy descent. I perhaps see a more gradual curve than you, which maintains more options, such as some longer-distance transport of food. If we go into a radical collapse scenario, it will be a Mad Max world, where any ecovillages had better have arms or they will be plundered by the roving gangs. In the broadest sense, I am looking for ways to avoid that, and mass death it implies. We need to begin building options at all levels today to steer the most gentle path to the future possible. That’s why I focus on building the future in place.
I'm hard at work at the moment, and so haven't got the time to adequately address all of your points here, Patrick. But I'll have more to say on these soon!
For the moment, I want to say that my relative expertise is in the Three E's, energy, economy and ecology as they relate to one another, as entangled aspects of a whole system. Most people do not have such relative expertise, and simply don't know how to conceive of these three in a fully integrated framework. This includes the supposed professional experts, which are usually only expert in one of the Three E's, and not integrated into a holistic transdisciplinary framework.
I KNOW that any reduction of fossil energy at the levels necessary to avert utter climate catastrophe would involve a proportionally concomitant reduction in GDP / GWP. And there is no way to have a rapid renewable energy transition which doesn't result in a rapid increase in greenhouse gases -- rather ironically. Almost all of the energy we now use is fossil energy, and it is fossil energy we'd apply (now, today) to building such technological devices and infrastructure. There is no magic in it. We COULD NOT rapidly and dramatically build these devices and infrastructure on renewable energy. This is not a guess. It's a bold fact.
If I had time to explain it here and now, I could basically demonstrate to you why urban flight (partial, not total) is almost certainly inevitable in the face of lower net energy in the total economy of any "developed world" nation. If energy shrinks by half, as it must, then urban jobs will shrink by at least that amount. It's just how this stuff works, and all of the Triple E experts know it, just as I do.
You're invited to join me in this process I just began today in a post on Deep Transformation Network.:
Deep Dive: Energy
I'm undertaking some "deep dive" research concerning the role of energy in our present metacrisis / polycrisis. And I'm going to begin my deep dive with reading Carbon Civilization and the Energy Descent Future, by Samuel Alexander and Joshua Floyd.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-12-12/carbon-civilisation-and-the-energy-descent-future/
This book is widely available in print at various book sources, but can also be downloaded for free as a PDF file here. (Just put $0.00 in for your price.)
You're invited to read this book with me and to discuss its contents in the "comments" below. We will address the Introduction and chapters in the order they appear.
This deep dive research and learning process will continue with other books and text resources when I/we have worked through the opening book in the series. You can go along with me here, if you wish -- or end your engagement with this material with the initial book. It's up to you.
I realize it is widely believed that economies cannot be decoupled, that carbon emissions and fossil use must escalate in proportion, Carbon Brief did find 21 countries that seem to have had some success, measured by consumption-based emissions, so they are not simply exporting their emissions. https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-35-countries-cutting-the-link-between-economic-growth-and-emissions/
A lot to chew on. I'll be back
I don't know why we can expect people to live in "evovillages" in the future. Why wouldn't they live in dystopian urban slums like those that ring Jakarta, Lagos, Karachi, etc? After all, the average urban dweller in those places occupies a very small carbon footprint, although their exploitation and inmiseration facilitates the persistence of the vastly larger one of their oligarchs. So why wouldn't our own oligarchs catch on and embrace the same model? (Indeed, perhaps they already have!)
Certainly there is the risk that, instead of living in ecovillage-like conditions in the future, most people would live in slums which resembleJakarta, Lagos, and Karachi. But they would not do this if they had the alternative option of living in an ecovillage-like situation. I'm assuming we will revolt against the system which would put us in slums, or keep us trapped in the status quo until the Earth is dead.
PS # 2
Retrosuburbia is coming to suburbia, whether we do it deliberately in advance of "collapse" or have it imposed on us by circumstances beyond our influence or control.
https://retrosuburbia.com/
Something similar can be said about cities and towns of all scales.
As David Holmgren wisely points out, suburbia is better suited to implementing a retrofitted ecovillage type of design in suburban neighborhoods than is the case in cities. Why? The typical land lot per residence is MUCH larger than dense urban settings. That means people can walk out their front and back doors into the permaculture gardens which supply the bulk of the food folks are provisioning for themselves.
I will have to check this out.
