----- Original Message -----

From: Steve Hamm

To: Coordinator HUB

Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 8:41 AM

Subject: CoordinatorHUB Re: Lifeboats for Collapse or Transitioning to a Better World

While I share the bleakness of Ken Whitehead's basic analysis, I feel the essay is sparse on complete thoughts or readily acknowledged logical conclusions. I suppose this is to be expected in a short essay trying to cover a vast subject with so many unknown variables and implications.
To begin, there are too many assumptions that underlie this analysis and, without delineating them better, the essay is easily open to critical undermining. Delineating them would easily have to cover a large number of volumes ranging in content from social and cultural mindsets to resource access to scientific/technological constructs to political dynamics to spiritual aspirations.

For an obvious example, his statement that regarding a "...number of suitable areas exist throughout the world where population pressures are still not critical" avoids a host of possible natural (as in Nature) and external and internal human dynamics that will likely impact such places and those who may already reside there. I realize they are only examples but we have no idea how this will shake out or the degree to which we've unknowingly affected the basic components that make human life possible or how fast things will change once the tipping point is reached and carrying capacities catastrophically fail.

As well, any technological approaches he implies have so many dependencies as to boggle the mind and we are without any foresight as to how those dependences will be affected, again by natural or human influences.

In general, the essay serves as another starting place for discussion. Contingency planning is always appropriate and those necessarily involve imagined projections and possibilities. Kunstler, Diamond, Heinberg and numerous others have addressed the issue.

Overall, along with what Elvira White wrote, it seems past time to map our bioregions' resources, technical skill sets, adaptability levels, community interdependencies and political landscapes to see if we can begin supporting ourselves wherever we are, holding the idea that, mostly likely, some will make and many won't.

Steve Hamm

-----Original Message-----
From: jcbradford [mailto:jason@]
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 9:12 PM
To: Coordinator HUB
Subject: CoordinatorHUB Re: Lifeboats for Collapse or Transitioning to a Better World

Perhaps you are referring to discussions and possible plans such as described here:

http://growthmadness.org/2008/01/17/sowing-the-seeds-of-a-future-society...

I find myself woefully lacking in the $ to do something like this. And I haven’t found others willing to go in on such an endeavor, but I can see it having merit.

Jason

________________________________

From: Holistek [mailto:david@]
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 4:16 PM
To: Coordinator HUB
Subject: CoordinatorHUB Lifeboats for Collapse or Transitioning to a Better World



Dave Ewoldt wrote:

DE: Hi David... I guess this depends on what you mean by the world. Are you referring to the planet Earth, or to Western civilization and its reliance on a doomsday economy?

DS replying: Well, to Western civilization, certainly.

DE: Building lifeboats is what Post Carbon communities are all about. We have the technology today to get by just fine without fossil fuels, as long as we start reducing population down to a sustainable two billion or so over the next couple of generations, and get over the idea that a growth economy is the only path to prosperity, progress, and well-being. Although it really does run deeper than that, as a growth economy is actually keeping us from achieving all those things.

DS reply: Well, this is the thinking that I was referring to in my first email, when I remarked that "Contemporary values tell us that it's important to be positive, to look for the opportunity in every calamity, etc." I do not see evidence that Post Carbon communities are lifeboats in any meaningful sense of that metaphor. I agree of course that the growth economy is at the root of the difficulty that Western civilization is having with resource depletion, pollution, and many other ills. But the idea that human beings can readily and elegantly ("by making rational conscious choices," in your words David) transition to a steady state economy strikes me as naive at best, and a dangerous fantasy at worst.

DE: Humans are living systems. They have an innate ability to think systemically, even though this ability has been schooled out of the majority of people today. If people's attention span couldn't extend beyond the next sabre-toothed tiger, then bonobos, dolphins, or elephants would be the current pinnacle of evolution.

American Indians planned for the seventh generation, and just about every other global culture has been able to plan for the future since humans moved out of the caves. The Mayans, for example, even though their society collapsed. What we're experiencing today, with force-based ranking hierarchies of domination that are bent on destroying the world and all species on it is a case of devolution, not evolution.

DS reply: I am sorry to disagree so strongly with you, David, but this is nostalgic nonsense. Earlier societies, including the American Indians, were even worse in many ways at living within limits than we are: for example the rate of species extinction of their prey animals was higher, per capita, than ours. The thing (the only thing) that limited the damage they were able to do to the ecosystem was their lack of technology. What you are describing is a persistent modern myth called "the noble savage," which was well deconstructed in Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature."

