Economic crisis and what to do about it

This little animation (complete with Australian accent) is a great summary of one narrative gaining steam in certain circles. It outlines an analysis of economy, energy and environment that draws a picture of three converging crises as shaping the coming decades in quite dramatic ways that are likely to take the form of a global sustained Greater Depression, complete with economic deflation, energy supply constraints and political instability. As a positive response it suggests re-localisation, social resilience, trust building, and power-down innovation (such a permaculture). This is what the Transition Movement is all about and this animation is in many ways one accessible and cogent expression of that movement.

I am very attracted to certain elements of this account. I accept that there are grave threats in these systems (though I would characterise some of them differently) and that they could interact in complex ways. I also agree that rebuilding local communities of trust is a critical part of a health response to our present predicament. Where I'm perhaps most hesitant about an account like this is that I feel it is somewhat naïve about the likelihood of larger political events overwhelming merely local efforts. That is, very often such localism involves an explicit ignoring of national and international entities as doomed to fail anyway. I think that while such entities gain their legitimacy through acts of collective imagination (and so a widespread adoption of re-localist principles would indeed see them hollowed of clout), the path from here to there is never going to be smooth. Government and corporate powers hold sufficient cards to make life very difficult for localist movements if and when they are perceived as growing to a point where they might begin undermining their legitimacy. And even beyond such deliberate opposition, the capacity of a globalised economy and wounded ecological order to deliver sudden and catastrophic blows to a local community is easily underestimated.

So let's get serious about nurturing local communities of trust, about adjusting our expectations away from high energy consumption, about building resilience into our economic and social systems. But let's not take our eye off the ball of the macro-scale political and economic order or abandon the field to the plutocrats, deniers and techno-optimists.

Life after a terminal diagnosis

I am all for motivating people with positive visions of the future, and using fear (if at all) as a smaller stick to a bigger carrot. I think this generally works better in the long run. Fear might sustain a sprint, but only love can complete a marathon. That said, my own work is about finding a constructive (rather than destructive) place for ecological fears within theological ethics. And this is because I think that fear is not always a pathological response, but can be part of a healthy response in certain circumstances (at least certain kinds of "fear": deep concern for my neighbour's wellbeing, for instance and I think there is plenty to be deeply concerned about).

And so I don't shy away from suggesting that contemporary society has more or less received a terminal diagnosis (more on this soon). This doesn't mean there is no hope or nothing to aim for, far less that no motivating vision for the future is possible, but it does mean that I think certain visions of the future may well have to be relinquished as false or simply entirely unrealistic hopes. This is one of the helpful things about the Transition movement, since it isn't so much aiming to make current society "sustainable" (a likely impossible task) as to foster local communities of trust and resourcefulness that are resilient to the likely shocks of coming years and decades. This is where I think the church has excellent news, since fostering such communities, whose loyalties lie not with this passing age but in God's coming future, is what we do.

Things may unfold faster than you think

Nicole Foss, one of the authors at The Automatic Earth, on the triple challenges of economy, energy and environment (especially climate in this case). She sees energy as the most significant driver of where industrial civilisation heads next, though economics is the way that it will manifest itself with most speed and violence in a debt-driven economy. Her analysis of the effects of peak oil as being an exacerbation and acceleration of economic swings is an important corrective to those who imagine that peak oil simply means ever increasing price spikes. I think she underestimates the long term significance of climate, but her points about resilient communities of trust and the importance of forward thinking prudence in order to avoid toxic and violent responses are well made. Whether she is right about deflation as the way in which the next financial crisis (the continuation of the present financial crisis, depending how you look at it) is above my pay grade (which, given that it is almost zero, isn't saying much).

In short, she thinks it is very important to get out of debt as soon as possible, to prepare mentally for a different and more difficult world within the next few years and to invest in local relationships of trust. As a Christian, I don't see much to disagree with in this advice.

Transition: from oil dependence to local resilience

The Transition Movement (a.k.a. Transition Towns) is a grassroots international social movement whose tag line is "from oil dependence to local resilience". In the light of the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil, this movement works at the local level to build networks of trust and skills to face a bumpy future. The goal is not to make the present society sustainable (a likely impossible task), but to prepare local communities for the shocks ahead, and to make them resilient to those shocks through increasing local food, energy and water production, raising awareness and building relationships between neighbours prior to events that could shrink the trust horizon.

Transition is a movement that began in Ireland, but has spread around the world and is particularly strong in the UK. I've mentioned these guys before a few times, but raise them again now for two reasons. First, I realised that I'd never explained who they are, for those who might not have heard of them. Second, this weekend, Jessica and I will be at the international Transition conference, which is very conveniently being held here in Edinburgh. I may have more to report by the time it is over, but for now, here's a video introducing the key concepts of Transition.

In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.

Monbiot gives up on governments

"Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don't want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won't. They weren't ever going to do so. So what do we do now?

"I don't know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we've sought to avoid. The conversation starts here."

- George Monbiot, "Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it is dead".

Perhaps the UK's best known writer on ecological issues, George Monbiot has now given up on a sane institutional response to climate change. This is more or less the same discussion as back here.

My response would still be to say that I agree with Monbiot insofar as expecting governments and other institutions to respond in ways that solve or largely dodge the problem has for some time been wishful thinking, however, it remains the case that their actions over the coming months and years will make significant differences to the lives of millions as we face increasingly difficult situations.

