Descent, Transition or Collapse, which is it to be?

Or all three and more, all at once...and more.

Part Two:

A lot can happen in twenty four hours- two things occurred as I was about to finish this off that allowed me to make some significant improvements. I'll point them out when we get to them.

Last time I started by mentioning a book by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse, A manual for our times (Polity 2020). I went on to describe, very roughly, how the myth of permanent economic growth got going until the 1970s when the oil shock gave the ol' high energy system a heck of a shake up and how the ruthlessness of the Thatcher regime bought a little more time for the myth by selling the crown jewels (privatisation) and deregulating the financial sector, setting the scene for the disasters to come when all the web of financial products based on the sale of debt, too complicated for anyone to understand, finally came crashing down in 2008. (As an aside, I notice today the UK government intends to remove the controls on finance that were put in place to avoid a similar crash happening again- deregulation all over again- in order to kick start GROWTH! Duh!)

I also mentioned the Meadows' work, Limits To Growth, which presented a very different view of what the future was likely to bring if the myth of perpetual growth was pursued, namely, systemic collapse.

In another piece (How to Crash a Country) I talked about where we'd gone next in the UK, along with many other countries, effectively bailing out the banks, the very people who'd caused the financial crash in the first place, at the expense of the rest of us, especially the poor. At least it was becoming more obvious where capitalism was taking us.

Here I'll begin with David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture design, who, in his work Future Scenarios¹ gave us an extremely lucid account of four possible scenarios arising from the collision of climate change and peak energy,

David has an extremely good understanding of energy, (drawn in part from Howard T. Odum's work), and this gives Future Scenarios a very solid foundation. The attention given to energy is absolutely crucial, for when a society that is so heavily dependant on energy, such as ours, experiences shortages in supply and consequent price rises, the repercussions are felt pretty much throughout the system and can be considerable, as we are experiencing now, in the UK and other parts of the world.

It also explains the desperate actions being undertaken by governments to try to safeguard current energy levels by extracting oil from ever dirtier sources (shale gas, tar sands and the return to coal- Michael Gove has just given the green light to begin deep mining of coal in Cumbria). This is David's “Brown Tech” scenario; all this despite the clear evidence of global warming.

In Future Scenarios, David presents the idea of descent, rather than collapse, where shocks to the system roll in one after the other but there is some time (hopefully sufficient time), between each shock to adapt to the new conditions, usually at a lower level of energy use than the previous state, before the next shock kicks in.

We can see this occurring now in the UK with folk trying to adapt to increased energy prices as winter begins. This is obviously going to be hardest for the poorest in our society, whose adaptation may be limited to simply wearing more clothes and heating only one room for a few hours a day, if at all, as opposed to those who have money and own their own roofs and can afford to install solar panels or take advantage of grants to install air source heat pumps. The temperature was -5.1 here this morning and there are people in the UK, families, who cannot afford the energy needed to heat their homes...

There's a similar attention given to energy in How Everything Can Collapse, although the book is much wider ranging and presents a whole host of boundaries and limits, rather than just energy. In the book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens have collected together a huge amount of work by the many other people who have been looking at the idea of collapse for decades now. Some names, such as Dimitri Orlov² and Jared Diamond³ and others, whom I was familiar with.

David Holmgren's Future Scenarios also gets a mention along with permaculture as a positive alternative to conventional high energy farming, though its permaculture and not permaculture design, that they refer to and there's no mention of it as general system design (Bill Mollison, the other co-founder of permaculture design, describes it as a design science); this is a problematic mistake that I'll refer to again.

But to be honest, compared to when I last had a look at this subject, I was quite gob-smacked by the weight of all the evidence now, the number of critical boundaries and limits that we are approaching or have already passed and the variety and number of individuals, bodies, organisations and authorities involved in ongoing analysis and future projections; “In many countries, economic, scientific and military experts, as well as an array of political movement (the Degrowth Movement, the Transition Movement, Alternatiba etc.) have no hesitation about openly discussing collapse scenarios”, remark the authors.

It seems that the only people who are ignorant of this are our political leaders who still hold the myth of perpetual growth to be true and that growth is the only way out of all of our problems, when in fact its just going to make things worse. Dennis Meadows said of the reactions to his Limits to Growth report over the last forty years "We simply continued to change the reasons for not changing our behaviour."

He goes on, "In the 1970s, critics claimed, 'There are no limits. Anyone who thinks there are limits simply doesn't get it...'. In the 1980s, it became clear that the limits existed, so the critics then said, 'Okay, there are limits, but they're very far away. We don't need to worry.' In the 1990s, it became apparent that they weren't that far away....So supporters of the growth claimed 'The limits may be close but we don't need to worry about them because markets and technology will solve the problems.' In the 2000s it started to seem that technology and the market would not solve the question of limits. The answer changed once more: 'We must continue to support growth, because that's what will give us the resources we need to deal with with the problems."

This leads to the current idea of growing the Green Economy to produce ever more wind turbines, replace all the petrol and diesel cars and lorries in the world with battery powered ones, build more nuclear reactors and the like. This would require an expansion of the exploitation of the earth for the resources needed that would dwarf what we've done already, would push us far beyond a whole range of boundaries and limits, increase global warming and make the collapse when it came even more rapid and destructive. Its growth that is the problem, not the solution!

But what do we take away from this sort of information? What do we do about it? The authors make various suggestions and proposals for future study and I'll look at some of these here as they have relevance to what many of us are already doing.

