Kunstler is best known for his non-fiction book, The Long Emergency, a disquieting exploration of what might eventuate when the world passes through the peak of oil and other critical resource production and goes into shortage. His scenario is that the cities become unviable and life devolves to small town rural living. World Made by Hand is a fictional exploration of that world as lived in one small town.

The story follows the main character through a hot summer some time after the oil peak and following a major conflict in the Middle East in which the US was involved. Washington and Los Angeles have been destroyed by terrorist nukes and central government has broken down. Armed gangs are on the loose and people are on the move. There has been inter-ethnic conflict between white and black as well as with hispanics. The town is fortunate as it is out of the way of most of this chaos, though the inhabitants also suffer for their isolation as they have little news of what is happening anywhere else. Kunstler speculation on post-apocalyptic living in the small town is reported through the lives of the lead and supporting characters, which includes members of a Christian religious sect that moves into the abandoned town school.

The book opens gently and picturesquely with the main character and a friend walking home from a fishing trip to the river. It follows with a description of recent history leading to the present situation then follows the main character through his relationship with two townswomen and his appointment as mayor. This leads to the two challenging incidents of the book, the rescue of a number of townsmen from imprisonment by the dictatorial leader of a river trading town and the bringing of justice to the authoritarian and violent leader of nearby settlement that lives off salvage. These provide the action highlights needed to counterpoint the descriptions of life and economy, Kunstler’s explorations of a world that continues to use federal currency though at local valuation and mixes this with barter.

The title of the book comes from a statement of one of the religious sect and refers to the reliance on manual skills and tools in a time when the energy and maintenance infrastructure required by power tools and machinery is no longer present.

Post-apocalypitic writing

This scenario cements the book in the post-apocalypse genre of speculative fiction of which there are numerous examples spanning the good to garbage. The value of this genre is that it engages in reflection on our present society and its vulnerabilities and speculates about how people would adapt without our existing infrastructure.

The book draws on a vein, a tradition perhaps, of apocalyptic thinking that is prevalent more in the US than anywhere else. Much peak oil literature belongs in the genre because it forecasts societal doom and downplays creative adaptation. This especially so in the US where peak oilers have proposed building fortified rural retreats in which to sit out the chaos they expect. Both the genre and the peak oilers reinforce the notion that the veneer of civilization is rather thin spread in the US and that the society would be likely to devolve into social chaos without a great deal of provocation.

Techno-collapse

Kunstler’s world is, of course, one without cars. Highways and roads have become walkways for people and the dominant form of transport other than walking, which is horse and carriage. The roads are quickly falling into disrepair, the paved surfaces disintegrating and becoming overgrown. But what about bicycles? They figure prominently in imaginings of a post-peak oil future, bit in Kunstler’s world these too have disappeared as they rely on a manufacturing industry no longer working and on the supply of rubber for tyres, an imported resource no longer available.

Electricity still exists but only for very limited and unreliable periods, and it seems to be on it’s way out. It is unclear in the book where it comes from. There is infrequent, limited radio broadcasting from locations undisclosed but it carries only ranting religious preachers and nothing useful like news. Lighting comes from candles. Flu and other diseases have swept through the region and the town resulting in a population decline, and medical supplies have fallen back onto the herbal and salvage.

This is a salvage society living off the pickings of technological civilisation. Such a situation cannot endure indefinitely and it would be necessary to develop replacement materials. Skills such as carpentry (the lead character is a builder), farming and food processing to produce preserves are those in need and agriculture is the dominant activity for most people living around the town.

Without modern agricultural technology, plant pests and diseases take on a frightening potential and a clearly a concern. There are hints of climate change through the story and the summer of the story is a particularly warm one and indicative of a trend. One of the large farms, more enterprising than the others, has attracted people to live and work on it and has taken on the quasi-plantation structure once common in the southern states of the US. This, one of the characters describes as serfdom.

Dialogue is kept simple and draws on traditional rural American styles of speech. The characters are believable and you get the idea that Kunstler has deliberately used stereotypical personality types for the preachers and other characters, though he shows the members of the religious sect to be subject to human vulnerabilities too.

