cars - what's the big deal?

Hi Piquod,

I'm based in Totnes, where are you?

Peak Oil frightens me deeply, not just for the more obvious losses with its inevitable decline, but to all of that 57% of over 60 year old pensioners, of a population of 8600 here in Totnes, who weekly claim returns on both private and state pension schemes that are index linked somewhat indirectly to the housing market. The housing market, in due course, is paid for by those earning a living making money to pay back debt, and they in turn burn up energy to earn that wage in the form of oil. A decline in oil, a decline in mortgage payments, a decline in mortgage payments a reduction in the volume of money and then, that 57% of pensioners over 60 start turning into an incumbency rather than a support to the community with their previous old money wealth.

What do we have left? About 4000 people. Of those, around half of those are living here in the splendour of a beautiful part of the country out of choices that will begin to decline when energy becomes too expensive to commute. The recent £1.20 a litre of petrol and diesel is crushing a great many of the people that commute from here day to day because there is no alternative. There aren't any jobs worth there salt here, and what there is pays just above minimum wage and is seasonal.

Sadly, the vast majority (I can account for a possible 95+%) still live in the old linear thinking, 'what came before will be the same tomorrow' philosophy, knowing nothing, if anything about, those global decline rates running somewhere between 4.5 and 6.7% (IEA Figures) that I gave you in an earlier thread, and assume, since there is well over a thousand years of history here, in one of the wealthiest areas of the country, so it will remain.

Totnes is the granddaddy of the Transition Town Movement, and the head of this movement is a spirited and inspirational leader called Rob Hopkins. Rob actually met up with Chris Martenson back in late February this year whilst Chris was over here promoting the Crash Course, and they've shared much of their knowledge with each other over time for what I am aware.

This small town has a long way to go to get back to the way it used to be; needs to get back to the self sustaining, self perpetuating town that it was before cheap fossil fuel stripped away its ability to stand upon its own feet. In truth, all of the things that helped it to survive over the preceding thousand years appears to have been dropped through being old fashioned, yet these were the very things that made it viable.

I'm going to leave Rob Hopkins to describe a clever game, explaining what it is exactly that has to be re-created from the ground up in Totnes. Most of what he says, right now, isn't obvious to the 95% I described earlier. They happen to think what they see every day is quite totally normal. In fact, the issues are huge. So big in the face of Peak Oil that they are quite simple 'hidden in plain site' ...

This is transcribed directly from pages 60 and 61 of 'The Transition Handbook', written by Rob Hopkins: -

The Web Of Resilience Exercise

At the beginning of any course I teach, and also at events where I need one practical exercise to communicate the Transition concept, I use the following exercise, an adaptation of one I have used for years at the beginning of permaculture courses. I have done this with very diverse groups of people and I have never had it not work; it is always very powerful.

Divide students into groups of no more than 15 (minimum of 6, ideal around 12). If you have any more than that divide them into smaller groups. Get them to stand in as tight a circle as they can, so their shoulders are touching.

Equipment Needed

One large ball of string and one sticker per person in each group (these are large parcel labels that you buy on a roll), with the names of different elements of a native woodland written as visibly as possible on these in advance. Here in the UK, my list consists of Oak Tree, Soil, Hedgerow, Badger, Worm, Dormouse, Rainfall, Owl, Leaf Litter, Fox, Robin, Wetland, Hazel, Beetle, Fungi, Blackberries, and so on. You can adapt it for species more appropriate to your area.

Directions

The setting for this exercise is a native woodland (ideally do this exercise outdoors, in a woodland, under a large oak tree, but this is not always possible, especially in an evening class - in this case ask people to imagine themselves in a wood).

The stickers are handed round, everyone sticks theirs to the top of their chest. The ball of string is then passed across and around the circle, the only rule being that as you pass the string to someone you must make clear what your relationship is to them.

As the string is passed around you can chip in any extra information you have on woodland ecology that is relevant about relationships between the different elements.

After a while you end up with a complete web of string between everybody. When it is finished, get everyone to pull the web tight, and then to put their hands on top of it and see how strong it is. At this stage people feel quite proud of this web they've created, and are rather proud of themselves.

Once you have the web created you can make the following observations:

"In nature, this web of relationships is inherent in all ecosystems, and it is the diversity of relationships that make these ecosystems work. These webs are very complex and resilient, but they are also very fragile. We intervene in them at our peril, as we can never really know what effects we are having, as we have insufficient understanding of them. While we have just done this exercise about a woodland, we could just as easily do it about a town, with the butcher, the church, the schools, the farmers and so on. Before cheap oil our communities and our economies depended on these networks of relationships and connections. Cheap oil gave us the dubious 'luxury' of thinking we could live without them. People now often live with no idea who lives next-door to them. What life beyond the peak will need, and what permaculture is about, is rebuilding these connections.