For a start, they point out, highly interconnected networks initially resist change but if the disruption continues they become subject to domino effects and hence catastrophic change; that is, sudden and irreversible collapse. Think global economy, supply chains, large corporations, big charities reliant on huge donations and the like.

Modular networks, on the other hand, that are only loosely connected, with largely independent parts will withstand shocks by adapting. Losses tend to be local and only gradually does the system become more and more damaged. Think local groups, organic market gardens, transition communities, (the permaculture network of groups and projects?).

The more self-reliant the parts are, the more resilience there is to large scale shocks; I'm thinking here of the traditional rural communities I've spoken of before (We’re Still Here) composed of the tyddynwyr, smallholders, crofters, cottagers. So prepare for shocks by building small, resilient systems. Sound familiar?

Here's some quotes from the book: “Preparing for a catastrophe then means weaving a web of connections around you” and “the most important ...task is to rebuild a strong and vibrant local social fabric so as to gradually establish a climate of trust.” Thus “We need to get out and about and create collective 'practices'.” So keep up the good work folks!

They also make a series of suggestions for the Enlightened Catastrophist (!) such as, act as if abrupt changes are certain and so do everything to make sure they don't occur. Then accept the fact that we are not able to predict everything so don't say that collapse is immanent but, they continue, we are unable to say with any certainty that we haven't already crossed a critical boundary; in a time of complete uncertainty, its intuition that counts.

One crucial point they make is that economic inequalities are toxic to society, so toxic that extreme economic inequalities always precede collapse. Wealth has a buffering effect and allows individuals to put off change and provides the excuse of a past abundance. So work to reduce economic equalities; this is good for all, even the rich.

However, compared to the weight of the evidence they present earlier, this is the weakest part of the book and here's how we can strengthen it.

Firstly, I mentioned above that the authors make what to many permaculture designers is the familiar error of talking about permaculture merely as a method of managing land for food production, rather than a strategy for designing systems, founded on ecological principles and having an ethical foundation, created specifically by Mollison and Holmgren to allow us to design sustainable solutions to the challenges we face today. We now have over forty years of practical experience in almost every country in the world of creating locally based, resilient solutions.

One of the things which occurred that I referred to at the top of this piece was that my old friend and colleague, the permaculture designer Steven Read, synchronisticly as usual, published his latest piece on Substack which addresses exactly this issue far more coherently than I could and provides a programme for what we are attempting to put in place before the proverbial hits the fan, so saving me considerable time, effort and space here; Many thanks Steve!

Limits to Growth and Permaculture

The second thing was that I received a comment from a reader of part one who reminded me of the work of David Fleming, whose magnus opus, Lean Logic; a Dictionary for the Future and how to survive it; 2006 Chelsea Green Publishing, I was asked to review a decade ago, just after David's death. Many thanks for the reminder, Jason!

David's Lean Logic completely boggled me then and still does now; it felt and still feels as though it was written tomorrow and somehow got dropped back into our time and presents, in the form of a dictionary, some remarkably prescient suggestions for how we might begin to deal with the many and varied challenges that will arise as we make our descent. Its now available online here.

The point here is that there is a considerable amount of genuinely useful work that has been and is being undertaken in many countries by a great many folk, including indigenous peoples, that does not appear in How Everything Can Collapse because it does not gain attention in the same way the negative stuff does. And the further point is that undertaking this sort of work can and should be more fulfilling, enjoyable and downright fun than anything the growth economy has to offer!

I'll end with one of Pablo Servigne's and Raphaël Stevens' positive observations from past experiences of catastrophes.

Human communities contain formidable “self healing” capabilities. In general, after a catastrophe, behaviours associated with competitiveness and aggression are set aside in a general upsurge of feeling where all 'I's becomes 'We's with a force that nothing seems to stop. “Its as if extraordinary conditions bring out extraordinary behaviour”. But perhaps extraordinary only in relation to the perceived competitiveness and aggression of the current, relatively new, capitalist society- in relation to our much longer experience as hunter/gatherers, its probably a reversion to our normal, human behaviour- ‘bout time!

As always, thanks for reading- next time, as an antidote to all this, I'll look at a type of Growth that can provide us with all our physical needs and yet does not lead to disaster, in fact the complete opposite! Take care you all.

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1. David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture design with Bill Mollison, writes extensively, much of which can be found on his website, including a presentation of Future Scenarios and his review of How Everything Can Collapse.

2. Dimitri Orlov undertook a thorough observation and analysis of the collapse of the USSR from 1992 on. He came up with a model for collapse that led through five stages, namely financial, economic, political, social and cultural. The Russians got as far as stage three but the society survived. He now applies the model to the USA. He recently added a sixth stage of collapse, ecological, which describes a scenario where the environment is so damaged as to make recovery impossible. He has produced numerous blogs and articles which make intelligent and, at times, humorous reading. Easy to find his stuff online.

3. Jared Diamond; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin Books. 2006

I think Jared Diamond's writing is consistently excellent- the man's a bit of a genius, a polymath who's able to look at things from multiple perspectives without causing confusion. In Collapse he provides a lucid analysis of past civilisations, some of which collapsed, some of which recognised where they were going, adapted and survived. From this analysis he is able to extract a set of criteria which lead to collapse, though it is never inevitable. The inability of the ruling elite to see or accept what is happening, is one of the critical factors that makes collapse unavoidable.

Some of his other books, equally interesting and lucid include The World Until Yesterday and Guns, Germs and Steel.