[SustainableTompkins] relocalization

[Jon Bosak]

Thanks very much to Karl for the TCRP (now TCLocal) plug.  I've
uploaded a current copy of our standard energy descent
presentation at the URL quoted in Karl's message
(http://ibiblio.org/tcrp/pres/tcrp-intro.pdf).

Quick responses to a few of his points:

| I encourage them [TCLocal] to organize more educational outreach
| (in which I would be glad to participate) on discussion lists like
| this one.

Like everyone in the local sustainability movement, members of
TCLocal are way overextended, but we'd certainly be happy to give
presentations to any group in the area that would like to be
better informed about the challenges that decreasing energy
availability will pose for our way of life over the next few
decades.  So far this year we've managed to talk to the Ithaca
Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers); the
Wells College Activism Symposium; a Presbyterian Church group in
Cumberland, MD; the Planning, Development, and Environmental
Quality Committee of the Tompkins County Legislature; the
Renewable Energy Group of the Southern Tier; and the Northeast
Permaculture Convergence, as well as manning tables at Earth Day
and the Ithaca Sustainability Fair and holding energy descent
briefings for aides to Senator Clinton and Congressman Arcuri.

This is a tiny fraction of the people who need to learn about
energy descent, but none of us has the time to line up speaking
engagements in addition to the primary work of TCLocal, which is
researching and planning policies for dealing with the problems
we'll be facing here in Tompkins County.  It's particularly
unfortunate (though completely understandable) that so far we've
been most successful in reaching groups that are already somewhat
familiar with the message, while mainstream business organizations
and local government bodies continue their planning largely
ignorant of future trends that will make many of their projects
irrelevant.  Anyone representing a group in the area that would
like to learn more about energy descent should contact me to set
up a presentation.  (And Karl, let's talk about your kind offer to
participate when you get back from your trip.)

| The Crisis, in its multidimensionality, with likely multiplier
| effects across its elements, and cascading effects over time:
|
| 1. Exponentially rising energy costs for coming decades as
|    currently foreseeable alternative energy technologies fail
|    to compensate for the end of cheap oil;
|
| 2. Increasing water shortage for the irrigated deserts that
|    currently supply large proportions of the food economy, here
|    (like the California Central Valley) as elsewhere in the
|    world;
|
| 3. Gradual loss of high-energy inputs that currently prop
|    agricultural productivity and mask the degraded state of
|    most farmland. Present low agroecosystemic potential stems
|    from decades of damage to its natural capital: the
|    biodiversity and health of mineral, water and carbon cycles
|    that provide essential ecological services.
|
| 4. Accumulation of persistent organic pollutants, degradation
|    of genetic traits of sustainability in most agricultural
|    plants and animals, homogenization of gene pools and
|    extinction losses, are all nearing a tipping point;
|
| 5. Increasing weather volatility, a near term impact of climate
|    change;
|
| 6. Increasing agroecosystem instability, a long term impact of
|    climate change;
|
| 7. Increasing economic crisis in the United States as federal
|    debt, corporate debt, consumer debt, and trade deficit
|    approach a tipping point;
|
| 8. A declining domestic economy as the empire tries to salvage
|    with military control what it is gradually losing in global
|    economic hegemony.
|
| 9. A massive national disinformation bubble of which most
|    people living in it are blithely unaware.

An excellent summary of the problem.

| As for the forces arrayed against relocalization, I suggest for
| starters a paper I available on my website:
| http://www.geocities.com/northsheep/foodchange.html In it I argue
| that the structure and nature of the political economy is such
| that most people's current change strategies - lobbying govt,
| changing consumer preferences, etc. will fail.

Which is why (aside from educational efforts within the county)
we're not spending much of our time on these approaches.

| A proper understanding of the present local and national structure
| of power (5% of the population holds 95% of the wealth) indicates
| that the construction of mass movements are necessary for
| significant change to occur, and then only as they are powerful
| enough to leverage policy changes deep in the system. I argue that
| due to the power entrenched in an elite minority, all serious
| attempts of local communities to take charge of their own
| destinies will confront a glass ceiling. It is glass (that is,
| invisible to most) because of the false understanding of the
| nature of our society that has been cumulatively manufactured in
| the collective consciousness. In sum, I argue that successful
| strategies for change will require a new understanding of the
| nature of our society.

Here I think we part ways.  I agree with what I think is implicit
in Karl's paper, that change is only possible at this point at the
local level; and I agree that the successes of local efforts will
meet resistance at higher levels for just the reasons Karl points
to.  (In fact, I expect such successes to bring out all kinds of
reactionary antibodies.)  But I'm not convinced that the answer to
resistance at the state or national level is a mass
countermovement; maybe it is, but this sounds to me too much like
the political equivalent of meeting conventional warfare with
conventional warfare, and I would point out that similar
large-scale attempts to prevent or limit our involvement in the
current war (which is being fought for reasons linked directly to
the prospect of energy descent) have been notably unsuccessful.
And I don't buy the assertion that "the construction of mass
movements are necessary for significant change to occur, and then
only as they are powerful enough to leverage policy changes deep
in the system."  With the possible exception of labor unions, I
can't think of a single fundamental societal change of the last
century in this country that was due to an organized mass
movement; the big changes have come about either through the
calculated manipulation of desires by cadres of social programmers
in the service of wealthy elites or through viral memes (such as
the ideal of sustainability itself) that spread in a
self-organizing way until co-opted more or less successfully by
the same programmers and put to service selling more goods.

It seems to me that the closest we're going to get to the
"specific positive strategies and/or approaches to strategy
development" that Elan was asking for is a vision of a return to
local self-sufficiency and (eventually, if we play our cards
right) to the forms of political organization that are only
possible with local self-sufficiency.  Those forms lie more in the
direction of Jefferson than in the direction of Marx.  To put it
another way: the answer to big repressive right-wing government is
not big counter-repressive left-wing government, because the
problem is bigness itself.  The adaptive response to the
crises of energy descent and climate change is not a national
effort to develop one policy that tries to fit all situations, but
rather a proliferation of local policies tuned to the challenges
in each place and the resources available in each place.

What Jefferson understood is that a country consisting largely of
people who can sustain themselves through their own labor is a
country that cannot be dominated by a central authority.  If a
community can feed and clothe and shelter itself based on its own
resources, then what a distant power elite wants to do is largely
irrelevant, because that power is exercised primarily through
economic and material dependency; cut the dependency and you cut
the control.  So my "positive" vision of society a hundred years
from now is one that is largely decentralized and locally
self-sufficient.

Admittedly this leaves unanswered how we're going to deal with
some massive difficulties we'll likely be facing between now and
then -- including a complete economic collapse and the mass
movement of populations in reaction to a changing climate.  For
example, it's becoming clear that the long-term survival of the
millions of people in our large cities will depend on relocating
most of them back out to the farm where their ancestors came from
in the first place.  I don't have a clue how we're going to manage
this, though I suspect that a successful strategy will rely on
changing the programming.  In the final analysis, education,
example, and the relatively uncontrolled access to information
made possible by the internet may be the best tools we have.

Jon