How to Thrive in the Next Economy

Designing Tomorrow's World Today

John Thackara

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773055
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

John Thackara has spent a lifetime roving the globe in search of design that serves human needs in a sustainable way. He believes that in our eagerness to find technological solutions to the big challenges faced by the human race, we have all too often ignored the astonishing creativity generated when people work together and in harmony with the world around them.

Drawing on an inspiring range of examples, from a temple-led water management system in Bali that dates back hundreds of years to an innovative e-bike collective in Vienna, Thackara shows that below the radar of the mainstream media there are global communities creating a replacement economy from the ground up. Through a series of chapters each devoted to essential human concerns, he demonstrates that it is possible to live a rich and fulfilling life based on stewardship rather than exploitation of the natural environment. Ultimately optimistic, Thackara believes that through a huge variety of quiet, piecemeal changes of thought and action, we are coming to a tipping point: the end of one civilization - but the beginning of another.

1 CHANGING: FROM DO LESS HARM, TO LEAVE THINGS BETTER

At a dusty crossing on the long cross-country road from Kanpur to Lucknow, in Uttar Pradesh, India, we come across a huge video screen on the back of a flat-bed truck. Together with a dozen villagers, four people on bicycles, and a cow, we stare in a daze at the screen. On the left side of the screen the landscape on each side of the River Ganges, in whose vast fertile plain we are standing, is made to look hot, dusty, and wretched. On the right of the screen, a better future is portrayed: busy cities, robot assembly lines, and high-speed trains. This before-and-after sequence is followed by a full-screen video in which computer-generated apartment blocks sprout like so many mushrooms from bright green grass along the banks of the River Ganges. ‘Welcome to Trans-Ganga HighTech City,’ explains the voiceover.

‘May the odds be ever in your favour!’ mutters my young companion. ‘This is pure Hunger Games,’ she explains, and goes on to describe how, in a film that everyone in the world has seen except me, a young woman called Katniss lives in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation. Every year The Capitol, where the rich people live, asserts its power over the poor regions that surround it by staging the Hunger Games in which boys and girls, selected by lottery from the poor areas, compete in a televised battle to the death. ‘May the odds be ever in your favour!’, I learn, is what the creepy ruler guy says when opening the Games – in which all but one competitor will die.

Trans-Ganga HighTech City resembles The Hunger Games all too well – a glossy, gated city surrounded by social hardship and degraded landscapes. Trans-Ganga is one of 100 Indian turn-key cities that developers want to build on green land swept clean of its small farmers and biodiversity. Investors are promised that special laws will be passed to ensure that millions of poor Indians are ‘excluded from the privileges of such great infrastructure’.¹ These physical and social impacts are disturbing enough – but what really cranks up the anxiety level are the bright and perky voices, on screens everywhere, proclaiming these developments to be for the good of all. Whenever a voice is raised in protest at the negative impacts of these plans, the perky heads blame the losers for their own misfortune: Get a job! Try harder! May the odds be ever in your favour!

The words we choose are important as we try to make sense of these new times. One man’s energy descent is another woman’s energy transition. Talk of an impending crisis is scary; realizing that the crisis is already underway, less so. The end of growth sounds grim – but it is not the end of life. The collapse of civilization is a terrifying prospect; the birth of a new one puts things in a different light. ‘What is civilizational collapse, after all,’ quips the Italian physicist Ugo Bardi, a self-styled ‘stoic scientist’, ‘other than a period in which things are changing faster than usual?’²

The apocalyptic view is couched in the language of danger and collapse. Industrial civilization has started to crash, say the ‘doomers’. For them, our best course of action is to head for the hills with a truckload of guns and peanut butter. At the other extreme, optimistic technology buffs are confident that man-made solutions will soon allow us to carry on as usual. And what about the rest of us? Most people I know are anxious about what’s happening around them, but silently so; they think less about the collapse of civilizations than with finding work, or feeding their kids. But they – we – feel less and less secure. It doesn’t help that the media are filled with fatuous advice about what we should do: drive a Tesla? Change a light bulb? Give us a break.

This book is that break. It tells of a third social movement – much bigger than the rifle-packing doomers and the green-tech dreamers – that’s emerging as the global crisis unfolds. This movement is below the radar of mainstream media, but it contains a million active groups – and rising. Quietly, for the most part, communities the world over are growing a replacement economy from the ground up. As you will read in the pages that follow, their number includes energy angels, wind wizards, and watershed managers. There are bioregional planners, ecological historians, and citizen foresters. Alongside dam removers, river restorers, and rain harvesters, there are urban farmers, seed bankers, and master conservers. You’ll meet building dismantlers, office-block refurbishers, and barn raisers. There are natural painters, and green plumbers. There are trailer-park renewers, and land-share brokers. The movement involves computer recyclers, hardware re-mixers, and textile upcyclers. It extends to local currency designers. There are community doctors. And elder carers. And ecological teachers.

For most of the people I write about in this book, the changes they are making are driven by necessity; they are not a lifestyle choice. Few of them are fighting directly for political power, or standing for election. They cluster, instead, under the umbrella of a social and solidarity economy. Different groups and movements have names like Transition Towns, Shareable, Peer to Peer, Degrowth, or Buen Vivir. Their number includes FabLabs, hacker spaces, and the maker movement. Some have taken over neglected buildings – from castles and car parks, to ports, piers, hospitals, and former military sites. There are campaigning organizations, too – for slow food, the rights of nature, and seed saving – not to mention bioregionalism, and commoning. And our number is growing. Up to 12 per cent of economically active citizens in Sweden, Belgium, France, Holland, and Italy work in some kind of social enterprise – and that’s in addition to the vast amounts of unpaid work already being done in the household and caring economy.

