permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Scott Vlaun wrote:
> To be fair, Cuba's transition wasn't exactly painless. Many suffered  
> greatly during their transition.

Yes--I called it "stressful," which is an understatement. And it won't 
be any fun elsewhere, either.

> They also happen to have a political system that was able to turn  
> agricultural practices around on a dime.
I think the old saying "we are only 3 meals from a revolution" will hold 
here, too. Rulers know that hunger breeds revolution, and I expect every 
functional government will take extreme measures to protect the food 
supply, letting other functions fail first.


Harmon Seaver wrote:
> China's growth (and oil use) is not declining so far, 

I expect that rising prices will have its usual effect on damping 
demand, as it did in 1974 and 1980, when jumps in oil price caused a 
decline in consumption worldwide. The law that price influences demand 
is a strong one, and that will hit demand very hard. Oil prices are 
still below what they were in 1980, and gasoline is only about 20% above 
what it was from 1950-1974, so there's no real incentive to conserve. 
Gasoline only uses 4% of an American household's discretionary income 
today, while in 1980 it took 6%. That suggests that pump prices can go 
up 50% before we conserve the way we did in 1980. I do wish we were 
smarter about it, although the drop in oil use growth from 6% per year 
before 1974 to the 2% of the last 30 years suggests we can learn.
> My family will have plenty to eat, and plenty of fuel for our
> vehicles and machinery, but we'll also be a long, long way from any city
> of any size.
I'm trying not to read that as, "I got mine, so there." But there are 
countless examples of rural areas doing far worse than cities in bad 
times. Homer Dixon-Smith shows that in ancient Rome, rural areas 
collapsed sooner than the cities, and people there were much worse off. 
The same for China in the collapse of the western Chou empire. In the 
Depression, a million people left US cities in 1930-32, thinking they'd 
be better off on farms, but from 1932-1935, 4 million people left farms 
for cities, showing they were wrong. There are thousands of abandoned 
camps in the rural South, left by people who couldn't make it in the 
country.

The country is where some food comes from (there are plenty of cities 
that grow 50-70% of their food) but the city is where everything else 
comes from: tools, machines, medicine, jobs, knowledge, innovation. 
Rural areas are generally poor, and over 90% of US ruralites commute to 
a job. They won't be better off. In a world of corporate farms, food and 
everything else will go to the cities first, in a form of triage. (After 
a major storm, my Seattle office had power in 12 hours. My rural house 
did without for 6 days. That's just a sample of what we're in store for.)

Toby

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