Life in the slow lane

For years I have advocated slowing society in order to break the system which is breaking the world. Speed is energy. Society at speed lives in a frenzy of lust and demand, rage and terror, obligation and debt, want and need and control. Society at speed demands ever more speed. Speed is energy.

A correspondent today pointed out that slowing would be good but not enough, and he is absolutely right. If humanity has a hope to continue to be a major player in the ecosystem on planet Earth we have to stop doing almost everything we do today and turn our efforts and attention to restoring a functioning natural ecosystem and biosphere. Yes, it really is that simple. Putting all our cleverness and attention into natural systems to produce food, sequester carbon, store ground water, purify surface water, and regenerate natural ecosystems might not be sufficient, but it would be our only chance. Earth today is literally short gigatons of biological entities, and each missing entity is somewhere in the neighborhood of half carbon by dry weight. The biological ecosystem runs on solar power and lubricates itself with water. It eats CO2 and shits oxygen and fertilizer. It requires very low energy inputs besides the big one in the sky. We don’t have to dig anything deeper than a person with a shovel can accomplish. The system is self fertilizing.

Hunting and gathering is easy if you planted the food trees, or even better if you’ve been watching the food trees grow all your life. Catching fish is easy if every creek is full of beaver dams.

There is no thing or group of things which humans can build which can provide the services of a functioning global ecosystem. The failure of the ecosystem to function sufficiently well to provide for our minimum needs today is in the news everywhere you look. People across the global North are dying directly of heat. Crops are failing in real time. Rivers are drying up. What we are looking at is a broad spectrum, multi cause, global system failure. As long as we proceed on our current path it will continue to get worse.

It does not have to. The ecosystem does not have to continue to degrade as it is doing. Currently we degrade it. We can just as easily nurture and enhance it. I absolutely know this to be true. I have improved topsoil amounts and fertility on my land without adding anything except time, attention, and interventions to increase total productivity. Plant things. Return annual growth production to the soil. Slow the flows of water. We know how.

I keep reading that we “have the technology” to “transition” to “clean energy.” (Previous brand name “renewable energy.”) We don’t and we have proven it. The records are clear. The more we build the worse the ecosystem gets. It’s not worth debating if building these machines causes the worsening. Building them is supposed to improve things and it isn’t. We invest vast quantities of money and energy in mining, hauling, smelting, hauling, forming, hauling, installing, and maintaining, all of it powered by diesel fuel and lubricated with oil. Aside from the steel, copper, and other metals, much of the physical structure of every wind turbine is made of oil. The blades certainly are. There is no evidence that it could ever work and generous evidence that currently it is not working. That’s enough.

We could make the change just for deciding to. As a species, as a race, the human race. Just pretend - don’t say anything about why it can’t, who is opposed, just pretend - that homo Sap decides to go for survival, and enacts the following:

Step by step instructions

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Jun 16

Speed is the lynch pin of modern technological society. Without cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes, no part of modern life would look like it does.

What comes afterwards?

I don’t know, not for sure. Just for the thinking, let’s consider what could exist knowing the restraints. There are two:

1. There is no concentrated energy transportation or industry. All transportation and all work is powered either by humans or animals. Presumably we retain cottage / village level metallurgy.

2. The dominant global industry is permaculture and other village scale ecosystem regeneration practices.

Cities as we know them today could not exist. We have ample archaeological evidence that people have lived in large groups since a long time ago, but they didn’t look like they do now.

One fundamental fact of any walking speed culture is that everyone can get all that they need for daily life within walking distance of wherever they woke up. Stores of resources have to be local to everyone. In general humans live in groups and always have, usually in small groups such as tribes, extended families, or perhaps villages, often entirely or partly nomadic but sometimes long settled in permanent locations. Prior to high speed transportation people have always distributed themselves across the land so that local food resources everywhere are sufficient to their needs.

If a person isn’t doing other things it’s not unrealistic to walk 25 or 30 miles in a day. If you’re working on the activities of daily living, winding the baby and washing the cat, you can’t go as far. One family, as part of a community, can operate a five or more acre permaculture / agroforestry / ecosystem regenerating holding more-or-less forever, and it’s an easier day job than commuting an hour to spend 8 hours in a cubicle. If your food resource continuously walks across the prairie grazing, so do you.

The job-money-drive-buy-consume-job model, regardless of how it’s organized, is antithetical to life as we evolved into it. Earth provides all of our needs and always has. The birds on my farm eat mulberries, sit on wires, sing songs and plant seeds. We used to be as smart as they. My bluejays and I both plant oak trees.

There are still remnants of villages in Europe, in France, some in eastern Europe. Amish people live a specialized version of village life. At a walking pace, most of the world becomes villages. A trip through The Dawn of Everything by Graber & Wengrow shows numerous ways villages have been organized by humans over millennia.

The ecosystem / climate / economic / governance mess we’re in is a direct outcome of the value system of modern technological societies. Labels like capitalist, communist, socialist, fascist, democrat, all just describe ways of organizing and distributing the items valued under our value system. Something called Standard of Living. Something called Life Expectancy, which is actually Average Age at Death. Something called wealth. Something called property.

Every bird owns her own nest. Few own the whole tree. None own the entire forest. At a walking pace, we can build our shelters, harvest our foods, nurture our woods and prairies. We can let beavers bring us water and mud, we can plant our oaks and cut the vines that strangle them. We can turn the fact that money doesn’t grow on trees from a condemnation of trees into a condemnation of money.

Money doesn’t grow on trees. Food does. Only one of those can a human live without.