Dreaming Away

Firstly thanks to oldnick, a commenter at the Guardian website, for this lovely definition.

“CACC – catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has a nice ring to it, though some will just say it’s a pile of shit. I don’t say “global warming” because I don’t think it’s broad enough. I will now start using CACC, as in “to CACC oneself” when faced with the gloomy state of the environment. Oh, and of course with CACC, any deniers could be referred to as “Pooh-pooers”"

George Monbiot had a typically hard headed comment on magical thinking in the Guardian yesterday, where he looks at vertical gardens, which according to their promoters, can feed city dwellers without pesticides, herbicides, oil based fertilizers, and reduce the energy needed for intensive farming and transport. George is not kind to this basically silly idea, and then goes on to discuss our habit of allowing our wishes to overrule our rational thinking, and laments that this fault is common on both sides of the climate debate.

The truth, as countless permaculture plots, including ours, have shown is that you can grow most of a household’s vegetables without artificial fertilisers and pesticides and with very little energy use. It’s surprisingly effective, and doesn’t require nearly as much work as you would expect, but it does need reasonably constant attention and its complexity means it doesn’t scale up well. The big organic farmers use almost as much energy as their conventional competitors, so I suspect (for this and other reasons) that sustainable agriculture is going to stay on a smaller scale. Growing some of your own vegies and keeping a few chooks is enjoyable and rewarding for those with a bit of land and an hour or so to spare during daylight hours, but its not going to catch on in our time and space poor city lives.

Our industry is built on specialisation and scale, and it has reached the limits where our major companies are as powerful as governments, and totally focused on the bottom line. This edifice is built on cheap energy and disregard for our natural ecosystems. When you buy in your fertilizer in bulk you want consistency and a low price, which means an oil based synthetic from a distant factory is preferred to a more sporadic and variable supply of animal manure from next door, even though the latter is cheaper and much better for the long term health of the soil. Scale, cheap energy, the ability to ignore environmental damage, and the profit motive causes the first to be preferred to the second.

Our cities are built on the same principles, we have needed a concentration of people in the one place to operate many of last century’s technologies, and they needed to be physically present at their workplace. Although this is often no longer true, our administrative methods still encourage the huge waste of energy and the boring time-wasting that is modern commuting. One of the less obvious benefits of Labor’s fast broadband rollout is that it could start to break this down by making simple forms of telepresence cheap and ubiquitous. Reducing commuting is only going to happen in one of two ways, either by crowding people closer together, which will increase the social pressures we are already seeing, or by spreading out into smaller communities and using telecommunications effectively to bridge the gap.

Our infrastructure has also reached a scale where it is quite fragile. It seems every time there is a little fog in the Sydney area, chaos descends on airline flights all over the east coast, and any road accident on a major freeway does the same for the roads. The costs to industry are starting to get quite serious, and the same sort of thing has happened with electricity supplies, both here and overseas, even before the stresses of environmental legislation are layered on. The trend will continue until we spend much more on infrastructure (more magical thinking), or start to address the root cause: too many people too close together.

Quite separately most working people complain that they don’t have enough time at home with the family, especially during daylight hours, and I have certainly found that the sense of community here in our little valley is dramatically more satisfying than that in the city. So there are major advantages to a bit of localisation, both in energy and social terms. It will however be swamped if our population continues to grow at third world levels, and so will our infrastructure. So its welcome that population is at last being discussed, even if the debate at the warm and fuzzy stage and is mainly framed in terms of immigration. We clearly see that the extra numbers of people in our cities are causing problems, while all of government’s and industry’s goals encourage continued growth. Hopefully this debate will continue after the election, and population planning is incorporated into government decisions, and maybe even the removal of perverse incentives such as the baby bonus. I’m not holding my breath.

So engaging in a bit of near magical thinking of my own, I can see that given a stable population, fast broadband could allow many workers to work remotely, which in turn would slow or break the ever increasing transport nightmare as well as boosting our communities. Again this won’t happen while governments are fixated on growth, and this won’t change until they start making decisions in the national interest, rather than believing the totally magical thinking that the market will fix all ills.

Tomorrow Australia votes in the first election I can remember where there is little apparent difference between the major parties, where most of the trumpeted policies are also magical tricks, and both leaders appear to have abandoned the principles they once stood for. Of the two I think Labor’s broadband policy puts them slightly ahead, while my key hope is that the Greens gain the balance of power in the Senate.