This section contains excerpts from the book Relocalization in Rural British Columbia: A Guide for Communities Before the Long Emergency, currently in writing.
Extreme Scenarios
Will the post-peak oil world be a time when we North American’s rediscover our spiritual, inter-human roots, when we shed the materialism that has deflected us from real values like some store-bought narcotic, when children learn again to make a game with a stick and a ball? Or will it be a time when even the United States fractures into pieces along lines of energy haves and have nots, cities and suburbs become unliveable and hordes of shivering, hungry former accountants and dock workers roam the countryside in search of something to eat and a place where they have a chance to survive?
Those are the extreme views offered by thoughtful, researched voices.
No one can tell the future. We can determine that oil is going to be in short supply. We can measure how that will impact the world economy. We can look at history to help us guess what will follow. In some respects, the near future is easier to predict now than at any time during the industrial age. The commodity that is most responsible for economic growth is about to be in short supply. One over-riding change is going to super-impose itself on human activity. Change is most difficult to foresee when the range of emerging probabilities is expanding. Peak oil will signal a contraction of emerging probabilities. It will stifle the range of possible futures. It is not that difficult to predict what our challenges will be; only difficult to tell how we will deal with them.
Every generation has its apocalyptic sooth-sayers and its voices of calamity. The energy descent prediction should not get lost among the grocery store tabloid predictions of Notradamus or the Revelation of John or the hoax of Y2K. Peak oil is not a reading of tea leaves. It is coming and the world is not ready for it. Nor should we be skeptical because earlier predictions of environmental calamities – acid rain, loss of the ozone layer – did not materialize. Peak oil and the energy descent are not just mantras of a continuously babbling cadre of misanthropes; they are realities visible on the spread sheets of petroleum engineers and manifest in the very ubiquity of oil use.
The Best of Times: back to Bucolia
There are several emerging organizations of communities that are making plans to cope with the impacts of peak oil. One of the largest is the Relocalization Network.
What is Relocalization?
Updated May 9, 2007
Relocalization is a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of Relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to dramatically improve environmental conditions and social equity.
The Relocalization strategy developed in response to the environmental, social, political and economic impacts of global over-reliance on cheap energy. Our dependence on cheap non-renewable fossil fuel energy has produced climate change, the erosion of community, wars for oil-rich land and the instability of
the global economic system.
The Relocalization Network helps Local Groups develop community activities and programs that can be used locally and as working models for other communities when the effects of energy decline become more intense.
The Relocalization Network: Background and History
Updated May, 2007
The Relocalization Network was created in 2003 as one of the first initiatives of Post Carbon Institute. It developed as a response to individuals’ questions about how they could take action to address the implications of peak oil. We found that the most effective strategies are initiated at the community level. For this reason, Post Carbon Institute decided that establishing a network of Local Post Carbon Groups was the best way to provide concerned individuals with the support and resources necessary to coordinate effective action.
The Network Team supports Local Post Carbon Groups by providing on-line communication tools, developing valuable resources, facilitating connections between Local Groups, and cultivating a sense of working together globally on local responses. By providing the web-based communication tools that will help Local Groups pool resources, share project ideas and templates and collaborate on initiatives, the RelocalizationNetwork will facilitates valuable connections between groups.
The Relocalization Network is now composed of nearly 150 Local Post Carbon Groups from all over the world that are working to prepare their communities for an energyconstrained future. These groups operate autonomously, while receiving guidance, educational resources, project and technical support and electronic infrastructure from Post Carbon Institute.
Primarily, the Network is a forum for planning. Of them, Bill Henderson observes, “most relocalization planning is for an optimum, sustainable socio-economic configuration after a slow energy descent or powerdown.” The books and websites of the relocalization movement are bullish on decline. They present an orderly transition to alternative energy sources and alternative lifestyles. A core element goes even further.
The energy descent is presented as an opportunity to address social and ecological issues. The crisis calls for ideas that are inspiring, creative and attractive visions of revitalised local economies, visions grounded by a connection to place and the people in it.
The Community Solution is another virtual organization with the goal of assisting communities to prepare for the energy descent. They are a bit more mindful of the upheavals that might accompany rapid decline. Here is their typology of possible futures.
While Plans A and B seek to maintain unsustainable levels of resource consumption through energy alternatives, Plan C advocates for cultural change.
Plan A – More and dirtier fuels like tar sands, oil shale, coal-to-liquids, and “clean” coal (bury CO2) to keep up with growing energy consumption.
