[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Looking for Roong Thisdara

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (November 26 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


There have been many times, during the two and a half years I've been
writing posts for The Archdruid Report, when I've found myself staring
at a blank computer screen of a Wednesday morning, wondering what on
Earth I can say that my readers might find even remotely interesting.
Happily, such times have been scarce this November. A passing reference,
in my post two weeks ago, to my dissatisfaction with a presentation on
the Transition Town movement brought a flurry of comments asking me to
say more about that; I did so last week, and fielded another flurry of
comments as well as some lively critiques on other blogs.

The core argument of last week's post centered on the possibility of
building a better future by deliberate planning, and many of the
comments and critiques took issue with my suggestion that this is not
only impossible but counterproductive. While most of these latter noted
that they were participants in the Transition Town movement, the ideas
they expressed in that context are anything but unique to that movement;
rather, it expresses a consensus that extends through most of the peak
oil scene, and indeed, most of contemporary society. Despite its
popularity, though, this confidence in our ability to plan the future
seems woefully misplaced to me, and the reasons that have forced me to
dissent from the consensus may be worth discussing here.

Trying to plan a way out of the crisis of industrial society is an old
habit. Back in the 1970s, when the challenge posed by the limits to
growth was first showing up on the radar screens of our collective
discourse, a great deal of discussion centered on how global planning
could back humanity away from the brink; since then, similar plans on
various scales - local, regional, national, global - have appeared at
regular intervals. The durable Lester Brown, to name only one of these
would-be planners, released the original version of his Plan B in 2003;
he's now on version 3.0, and further versions will no doubt be
forthcoming in due time.

A double helping of irony surrounds all this flurry of planning. If the
crisis we face could be met by making plans, we'd have little to worry
about; the difficulty is that making plans is the easy part. Go digging
in the archives of most American municipalities and you'll find an
energy plan drafted and adopted, after extensive citizen input, in the
1970s, calling for exactly the changes that would have made matters
today much less dire: conservation standards, public transit projects,
zoning changes to reduce the need for cars, and so on. You'll have to
brush a quarter inch of dust off the plan to read it, though, since
nobody has looked at it since the Reagan years, and not one of its
recommendations was still functioning when the housing boom began in the
early 1990s. A certain skepticism toward another round of plans may thus
be in order.

Yet there's a second dimension to the irony, because the recurrent gap
between plan and implementation is not the only difficulty that has to
be faced. The assumption common to all these plans is that it's possible
to anticipate the process of transition to a deindustrial society in
enough detail to make planning meaningful. I suggest that this
assumption is badly in need of a hard second look.

There are two widely held beliefs these days about how we can deal with
the end of the age of petroleum. The first claims that we simply need to
find another energy source as cheap, abundant, and concentrated as
petroleum, and run our society on that instead. The second claims that
we simply need to replace those parts of our society that depend on
cheap, abundant, concentrated energy with others that lack that
dependence, and run our society with them instead. Most people in the
peak oil scene, I think, have caught onto the problem with the first
belief: there is no other energy source available to us that is as
cheap, abundant, and concentrated as petroleum; the fact that we want
one does not oblige the universe to provide us with one, and so we might
as well plan to power our society by harnessing unicorns to treadmills.

The problem with the second belief is of the same order, but it's much
less widely recognized. Toss aside the parts of our society that depend
on cheap, abundant, concentrated energy, and there's nothing left. Nor
are the components needed for a new low-energy society sitting on a
shelf somewhere, waiting to be used; we've got some things that worked
tolerably well in simpler agrarian societies, and some promising new
developments that have been tested on a very small scale and seem to
work so far, but we have nothing like a complete kit. Thus we can't
simply swap out a few parts and keep going; everything has to change,
and we have no way of knowing in advance what changes will be required.

This last point is often missed. One of the people who commented on last
week's post, a software designer by trade, pointed out that he starts
work on a project by envisioning what the new software is going to do,
and then figures out a way to do it; he argued that it makes just as
much sense to do the same thing with human society. A software designer,
though, knows the capabilities of the computers, operating systems, and
computer languages his programs will use; he also knows how similar
tasks have been done by other designers in the past. We don't have any
of those advantages in trying to envision a sustainable future society.

Rather, we're in the position of a hapless engineer tasked in 1947 with
drafting a plan to develop word processing software. At that time,
nobody knew whether digital or analog computers were the wave of the
future; the handful of experimental computer prototypes that existed
then used relays, mechanical linkages, vacuum tubes, and other
soon-to-be-outmoded technologies, while the devices that would actually
make it possible to build computers that could handle word processing
had not yet been invented, or even imagined. Under those conditions, the
only plan that would have yielded any results would consist of a single
sentence: "Invest heavily in basic research, and see what you can do
with the results". Any other plan would have been wasted breath, and the
more detailed the plan, the more useless it would have been.