In it’s description of isolated rural life lived day-to-day, the book reminds me of another title I once picked up and read, Son of Heaven by David Wingrove. This is set in the UK and follows post-apocalyptic life in a remote rural village following the deliberate collapse of modern civilisation through manipulation of the global online trading system. A couple decades after collapse, the Chinese arrive to colonise the UK and other nations. In its pre-Chinese period this, too, is a salvage civilization complete with local trading networks and dangers from roving, marauding bandits, something that is a distinct possibility in a world in which the infrastructure of modern society has gone.

Sobering reading — think twice

For those peak oilers and others who look forward to a post-hi-tech world, Kunstler’s book is sobering reading in that it shows that such a world is one of personal and societal uncertainty with the return of old diseases and a general lack of ability to treat disease, added to the great potential for crime in the absence if any state enforcement of law and order. Food security would be a continuing challenge because, in the circumstances, it calls for production of a nutritionally balanced diet that is far removed from what is practiced in home gardens.

In the writing around a post-peak oil scenario, it has been speculated that society would revert to something like that of the mid-nineteenth century and that manufacturing would be craft rather than machine based. It pays to realise, though, that rural centers are affected by the loss of the urban markets that they rely on. Kunstler’s town of Albany is appropriately situated on the river at a time when longer distance road transport is problematic due to lack of road maintenance, and the river has become the highway for the transport of tradable goods. Reading this, you can’t help but recall the role of the Mississippi and of the steam paddlewheelers that carried goods and people along its liquid highway, tying together the towns and cities of that place at that time in US history. Mark Twain’s world emerges as a model for Kunstler’s.

While post-apocalyptic rural life, with the population reduced due to displacement and disease, is sometimes painted in more glowing terms in the genre, the decline of rural civilization following the collapse of Imperial Rome shows that when the cities go so does the countryside. Civilization folds into itself and becomes parochial, communication is cut, knowledge and skills are lost as is the sense of security that comes with a functioning state. A new dark age of subsistence and technological and educational statis comes about.

In his book, Future Scenarios, David Holmgren takes the reader through a post-peak-oil civilization struggling with the impacts of climate change and resource depletion. David’s, too, is a salvage civilization living off the manufactured materials of technological society and returning food production to what presently are the suburbs. A salvage civilization is a transitional civilization, however, as even tehno-society’s leftovers will fall into short supply and degrade, with no replacement possible. Such a society has to be on the way to something else, and the hope is that it is not a new dark age.

The difference with David’s society is that it follows an orderly shift into it’s low-energy future, however we must also entertain the idea that a new age of scarcity will be one of sometimes violent conflict. Many would presumably flee the city with it’s collapsing water, energy, transportation and medical infrastructure for the country, but would they be welcomed by rural townspeople and farmers? Probably not. Such a scenario is only viable where societal collapse has obliterated laws about land ownership and urban refugees can engage in subsistence farming where they can acquire the skills.

It’s no secret that ours is a technology-based civilisation as have all of humanity’s cultures. This made interesting a video clip on the UK Transition towns website that asked some of those involved in that movement, including it’s main spokesperson, Rob Hopkins, what technologies they would like to retain in the event of a partial post-peak-oil wind down of society. They could have three of their own choosing. Two that came up a number of times were the bicycle and the internet, suggesting that communication is a valued benefit of modern society. Both are multiple pulse technologies and it is this that creates their value. The video didn’t ask the question, but it’s worth asking anyway—how can we move to a lower energy consumption society and retain these hi-tech things we value? That, I believe, is something worth thinking about.

Clearly, modern societies with a higher degree of social coherence would fare better than super-competitive societies in the collapse described in Kunstler’s book.

Being a speculative book about a world few of us have experienced makes Kunstler’s World Made by Hand a worthwhile read for those who wonder what would happen were civilization to collapse.

What of their future?

Now that you know how the world got to its situation, the book leaves you wondering how things went in that little town in north eastern North America in the years after that hot summer. Was a national government reestablished? There were rumours about the existence of such a government through the book, though one without power or presence, and in which city it was supposedly based remained mere speculation. You get the idea that, in a situation with limited communication, stories of even a weak national government were rumours. Rumours are what you get when there is no reliable communcation. Then there are the other questions that come to mind. Did the existing, river-based trading network grow after the Albany despot was deposed? Did the religious group come to dominate the town… there were signs of tension between some townspeople and the newly-arrived group.