"Permaculture is about re-weaving this complex web of beneficial relationships. This game is a useful tool for giving form to what we have thrown away and what cheap oil does to us"

I then walk around the circle and ask them to note how some people are holding more strings than others.

"These are key elements of the ecosystem. When we make interventions in this system we do so at our peril. We could be a farmer who decides to clear the oak trees and drain the wetland. We could be the planners in a town with a strong local economy who decide to permit a large out-of-town supermarket. Either way we often don't see the results of this intervention immediately.

"What happens when we clear the oaks (the person who is the oaks lets go of their strings)? We can see that it doesn't make much obvious difference. So then we rain the wetland (wetland person lets theirs go). Again, it looks a bit worse but not much."

Then, using plausible narrative ("so then the farmer did this, and then that ... "), get people to let go of their strings one after the other; at a certain point it all collapses. The point to make is that you have an idea of knowing when that happens.

"You build the out-of-town supermarket and three years after the high street is deserted. In essence, human beings before cheap oil used good design, and networks of relationships to make things happen. Since cheap oil we have lost all that. We will need to rebuild it."

For added dramatic effect, you can brandish a pair of scissors and cut the strings! As a way of teaching people about permaculture principles and about how cheap oil has transformed our society, this can be a very powerful exercise. 

Paul (Totnes - UK)

 (edit) A friend just called me to say that he just bought fuel for his car at £1.22-9 a litre ...

I disagree with you about American cars and the burbs.  We have created an urban and suburban landscape in and around most cities that cannot exist without cars.  To ramp up mass transit to the level it is in Europe or the UK where masses of people can be moved efficiently and quickly without cars would take many years and probably trillions of $.  Even then, our spread out residential patterns make all forms of transit inefficient.  We don't have the manufacturing capacity to turn out buses and trains on a scale that could successfully adapt to a world without cars any time in the near future.  My guess is Americans will get used to paying really high gas prices first, and then the burbs will decay as people go rural, urban or small town.

Doug

Wow. I just did a quick calculation (exchange rate and liters/gallon) and that translates to about U.S. $7/gallon. I highly doubt the U.S. economy could handle gas prices that high. A lot of my co-workers will use up a gallon, or more, one-way just to get to work. $14 round trip? Not happening.

Yippeeee Doug

I found something I can agree with you on. Detroit is the future.

V

Hi Joe,

I believe the American gallon is slightly different from the English. Where the English gallon equates to 4.54 litre's, the American is closer to 3.8 litre's. My 15 year old diesel VW Golf (Rabbit in the US) makes 50 miles to the Engllish gallon.

If you remember back to July 11th 2008 when a barrel of oil was changing hands for $147 on the open market, fuel prices were so volatile in the UK that I witnessed petrol station's selling fuel for between £1.29 and £1.33 a litre.

In truth, I can't see the UK fairing very well with the expected price of a barrel of oil climbing above $100 by June/July this year and most possibly beyond. Connect that to the collosal amount of unsecured debt with the credit card industry here in the UK and you have a concoction for a steep decline in public mobility and a way of life too many have taken for granted for too long.

For example, Plymouth in the south gave me rise for pause about a month ago with this article in a local paper:-

City Debt Is £42,000 Per Adult

Put plainly, a great many people in Plymouth and most every major city in the UK are now paying off their mortgages and monthly fuel bills with their credit cards!!!

A House Of Cards that is another bubble market expected to pop sometime late this year onward.

I believe one of the benefits of the US system is subsidized fuel? I can't confirm this, but I seem to remember damnthematrix (Mike) pulled up an article a while ago that confirmed that if the US didn't have subsidized fuel from its government, the true estimate would be nearer $10 a gallon. Also as a truth, you're already paying much more for a gallon than you might think in principle, because the military charged 54% of all income tax in 2009, outlining a biting $1.49 trillion to keep the wheels roling across the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cheer Up! It's all going to go crashing down around our ears soon, but we'll all be (mostly) better for the experience ......

... I Hope ...

My Best,

~ VF ~

V, Doug,

yep, I predict that many major US cities are going to be using Detroit as a blueprint over the next 20 years ...

~ VF ~

Thank you for posting those videos, Vanityfox451. That's a really fantastic documentary, with great music to boot.

I have to agree that the vast majority of American cities will be virtually uninhabitable without access to cheap gas. They simply were not designed to be functional without automobiles for personal transportation and trucks that can bring essential goods in from far away.

