(Economics with a human face? Sounds good to me, and significantly better than eviction-producing robo-signers! – promoted by eli_beckerman)

Relocalization to the Rescue

By Larry Ely, Rob Crowner, and Steve Randall

“Civilized man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily.  His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent.  He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”  

–  Tom Dale and Vernon Carter, Topsoil and Civilization, 1955.

Our delusional sense of permanent mastership over the environment accelerated dramatically with the creation of the first American oil company, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, in 1854.  Melville had just been on a whaling ship hunting for another kind of oil and writing Moby Dick in 1851 – whale oil and wood having fueled American society until commercial oil extraction began in Titusville, PA.  In 1854, ironically the very year we entered “sub-nature” by extracting subterranean oil, came a warning from another American savant on the folly of the pell-mell rush to industrialization “Ahab style.” Thoreau summarized his manifold pronouncements on the human being’s relationship to nature by saying in Walden, “We can never have enough of nature.”  

Oil was cheap, involving opening a spigot instead of hunting for whales on the high seas. With the car’s advent we’ve been driven increasingly to be profligate oil users – out of touch with our bodies and each other. Cars have that passivity-inducing, separative effect. A ballooning, overweight body on the personal level now mirrors on the societal level the corpulent spread of the built environment (exurban sprawl).

A century after those warnings on sub-nature came the 1956 evidence from Shell Oil geologist Marion Hubbert (interestingly coincident with Dale’s and Carter’s work) that sub-nature’s oil was not infinite, predicting American oil production would peak in 1971, which it did.  (Coal is also sub-nature, as is uranium; all energy must come from non-carbon sunshine – photovoltaics, wind, hydro, geothermal.)  Experts say world oil is peaking now.  Production in 2030 will be half of today’s – so say goodbye to cheap food, cheap drugs, plastic bags – a myriad of products requiring oil to produce.

Two oil centuries bring us to the bracketing 2050 – the usual date for which parties variously state a CO2 decrease necessary to avoid runaway climate change. 2050 needs to be effectively the end of oil, an historic change of great moment. Civilization is in a race against time to replace oil with nature’s solar energy fast enough to avoid chaos.

Enter relocalization to the rescue.  Our predicament stems largely from our alienation from nature and each other, and the spirit of relocalization is to reacquaint ourselves with that contact with the environment and each other that our abstract, complex, globalized technical culture has sundered.  When is the last time you saw somebody change the oil in his car?  We need to get our hands dirty in the soil again.

Relocalization aspires to regain a balance with the natural environment, as counseled by Thoreau, by forming communities where each person is recognized and has a place.  It is this which creates authenticity and allows us to be fully human. Human development has been stunted by the hyper-individualism induced by growth economics, a worldview driving our politics and casting us as manipulated economic units. Relocalization take its cue from the rescuing meta-economics invoked by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973) and by Manfred Max-Neef in From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics (1981), who urge an economics of empathy over ideology.

Relocalization encompasses a bird’s-eye view of efficiency:  living in close proximity to production shortens distances to save carbon and money. Relocalization is: 1) communities returning to local agriculture and commerce in order to attain economic self reliance 2) producing local energy and conserving energy via weatherization and modes of energy efficient transport.  The political will to affect relocalization projects quickly can be most readily mustered at the town level; the inertia is insurmountable at higher levels.  Relocalization’s fruits:  wealth stays in town, democracy and cultural vibrancy are enhanced, happiness is increased.  In short, an economics with a human face.  

Larry Ely, Rob Crowner, and Steve Randall lead the Pioneer Valley Relocalization Project, formed in 2007. PVRP and its parent, the Mass. Coalition for Healthy Communities, have been showcasing the work of Bill McKibben and Richard Heinberg.