Although these projects are wondrously diverse they are all, for the Spanish writer Amador Fernández-Savater, ‘message-bearers of a new story of the world’.³ A green thread runs through this story: a growing recognition that our lives are codependent with the plants, animals, air, water, and soils that surround us. The philosopher Joanna Macy describes the appearance of this new story as the ‘Great Turning’ – a profound shift in our perception of who we are, and a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate from the Earth as a complex of living systems.⁴ From sub-microscopic viruses, to the vast subsoil networks that support trees, this new story goes, the entire Earth is animated by complex interactions between its life forms, rocks, atmosphere, and water. Explained in this way – by science, as much as by philosophy – the Earth no longer looks like a repository of inert resources. On the contrary: healthy soils, living systems, and the ways we can help them regenerate supply the ‘why’ of economic activity that’s missing from the mainstream story. The one kind of growth that makes sense, in this new story, is the regeneration of life on Earth.

The notion of a living economy can sound poetic, but vague. Where, you may ask, is its manifesto? Who is in charge? These are old-fashioned questions. The account given by Macy – of a quietly unfolding transformation – is consistent with the way scientists, too, explain how complex systems change. By their account, a variety of changes, interventions, and disruptions accumulate across time until the system reaches a tipping point: then, at a moment that cannot be predicted, a small release of energy triggers a much larger release, or phase shift, and the system as a whole transforms. Sustainability, in other words, is not something to be engineered, or demanded from politicians; it’s a condition that emerges through incremental as well as abrupt change at many different scales. ‘All the great transformations have been unthinkable until they actually came to pass,’ confirms the French philosopher Edgar Morin. ‘The fact that a belief system is deeply rooted does not mean it cannot change.’⁵

So this is an optimistic book – but not dreamily so. If I’m to convince you that the stories to come are the harbinger of the new economy we so desperately need, I first need to explore the powerful but hidden reasons that a return to normal is just not going to happen.

ENERGY

In 1971 a geologist called Earl Cook evaluated the amount of energy ‘captured from the environment’ in different economic systems.⁶ Cook discovered that a modern city dweller needed about 230,000 kilocalories per day to keep body and soul together. This compared starkly to a hunter-gatherer, ten thousand years earlier, who needed about 5,000 kcal per day to get by. That gap, between simple and complex lives, has widened at an accelerating rate since 1971. Once all the systems, networks, and gadgets of modern life are factored in – the cars, planes, factories, buildings, infrastructure, heating, cooling, lighting, food, water, hospitals, information systems, and their attendant gadgets – well, a New Yorker or Londoner today ‘needs’ about sixty times more energy and resources per person than a hunter-gatherer. To put it another way: American citizens today use more energy and physical resources in a month than our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime.

This upwards trajectory would be alarming if we thought about it clearly – but we don’t. We simply ignore the fact that all these ‘needs’ depend on growing flows of cheap and intense energy. Belief is one thing; basic mathematics, and the laws of physics, suggest otherwise. The exponential growth of anything tangible, or energy consuming, cannot continue indefinitely in a finite universe. As Tom Murphy, an American physics professor, patiently explains, even if the future rate of compound energy growth in our economy declined to a lower level than today, we’d still see an increase by a factor of 10 every 100 years; in 275 years, we’d reach 600 times our current rates of use. Surely, you may counter, economic growth could be decoupled from energy growth and be freed to expand to infinity that way? Well, no. Multiplying money always expands an economy’s physical impacts on the Earth. ‘Energy is the capacity to do work; it’s the lifeblood of activity,’ explains Professor Murphy. ‘Think it through: to keep GDP growing indefinitely on a fixed energy diet would mean that anything requiring energy becomes an ever-smaller part of GDP, until it carries negligible value. But food, heat, and clothing will never be negligible needs. There is plenty of scope for economic activities that use less energy – but that is not the same as reducing energy intensity to zero.’⁷ Indefinite GDP growth is Not Going to Happen.

The world is not in danger of running completely out of energy – in the short or even medium term. Strictly speaking, we don’t face an energy crisis so much as an exergy crisis – that is, a shortage of energy that is so highly concentrated, and easy to obtain, that it can easily be used to drive the economy. At its most dynamic, the thermo-industrial economy grew using oil that, if it did not literally gush out of the ground, was easily extracted using oil-powered machines. Since then, we’ve burned our way through the easy-to-access fuels and extracting energy gets harder and more expensive every year. To make matters worse, the man-made world has become so much more complicated – think of all those computer networks, aviation systems, and fancy hospitals – that it now takes far more energy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• About the author
• Other titles of interest
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1 – CHANGING: From do less harm, to leave things better
• 2 – GROUNDING: From heal the soil, to think like a forest
• 3 – WATERKEEPING: From harvest the rain, to river recovery
• 4 – DWELLING: From depave the city, to pollinator pathways
• 5 – FEEDING: From social farming, to food as a commons
• 6 – CLOTHING: From dirt to shirt, and soil to skin
• 7 – MOVING: From two-wheeled freight, to cloud commuting
• 8 – CARING: From cure to care, from me to we
• 9 – COMMONING: From social money, to the art of hosting
• 10 – KNOWING: From ways of seeing, to ways of acting
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright Page