BIKE: Visualize industrial collapse

[Roger Baker]

The Age of Entropy is here. We should all now be learning how to live
without oil

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 24, 2004

The Guardian

'Never again," the Texas oil baron and corporate raider T Boone
Pickens announced this month, "will we pump more than 82m barrels."
As we are pumping 82m barrels of oil a day at the moment, what Pickens
is saying is that global production has peaked. If he is right, then
the oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who announced to general ridicule
last year that he was "99% confident" it would happen in 2004, has
been vindicated. Rather more importantly, industrial civilisation is
over.

Not immediately, of course. But unless another source of energy, just
as cheap, with just as high a ratio of "energy return on energy
invested" (Eroei) is discovered or developed, there will be a gradual
decline in our ability to generate the growth required to keep the
debt-based financial system from collapsing.

A surplus of available energy is a remarkable historical and biological 
anomaly. A supply of oil that exceeds demand has permitted us to do 
what all
species strive to do - expand the ecological space we occupy - but
without encountering direct competition for the limiting resource.

The surplus has led us to believe in the possibility of universal
peace and universal comfort, for a global population of 6 billion, or
9 or 10. If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the results of an
energy surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be expected to
start fighting once again like cats in a sack. In the presence of
entropy, virtue might be impossible.

The only question worth asking is what we intend to do about it. There
might be a miracle cure. Photosynthetic energy, supercritical
geothermal fluid drilling, cold fusion, hydrocatalytic hydrogen energy
and various other hopeful monsters could each provide us with almost
unlimited cheap energy.

But we shouldn't count on it. The technical, or even theoretical,
barriers might prove insuperable. There are plenty of existing
alternatives to oil, but none of them is cheap, and none offers a
comparable Eroei.

If it is true that the Age of Growth is over, and the Age of Entropy
has begun, and if we are to retain any hope of a reasonable quality of
life without destroying other people's, then our infrastructure, our
settlements, our industries and our lives require total reconstruction.

Given that our governments balk even at raising fuel taxes, it is
rational to seek to pursue our own solutions: to redevelop economic
systems which do not depend on fossil fuels.

For several years, I've been involved in one of these. Now that it has
passed its 10th birthday, I think it is fair to say that it works.

Tinkers' Bubble is 40 acres of woodland, orchards and pasture in south
Somerset. It was bought by a group of environmentalists in 1994, and a
dozen people moved in, applied for shares and built themselves
temporary houses.

They imposed a strict set of rules on themselves, which included a ban
on the use of internal combustion engines on the land. They made a
partial exception for transport: the 12 residents share two cars.

Otherwise, the only fossil fuel they consume is the paraffin they put
in their lamps. They set up a small windmill and some solar panels,
built compost toilets, and bought a wood-powered steam engine for
milling timber, some very small cows and a very large horse.

Almost everyone predicted disaster. The Independent even claimed that
the project had collapsed, after one of its reporters turned up on
market day and found the houses empty. There's no question that it was
hard.

The first winter was spent wading around in two feet of mud. Some of
the locals, mistaking the settlers for new age travellers, went
berserk. There was plenty of internal strife as well. The work is tough.

They fell trees with handsaws, heat their homes with wood, cut the hay
with scythes and milk the cows, weed the fields and harvest the crops
by hand.

But they have come through. They have made friends with the locals,
who are coming to see the project as an asset: the land is biodiverse,
still has standing orchards, and is open to the public.

Their stall has won first prize in the local farmers' market. They
have learned, often painfully, to live together. Because it doesn't
depend on heavy machinery, this farm, unlike most, isn't in hock to
the bank.

One hundred and fifty years after he published Walden, Henry David
Thoreau is alive and well in Somerset.

Needless to say, an army of bureaucrats has been deployed to murder
him. Peasant farming, the settlers have found, is effectively illegal
in the UK.

The first hazard is the planning system. The model is viable only if
you build your own home from your own materials on your own land: you
can't live like this and support a mortgage. So the settlers imposed
more rules on themselves: their houses, built of timber, straw bales,
wattle and daub and thatch, would have the minimum visual and
environmental impact.

But the planning system makes no provision for this. It is unable to
distinguish between an eight-bedroom blot on the landscape and a home
which can be seen only when you blunder into it.

The residents applied for planning permission and were refused. They
appealed and won, but then the government overturned the decision.
They took it to the high court and the appeal court and tried to take
it to the Lords, in every case without success.

But when they reapplied, the council, which had woken up to the fact
that homeless people were housing themselves without costing the
taxpayer a penny, changed its mind and let them live there.

Then the environmental health inspectors struck. There are two sets of
regulations in the UK. There are those which the big corporations
campaign against; and those which they tolerate and even encourage,
because they can afford them while their smaller competitors cannot.

This is why it is legal to stuff our farm animals with antibiotics,
our vegetables with pesticides, our processed food with additives and
our water tables with nitrates, but more or less illegal to use any
process which does not involve stainless steel, refrigeration and
fluorescent lighting.

The clampdown on small food businesses, on the grounds that their
produce might contain bacteria, has been accompanied by a massive rise
in food poisoning cases since the 1970s: large-scale production and
long-distance transport provide far greater opportunities for
infection. Tinkers' Bubble, which has never poisoned anyone, is now
forbidden to sell any kind of processed food or drink: its cheese,
bacon, juice and cider have been banned.

But the settlers have learned to live with these constraints, just as
they have learned to live with all the others.

They haven't yet solved all their problems, but they have shown that a
life which requires scarcely any fossil fuel consumption is still
possible. It wouldn't work for everyone, of course, but it works.

And one day, unless we demonstrate some willingness to respond to the
impending crisis, those who live this way could discover that -
despite the obvious privations - their lives are more comfortable than
ours.