Seems to me that the collapse of large cities is inevitable because they require so much power--to get up to the 47th floor, and to bring food in. Al the talk about jobs and commuting time is based on current reality. In the future reality, resources and energy will be very scarce, so bullshit jobs, and indeed most jobs will be GONE--quite possibly even money will be gone. Food is the thing that is much easier for rural and even suburban sites than urban ones, and food is the thing we will all still need when a nice new dress or imported fruit or the latest gadget are things we remember, things we get only in dreams.. And in that scenario, the obstacle of the high cost of land, lack of deeds, will also be problems we remember from the bad old days--I quote Dmitri Orlov from a conference some years back:" In a time of collapse, no government will enforce the rights of absentee owners."
Yes, we also need shelter, and a way of warming it in winter and cooling it in summer, but often old methods will work fine. There are already extra housing units in cities; if as James and I predict, there is a mass flow to rural areas in search of food, there will be a problem in that many farm areas have LESS housing than 50 years ago--as farmers gave up and left, their housing deteriorated. But new farmers will just have to build with what's available, often earth, cob, which is widely available and very low cost, but labor intensive.
But of course, all of this depends on the speed and trajectory of collapse, which is impossible to predict.
Call me a doubting Thomas, but I am suspicious of the conceit that a social "movement of movements" drawing on the same kind of decentralized model of economic "Brownian motion" as the one that forms the basis of capitalism itself can somehow overcome the very problems as the latter produced by its own spontaneous operations in the first place.
Interesting observation. I guess I have to ask what are the prospects for centralized movements. In the 60s we saw a lot of great leaders shot down, and concerted disruption through Cointelpro. Decentralized movements are harder to cut off. Also to be noted is that I lay out ways for movements growing in many places to connect with each other and assemble a greater whole, while at local and regional levels community congresses provide a place for coalescence and coherence. I am all for movement at any scale we can achieve, and would not abandon efforts at any level. But I also believe we need to gain traction, and it is at local and regional levels where we have the most prospects.
Re the origins of capitalism, can we trace them to the accumulation of financial power in the Northern Italian cities, Venice, Milan, Genoa? Moving on to Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London? With the ultimate expression being the royally charted trading companies of The Netherlands and Britain, and the invention of the joint stock ownership enterprise with limited liability? It seems capitalism has highly centralized origins, in very specific places and institutions. And it has a long-term tendency to ever greater levels of centralization in monopoly, oligopoly, and increasing concentrations of wealth, as we see today. Can we see decentralization, with communities gaining greater power to invest in and direct their own development on a democratic basis, as an alternative? That is the proposition with which I am working.
Many people are starting to work towards this assumption as it seems to be the only option left to us. The XR movement in the UK (Just stop oil etc) is working on The Humanity Project now which is aiming to bring this concept to people.
Of course you are right that capitalism absolutely requires a massive amount of "dirigisme" on a world scale to sustain itself, a fact that the famed socialist scholar Leo Panitch convincingly emphasized, especially in his best known book, "The Making of Global Capitalism". These "exogenous" policing efforts are similar at an international level to the role that armed police play at the domestic level in a major US city, for example, ie, policing required social boundaries to ensure the smooth flow of transactions.
I have found Panitch illuminating. I have not read this particular work, but his analysis of the global financial power of the U.S. has been valuable to my understanding of global geopolitics and the current efforts toward dedollarization,
We have watched the even more spectacularly rapid implosion and cooptation of Digital Age "decentralized movements" than their 20th predecessors, as Vincent Bevins discusses in his recent book. Touting themselves as "post ideological", "neither left nor right", "nonhierarchical", etc, they were no match for their munificently well funded, militaristic, and semi-astroturf corporate and state backed opponents.
I am aware of the Bevins book and what it says. Let me draw some distinctions between what I am proposing and a couple of the perceived failures. First, Occupy. It had no leadership structure, really no program. It did leave us with the enduring meme of the 1% v the 99%, though it really is more like the 10% v. the 90%. So it came and went. Then, Black Lives Matter. We saw the uprising in 2020, and reforms in a few cities. Again, BLM put issues on the table but did not sustain an enduring organizing effort, and there have been rollbacks. What I am advocating is a sustained organizing strategy based in places. It seeks to create unified agendas for place-based change through Community Congresses engaging current movements, to give them a common basis for action with enduring organizing strategies. It aims to build successful models that can be transmitted laterally to other places, and into broader jurisdictions. It accumulates power that can ramify to national levels. It embodies what is known as municipalism, but seeks to build connections that deal with issues that cannot be readily addressed at the municipal level, such as militarism, which I wrote about in the piece. It also seeks to give a politics to the bioregional movement, now re-emerging, beyond self-organized actions in civil society. Again, I am genuinely interested in your views on how we organize to deal with the convergent crises we face. I am not advocating dropping anything we do, only giving it a new coherency in focus on place.
