Post-Peak Liberal: Positively Post-Peak 2011

Post-Peak Liberal

....... Life on the Downslope

Positively Post-Peak 2011

Last time, I made a pledge to look at things in a more positive, constructive light in 2011. Instead of constantly harping on unemployment, economic contraction, political corruption, and other bread-nuts of awfulness, why not examine some of the good things that are actually happening out there? After all, there's gotta be something positive going on somewhere, right?

Well, I'll give it my best shot. But first a couple caveats. There's definitely a New Year's Resolution stench to this whole positivity thing. You know -- weight loss, work on the great novel, yoga, shirt tucked in more often, reduced chicken finger intake.....and a more positive outlook. All these things seem great and doable in the throws of January. But come Superbowl Sunday, when you find yourself on the couch for 13 hours straight in sweatpants, holding an impossibly-creamy microbrew stout in one hand, and a blue cheese soaked jalapeno popper in the other -- then the reality of established patterned behavior sets in, and resolutions are scaled back to things like: "Well, I guess I could just get another pair of stretch-waist khakis -- it's not the end of the world."

So it's almost certain that I will drift back to my usual critical style as the year goes on. That's okay. But another, more substantive reason for the turn to positive examples is to provide some alternative to the usual liberal tropes that are out there already. As I have detailed many times on this site, I really believe that the underlying liberal narrative is almost as out of touch with reality as the conservative one (and in some cases, even more so). In the progressive world, the idea that we're in for massive de-leveraging, decentralization, and contraction is almost unthinkable. Most liberals seem to envision a robust, localized, expanding green economy -- but also, somehow, a return to economic growth, maximum employment, awesome wages, and all the other trappings of our One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form. As regular readers of this blog know, I consider this bizarre combination to be untenable and utterly fantastical. Instead, I think that no matter how green we get, the underlying ratios of work to production to consumption to ecological and economic collapse are just unavoidable, and will simply not support a return to our old lifestyle.

With that in mind, it's important to highlight what a positive, constructive life might look like in Post-Peak America. How can we live, realistically, in a landscape of contraction and down-scaling? Are our only alternatives either a return to breakneck growth or some kind of dystopian hell-swamp? I hope not. I am somewhat hopeful that we can craft some kind of positive, constructie, and ultimately fulfilling response to our current predicament.

In that light, here are some of the topics I hope to cover in the weeks and months ahead.

CoHousing -- there are many different forms of cohousing, but the basic idea is a collective group of houses or condos, built close together around a shared central community building. The individual units are usually smaller than regular houses, with driveways and parking pushed to the outside of the complex. Ownership is generally still based on individual families, with a group fee administered to maintain the grounds and central building. As mentioned, there are many variations of cohousing, but the overall goals are the sharing of some of the daily expenses of general upkeep, and to provide enhanced community interaction.
Intentional Communities -- cohousing can be seen as one manifestation of a more general category of what can be called "Intentional Communities." These represent a broader array of collective living arrangements, unified under the basic rubric of cohabitation with purpose. The reasons behind an intentional community can be religious, economic, ideological, social, whatever. These can be small groups of ten people, or large cooperatives of several hundred. And the economic arrangements can range from the fairly conventional cohousing model, which preserves individual home ownership, to intense income-sharing systems with no private property at all. But there is definitely more to this arena than just leftover hippie communes. Most studies show that intentional communities are rapidly gaining in popularity, as people become fed up with the atomizing nature of conventional social norms, and migrate towards like-minded people looking for more meaningful human interaction.
Deschooling -- one of the main application points of hysteria over preserving the hyper-consumptive, maximum employment lifestyle is schooling. We have been steadily panicking over the disintegration of our education system for decades. "Oh god, we're falling behind the Chinese! Our kids can't read! They can't find Canada on a map! They can't do advanced math! Oh, right, they can't do basic math either! Run for the hills!" Into this lovely cauldron of dread, we plop in our ideological grenades for extra seasoning: "Those GD unions are wrecking everything, protecting no-good teachers and rotting my kid's brain! And those pushy liberal school boards, trying to shove penis-on-penis action and ape-evolved-to-man bullshit into their godless curricula! But wait, we also don't pay our teachers enough, or hold the teaching profession in high-enough esteem! For shame! And come to think of it, why shouldn't there be a lot more private competition from for-profit schools, so that success can force out failure, via the purifying fires of the marketplace?" As I wrote in an earlier piece last fall, we tend to shoehorn too many of our overall societal failings and hopes into our schools. Our educational system thus becomes wildly overburdened and overblamed, at once our only hope for the future and the prime culprit in the overall economic shabbiness of the present. So we push and push and push our kids to do the best they possibly can in school, to invest all their dreams in academic achievement, and (gulp) college. We scare them with stats on how much less dropouts and high-school grads will earn, shaming them into over-achieving at all costs. Of course, we gloss over the squirmy fact that even college grads have been losing ground in absolute terms for years, and that college debt has been skyrocketing with no commensurate increase in wages. And we definitely stay away from the even more uncomfortable reality that institutional schooling, even the good kind, is essentially a training ground for a very limited set of adult corporate and organizational hierarchies, structures that thrive on conformity, obedience, and lack of will, and creators of conditions that have substantially underwritten the massive shift of wealth and power upwards to the tiny elite that now dominate our civilization. As an alternative to this insanely pressurized arrangement, deschooling offers a powerful tonic. This can be as simple as homeschooling, or as complex as a broad system of tax-supported community apprenticeships. But the general goal is to simply put kids in more human settings, so that learning can occur organically, and can contribute to community strength and self-reliance.
Going Local -- of course, the local thing is hot. Farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) are all the rage, with appropriate attention being paid to buying more nutritious, local food. And a lot of attention gets paid, from the right and the left, on supporting local businesses and struggling entrepreneurs. But deeper than that, a real commitment to rebuild local economies means some very drastic changes in lifestyle, changes that can be facilitated by the strategies mentioned in the above bullet points. Specifically, we can definitely revive local activity, but it will involve far broader facets than just training up for a job waxing windmill wings and buying local arugula. We're talking about drastically reducing overall consumption, with the major shifts in market employment ratios that go along with that. We will need substantial alterations in zoning laws, to allow for more compact working and residential commingling. We're talking about robust expansion of local use rules and eminent domain, so that absentee landlords can be booted out if they allow properties to sit unused or unmaintained. And we will ideally need some totally revamped structures for local lending and small business support, so that it becomes downright easy to find funding and assistance for entrepreneurial endeavors. And yes, we'll need to examine local currencies.

Those are some of the things to come. Now I gotta get out and beat the bushes to find out where some of these changes are being made right now.

Happy 2011!!