Did the occasional printed news sheets continue to travel along that river-based trading/communications network and did they help to recreate a broader, cohesive culture and open up the isolation of the town? Was the remaining radio broadcast capacity wrested from the religious and repurposed for news and useful information to assist the scattered communities develop their essential services and to rebuild a regional culture?

The book…

I obtained my copy of World Made by Hand from the Amazon Kindle digital books website and downloading the iPad version. I know buying books that way does little to support local booksellers (which is why they propose taxing book imports of this type but don’t look to their own maintenance of high book prices in a protected market as driving people to internet markets) but the book was very cheap and, unlike ordering a paper book and waiting weeks and weeks for it to be brought into the country if there are no local supplies, as there often are not, I could start reading it within a minute of pressing the download button. In a world made by hand, however, such convenience would be a distant memory.

Most of us have at least a working familarity with climate change and its likely consequences, however the peaking of global oil extraction and the impacts that it is likely to bring are less known. Peak oil, as it has become known, is the time at which extraction from economically accessible oil wells reaches its peak. After that, extraction plateaus awhile, then starts to fall below demand. The effect of this will be to boost oil prices and the cost of anything that uses oil in its extraction, manufacture, processing, transportation or consumption. New oil field discoveries, such as those likely to be accessed by deep sea drilling made possible by the retreat of the northern ice cap, will bring temporary relief but are unlikely to affect the downward tend in global production.

Peak oil is not a theory. The US peaked in 1970, Australia in 2000, and the North Sea wells peaked in 1999 — there, production had dropped by 43 percent by 2007. David Holmgren made this point — that peak oil is reality, not theory — while speaking at the Conversations With Authors at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair this year. There is plenty of empirical evidence for the peak. As for the projected price rises as supply falls below global demand for oil, that relationship is basic market economics.

Future Scanarios is more or less a paper version of David’s website of the same name. It’s not a large book in terms of number of pages, but it nonetheless serves as something of a wake-up call for those still in the slumber of an oil saturated present.

Exploring future scenarios

People familiar with David’s reasoning will find much that is familiar in the book. David takes the reader through his four scenarios that range from the consequences of business as usual to futures ranging through green technology, the survivalist ‘lifeboat’ scenario of social desperation that can end only in civilisational collapse, and his preferred scenario that he calls ‘earth stewardship’.

This latter invokes life as decentralised, self-governing towns and communities, with at least a partial abandonment of the cities which are mined for their materials. Life continues in the suburbs, however, though far from its present form. Although he does not go into detail in Future Scenarios, the multi-generational model of suburban conversion that David discussed during his 2006 national tour with US journalist and peak oil analyst, Richard Heinberg would likely be relevant here.

The model sees the development of multi-generational households and a substantial increase in food production, water harvesting and the use of renewable energies in the suburbs. In terms of urban infrastructure, it is a model I first encountered in the 1990s while working for Dr Ted Trainer at UNSW and that he called the ‘conserver society’, the title of a book be published on the topic. Through his books of the period, and in his courses at UNSW, Ted presaged many of David’s ideas on suburban conversion. This ‘ruralised city’ scanario is a model criticised by the authors of Resilient Cities, including the noted planner and educator, Peter Newman.

The book does not explore how this model would evolve in any detail — it is an investigation using the established scenario methodology that precludes detail, focusing instead on larger trends. The method has been used by government, corporations and civil society for some decades and takes existing demographic, resource, political, economic and other factors and projects how they could evolve within variables set for each scenario. Trends in oil production and other resources form the basis onto which David grafts projections about the possible impact of climate change to generate his four scenarios.

Return to appropriate technology

Earth stewardship is a model that is unlikely to be found universally appealing because it renders useless the skillsets of many. It is basically an agrarian future in which manual skills are those most valuable. It would be a profoundly different future, one less secure in many ways. Without hi-tech medicine, old diseases could return with little hope of cure. There is also the risk of a return to parochialism were global electronic communications to cease.

The scenario raises questions. How would human knowledge be preserved? Would we lose the extensive knowledge base drawn up over thousands of years of civilisation? Would there be any capacity to cooperate on projects of common endeavour over large regions ?

