Resilience: business as usual is not an option

I’m reviewing Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity without Growth, which says everything I’d like to say but much better. He argues that business as usual is not an option; he talks about peak oil, climate change and the continuing recession and says that prosperity without growth is a very useful trick to have up our sleeve when the economy is failing.

Tim Jackson is an economist, who understands our complex society very well. He’s pretty ruthless in sweeping away ‘Cinderella’ economies in which we all cosily swop skills for goods. He highlights the importance of people’s jobs as a measure that most of us understand as important in seeing ourselves as adding value to our communities and our households. He sees jobs and meaningful employment as key components of prosperity.

But we don’t have to have growth. Businesses today do need to protect jobs, but it’s a unique opportunity to sweep away short term thinking and replace it with considered policy that can deliver lasting prosperity. Tim defines prosperity as: a potential to flourish, within ecological and social limits. He’s seeking security for people’s livelihoods, equity – a fair society, and sustainable levels of resource.

With a sustainable economy such as Tim Jackson proposes, we could have a much better city.

Resilience: farming futures

Like most people, I have to earn my living; so I’m taking a strong interest in the local economy – how will it shape up when the oil runs out?

Farming is one of the most important industries locally, of course, and it’s changing a lot. (This is Tully’s expert area, so excuse my lack of in-depth knowledge.) A hundred years ago Norwich’s livestock and corn markets were the biggest in England. I’ve no idea whether that is true today and I should find out, because our future livelihoods could depend on it.

I did find out that the livestock market is thriving, after a long period of decline. I visited it a couple of weeks ago, where my picture shows some magnificent longhorn cattle. I was impressed – I thought that a cattle market would be hellish, but all the livestock were very placid; no stress to be seen anywhere. Heifers and their calves were always sold together. It was very different from the dreadful scenes of intensive agriculture filmed in Food Inc. I also found out that the market has switched from Fridays to Saturdays fortnightly, to accommodate the increasing numbers of part-time sheep farmers.

And I was inspired by the farming presentations at Greener Fram later the same day, especially Tim Waygood, talking about his Agrarian Renaissance. “We’ve got two futures as farmers,” he said, “global corporates or local SMEs” He told us how the profitability of farming has plummeted since the 1970s, while supermarkets’ profits have soared. Fifty percent of farms locally have gone out of business in the last fifteen years. Tim’s farm is important for the local community, providing jobs (including social enterprise for people with learning difficulties), links to the schools and a rural enterprise hub in the village. He’s not just feeding the chattering classes – he told me that people of all social groups come in from nearby Stevenage to buy their food direct from the farm. The bottom line? It’s profitable. Turnover on a mixed farm like Tim’s is £150K, compared with commodity crops such as rapeseed or wheat on the same acreage - £40K.

A completely different farming story caught my attention recently. Birds Eye has had a pea-growing contract with a local consortium of farmers for more than sixty years, but at very short notice cancelled the contract – just as the farmers were preparing to sow the crop. They’ve had to tear up their business plans and start again. Impressively, they’ve turned to growing hemp. I thought this produced some rustic crunchy-textured fabric with all the appeal of old sacks. Not a bit of it. It’s very high-tech and is being used in leading edge applications such as high-tensile brakes for Dockland Light Railway and bullet-proof materials far cheaper and better than anything made with synthetic materials.

So, is this where our local economy should be going? Not looking back; looking forward? I think so. Definitely not going for relentless growth at any cost. I’ll pick up on that theme of prosperity without growth in my final piece.

Resilience: what can we learn from Norwich's past?

We're facing tough times here in Norwich, but the city has survived huge crises before. I'm exploring the lessons we can learn from turbulent times in Norwich’s past; and I hope to draw also on Norwich’s potential for a resilient future.

I’ll start with a remarkable study that I discovered recently, while working in the Resilience Plan team. It’s Norwich: A Social Study by C B Hawkins. The book jacket says: “Norwich, with its 125,000 inhabitants, presents on a small scale all the features of a metropolitan city. Except London and Bristol, no other English city has been for so long an important manufacturing and commercial centre….the book is the outcome of close personal investigations on the spot by an experienced student of social conditions, and presents a lucid study of an exceptionally interesting provincial city.” What’s remarkable about this study is that it was written exactly a hundred years ago, in 1910. There are so many parallels with the crises that we are facing today.

Now, our Transition colleagues in Totnes (after their recent training session with Norfolk County Council) don’t seem to have picked up on the fact that Norwich is indeed ‘an exceptionally interesting provincial city’. It’s never been a rural backwater, in spite of one of my favourite jokes: “East Anglia, cut off on three sides by the sea… and on the fourth by British Rail”. It was interesting enough for the Normans to choose it for a very strong statement of their control, with their new cathedral, the castle and a new location for the ancient market.

And, as everyone knows, the city became very rich indeed with the wool trade – just count the number of medieval churches as an indication of its wealth. Global trading is something that Norwich has done very well for at least the last four hundred years. But what attracted the skilled silk weavers who gave it an extra importance? Why did they come here rather than anywhere else? Skilled migrant workers are nothing new for Norwich; in the time of the first Elizabeth an astonishing one third of the population were migrant workers. Norwich grew very prosperous.

….And then, an economic crisis very similar to the current threat of peak oil: the lucrative textile industry deserted Norwich in favour of much cheaper power in the industrial north of England.

If you go to the beautiful Suffolk towns of Lavenham and Long Melford, you’ll see what happened next to most of the East Anglian wool towns. They went bust. That’s why they are preserved just the way they were in the eighteenth century.

But Norwich is made of sterner stuff. It didn’t go bust. It found new industry, in spite of extreme economic pressure, compounded by the impact of the agricultural industrial revolution, forcing huge numbers of unskilled labourers to abandon the countryside for the city.