One example of this concerns whether city governments prevent or allow further development on flood plains. Another, whether remaining biodiversity is respected and preserved or trashed for short term gain. Such examples can be multiplied many times over. Even if the cumulative response still falls well short of what is required to prevent very bumpy times ahead, such decisions still make a significant practical difference one way or the other.

To use another (partial) analogy: if I receive a terminal diagnosis and become convinced that nothing can be done to save my life, do I go out and squander my goods (either in a hedonistic spree or on far-fetched miracle cures), or do I make sure that I have a generous and thoughtful will drawn up, and seek to use my remaining days to bless others?
I also agree that part of a healthy response at this stage is to build resilience at whatever levels we can (certainly including, though not limited to, local resilience) and I will say more about this in coming posts. Some call this building lifeboats (or I heard a paper at a Christian Ethics conference recently that called it "ark building"). There are some serious problems with the metaphor, but the basic idea is sound.

Revenge of the Blackbirds: Eco-parables from Mother Goose

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?
The king was in his counting house counting out his money,
The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

It is the world's poor who suffer the first ecological consequences of over-consumption by the rich.

The opening line of this dark parable announces its theme: the relation of economics ("sixpence") and food production ("a pocketful of rye"). The second line then introduces the problem: excessive or extravagant consumption. Once we have correctly identified the industrial capitalist ("the king"), the western consumerist ("the queen") and the worker from the two-thirds world whom they keep in subjection ("the maid"), then the tragic moral of this biting social commentary becomes clear.

Innocent children's nonsense song or a devastating critique of contemporary economics? You decide.

Of course, we could go on and identify the potent warnings and analyses found in other eco-parables from Mother Goose:

• Jack and Jill - rising tensions over dwindling supplies of fresh water.
• Doctor Foster went to Gloucester - climate change and de-globalisation, or the re-localisation of economies due to shifts in precipitation and sea level rise.
• Hey Diddle Diddle - the deleterious effect on food security of astronomical beef production and excessive numbers of domestic pets.
• The Grand Old Duke of York - indecision at Copenhagen.

Although I've indicated that points are currently on pause, I'll offer up to twenty for the best suggested readings of the hidden ecological messages encoded in other traditional nursery rhymes.

The good oil: oil and the common good

One point where the rubber of individualism really hits the road is transport. We love our cars. What an amazing ability we have: to select a destination that would take hours to arrive at on foot and get there in minutes! But this has become so normal that we think we have a right to get anywhere we want in a minimum of time and without reference to others. Perhaps that's why we get so angry at traffic. Or high petrol prices.

Yet rising petrol prices are good. Because rising prices are a signal telling us that, as a society, we are using petrol faster than we can produce it. If there's not quite enough to go around, then prices will rise until demand falls to the level of the available supply. Of course, rising prices might be telling us something else: that petrol companies are ripping us off, that there has been a brief disturbance in the global oil supply due to political instability or natural disaster, that the government is unfairly taxing a useful commodity, that speculators are pushing the price up in order to make a quick buck. But sustained global price rises (the cost of oil has doubled in the last year, quadrupled in the last six) tells us that whatever other short-term causes there might be, something very basic about supply and demand is probably going on behind it. And that is something worth pondering.

Oil is a finite resource. There is only so much of it beneath our feet and so far we haven't worked out how to make any more any time soon.* This means that at some stage, we will reach a point where we can't get what's left in the ground out any faster than we already are.** If not now, then within a handful of years, most geologists think that the world will hit that maximum possible oil production. And from there the only way is down. And that means more price rises.

At least, that's what companies like Ford, General Motors, Toyota, British Airways, American Airlines, Dow Chemical and United Airlines - all of whom whom rely heavily on oil - are assuming, based on their recent moves to start radically reshaping their activities. They don't expect prices to significantly drop in the medium to long term and so are working out how to adjust as a result.

But it's not just companies. There are all kinds of implications for governments and individuals too. The end of cheap oil will affect all of us and not only when we fill up. Readily available oil has been one of the basic assumptions upon which our modern society is built. But higher prices are a signal that it's time for a re-think of many things.

For a start, we'll need to re-examine the way we build our lives around the almost ubiquitous use of cars. And one thing that might mean is working out how to live more locally. Another might be a greater reliance on public transport (for instance, you might like to support this campaign).

For the last six months, Jessica and I have been blessed with a car on loan from a friend who has been overseas. He returns this weekend, which will force us to be more deliberate about our transport options again - a good thing! The habit of believing I ought to be able to go anywhere anytime is hard to shake. Cars can be a lovely luxury, but they are also one of the primary sacramental experiences of an individualist culture. In my car, I feel I am master of my own destiny, able to negotiate a path through life to where I wish to go. The only community consists of paying just enough attention to one other's movements such that we might avoid bumping into each other. Perhaps rubbing a few more shoulders on the bus will be good for our soul.
*I realise that it is possible to turn coal and natural gas into oil, but this process is currently very polluting and in any case both coal and gas are likewise finite, and so even massive investment in this technology would simply postpone the issue a little.
**I realise that I'm simplifying here too, but not - I hope - irresponsibly so.