The difficulty faced by our imaginary engineer is that meaningful
planning can only take place when the basic outlines of the solution are
already known. A different metaphor may help clarify how this works.
Imagine that you suddenly wake up in a hotel room in Edinburgh. A
mysterious woman tells you that you have been drugged and brought there
secretly, it's now December 30, and you have to get a message to someone
you will meet beneath the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square in London
at midnight on New Year's Eve. If you succeed, Earth will be saved and
you will get 100 million Euros. Since you know where you are, where you
have to be, and how much time you have - the clock by the bed says 10 am
- you can easily make plans and carry them out.

Now imagine the same scenario, except that the hotel room could be
anywhere and you have no idea what day or time it is. Until you know
where you are and how much time you have, planning is impossible. When
the mysterious woman leaves, rather than heading for the door, the first
thing you might logically do is to throw open the curtains. The results
determine your next step. If you see the familiar skyline of Edinburgh,
you can proceed at once to make and implement plans; if the vista before
you is the clutter and bustle of an industrial town in Asia, you may
need to learn more before planning becomes possible; if you see two
moons setting in a pink sky above a cityscape of glittering domes, and
the beings walking alongside the canal nearby have pointed ears and
green skin, the one thing you know for certain is that the trip to
Trafalgar Square is going to be interesting!

Now imagine the same scenario, except that the landscape outside has the
pink sky, two moons, and alien promenaders, and the mysterious woman
tells you that you have to get to the local equivalent of Trafalgar
Square by the local equivalent of New Year's Eve. All hope of planning
has just gone out the window. Your only option is to improvise as you
go, try as many options as possible, collect tidbits of information, and
attempt to piece together what you learn into a workable mental model.
Nor will you have any way of knowing whether your model is right or
wrong until you fling yourself out of an ornate airboat, sprint up to
the giant bas-relief of Gresh the Omnivorous at Roong Thisdara right at
the purple of the high red of twelfth Isbil past Eshrey of the rising
calendar, and find the person you need to meet waiting there for you.

Conventional ideas of planning tend to assume situations like the first
scenario I've just outlined, where the problem and the potential
solutions are both clearly visible and the only issue is how to connect
them. More innovative ideas of planning - and it's to the credit of the
peak oil scene that these latter have been very well represented there -
tend to assume situations like the second scenario, where investigation
must precede planning, and then follow along the planning process to
keep it on track, rather like a herdsman's dog trotting alongside a
flock of sheep. As I see it, though, the situation we face at the end of
the petroleum age most resembles the third scenario, where all we have
to go on is a relatively vague idea of what a solution might be like,
success or failure can be known only in retrospect, and improvisation is
the order of the day.

The core fact of the matter, after all, is that what we are trying to
invent here - a society that can support some approximation of modern
technology on a sustainable basis - has never existed on Earth. We have
no working models to go by; all we have, again, is a mix of agrarian
practices that seem to have been sustainable, on the one hand, and some
experiments that seem to be working so far on a very small scale, on the
other. Our job is to piece something together using these, and other
things that don't exist yet, to cope with future challenges we can only
foresee in the most general terms. That leaves us, in terms of the
metaphor, looking for Roong Thisdara when the only thing we know about
it is that it's roughly equivalent to Trafalgar Square.

Now of course it's quite possible to imagine post-industrial communities
and societies in a fair amount of detail, and several imagined futures
of this sort have found enthusiastic followings. The fact that something
can be imagined, though, does nothing to prove that it will work. It's
not too hard to envisage a perpetual motion machine, say, or an
investment that keeps on gaining value forever, and as we've seen, it's
quite possible to build a substantial social movement around belief in
the latter, only to find out the hard way that attractive visions and
passionate beliefs can rest on foundations of empty air. I recognize
that many people find belief in such visions a powerful source of hope
in a difficult time, and I sympathize with their feelings, but if we
allow the desire for emotional comfort to trump the need to face
unwelcome realities, we are in very deep trouble indeed.

There is actually a third irony to all this. As mentioned above, the
last round of energy crises in the 1970s saw a great deal of energy go
into making plans. A great deal of energy also went into improvisation,
in a wide range of fields - notably alternative agriculture, renewable
energy, and home design and construction. The plans have been forgotten;
I don't know of a single one that was still in force a decade down the
road. The improvisations, on the other hand, have not; they include
today's organic intensive gardening, permaculture, most of today's
arsenal of solar energy methods, a range of alternative homebuilding
methods, and much more.

Nobody drew up plans to develop these things, after all; the developers
simply developed them, working things out as circumstances demanded, and
shared what they learned with others as they went. Thus nearly all the
ingredients being inserted into the current crop of plans for the
deindustrial future were themselves the product of improvisation. It
might be worth suggesting on this basis that our best option would be to
skip the plans altogether and get to work on more improvisations.

All the points made here can be phrased in another way: a society is
more like an organism than an artifact, and while artifacts can be
planned and manufactured, organisms must evolve. This last point,
though, presupposes an understanding of the difference between evolution
and the ideologies that have sometimes been dressed up in evolution's
cast-off clothing - an issue that will be central to next week's post.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/11/looking-for-roong-thisdara.html


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