ARTICLES

Originally published in the Spring 2020 edition of STIR magazine

Extracts from David Fleming’s extraordinary, posthumous Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (Chelsea Green, 2016).  Selected for this issue by its editor Shaun Chamberlin.  Endnotes omitted.

Asterisks mark words with their own separate entry in the dictionary.  Any of these can be read in full and for free at the newly-launched LeanLogic.online

Expectations. The attitudes and assumptions which shape the way we make sense of events and plan our response. Unless our expectations are right, or at least expressed as a considered set of probabilities, we plan to fail. But, right or wrong, expectations are self-reinforcing, for we see what we expect to see. We may not realise how critical expectations are in guiding perception, but they are decisive. In the context of our perception of *art, the art historian E.H. Gombrich reminds us of . . .

. . . the role which our own expectations play in the deciphering of the artists’ cryptograms. We come to their works with our receivers already attuned. We expect to be presented with a certain notation, a certain sign situation, and make ready to cope with it.

The experience of the approaching civilisational convergence of crises will affect our expectations in three ways. First, options which were formerly dismissed will now be grasped with both hands, and we may wonder how we could have been so stupid as to turn them down when they were still available. Secondly, opinions and fundamental values, hitherto seen to be sacrosanct and *self-evident, will be challenged and may break down rapidly. Thirdly, there is likely to be expectations-creep, as the (bad) new conditions are seen to be as acceptable as the (good) old ones used to be, without people being explicitly conscious of having changed their opinion. Events will change the frame of reference in which we make *judgments.

And there may be a *time-lag, leaving us always one step behind, fighting the last war, although *lean thinking—for which fast *feedback is a core principle—would help us keep this lag brief. Critical to this is a sense of history. History forms our expectations; it is our data. Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now.

Cohesion. Society’s ability to hold itself together over a long period, despite stresses which would otherwise break it apart. The *market economy is an effective system for sustaining social order: the distribution of goods, services and other assets is facilitated by buying and selling, supporting a *network of exchange to which everyone has *access. But if the flow of income fails, the powerfully-bonding combination of *money and self-interest will no longer be available on its present all-embracing scale, and perhaps not at all.

It will then be necessary to rely instead on the cohesive properties of a robust common *culture, and the *loyalties and *reciprocities supported and sustained within it. Without this, there will be no basis for a cohesive society. And that, of course, is putting it mildly, because the time-interval between the demise of the market and the birth of a cohesive culture may be expected to be turbulent.

Reliance on the market economy has led to the asset of a common culture falling into neglect; sometimes we pick through the ruins like tourists marvelling at a lost settlement and guessing at what was once there. It would be helpful—though late in the day—to stop dismantling what remains of a culture in today’s *political economy, and to start to re-grow cultural and *artistic links as an essential basis for cohesion in a future which, from where we sit, will be barely recognisable.

Empowerment. Empowerment, applied to the individual or the *community, means being confident, being assured; having the *authority to think things through and to act accordingly. In contrast, disempowerment speaks of apathy, futility, lack of hope and lack of influence over one’s own destiny. The disempowered person, population or class is one that no one listens to—the electorate that is patronised and reduced to an *abstraction of consumers, not to be entrusted with doing anything for themselves unless they see a *private advantage. It is about accepting passively what comes along, because there is *no alternative. Empowerment, in contrast, dances to a different logic: it is about investing *imagination and energy in the *place we live in, and in the people we live amongst.

In fact, Lean Logic prefers the label *presence: it suggests permanence and natural competence, without the rather breathless sense of self-assertiveness and ‘recovery as work-in-progress’ that we get with empowerment. Indeed, as the management writer Daniel Pink points out, empowerment is an awkward word—almost an oxymoron—since it suggests that some kind authority is giving you lots of empowering flexibility—like a dog on a long lead—which is far from the autonomy of being able to choose your own route and apply your own mind:

[Empowerment] presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees. But that’s not autonomy. That’s just a slightly more civilized form of control.

But “empowerment” may communicate more clearly than “autonomy”—and the process of recovering, or wresting, or even being donated with, powers and freedoms that we didn’t have before is in fact what is typically and urgently needed—so, with Pink’s caveat in mind, we shall stay with it, for now.

The civilisation which we have *inherited is a product of empowerment, widely-shared. In the medieval period it built *institutions of great competence. The monasteries, for example, acted as schools, hospitals, centres of the arts, history, science and horticulture; they provided assistance for the poor, old peoples’ homes, safehouses and prisons; and they were effective instruments for the control of *population. The manorial system of *land tenure and cultivation—though contained within a strong and at times harsh framework—was kept functioning by the people who belonged to it, sustaining *cooperative *commons as a central enabling institution for some four centuries. The *law, to an increasing degree, arose out of deliberation by the “republic”—the community of citizens with responsibility for the place they lived in, and it was sustained, not least, by local people as juries and magistrates.

Through that period and beyond, local competence sustained *carnival, music, architecture, and the *reciprocities of *social capital; it supported *households, delivering the routine miracle of making people, teaching language, building *emotional development, *humour, handiness, and the accomplishment of listening and friendship. And its achievements continued into the modern period through the Industrial Revolution. It built the institutions—the schools, hospitals, local government and (later) friendly societies which, though voluntarily taken up, provided widely-shared *protection against loss of income through sickness and unemployment. It developed to keep pace as the social order broke beyond the limits that could be sustained by local self-reliance and needed to be invented and rebuilt on the scale of the city-everywhere.

In a sense, the roots of disempowerment that followed can be traced a long way back, to the invention of *money by the Greeks—the turning point at which the integration between skills and community began to fracture. Informal *reciprocal exchange began its long descent towards being a residual—merely the parts that monetary *economics hadn’t yet reached. In our nearer history, early signs of what was to come began with the dissolution of the monasteries, the Enclosures—the loss of common land—and by the progressive retreat of domestic competence and local reciprocity, as money exchange—detached, impersonal, efficient, neat—tore through the *informal economy, which had no immunity. And now, *economism has brought the presumption that all values are economic values, and a demolition of confidence that there is any such thing as society, a thing which we can love (*Public Sphere and Private Sphere).

The power of economism has been formidable. The progressive removal of hands-on responsibility for the community has been carried through almost without challenge. And here are the losses: our sense of *place and the idea that it is in our power to care for it and to take responsibility for it; our regard for and accomplishment in *manual skills; our confidence that we have anything to teach, and can cope without massive institutions behind us; that combination of originality and persistence known as *character; a *culture committed to the making and sustaining of emotional development; our land as a rich, living *ecology, protected (unconditionally) from *genetic modification and *nuclear contamination and (substantially) from concrete; our *manners and our sense of the wild (which, in deep ways, are the same things); our *spirit; our consciences and, perhaps, our future.

The balance sheet we have inherited is a wasteland. And yet, buried under economism and its anticulture, a seed growing secretly, is a human ecology. That is what—in the early stages of working out what empowerment means—we may with persistence, recover.

Frankness. The exposure of ideas and opinions, formerly forbidden by the *ethics and values of society, which can be expected to erupt in the disorderly conditions that will follow the *climacteric. Under the surface in the well-behaved citizen, there is a *second nature, to whom outrageous thoughts and opinions occur, but which the person has no trouble in censoring and keeping in check. In deeply destabilised conditions, however, that second nature tends to break out; the *decency-censor is ignored; the person’s second nature becomes, simply, her nature.