Plan B – The "clean and green" approach proposes using large-scale renewables like wind, solar, biofuels and hydrogen to maintain our high energy way of life and keep us complacent and consuming.
Plan C – Our strategy of culture change, conservation and curtailment.
Through reductions in resource consumption, dramatic conservation and curtailment of energy use coupled with an increase in local community living we can survive peak oil and create a sustainable world in its wake. Plan C addresses many of today’s issues head on and reduces the impetus for war. Our solutions look at how each individual can make a difference, reduce CO2 emissions, and help bring peace to the world.
The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) has chapters in many Western countries. It was founded by the Dr. Collin Campbell, one of the most respected peak oil forecasters. Here is the energy descent strategy of the New York City chapter (http://www.peakoilnyc.org/). We do not suggest that Dr. Campbell should be associated with the chapter’s naiveté.
Urban retrofitting – where those who prefer the city life learn how to make their buildings more energy efficient, work to provide for low energy transportation systems, to support and perhaps operate local businesses, and to use all available space for the local production of food. Suburban/small town retrofitting - where those desiring the suburban or small town lifestyle learn how to recreate sustainable systems in these areas. The focus here is on local energy generation, local business and the efficient use of public lands. Rural retrofitting – where those dedicated to preserving the culture and sustainability of the larger metropolitan populations move to outlying rural areas and begin the process of repairing the land and rejuvenating local food production. |
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There is little sense of alarm about the future in the literature of these relocalization advocates. We can make the transition relatively painlessly by adopting already existing agendas for alternative energy, energy conservation and environmental restoration. A new culture of conservation, community cooperation and a renaissance of the old trades will see us through. The energy descent will see the demise of many of civilization’s ills. We will be forced gratefully into lifestyles that are sustainable, a restoration of the human-ecological balance and a return to a time of spiritual and social rootedness.
This vision is dangerous.
We agree that relocalization will occur. We agree that communities that work cooperatively within and without will do better than those that do not. Communities (and provinces and nations) should begin preparing now. And, no doubt, some of the social and environmental outcomes will be positive . . . whether we like them or not.
The undermining problem with implementation of this vision is that it involves a social and environmental agenda that could only be conceived in an energy-rich world. If we have not been able to “dramatically improve environmental conditions and social equity” during a time of excess wealth, will we be able to on the downslide? Will we be able to build 100,000 3-Mw wind turbines and twenty nuclear power plants, plus the infrastructures to link them across the nation, when oil and gas supplies are declining.
Will we see an orderly exodus of “those dedicated to preserving the culture and sustainability of the larger metropolitan populations move to outlying rural areas and begin the process of repairing the land and rejuvenating local food production” in support of those who prefer the new urban life, where everyone is a gardener and rides a bicycle? These are elitist views of those who cannot imagine that when the lid is taken off of law and order, the long disenfranchised may have their own ideas about “cultural change” and who owns what.
This vision leaves out that the world will likely be at war over oil. It is already. It ignores the possibility of mass migration, domestically and internationally. It ignores that we will be contending with destructive climate change at the same time we are dismantling suburbia and planting corn in its place.
Relocalization movements are under-written by a nostalgia for a simpler life, a time of self-reliance, of deeper human interaction – a longing for “Green Acres.” Please pass the pitchfork while we play the theme song. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh . . . duh duh.
The Worst of Times: fast forward to Mad Max
We begin this section with a conceptual framework for appraising the impact of energy descent, summarized from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down (2007). Despite the title, Homer-Dixon’s book gives little food for comfort.
Next, we pillage one of the best known pictures of a post-peak world of chaos, from the last chapter of James Howard Kuntsler’s The Long Emergency (2004). A 2006 film, “The End of Suburbia,” based on Kuntsler’s work, has been shown on North American television.
Bringing it closer to home, we take a quick look at the future as seen by BC relocalization proponent, Bill Henderson, editor of the Energy Bulletin (www.energybulletin.org).
Canadian author and Professor of Political Science at University of Toronto, Thomas Homer-Dixon, examines the impact of peak oil in terms of energy economics. The energy descent will be a transition from high energy return on investment (EROI) fuels to low EROI substitutes. In The Upside of Down (2006) Homer-Dixon presents a historical thesis of the wealth, complexity and lifetime of societies being ultimately dependent on access to energy.
Homer-Dixon’s prognosis is summarized on page 253.
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Because it takes energy to create and maintain complexity and order, and because energy will become steadily more expensive, we’ll find it steadily harder to implement complex solutions to our complex problems. |
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He illustrates the fall of the Roman Empire as an example of complexity unravelling as low-EROI sources of energy replaced high-EROI sources. “In the end, as costs outstripped revenues, the western empire ‘could no longer afford the problem of its own existence.’” Is today’s western empire in the same predicament?
Homer-Dixon is fairly optimistic that we will develop economic and social ways to weather the long emergency, until a new form of civilization is hewn. However, if one takes seriously his presentation of growth and systems theory, then his optimism lie’s at the bottom of a Pandora’s box of chaotic forces: negative reinforcement loops, diminishing returns, natural cycles of collapse and a genetics of denial. We provide his account of the energy descent, why we are in denial and lastly his sense of the size of the catastrophe we are heading for, all from page 253.
[T]oday’s globalized economy won’t be viable, because it takes too much energy to keep it running. As energy prices rise, we’ll first see cutbacks on long-distance travel and trade. . . [T]he world will become more regionalized and even hierarchical because manufacturing, commerce, and political power will shift to countries with relatively good access to energy. Eventually those of us in rich countries will have to change many things in our societies and daily lives – not just the machines we use to produce and consume energy but also the work we do, our entertainment and leisure activities, how much we travel in cars and airplanes, our financial systems, the design of our cities, and the ways we produce our food. |
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Sounds manageable, until he raises the spectre of denial.
The growth phase we are in may seem like a natural and permanent state of affairs – and our world’s rising complexity, connectedness, efficiency, and regulation may seem relentless and unstoppable – but ultimately it isn’t sustainable. Still, we find it impossible to get off this upward escalator because our chronic state of denial about the seriousness of our situation – aided and abetted by powerful special interests that benefit the status quo – keeps us from really seeing what’s happening or really considering other paths our world might follow. Radically different futures are beyond imagining. So we stay trapped on a path that takes us toward major breakdown. |
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Systems tend toward complexity and connectedness as they grow. Nothing grows forever. When a system is enabled to continue growing due to abundance of a basic input – such as a century of above average rainfall or a century of cheap, versatile energy – the eventual collapse of the system is proportionate to the over-built dependence on the diminishing basic input. The higher you go, the harder you fall.
The longer a system is “locked in” to its growth phase, says Buzz Holling, “the greater its vulnerability and the bigger and more dramatic its collapse will be. If the growth phase goes on for too long, “deep collapse” – something like synchronous failure – eventually occurs. Collapse in this case is so catastrophic and cascades across so many physical and social boundaries that the system’s ability to regenerate itself is lost. |
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Collapse theory
The collapse of civilizations has been a popular subject recently, spawning several best-sellers that are based on multi-disciplinary research. These histories give cause for fright. It seems civilizations often don’t see the collapse coming. They go on over-exploiting the basic resources that enable growth until they are gone (forests) or naturally decline (rain cycles). Sometimes the vigour of the civilization is at its peak when collapse occurs. The speed and height of the fall is a function of how much unsustainable growth and complexity accumulated during the era of plenty.
Human population tripled during the first century of oil and natural gas use. Wealth, measured in total value of goods and services produced, has risen times fifty. We produce enough food to feed the world (in possibility, not actuality) using less land per mouth than ever before. We are exploiting resources in ever corner and under every corner of the world. Slightly less than one billion people have ample spare cash for elective plastic surgery, designer clothing for their “Fifi,” and to generate taxes that support social safety nets and exploration of Mars.
We are living in the biggest bubble of unsustainability in human history. Our wealth and our numbers are critically dependent on cheap, abundant, versatile energy from oil and natural gas. We have stretched these basic resources to their limits, and soon their production will decline. Currently, there are no viable substitutes. We don’t see it coming. Growth is still the mantra du jour. We are rushing headlong toward the collapse of not a civilization, but of civilization itself.
Collapse Scenarios
We turn to Kuntsler’s vision of the long emergency. Kuntsler is a listened to forecaster because of his acute eye for the unsustainable and the accuracy of forecasts about the ruinous effects of land use patterns and economic giganticism on American cities and towns.
Kuntsler is an impassioned denouncer of suburbia. His brilliant 1993 The Geography of Nowhere depicts suburbia as an energy guzzling, near-sterilized broken promise of the best of country and city - perpetrated by the oil, automobile and construction industries - and the true driver and barometer of the U.S. economy.
For Kuntsler, relocalization is our future.
The salient fact about life in the decades ahead is that it will become increasingly and intensely local and smaller in scale. It will do so steadily and by degrees as the amount of available cheap energy decreases and the global contest for it becomes more intense. The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply. . . . The downscaling of America is the single most important task facing the American people. As energy supplies decline, the complexity of human enterprise will also decline in all fields, and the most technologically complex systems will be ones most subject to dysfunction and collapse – including national and state governments. (239) |
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Like most peak oil futurists, he singles out food supply as the premiere issue.
In the economy of the long emergency, [a]ll other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labour. . . . To put it simply, Americans have been eating oil and natural gas for the past century, at an ever-accelerating pace. Without the massive “inputs” of cheap gasoline and diesel fuel for machines, irrigation and trucking, or petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides, or fertilizers made out of natural gas, Americans will be compelled to radically reorganize the way food is produced, or starve. (239) |
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Many people have heard Kuntsler’s forecast of the end of suburbia.
We spent all our wealth acquired in the twentieth century building an infrastructure of daily life that will not work very long into the twenty-first century. . . . Suburbia has a tragic destiny. More than half the U.S. population lives in it. The economy of recent decades is based largely on the building and servicing of it. And the whole system will not operate without liberal and reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas. (248) |
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Inner cities will fare no better.
America’s big cities created themselves in tandem with the industrial revolution. They were products of it and servants to it. (250) The industrial cities will never again be what they were in the twentieth century. They require too much energy to run and the industrial activities they were designed for are already defunct. Like big corporations, big farms, and big governments, big cities will not be suited to the reduced scale of life in the post-cheap-oil future. (252) |
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If scenarios of disintegrating suburbs and cities are not frightening enough, Kuntsler predicts the disunion of the United States along lines of sustainability or lack of it. Regions that have only become habitable because of oil and natural gas will be hit hardest. Identifiable cultures, histories of development, respect or disrespect for law, racial profiles and religion will be factors in the formation of united regions.
In times of decline and distress, divisions between self-identifying groups that were barely visible during times of order and plenty become sharply drawn. Kuntsler draws attention to race and religion as two socio-cultural sources for us-then tribalism. In his view, the United States has many lines of fracture.
The most obvious fracture points are along racial lines. The U.S. has large populations of ghetto-ized African Americans and Latin Americans. Most of them live in places that will be the most inhospitable during the long emergency. Hostility between poor, largely non-white urban “militias” and wealthy, mainly white holders of the best productive lands is a possibility Kuntsler does not mention specifically, but which fits his scenario.
The United States already has a national ideology that is capable of justifying sectarian divisions and their defence. Fighting for the American “way of life” has long been justification for international ruthlessness. Certain rights are inviolable: the right to own private property absolutely; the rights of free enterprise; the right to drive an SUV; the right to carry arms and the right to use the latter in defence of the prior.
Widely, religion in the U.S. supports “the American dream” and all of its rights and privileges. In its current excesses it supports anything that perpetuates the wealth of the nation – even spawning something as transparently discordant as a “gospel of wealth.” The Good News of Jesus is that God rewards the faithful with material wealth. We should expect in a time of decline and disorder that a utilitarian, fundamentalist religious orthodoxy will provide rallying points for group identification and justification for its extremes.
That’s not all. A group of contending regions that was once the United States of America may still be trying to fight wars across the world over oil. The North American continent may be under attack by other countries or by pirates. The borders that marked Mexico and Canada might not mean much anymore.
Closer to Home
British Columbian Bill Henderson, editor of the Energy Bulletin, assembles economic and social predictions of impacts of the energy descent that are similar to Kuntsler’s, but with less alarm.
| • | oil spikes upwards over $100 a barrel, perhaps $200 a barrel; |
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| • | companies in key industries - airlines, tourism, distribution, etc. - go bankrupt |
| • | deflation pounds existing speculative bubbles - real estate, stock markets - which burst |
| • | as deflation accelerates, lack of demand, plus increased energy costs for production and distribution, plus strikes/fuel price protests, rapidly paralyse existing trade. |
| • | Places like where I live on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast are forced to become largely self-reliant, with little support from provincial and federal governments overwhelmed by widespread demand for disaster assistance, while revenues plummet and governmental agencies and resources atrophy. |
| • | Our local pulp mill and other forest industry employers cease production. Tourism dies. Pensions and investment income fade away. |
| • | Present imports of food and other commodities including medicines, perhaps energy, information, etc., are seriously disrupted. Local governments are besieged by desperate constituents as a drastic relocalization of the economy is forced in a very short timeframe. |
Immediately, Henderson states he does not think the scenario is probable. Instead, he uses it as a call for action, NOW, by all levels of government.
Shortly after, however, he criticizes the relocation network for under-estimating “possible governmental/societal re-organization and [not] planning for conflict.”
Dislocation will bring social chaos, anger, irrational expectation and demands on whatever form of government remains. For only the most obvious example, truckboys - a crude but useful caricature - co-evolved with the deceased economy and now unemployed, angry, no gas, no toys, no future except what they perceive as serfdom, are going to be immediate and dangerous problems for relocalizing governments. Social hierarchies collapse with the economy and resulting herd dynamics will probably be painful. Consideration of these problems beforehand should perhaps be the beginning of relocalization planning. |
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This is pretty much Kuntlzer’s scenario, more crudely expressed. It appears that Henderson, after articulating a scary picture, wants to deny it could ever happen. Why?
Between Extremes
We would all like to deny the Mad Max extreme. We would prefer to believe the back to Bucolia scenario, but know that abrupt global economic decline will not be pretty.
At Rural Futures, we believe that communities should plan for BOTH extremes. The energy descent will be a time of extremes. By planning for a time of increased community co-operation and building local self-reliance, it may be possible to smooth the descent. The recommendations of relocalization movements are the only ways that rural communities have to cushion the impact of the energy descent.
Ar the same time, rural communities should prepare for the worst. A terrible irony of these extreme scenarios is that, should law and order erode, the communities that are the most successful in preparing for the energy descent will become the most attractive places to live . . . or pillage.
Everyone hopes that the energy descent will not be too painful. We must move forward with the belief that it will mean belt-tightening, not chaos. The end of the oil age is not the end of the energy age. It is not the end of human ingenuity. We need to get off of fossil fuels anyway, in order to avert another calamity. The energy descent is ironically timely. Despite the lack of substitute fuels and the limitations of alternative energy sources we should remain optimistic that science will discover new ways to produce energy that we can live with.
Rural areas in general will be better off than urban areas. Most are able to grow the necessity that may be in shortest supply, food. Many parts of British Columbia are capable of growing crops and livestock to meet their regional needs. However, in order to feed themselves rural communiites will have to develop strategies to keep food at home and distribute it equitably. The provincial government might impose rationing and food distribution to the hungry cities. There will be temptation by growers to sell to the highest bidder, and much wealth will remain in urban populations. Communities should begin now to assess their food supply. Is it sufficient for the current population? Is their excess for refugees or for trade?
British Columbia is blessed with a relatively large organic farming industry. Approximately 10% of farms in BC have organic certification. Thirty-six percent of BC’s conventional farmers use some organic farming methods, most often for pest control. We can use the knowledge of our farmers to make a transition to sustainable farming. There will be less gas and diesel for farm equipment. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides will first be extremely expensive and eventually even unavailable. Diesel driven irrigation systems will be useless.
Converting from a free market system to regional control of food resources is one of the most important preparations a community can make. The challenges are many. Do we make farmers sell (or barter) to a region, perhaps even take over private farmland in the public interest? Or, can we construct political economies in which farmers voluntarily limit the range of their sales?
As our economies become more localized, members of a community will become increasingly inter-dependent. Secure relationships will be local; distant relationships less secure. Self-reliance will be in everyone’s best interest. Farmers will need the good will of the community. They will be invested in its preservation. This, we hope, will be a rationale that farmers understand and adopt.
The way we shop may change. Rather than 100 trips to the grocery store, a truck delivers orders to 100 homes. We place orders online, possibly even having real time video of the selection in the produce department. In-home sales, like Avon once did, and in-home group sales, like Tupperware parties, may be used for many products.
If relocalization is deep, then communities may establish rules for commerce. They may create financial institutions. Bartering may become a common, taxable method of commerce. Local currencies might be needed both to keep wealth in the community and because the national currency may worthless or too restricted to handle the pace of commerce in a region.
Most of rural BC has water adequate to its needs. Most places have adequate sources of wood. With a bit of reconfiguration, BC sources of hydro power could supply all the needs of British Columbia. Rural areas with sources of hydro power should determine their needs for electricity following the energy descent. Hydro power will be used to heat buildings and run manufacturing, far more than it is now. Making sure this power is available to the region first is another challenge.
Even if deep relocalization occurs, there will be commerce between regions and across the continent. Railways will resume importance and be principle means of transport of goods and people. It is possible that the energy efficiency of trains will mean it makes sense to direct diesel fuels to their operation. Or, our rail system may be electric. Either way, beginning the rebuilding of BC’s rail system should begin while there is the still the energy to do it.
The energy descent will show us what was unsustainable. One of the first examples will be the many homes and condominiums that are second homes. Beautiful rural BC is still in a boom of housing construction. Many, in some cases most of a sub-division, are seasonal or intermittent second homes vacation retreats or investment properties. Their owners travel hundreds of kilometres, often several times a year (even weekly), to them in SUVs and RVs. They can afford to heat 3000 square feet that they only live in four weeks of the year.
These homes will become unsustainable and virtually worthless in early stages of the energy descent. The owners may decide to live in them permanently, in which case they may be sustainable or made sustainable. Owners will demand the government compensate them. The homes will be worth less than their mortgages; a situation like the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Foreclosures and tax default seizures will make the homes public property. What they are made of, high energy intensive commodities such as steel, alloys, wire, concrete, plastics, porcelain, shingles and glass, will be of high value and not importable. They will become a community stock of materials.
We will live in a time when all material resources and energy will become precious. We already see a market in materials like stolen copper. That is a foreshadowing of what will likely happen.
Tourism will be another first casualty of the energy descent. Resort development continues at a furious pace in BC. Golf courses surrounded by occasional homes are growing in number. Nearly every ski resort has made big investments in increased capacity in recent years. There is a billion dollar ski resort begun in Revelstoke, with hundreds of occasional homes and 16,000 rental beds. What do you do with something like that when it is no longer operating? These resorts depend on sales of homes to distant owners and tourist traffic, the first two casualties in the energy descent.
Unsustainable industries will also shut down, adding to the reclamation wealth. Everything to do with the auto industry will suffer. One relatively bright spot in the energy descent is transition to a new auto transport system. On the reduced scale of relocalization, electric cars might be more suitable. Rural areas can produce biodiesel and ethanol from biomass to fuel tractors and personal vehicles. In deep relocalization, this would mean converting gas-driven vehicles or building vehicles, because they won’t be coming from Oshawa or Detroit.
Provincial and national social agencies will have less funding and fewer employees. Communities will have to take up the slack. In order to do so, they should begin now by assessing their social and health needs, infrastructures and professional personnel. Based on those assessments, they should make a plan for social and medical services provision.
In deep relocalization most of the services now provided by provincial governments will be provided by local governments. Systems of local taxation will have to be developed as services provision devolves.
In even the best case scenarios, the institutions of law and order will be scaled down and less connected. Police departments will have smaller budgets, fewer officers and fewer material resources. Provincial and national law enforcement organizations will become decentralized. Police response will be slower. There may be some improvements. Rural areas that have seen their police contingents moved to regional stations may find that a few officers are posted in their community. Cops may be walking or cycling the rural beat. We may see pathetic scenes of cops in small electronic cars trying to give chase to criminals on ATVs or in fast cars run on black market gasoline.
In this relatively rosy scenario, citizens will increase their role in keeping the peace and protecting communities. Civilian organizations, like Neighbourhood Watch, will be on duty 24 hours a day. These groups may be the first response to crime. Block communities will organize communications and security systems. Gated communities may become more popular and be enhanced to have a defensive capability. The jobs done by local disaster relief organizations will be needed and these organizations should be beefed up and supported locally.
The unpleasant reality for rural communities is that their ability to cope with the energy descent will make them targets for urban refugees. The more successful a community is at conserving food, energy and materials, the more attractive a target it will be for desperate people and criminal thugs. In a world of scarcity, it is not difficult to convince groups of people they should force others to share the wealth.
The threat of disorder will mean that sustainable private property is more a target than a refuge. Homes with wells, energy from wood, wind, sun or water and room to grow food will be perfect places . . . for gun runners and heads of militias. All over British Columbia people own land expressly as a refuge for the energy descent. They balance remoteness and security with opportunities to be self-sufficient. They plan for security with their neighbours.
Whatever the severity of the energy descent, much of the scenario painted here will materialize. Many of our recommendations make sense in the name of sustainability and combating global warming. That is why Rural Futures is forming a team to advise and assist BC’s rural communities to begin a transition to a changed economy, to carbon reduction and to greater self-reliance.
The relocalization advocates are right about one thing. The most important factor in weathering a deep energy descent is community cohesiveness and cooperative action. We hope the worst case scenarios forecast by Kuntsler and others will not come true. But if they do, again, working as a community is the best defence.
Email: futures@ruralfutures.ca