Writing this review, I recall ideas from the 1970s that were part of that exploration of what we then called ‘intermediate technology’, a term coined by British economist, Fritz Schumacher. Propelled by the 1973 oil crisis — the embargo of the West imposed by members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, in retaliation for Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war of the same year — intermediate technology (later to be renamed ‘appropriate technology’) sought simpler, cost-effective and more easily maintained tools and technologies to accomplish life needs. It was the dawn of renewable energy systems and paralleled the rise in popularity, although it remained organisationally separate to, organic gardening and farming.

Initially, intermediate technology found practical application in the intentional communities that developed during that period, however there was substantial interest among the more innovative of urban youth, especially those that considered themselves a part of the ‘alternative culture’ of the time, and by international development practitioners. Appropriate technology would certainly come of age in David’s earth stewardship society.

Imagining the scenarios

David outlines two ways of looking at his scenarios — as separate trends and in a nested structure. For me, it is the nested structure that is the most realistic as it recognises that different trends exist simultaneously, though at different scales and in different social milieus, in Western and, probably, other societies. Thus, the 1970s alternative culture existed within a growth economy then still expanding. Today, David’s earth stewardship model exists as loosely connected components in contemporary society focused around a number of movements such as permaculture, climate change and some elements of environmentalism.

Another way of looking at this is to see it as the new being born and prototyped in the bosom of the old. From that comes the resolution of what is a perceived contradiction among change agents making a living and pursuing their agendas within the infrastructure of a society they would severely modify or replace. Realistically, they have to live in both worlds at the same time, with a foot firmly planted in both. We all do.

Elements of the earth stewardship and the green technology scenarios are found within the permaculture milieu which David has some responsibility for co-creating. Here, there is a creative tension between the advocates of a basic and largely ruralised lifestyle and those who seek socially constructive solutions through green technology. Fortunately, David sees green technology a starting point for his journey to earth stewardship. The transition will come as energy supplies run down over time.

It is the force of David’s reputation, based on his role as co-originator of the permaculture design system and in recent years as its most prominent thinker, that leads to the ready adoption of his ideas by those within that milieu.

The influence of government

David writes that government has a substantial influence on these different nested scenarios, with local government holding most promise of influencing community-based initiatives that would form elements of the earth stewardship model. Through legislation, regulation and subsidies, local government has an influence on the structuring of households as, in effect, microcosms of the lifeboat scenario yet, at the same time, as components of the earth stewardship model.

What is implied here is David and his partner, Sue Dennet’s notion of the ‘household economy’. This views the household — whatever its makeup — as primarily a productive rather than consumptive entity. In reality, of course, households would be both consumers and producers, especially where they participate in a community-based, non-monetary system of exchange such as time dollars or LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System).

Seen as ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) entities and as micro-lifeboats, households would:

• produce in home or community gardens (and process as preserves) some of the food their inhabitants consume
• harvest and store for subsistence purposes rainfall and overland flow (the later where households have garden space)
• generate energy via photovoltaic or other system
• and form the basis, perhaps, for some home-based industry that produces goods or services for trade with others through LETS-like systems or as part of the informal or formal economies.

Local government, though in still-too-few cases, has made a start on educating people in these basic skills. Some offer workshops and courses in sustainable living where participants pick up largely forgotten skills in what Rob Hopkins, spokesman for the Transition movement, calls ‘skill-up for powerdown’ — growing food, storing water, producing home energy and other like things. Some councils facilitate the setting up of community food gardens and farmers’ markets. Others install photovoltaic systems on their buildings.

These things are not done as some deliberate policy of popular skilling-up but because they are components of the green technology model, the most popular model of sustainability, and because it is compatible with local government policy and practice for ameliorating and adapting to climate change. This motivation does not matter, of course, because such initiatives smooth the way to a earth stewardship society and have a firm place within it.

Both idea and template

Future Scenarios will no doubt be criticised because it will be seen to offer little option other than the evolution of earth stewardship societies.

Green technology advocates might feel a little chargrined that their preferred future might be only a transitional form between the present and the future. That is understandable, because much of the search for solutions to impending global trends focuses on technological fixes even though some proposing this foresee a less growth-oriented, perhaps even an economically steady state society emerging.