The Hawkins study shows that, in spite of a lot of poverty, Norwich was able to survive because it created new industry that gave people jobs; there was also a very strong fabric of community. A hundred years on, what are the clues about resilience and what are the job prospects for Norwich’s citizens? I’ll pick up on that theme tomorrow.

Biosphere in transition. 4. Waste

If you read the footnote on Sunday, you will have seen that I replaced the T in the original with W. T stands for technology and W for waste. I think technology is misleading here, because it is not about how much technology you can throw at your own life and still enjoy it (like in the Charlie Chaplin film modern times), but about how to minimize the waste per unit of quality of life, which more likely than not will be a social efficiency rather than a technological one. To elaborate on the example I gave on Sunday, although I’m sure health care in Norwich could be made to produce the same benefits with less waste, there must be a limit to that that would still produce much more waste per capita for the kind of service we get, than is produced by a clinic in, say, a remote village in Vietnam. And that if you agree with me that we want to keep the former, we’d better start that one child campaign now.

At the same time, just as we say that everybody should become energy literate, we also need to become waste literate. That is, that in every decision we make, we automatically include an assessment of how much quality of life it gives us per amount of waste it produces. This doesn’t need to be very fancy, just the kind of background that at the moment allows almost every adult to make an automatic assessment of whether they can afford to buy something they would like to have in monetary terms. Like Tom Harper I was very encouraged by the example he gave that this is already happening.

Biosphere in transition. 3. Affluence

I would define affluence as the material part of quality of life. As I said yesterday, if the whole world lived like we in the UK do, we would need 3.2 planets. And while yesterday I talked about living our present lifestyle with 2 billion people on our one planet, today I would like to talk about living on less affluence. Our personal impact can be divided into four roughly equal parts: food, stuff, direct energy and transport. For each category I would like to give a rough idea of what it would take to reduce one’s impact to half the national average. While this isn’t quite enough with the current population, it’s what we agreed to do in TN2 in one year starting last July, so I think this is a good basis for getting started. For food, one way of achieving this is to eat only organic, local and seasonal food. This has now become very straightforward to do, by signing up for the TN community supported agriculture. Another way is to halve the amount of food you throw away and reduce animal based food by 2/3. For stuff (a.k.a. embodied energy) I really can’t be of much help, other than to note that buying as much as half the national average must be really exhausting. For direct energy, the easiest first step is to sign up for green electricity, and to lower the thermostat to 17 °C (this was the UK average in the 1970s (or maybe it was the 60s)). I’m not sure whether this would be enough. If you want to do more switch to heating with wood. For transport the solution is to stop flying and replace half of your driving by cycling or walking, or stop flying and replace 2/3 of your driving by train travel. Sounds doable? Join TN2.

* The brown dot in the lower right sustainable high quality blue square is Cuba.

Biosphere in transition. 2. Population

A voluntary one-child policy for the UK?

By dividing the ecological footprint by the biocapacity, one can calculate that in 2005 the UK was 3.2 times overpopulated (Ewing et al. 2008; the ecological footprint is one way of determining the product PAW, and the biocapacity is the carrying capacity calculated in the same units as the ecological footprint). As Charlotte hinted at on 12 November 2009 if we start accepting that living a high impact life is morally unacceptable, maybe it’s also time to start accepting that having more than one child is no longer morally acceptable. If this sounds unattractive, I would point out that as far as I can see there are only two alternatives: the example of China, where the state has enforced a one child policy, or to wait until the carrying capacity drops far enough that mortality will go up. In the book Collapse Jared Diamond gives numerous examples of past societies outstripping their local carrying capacity, and he suggests that the majority of citizens of these collapsing societies would have moved away, something that won't be possible if we continue outstripping our global carrying capacity, so it might be a good idea to not let it get that far.

Biosphere in transition. 1. Carrying capacity

I thought it might be useful to place the transition we’re in into the wider context of life on planet Earth. Over the next four days I would like to talk about the negative impact that we as a species have on the biosphere, as seen by e.g. global warming, loss of soils, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. I will use the formula I=C-PAW* to look at four main factors that influence our impact (I): carrying capacity, population, affluence, and waste. The first one sets the limits, and we’re in transition because of a recognition that the product of the latter three factors is too high. None of these factors by itself is “bad”. It’s natural to have children, to prefer a comfortable over a degrading life, and to produce entropy or waste. The whole of the problem is that the biosphere has a limited capacity to absorb this impact, which in ecology is called the carrying capacity. One of the important things to realise is that if the product PAW exceeds carrying capacity, carrying capacity decreases. That is, impact that isn’t absorbed by the biosphere stays around to do damage. Hence the negative impacts.

Today I will look at carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the number of organisms that can survive on a given area. Carrying capacity is not absolutely fixed. For instance, if food is grown in a polyculture rather than a monoculture, yields go up and thus the carrying capacity increases. For a given population size and technological efficiency, increasing carrying capacity allows for more affluence. However, carrying capacity is not a panacea. For instance, health care consumes resources without producing food, so the carrying capacity with health care is lower (fewer people with a life expectancy of 80) than without (more people with a life expectancy of, say, 50). I find this a useful yardstick on which to base policies for technology. If it gives us more affluence with the same amount of waste it is good, and if its negative impacts give us a bigger decrease in long-term carrying capacity than any short-term increase in affluence then it is a bad idea, and one has a rational basis for calculating the cost of the negative impacts that can be balanced by a pollution added tax that functions to limit the implementation of this technology until it fits within the carrying capacity.

* I arrived at this formula by combining the formula I=PAT from Ehrlich & Ehrlich (1990) with the concept of the ecological footprint (e.g. Ewing et al. 2008).