The End of Suburbia.......,moving toward holistic, natural systems.

[Dover]

"If you would learn more, ask the cattle, seek information from the birds of the air. The creeping things of earth will give you lessons and the fishes of the sea will tell you all. Speak to the Earth and it will teach thee."
Job: 12, 7

YouTube Film: The End Of Suburbia (just under an hour in length)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug


The Coming of Deindustrial Society: A Practical Response
John Michael Greer 2005

With the coming of Peak Oil and the beginning of long-term, irreversible declines in the availability of fossil fuels (along with many other resources), modern industrial civilization faces a wrenching series of unwelcome transitions. This comes as a surprise only for those who haven't been paying attention. More than thirty years ago, the Club of Rome's epochal study The Limits to Growth pointed out that unless something was done, a global economy based on fantasies of perpetual growth would collide disastrously with the hard limits of a finite planet sometime in the early twenty-first century.

The early twenty-first century is here, nothing was done, and the consequences are arriving on schedule. The road that would have brought industrial society through a transformation to sustainability turned out to be the road not taken. The question that remains is what we can do with the limited time we have left.

The Failure of Politics

There are specific practical things that can be done, right now, to deal with the hard realities of our situation. The problem is that most of them are counterintuitive, and fly in the face of very deeply rooted attitudes on all sides of the political spectrum.

The first point that has to be grasped is that proposals for system-wide, top-down change - getting the Federal government to do something constructive about the situation, for instance - are a waste of time. That sort of change isn't going to happen. It's not simply a matter of who's currently in power, although admittedly that doesn't help (Bush). The core of the problem is that even proposing changes on a scale that would do any good would be political suicide.

Broadly speaking, our situation is this: our society demands energy inputs on a scale, absolute and per capita, that can't possibly be maintained for more than a little while longer. Sustainable energy sources can only provide a small fraction of the energy we're used to getting from fossil fuels. As fossil fuel supplies dwindle, in other words, everybody will have to get used to living on a small fraction of the energy we've been using as a matter of course.

Of course this is an unpopular thing to say. Quite a few people nowadays are insisting that it's not true, that we can continue our present lavish, energy-wasting lifestyle indefinitely by switching from oil to some other energy source: hydrogen, biodiesel, abiotic oil, fusion power, "free energy" technology, and so on down the list of technological snake oil. Crippling issues of scale, and the massive technical problems involved in switching an oil-based civilization to some other fuel in time to make a difference, stand in the path of such projects, but those get little air time; if we want endless supplies of energy badly enough, the logic seems to be, the universe will give it to us. The problem is that the universe did give it to us - in the form of immense deposits of fossil fuels stored up over hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis - and we wasted it. Now we're in the position of a lottery winner who's spent millions of dollars in a few short years and is running out of money. The odds of hitting another million-dollar jackpot are minute, and no amount of wishful thinking will enable us to keep up our current lifestyle by getting a job at the local hamburger joint.

We - and by this I mean people throughout the industrial world - have to make the transition to a Third World lifestyle. There's no way to sugar-coat that very unpalatable reality. Fossil fuels made it possible for most people in the industrial world to have a lifestyle that doesn't depend on hard physical labor, and to wallow in a flood of mostly unnecessary consumer goods and services. As fossil fuels deplete, all that will inevitably go away. How many people would be willing to listen to such a suggestion? More to the point, how many people would vote for a politician or a party who proposed to bring on these changes deliberately, now, in order to prevent total disaster later on?

John Kenneth Galbraith has written a brilliant, mordant book, The Culture of Contentment, about the reasons why America is incapable of constructive change. He compares today's American political class (those people who vote and involve themselves in politics) to the French aristocracy before the Revolution. Everybody knew that the situation was insupportable, and that eventually there would be an explosion, but the immediate costs of doing something about it were so unpalatable that everyone decided to do nothing and hope that things would somehow work out. We're in exactly the same situation here and now.

So while it may be appealing to fantasize about vast government programs bailing us out of the present predicament, such fantasies are not a practical way of responding to the situation. We have to start with the recognition that the most likely outcome of the current situation is collapse: to borrow the Club of Rome's formulation, sustained, simultaneous, uncontrolled and irreversible declines in population, industrial production, and capital stock.

