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The UK National grid connection is about to take its first injection of liquified natural gas (LNG). The pipeline runs near me and I watched it being driven across Wales and England with near military efficiency in 2007, it passed and was covered over within months that summer. If only we could build wind farms and plug them in as rapidly.
They have heard it a million times over the past decade. I’ve gone hoarse trying to get my elected representatives to listen (see some of my rants on Western Fragility and the Rhizome Alternative).
Globalisation is a moronic enterprise. It is ecologically insane to reduce redundancy and diversity. It’s called ‘putting your eggs in one basket’. The financial crisis is simply the first of many major events that will very likely lead to a global economic and societal collapse – the end of civ. We learned nothing from the Romans and every other civilisation except how to repeat their mistake (See Jared Diamond or Derrick Jensen on this monumental elephant in the room).
Our British Prime Minister, supposedly hot on economics, seems to know very little about the complex processes that underlie his neat classical thinking. He is no ecologist, and clearly never took acid. No doubt the fundamental complexities of our universe probably scare politicians and business leaders ridged. They like it simple and neat so they can control it – anything else and they plunge into denial.
I’ve just read Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan and he puts the same thing in different words. Yet, I doubt if any politician will read his book. They just don’t want to admit that the whole political class has got it wrong and that the Emperor is Stark Bollock Naked:
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. April 2007)See more from Taleb here
The solution is not more technology. The solution is not more centralised control. The solution is to simplify, build diversity and redundancy into our socio-economic system, and to embrace the rhizome, embrace anarcho-syndicalism, embrace the ecovillage and localism. Embrace a scale-free human-scale social attractor.
Governments are simply not going to do this. They do not have the culture, language or attitude for it. But you can. And you should, if you value your own well-being and that of future generations.
Gordon Brown, the UK’s ‘leader’ is currently floundering as we enter the years of the Perfect Storm. He has no answers, he is not proacting, he is showing clearly that he has no clue how to discuss with his nation the problems that face us all:
Military crisis
Environmental crisis
Financial crisis
Food crisis
Oil crisis
And the biggest crisis of all: These five layered and forward-feeding factors that will end the world as we know it. Watch Naomi Klein (author of No Logo; Shock Doctrine) on the choice that is currently facing Americans.
This same choice will face Europeans as the situation here quickly follows that in the US. We may not be such a suburban culture as North America, but our way of life is nevertheless still predicated on what the philosopher Derrick Jensen terms a Culture of Make Believe.
We will be faced with an End of Suburbia and social and economic change on the same scale as North America, culturally different on the surface but no less massive. The five horses of the combined emergent property known as the apocalypse, the five factors of the Perfect Storm, are now upon us. Rome is burning and we are down at the forum watching Big Brother. Just at the moment when UK Parliament is considering building Big Brother’s brain. How beautifully ironic.
Just in time production is an excellent idea. Don’t store resources, produce them and get them to the user immediately. In principle this is efficient but when you look closer at the broader economic and social aspects it is a house of cards. A similar situation exists in relation to many of our social structures. Our society is becoming increasingly fragile due to hierarchical centralisation of processes, whether they are social or economic. The West has developed structures that are highly dependent on energy, on centralised control, and blinkered thinking. The potential for energy shortages to cause a system failure is only one of the threats the West faces. Disease, terrorism, and climate effects all pose a significant threat of social and economic collapse and these factors are all on the increase.
Where do you get your food and other vital supplies from? Most of us obtain our food through the supermarket supply chain. They obtain the produce from a myriad of sources in your country and from around the world. This is a process which is highly dependent on energy and communication systems. If those systems break down (even if only for a few weeks) where will you get your food and medicines? Our ancestors had their sources of food and medicine all around them. Even in living memory people had the means to grow sufficient food locally and kept a stock for lean times. If there are lean times now where will you get your food? You might grow it, or you might live in an area where farms grow food and would sell it to you directly. But where would you or the farmer get their seeds? The way we organise production is highly fragile. The solution is to decentralise production, reduce the reliance on complex communication networks and transportation.
Technology should be offering solutions that help to decentralise our production systems and yet it seems that every technological innovation is applied in ways that increase centralised control. This is in order to maximise profits and shift high quantities of product to the consumer. This depends on highly complex technology which itself depends on a network of production, communications systems, and a trained and available workforce. However, all of this is predicated on a cheap and flexible energy source. If that energy source is disrupted there will be far less of everything to go around, if at all. The complex web of resources that are brought to bear on production may simply collapse. A major epidemic, or a concerted terrorist campaign could have similar effects, although for the time being having oil makes our systems reasonably resistant. But consider what would happen to the US and EU if avian influenza took hold? Who would want to risk catching it by going to work? With a low labour turnout a complex network of production may fail simply because of its complexity.
I have not touched upon our social life which is also highly centralised, relying on communication systems in order to push information hierarchically downwards. Our culture used to emanate from the bottom upwards, it used to come from us, but now it comes predominantly from the top down. If we are to maintain a rich culture and the economics which are interdependent with it then we need to distribute its control. The internet helps this but increasingly corporations are finding ways to control the internet and it means that our culture is also becoming fragile.The answer is distributed control systems and local production of all essential resources, and a move towards less reliance on energy and just in time processes. This all points to the need for a revolution in the way the West organises itself economically and socially in order for us to replace fragility with robustness in the face of emerging threat such as and end to cheap energy, terrorism, disease, and climate change.