The shock of a new frankness has been experienced before—for example, at the time of the Renaissance, when changing *expectations were forced into even more violent change by recurring outbreaks of the plague. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron explores this disorder with astonishment. The *conversations described in it (he explains) do not take place in church, nor in schools of philosophy, but in the whorehouse. In fact, the times are so out of joint that . . .

. . . judges have deserted the judgment-seat, the laws are silent, and ample license to preserve his life as best he may is accorded to each and all. . . . If so one might save one’s life, the most sedate might without disgrace walk abroad wearing his breeches on his head.

Fortitude. Persistence in the face of trouble, danger, *conflict, mockery, fatigue, solitude, *demoralisation, guilt or *fear. It can be mere bloody-mindedness, of course; it is the connection with *judgment that matters. And yet, the judgment itself may be *intuitive. Bloody-mindedness can save the day.

Wood engravings from Lean Logic:
‘The Slippery Slope’ by Harry Brockway, and ‘Cottage Interior’ by Howard Phipps.

Shaun Chamberlin is a consulting scholar at Sterling College and executive producer of new film The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?

Originally published in the Fall 2018 edition of Tikkun

As Simon Mont wrote in Tikkun’s recent issue on the New Economy, “capitalism is collapsing under the weight of itself, and it’s not pretty.”^[i]

Our globalised world finds itself caught on the horns of a seemingly impossible dilemma — either cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend.

As my late mentor, the historian and economist David Fleming, put it,^[ii]

It is certain that there are no simple answers to this — none that could be proposed without proposing at the same time a transformation in the whole of the way we think, work and order our lives.

And yet, faced with this fundamental systemic conundrum, our leaders hold tight to their simple answer — growth. Having worked supporting people with drug addiction for several years, it is hard to escape the parallels to the more tragic cases. The dire consequences of our choices are piling ever higher around us, threatening the very continuation of our lives and those around us. And the response is to double down on the current path and turn a blind eye — to sink deeper into denial. It is just too difficult, too brave, to undergo that dark night of the soul — to admit the problem, to seek a new paradigm.

So we hear it over and over — we must keep growth high, keep unemployment low. Donald Trump’s recent Twitter boast that U.S. GDP growth (4.2%) was higher than unemployment (3.9%) for the first time in over a century was both inaccurate and bizarre, but it betrays his allegiance to these numbers.

And of course, he is far from alone. All his peers are junkies too. Most people — even most economists — never question the desirability of these measures, as if mastery of them could somehow heal an economy so violently contrary to our human instincts and desires that it leaves epidemics of depression, loneliness and suicide everywhere it goes. That sparks not only economic and environmental devastation, but cultural and spiritual annihilation.

As if there were not something deeper, something larger, going on here…

So let’s step back for a minute. First, “keep unemployment low”. The appeal is easy to see, but what’s really going on here?

Consider the great economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction, in 1930, that by the year 2000 the onward march of technology would lead to an average 15 hour working week in countries like the U.S. and U.K. Naturally he saw this as progress — not a doom-laden prophecy of mass unemployment — and this fact begins to expose the inherent contradiction in the aim of maximising employment. What economists see as wastefully underutilised ‘spare labour’ is what most of us might call spare time — time enjoyed outside the formal economy — a welcome part of a life well lived rather than a ‘problem of unemployment.’^[iii]

Of course, modern life is not noted for the utopian, leisurely daily routines enjoyed by the bulk of the population. So why was Keynes wrong? Certainly not because the rate of technological advance over the past century failed to live up to his expectations. No, rather because our economic paradigm literally makes widely-shared leisure time impossible.

To see why, Fleming invites us to take a further step back. He notes the startlingly extensive holidays (five months of each year, in some places) achieved in medieval Europe. How were the good folk of the Middle Ages able to enjoy so much more leisure time than we are in our technologically-advanced society? He explains,^[iv]

In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly equally-shared leisure time — say, a three-day working week, or less — is hard to sustain, because anyone who decides to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (working longer hours lets them produce more, and thus earn the same wage while selling each item or service more cheaply).

 

These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely.

 

This is what puts the grim into reality.

So in an economy like ours, a technological advance that doubles the amount of useful work a person can do in a day becomes a problem rather than a benefit. It tends to put half the workers out of work, turning them into a potential drain on the state (or simply leaving them destitute).

In theory all the workers could just work half-time and still produce all that is needed, as Keynes predicted, and as is promised all over again by today’s latest wave of automation techno-utopians.^[v] But in practice workers are often afraid of having their pay cut, or losing their jobs to a stranger who is willing to work longer hours. In the absence of a sense of community or mutual trust, and having been taught to seek their security in a wage, people instead compete against each other for the right to perform the pointless tasks that anthropologist David Graeber memorably characterised as “bullshit jobs.”^[vi]

Meanwhile, governments see that the only way to keep unemployment from rising to the point where the system breaks down is through endless economic growth, which thus becomes a non-negotiable obligation — a dogma. Ah, here’s our second simple imperative, “keep growth high”…

The problem with this one is elementary, brutal maths. Economists tell us that 2-3% growth annually, give or take, is necessary to avoid recession or depression. Arithmetic tells us that if something grows at 2% a year, it will double in size in 35 years. At 3% a year it will double in 24 years. At Trump’s claimed 4.2%..? 17 years

Can we seriously imagine our world in just two or three decades with twice the economic activity — twice the oil extraction, twice the intensive agriculture, twice the manufacturing, twice the pollution? And then in two or three more decades doubling again, to four times the size of today’s economy… Even superabundance like that of the natural world cannot indefinitely support an exponentially growing parasite.^[vii]

It’s a remarkably straightforward point; just arithmetic. And yet it remains respected mainstream opinion that we should just keep growing, quietly crossing our fingers that somehow Nature — the economy upon which all others depend — will defy both physics and maths and continue to bail us out forever. As Fleming put it,^[viii]

Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion.

In this context, then, it’s no surprise to be hearing increasingly shrill, desperate alarm from scientists around the world as they observe the natural world crumbling under the impossible, ever-growing pressure. As I write, the latest report announced that 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles have been annihilated since 1970. Put starkly, most of the wild nature that was here fifty years ago is gone. And still we seek to grow the human economy, and cheer when that growth accelerates.^[ix]

Similarly, the inherently conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their Global Warming of 1.5ºC report, which makes it abundantly clear that the unfolding physical realities studied by climate science are dramatically outpacing the policies notionally intended to address them. They find that we must halve emissions in the next twelve years, and so feel forced to call for “rapid and far-reaching … unprecedented” transformation in the economy.^[x]

Hence it has become impossible to be simultaneously realistic about both the political climate and the science of climate. The two stubbornly refuse to reconcile, so we are forced to decide which carries more weight, and then be profoundly unrealistic about the other.

To take present policy seriously demands a total rejection of the science. To take the science seriously demands a total rejection of the policy on the table. And so grassroots movements like the Extinction Rebellion and Climate Mobilization are emerging — the realists of a larger reality.

They recognise that the dominant politico-economic paradigm leads to nothing but a literal dead end. We are on the cusp of a fundamental shift, for better or worse — either we change direction or we end up where we are headed.

It’s interesting then that a change of direction is exactly what electorates have been voting for, or at least trying to. Globalisation and neoliberalism are not only destroying our collective future, but have also all-but-destroyed the present for many, as the neofeudalism termed ‘austerity’ continues to bite. The common factor behind unexpected election results like Trump in the US, Brexit and Corbyn in the UK and Bolsonaro in Brazil appears to be desperate rejection of the establishment and the status quo.

Unfortunately, in such times, when more and more people are struggling to support their families, and losing faith in the dominant stories of what is important, the far right has a track record of providing simple answers. It is important to remember that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler didn’t only consolidate power on the basis of lies and fear — they also raised wages, addressed unemployment and improved working conditions.

To effectively challenge the drift into fascism, then, we need to present an alternative politico-economic vision that can restore identity, pride and economic well-being. We need to tell a beautiful story of how we will make the future better for the desperate, rather than a fearful one. To provide a grounded, compelling alternative to a future I have no desire to live through.

This is what Fleming devoted his life to developing. Fifty years ago he saw the central dilemma of our times approaching, and devoted his life to facing the inevitable question — what might a life-sustaining, nourishing economy look like, after the impending end of economic growth.

This culminated in his posthumous 2016 book Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.

Therein, he reminds us of just how unusual today’s ‘ordinary’ is, and how profoundly unrealistic it is to pin our hopes on market capitalism — an economic system that has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and is already not only destroying its own foundations, but those of life on Earth. In his words,^[xi]

The Great Transformation has already happened.

 

It was the revolution in politics, economics and society that came with the market economy, and which hit its stride in Britain in the late eighteenth century.

 

Most of human history had been bred, fed and watered by another sort of economy, but the market has replaced, as far as possible, the social capital of reciprocal obligation, loyalties, authority structures, culture and traditions with exchange, price and the impersonal principles of economics.

This historical context is critical. The New Economy that we need is, in many ways, the Old Economy.

It is time to rediscover the ways human beings related to each other for hundreds of thousands of years before we were ripped into isolation by the brief historical anomaly of market capitalism, into which all of us alive today happened to be born.

As Mont put it,^[xii]

[The New Economy] is a groundswell to relying on a memory harbored in our hearts to make real a vision of humans returning to deep relationships with earth, spirit, and each other, that is constantly evolving and changing, while staying acutely cognizant of the fact that we must relearn how to keep ourselves alive without capitalism and extraction.

Fleming took that dear memory harbored in our hearts and wrote it large across the page. “We know what we need to do,” he writes, “We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow.”

His sparkling, tantalising writing has become a touch-stone for thousands of communities around the world who are putting it into practice, with his startling seven-point protocol for an economics based in trust, loyalty and local diversity one of the key factors in the birth of the now-global Transition Towns movement.

Drawing on the work of the likes of Edgar Cahn, Fleming provides the radical but historically-proven sequel to today’s capitalism: focusing neither on the growth nor de-growth of the market economy, but on huge expansion of the ‘informal’ or non-monetary economy — the ‘core economy’ that keeps our society alive, even today. This is the economy of what we love: of the things we naturally do when not otherwise compelled, of music, play, family, volunteering, activism, friendship and home.

Refreshingly — uniquely perhaps, among modern economists — he argues that the key to sustaining a post-growth economy is culture and community. Those extensive holidays of former times were far from a product of laziness. Rather they were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for. ‘Spare time’ spent in feasting, performing, collaborating and merrymaking together formed the basis of communal bonding, membership and trust. As one of his readers put it — when productivity improves, “in our system you have a problem; in Fleming’s system you have a party”.

These shared cultural ties then bind people together in cooperation, support and solidarity, the essential foundations for the communities which have thrived throughout history in the absence of economic growth or full-time employment. As Fleming writes,^[xiii]

The [future] economy will depend for its existence on a deep foundation in culture.

 

It is possible to live without it, but only for a time, like holding your breath under water.

This is a key lesson for our organising and our community work. With its rare blend of charm and rigour, Fleming’s writing reminds us that nurturing the core economy back to health — getting to know people, enjoying time together and helping to provide for each other’s basic needs — is not merely some quaint and obsolete shared longing, but an absolute practical priority.

Over the past couple of centuries, this core economy has been much weakened, as the ever-growing stresses of precarious employment and rising prices have left people with less time and energy for friends, family and fun. But as we in communities around the world spend our days relearning how to seek our security in each other rather than in money, we notice that the unfolding collapse of the omnicidal growth economy becomes less something to fear, and more something to celebrate.

We think less about what we might stand to lose and far more about the joys we had already lost and are slowly learning to regain, together. At long last we are remembering how to build a world in which, as David put it, “there will be time for music.”

__

Shaun Chamberlin authored the Transition movement’s second book, The Transition Timeline, and has served as both chair of the Ecological Land Co-operative and a director of Global Justice Now. He is the executive producer of 2020 film The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? and editor of several books, including David Fleming’s posthumous Lean Logic and Surviving the Future.

[i] Mont, S. (2018). Introduction to the next economy. Tikkun, Volume 33, Number 3:16-17.

[ii] Fleming, D. (2016). Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy (p. 129). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

[iii] Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Available at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

[iv] Fleming, D. (2016). Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy (p. 75). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

[v] These claims have a long history. The Democratic Review, impressed by the new technologies, predicted in 1853 that by 1900, “men and women will then have no harassing cares or laborious duties to fulfil. Machinery will perform all work — automata will direct them. The only task of the human race will be to make love, study and be happy”.

[vi] Graeber, D. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. STRIKE!, Issue 3. Available at: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs

[vii] In the words of Prof. Albert Bartlett, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” His legendary ‘Arithmetic, Population and Energy’ lecture is one of the most important ever recorded and widely available online, e.g. at: https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html

[viii] Fleming, D. (2016). Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy (p. 180). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

[ix] WWF (2018). Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A. (Eds). Gland, Switzerland.

[x] IPCC (2018). Global Warming of 1.5ºC, Summary for Policymakers (p.21). Available at: http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf

[xi] Fleming, D. (2016). Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy (p. 179). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

[xii] Mont, S. (2018). Introduction to the next economy. Tikkun, Volume 33, Number 3:16-17.

[xiii] Fleming, D. (2016). Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy (p. 40). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Originally published in the Fall/Winter 2016 edition of the Kosmos journal

I confess — I love Magnum ice creams!

Yet surely as a good, responsible eco-citizen, I must be aware that these relatively cheap, beautifully packaged nuggets of deliciousness are inescapably products of the industrial system that is destroying all that I hold dear?

That Magnums are produced by Unilever, not only the world’s biggest ice cream manufacturer but the world’s third largest multinational consumer goods company, associated with deforestation for palm oil, exploitation of workers, the promotion of unsustainable agriculture, factory farming, the use of tax havens, lobbying against GM labelling and so on…

I don’t mean to imply that they’re the worst offenders. It’s just that I happen to particularly enjoy their product (despite being aware that there’s no actual cream in it). For me, it’s what Unilever’s marketing team would doubtless term a ‘wicked indulgence.’

So I should stop eating them, right? I should overcome my baser urges and live a lifestyle that accords with my values and beliefs?

Well, there is certainly an argument for that, and I know many friends who struggle and expend huge energy and willpower on resisting their deep desire for Magnums, or bacon, or jet flights or whatever… And even feel resentment towards those who don’t do the same.

Occasionally, of course, they give in and then feel huge guilt, and maybe greater ill will towards those who seem to consume without even feeling this inner conflict.

With this approach, it is little wonder that we environmentalists are often characterised as tedious killjoys who wouldn’t know how to enjoy ourselves in a vegan chocolate factory. Perhaps it is even fair. After all, there is nothing inspiring about the struggles of a divided and conflicted self. And there is nothing less inspiring than ‘shoulds.’ With the possible exception of ‘should nots’…

But what is the alternative, if we are mindful of the consequences of our actions? How can we live lives of full joy, without sacrifice, guilt or wilful ignorance? For me, what works is letting the two sides of my self talk to each other. The part that desires the Magnum and the part that does not desire the consequences. Rather than choosing between them, I let them talk it out. Surprisingly, perhaps, they seem to come to an agreement quickly enough.

So most of the time, I choose not to eat Magnums for the simple reason that I could not do so with my whole heart. Part of me would indeed feel sad for the consequences I see to my actions, and while I might be able to shut down that part of myself — to quiet the voice of that awareness in me — in doing so I lose much of the joy of the experience. And if only part of me could enjoy that meal, I would be bringing about those negative consequences without even fully appreciating the pleasures. To play a part in the death of the world for the sake of filling an empty, joyless hole is surely the saddest of fates.

But, just occasionally, I do eat them, and I do so wholeheartedly, taking full delight and hedonistic pleasure in the sensory extravaganza. Not because I have successfully quelled or overcome my morals, but because I have integrated them.

Maybe on that day I am tired or heartbroken from a defeat. Perhaps all parts of me know that the simple pleasures of the indulgence will help revive my spirits and reinvigorate my soul and my work for a more beautiful world. Nothing wrong in that. But before making the purchase, I will ask myself a simple, honest question: Would those exploited workers, those ruined ecosystems, begrudge me this pleasure?

With over 10,000 Magnums sold every hour in Britain, one may not make much difference, and perhaps the boost it gives me counts for more than the damage done. On the whole, it is thoughtless habitual purchases that make up the bulk of the problem, not mindful one-offs. Most of the time, I prefer to find sustenance in other things but once in a while I find that my best understanding of those victims hears them saying “go on, just one!”

And then I enjoy the pleasure deeply and thoroughly and without a hint of guilt, while using it to remind myself of my commitment to working for change. As I understand Native American nations have it, in eating something, you take on a responsibility for the wellbeing of the people and systems involved in producing it.

And, in truth, over the long term, I find that I desire such indulgences less and less often. Without any conflict, moralising, denial or shoulds.

Yet what if someone tells me that Magnums are even more damaging than I realised, that my occasional pleasures are contributing to still greater evils than those I listed above?

Happily, I find that having banished shame, such new information becomes entirely welcome — it can only help me shape a life that is more in tune with my deepest desires. Hopefully, one day I will find similar pleasure in refreshments that support the world I wish to inhabit.

But hold on. I wholeheartedly enjoy the fruits of the system while working to change it? I eat Magnums, yet if I could eliminate the system that produces them I would do so in a heartbeat? Doesn’t this make me a shocking hypocrite?

Well, when faced with accusations of hypocrisy, I turn to my dear late mentor David Fleming’s just-published masterpiece Lean Logic,¹

If an argument is a good one, dissonant deeds do nothing to contradict it.

 

In fact, the hypocrite may have something to be said for him… There is no reason why he should not argue for standards better than he manages to achieve in his own life.

 

Indeed, it would be worrying if his ideals were not better than the way he lives.

Shaun reads from Lean Logic at the book’s launch event in London, September 21, 2016

Most of us were born into an ecocidal culture. And when advocating that the culture we came from and depend upon changes its ways, accusations of hypocrisy often follow. Yet if our response to this is to withdraw from the discussion until we have “set our own house in order” and developed a perfect lifestyle, we will disappear from the conversation altogether, taking the ideals we believe in along with us.

In truth, accusations of hypocrisy themselves tend to be rather hypocritical — if no hypocrites were permitted to hold opinions, there would likely be no opinions at all. And besides, you can’t win anyway. Even if you did somehow manage to align your life perfectly with your ideals — in truth more likely to involve crushing your more ambitious ideals than achieving your every dream — you still would not find yourself beyond criticism.

I remember Jeremy Leggett’s early insider’s critique of the oil industry being dismissed as insignificant and ill-informed. Then he put his money where his mouth was and started a renewable energy company — long before it was fashionable — which has proved a great success. Did the criticism stop? No, now the refrain is, “Well, you would say that, you own a renewable energy company.”

Or as Russell Brand pithily put it,

When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter. Now I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite.

 

I’m beginning to think they just don’t want inequality on the agenda.

And of course, if you actually achieved a life of harmony and peace, you’d disqualify yourself. They would tell you that you’re ‘a special person’ (like Gandhi perhaps, or Mandela, or Enric Duran) and that it’s unrealistic to ask the rest of us to emulate such holy behaviour.

No, accusations of hypocrisy should be seen for what they generally are: irrelevant. While a friend or your own conscience might helpfully challenge you to perceive ways in which your lifestyle could better match your aims, an adversary just wants to distract attention from the truth you speak. Don’t take such accusations to heart, and don’t let them distract you from the work of your heart. Failure to live up to a truth doesn’t make it any less true, less worth striving for, or less worth defending.

Once we hear all the voices inside us — and set aside unfriendly ones accusing us of hypocrisy — we can start to live a full expression of who we are; whoever we are, and whatever others think of it. This is so deeply nourishing and refreshing, for when I fight my desires — fight myself — they fight back, constantly draining my willpower. But when I acknowledge and hear them, they return the favour by bringing me energy and sustenance.

The energy those old conflicts were sucking from our souls is released to the part of us that is always yearning to live and explore, always striving to create the next most beautiful version of what we can be, always seeking to uncover deeper truths and unleash new energies and potentials.

These are the endless challenges and rewards of a life fully lived, and I find that in following where they lead, unexpected connections are often revealed….

Over recent years, that striving has been calling me to face my grief, and especially the deep grief that many share — or suppress — at the death in our world. At the humans killed unnecessarily, and the non-humans too. At the deaths now numbered not in hundreds, thousands, or even millions, but in entire species, as even birth is denied to many beautiful forms of life. At the ‘endlings’ — the last individuals of their species standing as the final hopeless bulwarks against extinction.

Death seems out of control. But as I worked on David Fleming’s lifework in the aftermath of his own death, I discovered that he speaks to this too.²

A natural system lies in tension between life and death: death is as important to it as life.

 

A lot of death is a sign of a healthy large population.

Too much death is a sign that it is in danger; it is not coping; its terms of coexistence with its habitat are breaking down.

Too little death is a sign of the population exploding to levels which will destroy it and the ecology that supports it.

No death means that the system is already dead.

 

 

Expressing faith in the sanctity of human life is a licence — in a series of little, well-intentioned, self-evident steps — to kill the ecology that supports it.

The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win.

Death, then, is not our adversary. Death has its rightful place, as the partner of life, and it always will.

No, our true enemy is far more pernicious, lurking in the shadows, shrinking from the light.

It is not death but undeath that we must face down — the true realm of zombies, of vampires. That living death that hollows all joy, pleasure and meaning from our souls even as our bodies continue to feast on all around us. The cold, relentless, insatiable hunger working to consume all that we hold dear, and taking no pleasure in that work.

This is the enemy of nature and of life. The enemy of art and of love.

And this is the very undeath that our native culture seems to specialise in, as it urges us perpetually towards joyless, guilt-riddled consumption. As it values the number of breaths in our life far more than the amount of life in our breaths. As it places inside its children values that can turn the desire to heal our world into a burden of guilt and self-denial so heavy that the decision to buy an ice cream becomes exhausting. We carry the wetiko culture within us.³

Yes, this contagion is the enemy. And the antidote is not weary admonitions nor endless reams of data on the destruction it is wreaking.

Perhaps it is too late to head off the worst of the consequences. Perhaps not. But this I am sure of: the antidote is joy. A life wholehearted.

The gifts of the tingling intensity of full life — the simple wonders of a path untainted by despair, corruption or surrender. Delighting unapologetically in the exquisite tastes of food, the truth and beauty ringing in music or a beautiful day and, for me, always the dancing — my wild, beloved dancing.

So let the different voices in your heart converse and converge. Then eat the Magnum, or don’t. Fight for what you believe in, or accept things as they are. But create a life that you choose wholeheartedly. This is utopia today, and perhaps the only utopia there has ever been.

Endnotes

1) Fleming, D. (2016). Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive it (p.203). Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, VT.

2) Fleming, D. (2016). Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (p.88). Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, VT.

3) Ladha, A., & Kirk, M. (2016). “Seeing wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transition“. Kosmos journal, Spring/Summer, 22-27.

Originally published on openDemocracy on 26 October 2016

The original article can be found here

Economics shapes the bulk of our waking hours, so how do we reclaim control of our lives from such a dismal science?

—

As my friend David Fleming once wrote, conventional economics ‘puts the grim into reality’.

Something of a radical, back in the 1970s Fleming was involved in the early days of what is now the Green Party of England and Wales. Frustrated by the mainstream’s limited engagement with ecological thinking, he urged his peers to learn the language and concepts of economics in order to confound the arguments of their opponents.

By the time I met Fleming in 2006, he had practised what he preached and earned himself a PhD in Economics. But he never lost his aversion for the ‘economism’ that presumes that matters of public policy, employment, ecology and culture can be interpreted mainly in terms of mathematical abstractions.

Worse, he noted that even the word ‘economics’ has the power to make these life-defining topics seem impenetrable, none-of-our-business and, of all things, boring. Fleming’s work was all about returning them to their rightful owners—those whose lives are shaped by them: all of us.

Fleming was a key influence on the birth of the New Economics Foundation and Transition Towns movement, but it was only in the aftermath of his sudden death in 2010 that I discovered the breadth of the powerfully-different vision of economics that underpinned his life. On his home computer I discovered a manuscript for the book he had been preparing to publish after thirty years’ work entitled Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It.

Reminding us that our present growth-based market economy has only been around for a couple of hundred years (and is already hitting the buffers), Fleming’s lifework looks to the great majority of human history for insight: “We know what we need to do,” he writes, “We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow.”

What he found was that—in the absence of a perpetually-growing economy—community and culture are key. He quotes, for example, the historian Juliet Schor’s view of working life in the Middle Ages:

“The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking

 

…All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors.

 

The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”

Reading this took me back to a childhood fed by TV programmes like the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, which had informed me that by now robots would be doing all the menial work, leaving humans free to relax and enjoy an abundance of leisure time.

So it came as a shock to realise that the good folk of the Middle Ages were enjoying far more of it than we are in our technologically-advanced society. What gives? Fleming explains,

“In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly-equally-shared leisure time—say, a three-day working week, or less—is hard to sustain, because any individuals who decide to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (by working longer hours than the competition they can produce a greater quantity of goods and services, and thus earn the same wage by selling each one more cheaply).

 

These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely.

 

This is what puts the grim into reality.”

So in an economy like ours, a technological advance that doubles the amount of useful work a person can do in a day becomes a problem rather than a benefit. It tends to put half the workers out of work, turning them into a potential drain on the state.

Of course, in theory all the workers could just work half-time and still produce all that is needed, much as Tomorrow’s World predicted. But in practice they are often afraid of having their pay cut, or losing their jobs to a stranger who is willing to work longer hours, so they can’t take the steps needed to solve their collective economic problems and enjoy more leisurely lives. Instead, people are kept busy partly through what anthropologist David Graeber memorably characterised as “bullshit jobs.”

How, then, can we feed, house and support ourselves without working as relentlessly as we do today? Fleming’s work explores the answer, making a rigorous case that we need to get beyond mainstream economists’ ideas of minimising ‘spare labour’ if we are to sustain a post-growth economy. This ‘spare labour’ is what most of us would call spare time—a welcome part of a life well lived rather than a ‘problem of unemployment.’

He highlights that the holidays of former times were far from a product of laziness. Rather they were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for. ‘Spare time’ spent in feasting, performing, collaborating and merrymaking together formed the basis of community bonding and membership. Those shared cultural ties hold people together, even in the absence of economic growth and full-time employment. When productivity improves, as one of his readers put it, “in our system you have a problem, in Fleming’s system you have a party.”

Under the current economic paradigm, the only way to keep unemployment from rising to the point where the population can’t be supported is through endless economic growth, which thus becomes an obligation. So we are damned if we grow and damned if we don’t, since endless growth will eventually cross every conceivable biophysical boundary and destroy the planet’s ability to support us. That’s why, in practice, we just keep growing and cross our fingers that somehow it will all work out. As Fleming writes:

“The reduction of a society and culture to dependence on mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well on the way to destroying it.

 

Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion.”

Technological fixes do not help, as we are all discovering to our cost. We are already working ever harder, and with ever more advanced technologies, yet the hope of a better future dwindles day-by-day. Take heart though, for when the current paradigm transparently provides nothing but a dead end, we can be sure that we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift.

Fleming provides a radical but historically-proven alternative: focusing neither on the growth or de-growth of the market economy, but the huge expansion of the ‘informal’ or non-monetary economy—the ‘core economy’ that allows our society to exist, even today. This is the economy of what we love: of the things we naturally do when not otherwise compelled, of music, play, family, volunteering, activism, friendship and home.

At present, this core non-monetary economy is much weakened, pushed out and wounded by the invasion of the market. Fleming’s work demonstrates that nurturing it back to health is not just some quaint and obsolete sharing longing but an absolute practical priority.

The key challenge of today, for Fleming, is to repair the atrophied social structures on which most human cultures have been built; to rediscover how to rely on each other rather than on money alone. Then life after the painful yet inevitable end to the growth of the monetary economy will start to seem feasible again, and our technological progress can bring us the fruits it always promised.

Lean Logic finally reached posthumous publication with Chelsea Green Publishing in September 2016, alongside a paperback version I edited out from it called Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.Needless to say, both books are deeply controversial, overthrowing as they do the central paradigm of our economy. As the writer Jonathon Porritt said at a launch event for the books last month, “there is no conventional political party anywhere in the world that doesn’t have economic growth as the underpinning foundation, but David Fleming developed unique, astonishing ideas about resilience and good lives for people without growth.”

It’s increasingly clear that this is the conversation we all need to have, and Fleming’s compelling, grounded vision of a post-growth world is rare in its ability to inspire optimism in the creativity and intelligence of human beings to nurse our economy, ecology and culture back to health. I am proud to have played a part in bringing it to the world; in fact, it might just be the best thing I have done.

Originally published in the Carbon Management peer-reviewed journal on 16th April 2015

The formal version of record can be found here

This is the Abstract, Executive Summary and Introduction of the paper. Full text available here.

—

Reconciling scientific reality with realpolitik: moving beyond carbon pricing to TEQs – an integrated, economy-wide emissions cap

Abstract

This article considers why price-based frameworks may be inherently unsuitable for delivering unprecedented global emissions reductions while retaining the necessary public and political support, and argues that it is time to instead draw on quantity-based mechanisms such as TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas).

TEQs is a climate policy framework combining a hard cap on emissions with the use of market mechanisms to distribute quotas beneath that cap.

The significant international research into TEQs is summarised, including a 2008 UK government feasibility study, which concluded that the scheme was “ahead of its time”. TEQs would cover all sectors within a national economy, including households, and findings suggest it could act as a catalyst for the socio-technical transitions required to maximise wellbeing under a tightening cap, while generating national common purpose towards innovative energy demand reductions.

Finally, there are reflections on the role that the carbon management community can play in further developing TEQs and reducing the rift between what climate science calls for and what politics is delivering.

Executive Summary

Framing

• Politics is not reflecting the urgency of climatology findings.
• Interdisciplinary analysis shows that carbon pricing is an unsuitable policy framework to guide the unprecedented emissions trajectory required.

Carbon pricing cannot deliver four essential features of an effective climate policy framework:

• Ensuring real and radical emissions reductions in practice.
• Facilitating public/political acceptability for the implementation of such cuts.
• Embedding a longer-term perspective into societal decision-making.
• Integrating cross-sector engagement with intrinsic motivation and society wide co-operation.

An alternative policy framework: TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas)

• TEQs is similar to a national electronic rationing scheme for energy, but with legally tradable allowances. It could meet the four criteria outlined above.
• It combines downstream engagement with upstream enforcement and would cover all sectors of a national economy, including households.
• It would act as an umbrella framework, ensuring a hard cap on emissions and supporting other climate policy.
• Research into the scheme suggests that it may be expected to meet with greater public acceptability than carbon pricing frameworks, as it is a progressive scheme that would safeguard entitlements to energy while leaving households to manage their consumption as they see fit.
• TEQs draws on principles from social psychology in engaging a nation’s ingenuity in reducing energy demand. It attempts to define new norms of acceptable carbon consumption and create a clear shared goal, generating common purpose around intrinsic shared desires to overcome climate change and retain secure access to essential energy services.

A political history of TEQs

• TEQs was first developed in 1996.
• A UK government feasibility study in 2008 declared it “ahead of its time” on grounds of cost and public acceptability, and so the government withdrew from funding further research at that time, although expressing continued interest.
• Substantial research since, including 2011’s high profile cross-party parliamentary report, has challenged these negative conclusions.

Conclusion

• As members of the carbon management community, we must frankly recognise the shortcomings of carbon pricing frameworks.
• Hard cap based schemes are called for, and TEQs is the best-placed to reconcile the rift between science and politics.
• Governments must be challenged on their failure to implement their own carbon targets, and why they do not implement frameworks suited to do so.
• The carbon management community has a key role to play in refining, promoting and driving the implementation of TEQs in a national context.

The paper

Introduction

The essential problem is easily stated: there is a rift in realism. Realism about the findings of climate science demands dramatic and immediate emissions reductions if we are to avoid catastrophic destabilisation of the global climate [1,2]. Anderson and Bows argue that these reductions must be in the region of 10% per annum in industrialised (UNFCCC Annex 1) countries [3,201]. Yet present political reality in these countries says that such reductions are unthinkable [4]. While realists about climatology rightly argue that physical reality ‘bats last’ and does not negotiate, realists within politics argue with equal validity that any approach that tries to radically transform society against society’s wishes will be resented and, soon enough, rejected.

The failure to reconcile these viewpoints is perhaps the greatest obstacle facing the field of carbon management, since without clear agreement about where society is transitioning to, it becomes virtually impossible to effectively enable the sociotechnical changes required, and to retain the necessary public backing. If we are seeking only to tweak the economy for marginal, politically palatable emissions reductions, then carbon pricing might be an appropriate framework. For example, it can serve to stimulate the incremental adoption of ‘low hanging fruit’ such as overdue efficiency improvements [5]. However, climatologists are ever clearer that we require dramatic and unprecedented emissions reductions in order to avoid the worst ravages of climate destabilisation [6].

As Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author Josep G. Canadell recently stated in this journal, “The time has come to truly build carbon management into the deepest inner workings of society” [7]. Canadell goes on to state the common assumption that “no doubt” this should be achieved through carbon pricing. His recognition of the need for a coherent, overarching framework to harness the many facets of climate policy and action towards the goal of dramatic global emissions reductions is entirely justified. However, in this article we raise significant doubts that carbon pricing is the most appropriate candidate to deliver the speed and depth of change required, regardless of whether prices are set via carbon trading (e.g. the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme) or carbon taxation. The dominance of the argument that price-based mechanisms are best able to deliver change in an efficient and cost-effective way [8,9] may be concealing other options from view, but alternatives are both available and much needed.

As is widely recognised in the field of socio-technical transition, in order to achieve deep societal change, the path-dependency and political and cultural lock-in which underpins current carbon usage must be addressed. This requires careful consideration of the multiple levels where change can be directed, and where pressure can be brought to bear [10], in order to nurture individual and organisational agency and develop alternative practices [11,12]. Smith et al. and others within the field note that marginal approaches that “treat regime transformation as monolithic and dominated by rational action” [11] may have been appropriate for addressing problems such as acid rain or water pollution, but are unlikely to succeed when applied to more challenging problems like climate change and resource depletion, which require a range of fundamental, complex and interrelated system changes [11,13]. A fresh approach is therefore needed.

As such, we, the carbon management community, have contributed to the widening rift between science and politics by attempting to respond to the imperatives of climatology with policy interventions that do not reflect the workings of society. As the literature on socio-technical transitions shows, a reconciliation will require action from us all: scientists, policy makers, campaigners and the public [11,12,13,14]. Within academia, we can begin by improving our cross-disciplinary communication, in particular by aligning the latest climate science more closely with findings in the fields of socio-technical transitions, social psychology and climate policy, and vice versa. One of the aims of this Perspectives article is to contribute to this process.

We begin by arguing for certain necessary features that any successful carbon management framework needs to display if it is to enable the scale and depth of changes required, both technically and socially. We consider several ways in which current policy frameworks fail to meet these, and then go on to assess an alternative with significant political and research history – TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) – and whether it demonstrates the required features. Finally, we draw conclusions about appropriate pathways for future climate policy.

Read the full paper here.

Originally published as the editorial of the Fall/Winter 2014 edition of the Kosmos journal

The online version of the editorial can be found here

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And if you want to transform…?

Sometimes we meet a young person who continues to hold a deep place in our minds and hearts long afterwards. I met Shaun briefly at the New Story Summit. It felt as though I had known him forever. The future of humanity and the hope of the world is with such talented and dedicated youth. I want to honor his work by sharing one of his essays.
~ Nancy Roof, editor, Kosmos journal

—

Like all the best tales, ours opens with music, and with Mark Kidel’s Resurgence article Conversation and Crossroads:

Some of the most powerful – and healing – forms of music combine strict ‘ways’ of doing things with free expression and the possibilities of interpretation or improvisation…

 

Wisdom and experience have suggested, in every corner of the world, that excessive self-expression is self-defeating and just as destructive as an over-zealous observance of rules and regulations. There is a need for a middle way which balances ‘hot’ and ‘cool’: the release of deep emotion with the articulacy and sophistication of formal aesthetic structures…

 

Whereas the enjoyment of pleasure was never frowned upon in the African context, it was set within a deeply rooted sense of ethical and aesthetic ‘right behaviour’ (as well as a strongly hierarchical community structure which held potential excess in check, and understood, in a highly sophisticated way, the need to balance creative self-expression with collective interaction and mutual support).

 

In the African and African-American context, the dancer who goes into trance is always being controlled in some sense by a divinity or spirits, so there is an element of ritual theatre which contains the fragility of the individual ego.

 

Similarly, at celebrations, no dancer hogs the floor for longer than a minute or two, reaching a brief climax, but not prolonging the transcendent thrill of near-ecstatic movement and expression beyond what is in some way ‘safe’ or acceptable in terms of strictly personal as opposed to collective expression.

Upon reading this I was powerfully struck by the concept of a community holding an artist safe while he or she explores the wilder reaches of individual expression. As Kidel goes on to argue, the absence of this protective tradition around Western rock music can be seen in the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, who in the context of a culture entranced by individualism, found their lives overwhelmed and consumed by the awesome powers unrestrained artistic expression can unleash.

But these ideas have a far wider application. Rock music has merely reflected western philosophy and culture in its deification of the individual. When existentialism announced that ‘existence precedes essence’ – that we simply exist, and that any meaning we might then attribute to this ‘blank slate’ existence is solely created by ourselves and our own choices – we assumed that the ‘we’ in question must be our individual selves.

Our culture has moved further and further away from any sense of the collective, let alone concepts like oneness with Nature, or with all of creation, or even (Science forbid) God.

And it is this philosophy of ‘individualist existentialism’ – deeply embedded in our culture – that leads to the pervasive story that while some might find their meaning and fulfillment in trying to assure the future of endangered species, or disadvantaged humans, or even life itself, others may find theirs in greed, gluttony and destructiveness. For the true believer, there is no contradiction here because there is no underlying meaning to seek – only individual constructs.

Within the tenets of Western philosophy it appears a logically unassailable position given that everything is fundamentally meaningless and the freedom of the individual is simply self-evident, what possible reason could there be to cease doing whatever I may fancy?

There seem to me to be two key answers to this question. The first is consequences. What I fancy now may not produce what I fancy tomorrow. If I choose to attach meaning or desirability to a reliable electricity supply, or food supply, then there are certain things I should really pay attention to.

But the second is empathy. While we may feel less empathy with beings more different or distant from ourselves, few of us would claim to feel no empathy at all. There is perhaps a sliding scale from total individualism to the sense of oneness with everything that is described in many of the Eastern mystical traditions, as well as among earlier representatives of the Abrahamic religions like Christianity. It is no coincidence that we tend to find individualists despoiling our common environment and those at the holistic end of the scale defending it.

Existentialist individualism argues that one’s position on this scale is a fundamentally meaningless personal decision. Our innate sense of empathy might whisper otherwise, but our scientific understanding of collective consequences like climate change forces us to recognise that even if individual freedom is our sole aim, we still have to change course, as the consequences of our actions will seriously curtail the future choices facing both ourselves and the rest of life on Earth.

Viewed from this perspective, climate change represents the death of passive individualism as a coherent philosophy.

So when Kidel speaks of the highly sophisticated understanding African cultures have of “the need to balance creative self-expression with collective interaction and mutual support”, he is not just talking about a better way to dance, he is speaking of the very cultural wisdom we need to build the future we deserve.

–

An extended version of this piece was first published on Dark Optimism in 2008, with this abridged version first appearing in The Future We Deserve in 2012.

Originally published in The Ecologist on the 21st December 2010

The online version of the article can be found here

Dr. David Fleming, a visionary Green thinker and one of the key whistleblowers on peak oil, has died aged 70. He was a significant figure in the genesis of the UK Green Party, the New Economics Foundation and the Transition Towns movement. His legacy also includes TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas), the energy rationing scheme currently under consideration by the UK Government, his influential book Lean Logic and the real delight and inspiration he gave so freely to all who met him.

David was born on the 2nd January 1940 at Chiddingfold, Surrey, to Norman Bell Beatie Fleming, a Harley Street eye surgeon, and Joan Margaret Fleming, an award-winning crime writer.

After reading History at Trinity College, Oxford from 1959 to 1963, he went on to work in manufacturing, marketing and financial PR before earning an MBA from Cranfield University in 1968.

Despite being an avowed Conservative voter, he was a significant figure in the development of the UK Ecology/Green Party — his flat in Hampstead serving as its party office in the late 70s and early 80s — and urged his contemporaries to learn the language and concepts of economics in order to confound the arguments of their opponents. He practiced what he preached, and in 1979 began studies in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, completing an MSc in 1983 and his PhD in 1988.

But Fleming’s true passion and genius was for exploring and understanding that mysterious thing ‘community’, in all its disparate forms. He admired tradition and ceremony for their ability to engender cultural stability, and was a lifelong member of deep-rooted groups as diverse as the English Folk Dance and Song Society, his local church in Hampstead, the Oxford and Cambridge Club, and ancient guild The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. He was a passionate advocate for the critical importance of pubs, and memorably, when once asked how best to improve the resilience of one’s local community, he answered “join the choir”.

Always something of an intellectual whirlwind, Fleming found time to be Honorary Treasurer and then Chairman of the Soil Association between 1984 and 1991; to help organise ‘The Other Economic Summit‘ (TOES); and to edit the 1997 book The Countryside in 2097 before making a major contribution to the world’s awakening to peak oil.

“The next oil shock?“, Fleming’s April 1999 article for Prospect magazine, argued that the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s most recent report represented a coded message, warning of an impending energy crunch with potentially profound impacts. After publication, to Fleming’s surprise, Fatih Birol — the future Chief Economist of the IEA — suggested a meeting, at which Birol intimated that “you are right… there are maybe six people in the world who understand this”. This encounter gave greater impetus to Fleming’s drive to see an effective energy rationing scheme put in place. Having first published on his TEQs scheme in 1996, 2008 saw a UK Government funded pre-feasibility study into the idea, which will be followed by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil’s report in January 2011.

Yet perhaps Fleming’s key focus over recent years has been the preparation of his magnum opus, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, the work that pulls the various strands of his thinking together into one cohesive vision. As those who knew him recall with sighs and smiles, his perfectionism had led to numerous delays in the publication date, but Fleming was making final preparations for publication before his death. It will now be published posthumously, thanks to the determination of the many readers Fleming asked to comment on early drafts, many of whom claim it as a key influence on their work and thought. A good example is Transition Towns movement founder Rob Hopkins, who once humbly described his own work as “simply taking Heinberg’s insights into peak oil, Holmgren on permaculture and Fleming on community resilience, rolling them together and making the whole thing comprehensible”.

Indeed, so many of the seeds Fleming planted will continue to bear fruit long after his untimely passing. In his wry way, he would often describe himself as having failed at everything he turned his hand to, but the truth was anything but. As a young Transitioner put it, remembering his first meeting with Fleming, “I was left thinking that this was the sort of man I would aspire to be”.

Fleming was a sparkling conversationalist, an often hilarious writer and a remarkably attentive listener. Compassionate and encouraging, almost all who met him were utterly charmed. The vast wealth of reading and knowledge he could call upon, and the unusual connections he drew in the course of any conversation (or helter-skelter lecture) led him to produce content fit for weeks of dissection, if sometimes too rich for immediate absorption. Fortunately, Lean Logic should preserve his thought in a format well suited to lengthy contemplation.

Fleming is survived by his sister Penelope, his niece Lucy, nephew Ben and his extended family.

Dr. David Fleming (2 January 1940 – 28 November 2010)

More on Fleming’s work at: www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil launch their report into TEQs on January 18th 2011.

My more personal tribute to David, and links to the other tributes paid online, can be found here.

Originally published at The Oil Drum: Europe on Apr 05, 2007

Reaction and comments on the article can be found here

The general consensus view on coal supplies has long been that we have hundreds of years of the stuff left, and that oil and gas depletion are the pressing concerns. However, dissenting voices are emerging. Canadian geologist David Hughes recently claimed that “peak coal looks like it’s occurred in the Lower 48 (US states)“, and the consensus position on coal is also called into serious question by the Coal: Resources and Future Production report just released by the Energy Watch Group in Germany. I present a summary of its findings here.

Reserves

The report highlights that the “proved reserves at year end” published in the most recent BP Statistical Review of World Energy in June 2006 are stated as being for year end 2005, but are actually based on the latest World Energy Council (WEC) assessments, which contain data for the end of 2002.

So our best figures on this are actually over four years old. And our worst figures? Well, some haven’t been updated in 15 years (China) and some in up to 40 years (Vietnam, Afghanistan).

But really the key message in the global data lies in the rate at which reserves estimates have been revised downwards. As Peak Oilers well know, conventional wisdom has it that reserves will increase as more exploration takes place and prices rise. Yet, in truth, estimates for global coal resources have been consistently revised down, and by 55% over the past 25 years, from 10 trillion tons hce (hard coal equivalent) in 1980 to around 4.5 trillion tons hce in 2005. Certain countries (including Germany and the UK) have been revised down by over 90% in this period. The UK reported proved recoverable reserves of 45bn tons in WEC 1980, but these were continually revised downwards to reach only 0.22bn tons by the latest report. Cumulative UK production in this period amounted to only approx 1.8bn tons.

Even Poland, the biggest coal producer in the EU, reports reserves revised down by 50% over the last 10 years. Since production alone cannot explain such revisions, they are deemed likely to be due to improvements in data. The chief exceptions to this rule are India and Australia, both showing significant upward revisions, but as we have seen the global trend is firmly downward. Only South Africa shows continuously shrinking reserves roughly in line with cumulative production. Globally, the report concludes that data quality is very poor and that these downward revisions must be expected to continue.

China

So back to China, the world’s largest producer, with the fourth largest reported reserves globally. The 2006 Statistical Review of World Energy credits China with 55 years of remaining reserves at current production rates (depleting its reserves at almost 2% per annum). But as previously mentioned, the Statistical Review faithfully reproduces proved reserves figures which were last changed in 1992 (note that China’s cumulative production in the 15 years since comes to about 20% of those stated reserves), so we can knock 15 years off that number straight away, reducing the remaining total reserves to 40 years’ worth. The Energy Watch Group report gives projected production profiles showing that China is likely to experience peak coal production in the next 10-15 years, followed by a steep decline. It should also be noted that these production profiles do not take into account uncontrolled coal fires which — according to satellite based estimates — add around 5-10% to regular consumption. Since China’s production dwarfs that of any other country (being almost double that of the second largest producer, the USA) the global coal production peak will be heavily influenced by China’s production profile.

Types of Coal

Now, before I outline the situation in the USA, which comfortably holds the world’s largest reserves of coal, it may be instructive to distinguish the different types of coal. There are four basic types, starting with the most energy-rich — anthracite (about 30 MJ/kg), bituminous coal (18.8-29.3 MJ/kg), sub-bituminous coal (8.3-25 MJ/kg) and lignite (5.5-14.3 MJ/kg). Those towards the anthracite end of the scale are often termed ‘hard coal’, and those towards the lignite end of the scale as ‘soft coal’, although the exact definition of these terms varies. The softest coals are sometimes termed ‘brown coal’.

USA

The USA, then, as we have all heard, has reported proven coal reserves that would allow continued production at current rates for more than 200 years. Three federal states (Wyoming, Montana, Illinois) hold about 60% of US coal reserves, but the low production rates relative to reported reserves in Montana and Illinois cast some doubt on the reliability or suitability of those reported reserves. As many of these reserves are of low quality, with high sulphur content and/or other drawbacks, it may be considered doubtful that they will ever be produced. Measured in terms of produced tons per miner, US productivity steadily increased until 2000, but has declined since, which also implies that ‘easy coal’ is running short.

The USA had passed peak production of anthracite (by far the rarest form) by 1950 and peaked in bituminous coal in 1990, but sub-bituminous coal more than made up for this decline in terms of tonnage. However, the US has now switched from being a net exporter to a net importer of steam coal and the report argues that total (volumetric) US coal production will peak between 2020 and 2030. However, due to the lower energy content of softer coals, the total energy content of annual US coal production actually peaked in 1998.

Global Picture

So, having looked at the world’s biggest coal producer and the holder of the world’s biggest reserves, we may perhaps turn our attention to the global picture.

Six countries (USA, Russia, India, China, Australia, South Africa) hold about 85% of world coal reserves, when this is measured in terms of energy content. According to the latest assessment by the WEC, total world reserves at the end of 2002 stood at 479bn tons of anthracite and bituminous coal, 272bn tons of sub-bituminous coal and 158bn tons of lignite, although for countries without large reserves, it is worth noting that only 15% of coal produced globally is exported, the rest being consumed domestically. Australia alone is responsible for almost 40% of global coal exports.

According to the Energy Watch Group, global coal production can increase for 10-15 years (mainly driven by China), but then production of anthracite and bituminous coal will peak around 2020 at a production rate around 30% higher than at present. Lignite production is predicted to peak somewhere between 2050 and 2060. However, as the quality of coal produced will be declining continuously the world coal energy peak is projected to come around 2025. It is also important to note that ‘peak coal exports’ should come even earlier, as lower-energy-density coals are not worth transporting long distances.

When we compare this with the scenarios (represented by the dashed and the solid line) from the IEAs 2006 World Energy Outlook (WEO) we get the following graph (click to enlarge):

As we can see, according to this report the WEO reference scenario is unrealistic, and only the production in the WEO alternative policy scenario (which assumed political measures constraining coal due to fears over greenhouse gas emissions) is actually feasible. The Energy Watch Group’s report, however, is not considering potential policy constraints, and is describing only what production may be physically possible.

I must stress that one of the key findings of this report is that data quality is very poor globally, and so all of the findings should be taken with that caveat, but the trends do seem clear. Indeed, we sent a copy of this report to Richard Heinberg and he has revealed that a Dutch study-in-progress using different criteria has reached preliminary results confirming this report’s findings. And the poor data quality is itself hardly reassuring for an energy source which is becoming increasingly central to our global future.

This report clearly carries many serious implications, but for now I’ll just share the information and leave these to be discussed on TOD. Further analysis of the report has also recently been released in Heinberg’s March MuseLetter.