DE: So, I seriously wonder whether or not the end of "business as usual" will put society into such a tailspin that it will look like Mad Max. This scenario assumes that what we have now is the best that could ever be.

David replying: The collapse scenario assumes no such thing. It simply assumes that most people in North America are seriously addicted to the lifestyle they currently enjoy, a lifestyle built on unsustainable fossil fuel and other resource (soil, water, etc.) use. It assumes that they will react very negatively to the forced withdrawl of their lifestyle, and that it will take significant reinforcement (in the form of severe deprivation) before they accept that that lifestyle is gone for good. And that during the interim, some of them will become violent, that social order could very well collapse for a time. If we think of this metaphorically as a storm, the lifeboat analogy, as I employed it, refers to the task of protecting certain people or communities (those in the lifeboats) during this time, until social order is restored and people again begin to work together constructively to rebuild a new society, rather than destructively.

I have seen no (zip, zero) discussion on this list of how communities, Post Carbon communities for example, are to get through such a time. If Post Carbon communities are lifeboats, then it would seem they are lifeboats in a different sense than I have described. What they seem to me to be is attempts to model a better way of living, i.e., how society might choose to live after we transition through the collapse scenario. This is good and necessary and valuable, but it is the collapse issue that currently concerns me, and I would like to see the Post Carbon discussions include it.

DE: What the end of business as usual will be is the end of a financial system that places and keeps us all in servitude. It will be the end of a ruling hierarchy that still believes in the divine right of Kings and the necessity of the noble lie. It will be the beginning of us all having increased opportunities to become fully human. How, exactly, does this translate into chaos and anarchy (although anarchy in its true sense would be a vast improvement over what we have today)?

DS reply: It is tempting, when one is in the grip of a dysfunctional system, to fantasize that a kind of negation of that dysfunction would be utopia, to react against rather than synthesize a new integration. It looks to me like this is what you are doing, David. This is a common mistake: feminism made it in its reaction against Patriarchy, for instance, and created an ideology that is just as dysfunctional (though in a different way) as what it reacted against. There is nothing wrong with hierarchy, for instance, it is an excellent way of organizing for certain kinds of tasks. Consensus, its polar opposite, is also an excellent way of organizing for certain other kinds of tasks. The challenge is to integrate both, to come up with an appropriate synthesis where each is understood and assigned to its area of excellence. Democracy, for instance, can be thought of as a system in which we assign hierarchical power to the biggest consensus.

Anyway, I hope that we can go forward taking the best of what we have learned from Western civilization, rather than seeing it as mainly negative.

But my main point is to raise the issue of transitioning through a time of chaos. Do people on this list have things to suggest about how Post Carbon communities might plan for this?

David Shackleton

To view this group on the web, visit The Coordinator HUB Home Page http://relocalize.net/groups/coordinate

To view this group on the web, visit The Coordinator HUB Home Page http://www.relocalize.net/groups/coordinate

Thanks, David, for your comments.

I just want to add to your comments about the Green Party. I expect them to be worse than useful in a genuine crisis, at least as a party organized on any level above the local. As individuals, I'm sure that there are some who will step forward and become precious resources to their community. But from what I've seen of the Green Party (not much, but enough), they are fixated on large-scale solutions coming from "someone else". They believe that crossing your fingers for another seat or two in the legislature is as good as busting your ass to create something at the local level that will help people in a crisis.

More worrisome to me is the potential for the other parties to swing hard right and promise security and prosperity through some kind of law-and-order crackdown. If what we've seen in the USA in the last few years is any indication, people are willing to defer enormous amounts of authority to the government in exchange for not having to think about where their food and other essentials are coming from. The only thing that will get us out of that trap is a societal loss of faith in our 'leaders', and that is only likely if new leaders emerge from everywhere at the grassroots.

Every wall we bang our heads against in the run-up to collapse just makes us harder-headed. Our attempts to galvanize action, many of which don't really succeed, are just ways of exploring ideas whose time has not yet come, but is coming fast.

David Parkinson
Powell River, BC



Jason wrote:

Perhaps you are referring to discussions and possible plans such as described here:

 

http://growthmadness.org/2008/01/17/sowing-the-seeds-of-a-future-society/

 

I find myself woefully lacking in the $ to do something like this.  And I haven't found others willing to go in on such an endeavor, but I can see it having merit.  