Apocalyptic Fantasies

Now as soon as this is said, most people who don't reject it out of hand slip off at once into apocalyptic ideas of one sort or another. These should be rejected; history is a better guide. Civilizations collapse. As Joseph Tainter pointed out in his useful book The Collapse of Complex Societies, it's one of the most predictable things about them. Ours is not that different from hundreds of previous civilizations that overshot their natural resource base and crashed to ruin. What we face is a natural process, and like most natural processes, much of it can be predicted by comparison with past situations...cont'd

(scroll down page for remainder of article)
http://www.attractionretreat.org/AttractionRetreat/EOS.html


The Earth Charter Initiative:
http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/


"The soul of man... is a portion or a copy of the soul of the Universe and is joined together on principles and in proportions corresponding to those which govern the Universe."

-- Plutarch circa 75 A.D.

[PM Martin]

1. kick

[imdjh]

2. Today's suburbs will be tomorrow's ghettos. (Richard Cohen circa 1978)

[starroute]

3. I really don't buy a lot of this

We've been hearing this message too often for too many years, and the holes in it just keep getting more obvious. Among other things, I've seen a lot of signs over the past 30 years that we're already going through a process of pre-adaptation to get ready for the next major transition.

- There's what Bucky Fuller called "ephemeralization" -- "Ephemeralization is a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller that refers to the ability of technological advancement to do 'more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.' Fuller’s vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization)

- There's the fact that more and more of our technology involves few or no moving parts, which means that to a significant degree it's never going to wear out. It's only our culture of planned obsolescence that makes us assume things have to be replaced every few years -- that and the fact that our paradigms are still based on certain big-ticket items, like automobiles, which are stuck in the old wheel-and-gear tech era. But that's not the shape of the future.

With an economy based on efficiency, appropriate technology, and building to last, we can have everything that really matters to maintain our quality of life -- health, education, entertainment -- and all we're really have to give up is our conspicuous consumption and perhaps our taste for strawberries in January. We're certainly not going to be reduced to a life of hard physical labor, shoving hand-drawn plows through the stony furrows to raise our meager organic crops.

In fact, the real problem will be just the opposite -- the less effort it takes to supply our real needs, and the fewer false needs we can afford to tolerate, the less there will be available in the way of busy-work to keep most of the world's population occupied. The current system which depends on "employment" to determine the allocation of goods and services is going to have to be replaced by a system which is not labor-based. And people are going to have to find new things to do with themselves to make their lives meaningful.

The kind of horror stories being presented in the OP seemed designed, if anything, to make people recoil from the necessary changes by painting them in near-apocalyptic terms. As a result, the only ones these stories really serve is those who want to keep things as they are -- the ones who profit from our economy of making too much stuff, as well as from the economic insecurity that keeps most of the human population scared and docile.

In any era, certain resources are plentiful while others are scarce, and that determines the shape of society. Energy may become relatively scarce after having been abundant, but that simply means the balance of priorities will change. It's not like this hasn't happened before -- you don't see a lot of really good flint nodules lying around on the ground these days, and your average caveman would wonder how people could ever get along under those circumstances. But we make do without readily available flint, and we'll make do with lesser amounts of energy.

The world will be very different, but it will be nothing like the simplified and degraded form of present-day society that scenarios like that in the OP envision. Instead, it will be something we can't presently imagine.

[diane in sf]

4. I agree with your response--it would be a good topic--we are growing into a future

that will be decentralized with industrial processes modeled on nature (cool, low energy input, no undigested waste products). World birth rates are falling rapidly and population will start dropping in the middle of this century. The deployment of renewable energy sources, especially wind and solar is growing exponentially. Why? Because they are economical. It makes total sense, unless you own Exxon, are strip mining Appalachia for coal or taking government money for insuring nuke plants. All of these dirty industries are internalizing their profits and spreading the true costs of their deployment to the public and the environment.

There are a lot of people making money scaring people; Biblical apocalypse for the superstitious, and a Mad Max future for the rest are the most popular scenarios.

This is not to say we haven't gotten ourselves into huge ecological trouble. Global warming is real and proceeding rapidly. All the low lying, densely populated coastal areas of the world are in danger of going under water. Habitat of every sort for humans and animals is in danger of being damaged into something we can't comfortably live with.

What that means to me is we have to keep pushing for our new technologies politically, from the local to global, and be green in our own lives (70% of the US economy is dependent on individual household behavior).

[kristopher]

5. Rec this responsee. nt

[happyslug]

6. Been on DU before:

in 2004:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2070075
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=106x8932

In 2005:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=180x14569

2006:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x5781705

In 2008:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x158008


Peak oil has been discussed in the PEAK Oil Forum, along with how it impact suburbia:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=266