It is in discussing these different models that Future Scenarios provides a service. The book, and the workshops David offers as a means of exploring the topic more fully, introduce a sophistication to permaculture design that is not always present in its popular forms. In doing so, David once again offers permaculture a new lease on life as an applied technology for a community-based response to climate change and peak oil that complements that being developed by the transition initiative movement and that offers opportunities to the more innovative permaculture and sustainability, community-based organisations that are capable of addressing those parts of society outside their usual sphere of influence.

Swapping thrown-away bottles for a coin is one of those practices now long gone except in enlightened states like South Australia. It is the memory of such practices that has inspired Meg Bishop and Graeme Gibson to produce their little book, Stories of Experience — learning from the environmental experiences of older Australians.

Victim of affluent times

That many of the stories collected by the authors come from the 1940s and 1950s is no accident, for it was around that time that the post-World War Two economic boom started to transform Australia’s economy and culture, as well as its environmental practices. The frugality, thrift and recycling that had been part of our culture were suddenly swept away in a flood of modernism and money. Now, however, there is a resurgence of interest in those chronologically distant practices. And while it’s genesis can be traced back to the 1970s ‘alternative’ culture, it is in more recent times that it has gained impetus.

The new Transition Initiatives movement is the latest social formation to discover the value of past experience. In part, that’s because it sees these ‘old’ environmental practices being of value in a world likely to have to deal with both the impacts of climate change and peak oil – the point of maximum extraction of global oil reserves after which prices of everything that uses oil in its production (and that’s most things) are likely to rise dramatically. The ‘rediscovery’ of how to live with less oil and less affluence may well have much to learn from those times more than a half-century ago, and doing so is recommended by Rob Hopkins in his ‘Transitions Handbook’.

Old times, new values

So, what can the authors tell us about the wisdom of the past that is relevant to the new values emerging in response to a changing world? The answer, it turns out, is plenty.

Take the experience of Dorothy Bremner of Nowra. She tells of how water was highly valued in the late 1940s when she was a child, a time when there were signs about conserving water above the taps at her school. Dorothy invokes those days by describing how her mother would heat water in a kettle on the stove, then pour it into a tin basin on the kitchen table and wash the dishes in it. And after that? The water went onto the garden. History repeats, because this is what some people I know have started to do in the present. Today, we rather grandly call it ‘greywater recycling’, but in those times it was nothing more than common sense.

Mardie Smith took the lessons of the country to the city when she moved from Eugowra. Her memories are of making jams and preserves and storing them in the household pantry… and of sharing excess. Reading this reminded me of attending a workshop at a conference in Melbourne a few years ago. I didn’t set out to attend this workshop, but my partner wanted to and suggested I come along. I obeyed.

The workshop was led by a woman from Hepburn, a small town in inland Victoria. Her name was Sue Dennett and her presentation was on something she called the ‘household economy’. What she said there resonated strongly with the activities and mentality that I found in Mardie Smith’s story and in other stories in Stories of Experience. So, it appears that either that those old attitudes and values did not pass with those earlier generations or that – and this is what I believe – they are being revived in a new iteration for modern times that we could call Frugality Version 2.0. Oh… that Sue Dennett who ran the workshop is partner to David Holmgren, the co-originator of the permaculture design system.

Interestingly, Mardie Smith talks about how the word ‘economy’ had a different meaning in those days. Rather than being the signifier of an arcane pseudo-science, economy was about making the most efficient use of things.

Small book, big ideas

In a modest 90 pages, this small book documents old and now new-again environmental practice culled from the memories of older Australians. A couple stories feature the creative slant of mixing fact and fiction, but all bring stories of water and waste, making-do and repairing, chooks, food, biodiversity and the value of neighbours and sharing. It’s about hard times and frugal times and, through its pages, you get the idea that although those times might have been tough they were lived to the fullest and people got by through a shared set of humane values based around mutual support. If we can do this again, though in a modern format, then our children and grandchildren will be well served.

Stories of Experience was published by the Council on the Ageing through a NSW Environmental Trust grant (www.environment.nsw.gov.au/envtrust).

Publishers information

Bishop M, Gibson G; 2008; Stories of experience — learning from the environmental experiences of older Australians; Council on the Ageing (NSW). ISBN: 9780 9804  22306.

Retail: Expect to pay around $10.

www.realoptions.com.au

Reviewed by Russ Grayson, April 2009