 

DS reply: Yes, thank you for this link, Jason, it is an excellent starting discussion for what I am pointing to.  And indeed, what this author refers to will take a good deal of money, as he acknowledges.  But perhaps there are things that can be done for less money, without starting new communities from scratch in remote locations.  If so, that is part of what I think Post Carbon communities must discuss.

 

It occurs to me that many on this list may not share my opinion that a sudden collapse of the current social order is the likely way that we will begin the transition to a more sustainable future.  Here are the basic assumptions and thinking on which this scenario is judged most probable.

 

1. The Western nations are mostly democratic, which means that any fundamental change would have to be driven by popular will of the voters.  It is exceedingly hard for me to imagine that a popular movement for major lifestyle reduction (read hardship, at least in the short term) could possibly reach majority proportions.  I would love to be wrong about this, and I will thank anyone who can show me that I am.

 

2. It is economically unfeasible for a single country to take the lead on this, for instance by the introduction of a significant carbon tax.  A carbon tax that was large enough to drive significant reductions in consumption would result in energy intensive industries (and most of them are, in one way or another) fleeing that country, and relocating where energy was still cheap.  Cheap energy would become the key economic driver of industrial location, replacing the current situation where cheap labour serves that purpose.

 

3. Given that there will be no majority popular movement for significant change, democratic governments will attempt to keep the current situation working for as long as possible, in order to stay in power (as indeed they are doing).  Thus we will consume every possible buffer, all of our credit and substitutable resources.  Collapse will likely happen only when it cannot be forestalled any longer.  Thus it will likely happen suddenly, and when the best of our resources to deal with it have already been consumed.

 

4. The many positive feedback mechanisms built into our society (e.g., into the stock market, where once something starts to fall, people try to sell, which makes it fall faster, which makes people rush to sell it more, which ...) will mean that the fall, when it happens, will be sudden, deep and unrecoverable.  Sophisticated systems don't fail easily, but when they do they suffer great damage.  For an example, consider the electric pylons that failed during the Ontario ice storm of 1998.  Because they were highly engineered to provide maximum strength for minimum materials (sophisticated design), when their parameters were exceeded with the weight of ice they failed destructively, like a crane boom, and twisted themseves to unrepairable garbage.  Sophisticated distribution, transport, agricultural and economic systems are likely to fail in the same way.  The greatest positive feedback mechanism of all is human psychology, which hoards when food is scarce, for instance, riots when political systems are most stressed, etc.

 

As an illustrative historical anecdote, consider the situation of Winston Churchill, who as an MP agitated for years for the British Government to be more concerned about the growth of Nazism in Germany.  When Neville Chamberlaine, the current Prime Minister, returned from appeasing Hitler to a standing ovation in the House of Commons, and newpaper headlines calling him a hero for avoiding war and achieving "Peace In Our Time," Churchill rose to boos and hisses and said, "We have suffered a total and inmitigated defeat."  Only he saw the situation clearly, and because of that they made him Prime Minister when war was declared only a few months later.

 

The Green Party is in an analogous situation today (at least in Canada), in that they have been warning about the dangers of ignoring environmental issues for years.  It seems clear to me that they will not gain majority power in government until there is a major collapse -- perhaps then a panicked population will vote them in.  However, unlike Churchill they will likely be constitutionally incapable of dealing with the situation they find themselves in: as a predominantly leftist party that has built all its plans on avoiding collapse, they will be hugely unsuited to the tasks of operating a country in a collapse scenario, which will likely involve enforcing martial law, deploying the army to maintain social order, etc.  It remains to be seen whether this list, also primarily and understandably a mainly leftist group, will be willing (as the Green Party is not - I have tried) to develop any plans for surviving a collapse, which is surely part of a sustainability strategy.  

 

After having kept silent for a couple of years on this list, I've said a mouthful.  I'll stop preaching now, in the hopes that there is enough interest and engagement with these questions for a discussion to follow. 

 

David Shackleton

 

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David



----- Original Message -----

From: Holistek

To: Coordinator HUB

Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2008 8:51 AM

Subject: CoordinatorHUB Re: Lifeboats for Collapse or Transitioning to a Better World



Jason wrote: