[p2p-research] interview on cuba's agricultural transformation (new localism)

[Kevin Carson]

On 12/5/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

>  If there is one thing this shows from Cuba's experience (even as they warn
> it is a misintepretation :-), it is that even if "Peak Oil" was true, a
> nation can deal with it very straighforwardly (with a rough transition of a
> couple years, and some suffering, admittedly, but overall, coming out from
> that transition in a happier place). So, even in this "worst case", Peak Oil
> was not a problem of the magnitude that many say it is. To be clear, even in
> the worst case of changing from an economy based on oil to an economy  based
> on something else in a matter of a couple years is an issue, and a big issue
> with widespread implications, but it is not an "end of civilization" issue.
> Of course, they do raise the issue that Cuba had stronger local communities.
> Still, one might hope the USA would respond to that with its own strengths
> and weaknesses.

Totally agree.  As good a story as Kunstler's World Made By Hand is, I
think the scenario lacks all credibility (I'm cc'ing him, BTW).

People like Kunstler vastly underestimate just how resilient economies
really are.  The "low-hanging fruit" that could be seized if necessity
were dire enough, in a very compressed time frame, probably
constitutes close to half of total U.S. energy consumption.

And the thing is, doing the stuff that's obvious and feasible at first
frees up enough slack to buy time for doing the stuff that takes a bit
longer, and so on.  I think markets will be pretty efficient, as
energy prices skyrocket, at diverting expensive fuel to the most
essential value-added operations--mainly because anybody who can by
any means squeak by without the energy won't be able to afford it.

At the most basic and necessary level, if diesel fuel rose to $15/gal
and the produce trucks were abandoned on the shoulder, we'd see a
local agricultural conversion at least as rapid and dramatic as
Cuba's.  As the supermarket shelves emptied out and people got sick of
the rationed USDA surplus commodities brought in by the Guard, produce
would be moving as fast as market gardeners could put it on the tables
at the farmer's market, and production would be expanded as fast as
they could break new ground.  Ditto  for digging "victory gardens" on
every available patch of land in the 'burbs.

Just switching to telecommuting by most cubicle workers, the
replacement of most business air travel by teleconferencing, etc.,
would eliminate a huge amount of energy consumption.

Re suburban monoculture, food is just one step.  Throw in what's
already feasible in retrofitting the 'burbs as mixed use economies,
like kitchen microbakeries, home-based daycare, home beauty salons,
repairing defunct neighborhood appliances in home workshops,
unemployed plumbers and electricians working out of the neighborhood
with parts from the hardware store and without the overhead of a
plumbing company with commercial rent, etc., and you've gone a long
way toward ending the suburban monoculture pattern that consumes so
much energy.

There'd also be pretty rapid implementation of such low-hanging fruit
as cogeneration of power from industrial waste heat in the first few
years.

With industrial supply chains relocalized as rapidly as feasible for
as many products as possible, the trucking and airline industries
virtually shut down, and essential long-distance traffic routed to the
railroads (and a hundred or two hundred billion $$ to eliminate the
worst bottlenecks and radically expand the capacity of the system),
and I expect we'd see a radically different industrial system in a few
years.

The impetus to networked micromanufacturing operations like
100kGarages, in particular, would result in an exponential growth of
capacity over several years' time.  Neighborhood, backyard and garage
workshops with cheap  CNC tools would be busily ignoring corporate
patents and producing spare parts on an emergency basis as GE's and
Whirlpool's supply and distribution chains dried up, and would
probably switch to making their own homebrew ultra-high efficiency
appliance designs for a tiny fraction of the price of the old
store-bought stuff from Sears and Wal-Mart.

Heating oil price spikes and shortages, with some middle class
families paying $1000/month to run the furnace in winter, would go a
long way toward lubricating things enough to remove the inertia that
currently stands in the way of conventional contractors adopting new
methods like passive solar heating and cooling.

And I just can't imagine a society totally without electrical power,
even with the combination of Peak Oil prices and nuclear terrorism
that Kunstler posited.  Maybe if you threw in a pandemic with medieval
Black Plague lethality and a supervolcano followed by a year-long hard
freeze, and maybe a monster solar flare frying every transformer in
the world, on top of everything else.  But nothing short of that.  All
the prerequisite components are out there, scalable and replicable,
endlessly scattered about at the microlevel, that you can't put the
genie back in the bottle with anything short of the seven plauges of
Egypt and seven seals of the apocalypse, all rolled into one.

As fuel prices rise and the electrical grid enters a period of
increasingly frequent rolling brownouts and worse, it's hard NOT to
imagine a lot of micromanufacturing entrepreneurs being smart enough
to hit on the market popularity of (say) a cheap and durable handcrank
generator with built in AC inverter and storage battery, maybe with a
battery charger built in.  As the energy crisis worsens, I'd expect
them to be churning them out like sausages with a customer waiting
list even so.  So that means, at least, millions of people with
ongoing access to laptops, radios, etc.

Most of this kind of stuff would be done pretty much automatically, as
a result of market incentives from expensive energy, and from the
necessary ingenuity of unemployed people trying to think of ways to
keep themselves fed from their skills.

Part of the problem is Kunstler's such a technophobe he just has no
idea what possible solutions actually exist.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html