These new value systems do not mean we will adapt to less, but rather we will return to core essentials, empowering individuals and local communities.
The concept of
energy descent usually refers to the progressive reduction of fossil fuel
energy and material consumption as society retracts from oil and gas,
particularly as supply approaches its limits or ‘peak oil’. Cheap oil and easy
drilling have become a thing of the past; today the technical difficulties of
offshore sea-drilling and the devastating ecocide produced by the fracking
industry, do not give humanity much choice but to consider the reduction in
dependence on fossil fuels as a necessary adaptation for the future.
If you added up
all the other sources of energy available today including solar, wind,
geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal and kinetic, plus other fringe technologies,
they would not amount to 20% of the energy requirements to run the world. I am
excluding atomic energy as an alternative solution to this energy conundrum
altogether, because of its incredible toll on the environment and toxic track
record. Concurrently our oil and gas prices will continue to rise because of
high demand as less production pushes the entire global economy to gradual
adjustment.
Dependency on cheap energy
In the west we
take forgranted that this dependence will continue to provide our local needs
forever. Agribusiness for example depends on fossil fuels for all of its
operations; consider that food distribution is dominated by giant
transcontinental cartels that fuel commercial trading with petroleum. If oil
stopped pumping tomorrow the paved highways, container routes, air couriers, freight
trains and parking malls would stop distributing goods.
On the other
hand fossil fuel has motored industrialism; this resource has been responsible
for the explosion of technology, population and all features of modern
societies. The energy of fossil fuel put to work and raised the capacity of
humanity past the industrial revolution into the information age, introducing
us to the convenient carousel of gadgets and machines of modernity.
Petroleum
products and derivatives invented the modern market values that have created
unprecedented wealth in the general population but also disproportionate wealth
for energy corporations that self-service their own markets.
These monopolies
are the big bosses of business that rule the world. Most modern economies and
nations depend on this oil-based geopolitical asset to keep on functioning. The
spread of the fossil fuel grid has made us mono-dependent, clumsy and huge,
unable to maneuver past ‘peak oil’ as we slam into ‘peak food’.
If we had the
technology ready to provide the world with all its energetic needs - perhaps if
we had cold fission all figured out and ready to go - we would still truncate our
time available and need at least ten years to reconfigure our standing power
grids and switch boards.
With the
development of agriculture, regional comparative advantages made some states
and communities more dominant than others. These dominant states imposed
economic grids on the rest of society, making way for the dominance of robber
barons and trade agreements. With its parameters of growth at all costs, men of
capital in dark suits commandeered the advantages of the topdown modern
corporate state take over, relentlessly depleting planetary resources with
mono-crop farming and GMO’s.
These forces
destroy biodiversity, denature soil and erode land and sea. The systematic
elimination of diversity and variety will sterilize and wipe out pest-resistant
poly-cultures of perennial bio systems, regional crops and heirlooms, leaving
us with irreparable collateral damage to survival value.
Unaware of this
cost, the structural power grabs in Big Agro stand to lose great economic
wealth in readjustment. Humanity’s energy consumption reality check is here and
can’t be postponed.
Returning to the essentials
The assumption
that fossil fuels will continue to provide the increasing demand for energy is
falsely based on dwindling resources and declining availability of petroleum.
The consumption of more and more of this same energy will inevitably collapse
the monolithic oil-based energetic grid structure of western industrialism.
This reality should be our calling card for radical change of consumer ways.
The ascending
use of fossil-fuel-derived energy for everything will transition to
oil-independence as we move towards much more diverse use of energy resources.
This new economic model includes innovation and synergistic diversity centered
around efficiently designed, independent and abundant systems.
These systems
and innovations will reduce to having almost no imprint on the environment and
in some cases retroactively give back wealth to its systems; improving on the
value of available resources. Our future assets are pristine forest, clean
water, healthy oceans, pure air, bio-dynamic rich soils, diverse flora and
fauna.
To this new set
of stock options and commodities, we can add community relationships,
scientific know-how, information technology, family values, art and bio-rich
cultural enterprises. The preservation of wild systems of nature in ecological
flux will prevail over reckless human intervention.
These new
value systems do not mean we will adapt to less, but rather we will return to
core essentials, empowering individuals and local communities, designing new
efficient resources that are dynamic, rebuilding perennial systems that are
high yield low maintenance, profiting from our recycled waste products, and
redefining consumerism; transforming the worlds’ output of fabricated obsolete
clutter into a renaissance of sustainable communities with locally generated
goods and services.
This new gamut
of design services and products will have regional scales plugged into a world
wide web of information solutions. The resulting growth will diversify and
empower humanity bringing unsought abundance and co-creation with planet Earth.
The senseless
consumption of useless, mindless and pointless stuff is the sociopathology that
will be left behind in this energy descent.
Designing comparative advantage
The age of
energy descent does not have to be a scary thing. Rather it’s our greatest
opportunity to mature and resolve our primary issues. The new paradigm will
empower the local scale of governance, with all the technological advantages
readily available to every individual, in a very open system of human empowerment
and voluntary exchange with an explosion of innovation, peer-to-peer
transactions, local time shares, financial cooperatives, cryptic currencies and
community swapping.