A grass-roots approach of local farming etc. might work in Detroit, where there's a relatively small population, but I wonder how well that idea will scale up? 

High Paul in Totnes

I'm at the other end of the country from you in N Berwick just East of Edinburgh where we have a nascent transition movement that I'm getting involved in.

One of the most important factors post-peak will be time. There have been a number of debates recently on www.theoildrum.com regarding the relative likelyhood of collapse vs gradual decline (BAU is an option but largely dismissed there as it is here). The time that we have in which to adapt will in my opinion go a long way to determining the path. My OP about cars was really about saying that if we can to a large extent do without them then it tilts the odds in favour of gradual decline rather than collapse. It buys us more time. Especially if activities such as agriculture still have access to sufficient energy. It may even be that agriculture can become more or less self-sustaining with biofuel prodcution on a part of the land used to fuel the rest (note - I'm NOT advocating biofuels for general use which I realise is disasterous!).

Another factor you touch on, also discussed recently on TOD, is the complexity of modern civilisation and how this is susceptible to disruption. My personal opinion is that it is almost impossible to model this, there are just too many variables and too poor an understanding of what is and what is not critical. Again I would suggest that time will be key in whether or not adaption is possible. Imagining current jobs, way of life etc, no longer being possible is calamitous if it happens quickly but maybe manageable as a slow transition. Sort of like the eating an elephant analogy. Not sure what happens to all those old people though (same issue in N Berwick) ;-)

The best reveiws I've ever read about ecological complexity and how to reduce it to more simple terms have been by HT Odum. His concepts of the macroscope, transformity, emergy etc are pretty controversial but they at least attempt to tackle the whole issue rather than draw an artificial boundary around one part of the problem. Worth reading if you've not already done so - some reasonable summaries of his thinking on the net if you Google about a bit. Given what you've posted I suspect you are already aware of his work.

You surprise me a bit when you say you think we will struggle at $100 oil. Here in the UK we are pretty well cushioned against the oil price thanks to the huge amount we pay in tax at the pump (about 70%). So even a 20% rise in the oil price only translates into 6% rise at the pump. The main reason petrol prices have been rising so much recently is even more tax to help pay for Gordon's largesse of the last decade - something we will all be paying for a long time to come (don't get me started!).

rgds

Mark

Doug,

I've just realised a post I thought I'd put up for you, didn't happen. Computer Gremlins!!!

I (supposedly) posted a link to the film The End Of Suburbia, with the news that after 3 years, You Tube have removed it. However, the trailer is newsworthy and compelling enough to this thread, and to me, puts across visually toward many of the differences with the American living arrangement than of the over all more walk-able European variety: -

One of the interviewee's of the film was James Howard Kunstler, so to make up for the loss, here's the man himself, larger than life itself on an episode of TED: -

With no surprise over the last 50 years, there have been large swaths of suburbia built on green and brown belt land across the length and breadth of the UK. No surprises there, considering many countries believe that the UK is the 51st state of America. Therefore, the UK is nowhere near as walk able or sustainable as I would like it to be, with the car acting as a stop-gap and a shrinker of Worlds ...

Put it this way, Totnes is an 18 hour hike both ways so as to have a day trip in the nearest city on foot ... ...

... which is an average for the American living arrangement, give or take a mile or two either way?

City planners are just plain mad!!!

Paul

Hello angle,

You're very welcome! It's a stunning film with excellent music that I've secreted away in amongst a few threads now. Aren't you surprised that it hasn't been released onto mainstream US television yet?

I think it's the end of the film (part 8) that put to bed for me any doubts as to what will happen in the future of Detroit. I think of it like the many camping trips I had as a boy. We'd sleep under leaking canvas, eat half cooked beef burgers and didn't wash for days, in the knowledge that there was a hot bath, good food, a warm bed and a TV to entertain back home.

In other words, right now, that group sat around that camp fire have a choice to stay where they are, or go back to the unsustainable lifestyles they've left behind. Eventually though, the choice will be set in stone for them and they'll simply have to continue on doing what they've learnt to do with what tools they have remaining. Flocks of migration-al Americans making their way through Detroit will be met by people surviving with fertile growing land and hard but fulfilling lives.

There again, as was also said in the film, Detroit looks like hell on paper, and maybe that will dissuade enough people not to go there, thinking it as a no go zone. All the better for those who can watch the city crumble down back to nature in peace?

As for scaling up the size of population, I think it will be decided on the level playing ground of nature: -

The Origin of The Species

'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life' - Charles Darwin

Paul