I don't have any highly prescriptive answers, but I would just say we shouldn't hastily jump to kneejerk rejection of certain useful features and lessons from past "failures". Leninism and democratic centralism, for example, were "failures" over a seventy year timeline, yet that timeline was also marked by astonishing successes of the sort which most historically counter hegemonic movements can scarcely dream of!
Finally, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, historic reverses and setbacks are to be expected, and the working class will have to sustain multiple "failed revolutions" before the final twilight of capitalism arrives and passes!
I think about the dialectic between centralized and decentralized quite a lot. Certainly one has to be impressed by China’s ability to marshal resources to rapidly build a nationwide high speed rail system and smart grid capable of handling mass renewables, and to conduct an industrial policy that has put them far in the lead in solar, wind and EVs. The forced industrialization under Stalin - I see you’ve written about that - made it possible for the Soviets to defeat the Nazis. Both these nations had histories of centralized development that preceded their revolutions, the Trans-Siberian railroad, the great waterworks of China. I have a theory that revolutions don’t change the fundamental political culture of a country so much as build on it. I am primarily writing and thinking about the US experience, which has a more dispersed pattern of development, and how that might be leveraged to address crises inadequately addressed at the national level. How to develop economies based on the common good where we live, and develop a latticework connecting them that ultimately provides a basis for broader change. To draw out the communitarian strain in US political culture. I don’t throw out the centralized approach. Ideally, climate disruption should be calling for centralized approaches on a global scale! But we’re not seeing that to anything close to the necessary degree. What gives people practical courses for action, that keeps them from falling into despair, when action at a national level is so blocked by big money interests? I think current labor organizing going on in the service sector is important, but it’s still wages and working conditions unionism. If we can get at transformative change in the current US context, I think it has take root in specific places before it spreads out further.
Check out Christian Parenti's "Radical Hamilton". Don't kid yourself: from electrification, to transportation, to modern computing and telecommunications, the modern North American economy was a state sponsored project through and through. It's only bourgeois reactionary propaganda that has clouded over its real history.
Btw: Trump's daddy made his fortune building federally financed housing projects. So when Trump talks about being against "socialism", he's really only using it as a fancy code word for "being too nice to Black people", since "socialism" seems to have worked well for his kin pre-1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
Capitalism was only really possible -- at least the kind of capitalism we have now, and as we have known it from within the whole capitalist-industrial epoch -- within an energy intensive economy similar to the economy which we had throughout the 20th century, especially its latter half (which continues in this century).
That level of energy intensivity must end now for two reasons. 1. EROEI shrinking, resulting in near term fossil fuel prices shooting into the stratosphere. (With no realistic hope of renewable replacement in the present ten year period.) 2. Burning fossil fuels is destroying the viability of the biosophere, and must be phased out as rapidly as possible.
If we have fossil energy, as we must, over the next handful of years, capitalism will end. Period. Full Stop.
Anyone who doesn't know what EROEI is should "Google" it and learn.
Brownian motion is very, very far from being an apt analogy or metaphor for decentralized movement functioning.
"Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) resulting from their collision with the fast-moving atoms or molecules in the gas or liquid. This transport phenomenon is named after the botanist Robert Brown." --https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/Sacramento_City_College/Chem_400%3A_General_Chemistry_I/02%3A_Atoms_and_ElementsEdit_section/2.1%3A_Brownian_Motion%3A_Evidence_for_Atoms#:~:text=Brownian%20motion%20is%20the%20random,after%20the%20botanist%20Robert%20Brown.
Decentralized movements are not chaotic, but very highly organized -- only they are not organized into hierarchical command structures.
Good comment! And my response indicates how decentralized movements can be organized, as well as the vulnerabilities of centralized movements.
Agreed.