This empowerment
will be the new fuel that will inspire diversity and abundance. This kind of
empowerment will deploy multiple regional resources and centres; in this new
paradigm, regional diversity is about designing comparative advantages for
local consumption with shorter perimeters, that do not involve
trans-continental shipping, where the food to the plate process is carried out
within a small radius and relies on less fuel. Shipping food across the world’s
oceans is inefficient, expensive, fuel dependent and comes with huge
externalities. Specialization of single advantages can put a system under a
lot of stress and frailty. Unlike global food distribution-dependence on
hydrocarbon fuels, self-reliant systems are intrinsically robust to global disturbances.
If the container ships and trucks of this world, loaded with food and
comestibles, suddenly stopped their freights we could approach a peak
population horizon that will not be pretty.
The owners of
factories and assembly lines full of labour specialists trade among themselves;
they parcel up the world and keep us in domination. These giant economic
consortiums control single resources and impose economic models; they sold us
the idea that the supply of oil would be multigenerational. The truth is we
have not only become mono-dependent contaminating the environment, but we have
also cheated and limited future generations of this non-renewable energetic
resource and the planet’s ability to heal.
We have the
opportunity to change this oil dependence and avoid peak food and peak
population. Some nations have begun to do it, in the realm of regional needs,
with the aid of the information age with new technologies and energy
alternatives.
Community talent
and skill swapping will supply the regional niches with peer-to-peer trading.
These new economic shares will dominate the rare product panoply of alternative
markets, measured from the point of view of an informed consumer who makes
ethical decisions for the earth and their community. The exchange of goods and
services will be dominated by honest needs that endure and are intrinsically
essential, practical and good for the environment.
The kind of
trade we will have in this energy descent will be characterized by unique,
personalized, built to last, robust enduring products designed with care and
sensibility.
Such systems of
low maintenance/high yield are possible and are inherited from natural systems
and perennials already in production. Permaculture and other natural design
initiatives are carrying out these principles blossoming everywhere.
The west has
been co-opted into believing in a world of scarcity, enclosed in a field of
limitation, in a universe of diminishing resources with diminishing returns.
This could not be further from the truth.
Just look at the
unprecedented wealth of the information age. This giant resource and playground
for ingenuity will continue to grow by leaps and bounds. This display of
creativity and invention will ignite and motor society into a golden era of knowledge
and plenty. Necessity will once again prompt society to action, with our needs
as our key to understanding, only this time we have the magnificent tool of
information left behind by our petroleum age. Unlike the petrodollars that ran
the engine of over-industrialism, the new currencies of the energy descent will
thrive within resource economies and permaculture design.
It is a
revolution of inputs where we will increasingly leave to the earth the
perennial role of providing us with its high yields. These new currencies
are already revolutionizing the flourishing goods and services of community
exchange. In communities of surplus and self-reliance, the exchange value of
goods and services becomes a secondary by product. In a market of abundance and
surplus, wealth is not based on middle men and the accumulation of treasury
notes and money but rather in the act of giving and sharing all goods in
surplus.
Because society
monetizes everything today, it is hard to see a different relationship; because
of this skewed value system we equate money with happiness, money with wealth.
This distortion extends to having expensive cooling, warehouses and
refrigeration, when we find value in hoarding perishable goods: when we give
value to real estate and paved highways instead of nutrient rich top soil; pollute
a pristine river in search of gold; give value to manufacturing sweat shops
instead of pure clean air; to Big Pharma and allopathic medicine instead of nutrition
and holistic living; our sprawling cities and senseless consumption habits over
the undisturbed jungles and forests of this world - when we value celebrities
and mass media instead of family and community values.
New value system
We have become
blinded to the real wealth of our existence. In this new value system, the
new petroleum will be the top soil as people and communities restore and find
pride in their new black nutrient richness. The new gold will become the
reservoirs and restoration of all the pristine waters and oceans; the new real
estate will become organic perennial food systems and markets along with
alternative energies.
In this new
value system big bank accounts will disappear and instead we will bank on
forest gardening, edible landscapes, urban permaculture and family businesses.
The adolescent mass culture mentality of the twentieth and twenty-first
century with its “only me counts generations” will have to evolve and be
replaced by an empathic social model.
In this energy
descent we must come together on voluntary grounds of cooperation. To solve
this shift in energy consumption, I am not advocating the return of the rugged
agrarian individualism that characterized much of the pre-industrial era, but
rather a coming together of interdependent town and country, micro regions,
provincial wisdom and self-reliant city states, all communicating with
information technologies. And I don’t suggest a scenario of scarcity either
where you don’t have access to essential needs, but on the contrary I would
like to invite you to the age of abundance and surplus beyond anything we have
seen in the modern era. As society matures and adapts its needs, we will come
together in a common mission to build the perennial and permacultural elements
of design needed for this transition.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Cuellar Brown is a New York City media artist and essayist who has written on new media, social theory and metaphysics. His essays have been posted online by Opendemocracy, The Global Dispatches, The Pelican Web, Kosmos Journal, and STARDRIVE.
In 2013 his essay “Intermedial Being” was published by A Journal of Performance and Art PAJ #106 MIT Press Journals. In 2015 Mr. Brown was nominated for the TWOTY awards out of the Netherlands for his essay “Blueprint for Change”. He has been a regular columnist for Second Sight Magazine and Fullinsight.
His book, In Search of Singularity: Reflections and Chronicles from the End of Time, published 29 January 2017, is a series of reflections on the current cultural evolution from competition to cooperation, from patriarchy to reciprocity between humanity and the human habitat.
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