Reversing Urbanization: food system adaptations—Jason Bradford interview—Radio Ecoshock 2019-04-03
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2019-04-30

The wave of humans into cities continues around the world. But what if we can’t find the fossil fuels to support those billions of people, or we can’t use them due to climate damage? Can city-building reverse into a pulse of humanity back to country life? Jason Bradford thinks so. Jason is a biologist, a farmer, and Board President of the Post Carbon Institute. He is here to talk about his latest report “The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification”, available for free.

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/04/when-clouds-cannot-continue-the-great-warming.html

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SHOW DETAILS
I lived on 200 acres in the country, moved to the city, and am now back in a rural village. Is that a common story, and will it become THE common story? Is this predicted movement toward the countryside based more on peak oil theory, or on limitations to carbon emissions required to prevent unsurvivable climate change?

4/5 of Americans and Canadians live in cities, and the movement toward cities is increasing. The number of city dwellers exceeds rural in China, and world-wide. It's brave to predict a reversal. When I read between the lines of this new report, I don’t see a pleasant back-to-the-land adventure. This great simplification could be a wrenching experience driven by panic, and maybe by outright hunger.

On October 31st, 2018, I interviewed French author Jean-Marc Jancovici: “I don’t believe a single second that we are going to keep the standard of living that we have today on Earth, with seven billion people, and just renewables. You can just forget that. It will never happen. Never. We can live only with renewables with five hundred million people, and the standard of living two centuries ago. And we know, because we have already had this experience once. That we know is possible.”

Jason and I discuss the key role of natural gas in modern agribusiness. As a farm manager, Jason was able to write in real options for agriculture, like growing cover crops, and varieties that do not demand natural gas for the drying process (quite common today, and all dependent on harmful fracking).

This report contains a section on “Stress Events to Watch For“. A key food stress event has already occurred, when Russia cut off wheat exports during the drought, heat and fires there in 2010. It’s worth out checking Jason’s other signs of food stress. He doesn’t attempt to put a date on these big changes; our complex system makes that prediction difficult. But sooner or later, due to energy stress and other factors, we cannot sustain the human population, or even a reduced population, without simplification, and de-urbanization.

I'm concerned there could be more soil loss, and more carbon lost from those soils, released to the atmosphere. If this new rural future isn’t careful, that alone could be a powerful driver toward a fatally hotter world. Jason address the dangers of rural “intensification.”

THE GREAT SIMPLIFICATION
This new report predicts “the Great Simplification”—“as we have less energy available, our society will become less complex, characterized by fewer monetary transactions and an increase in subsistence and informal economies.”

How can we know there will be “fewer monetary transactions?” With new information technology, jobs may become temporary contracts as short as a few hours, and more monetary transactions will be carried through a block-chain economy.

Can we know there will be a growth in “informal economies”? Isn’t it equally possible that mass gathering of information will have spawned a formal and almost dictatorial economy? If cash disappears, as it is doing in Sweden, and as India has threatened, then a corporate fascist government could directly control all wealth while attempting to crush “informal economies.” We should not oversimplify the future.

Others point to the experience of Cuba when it was suddenly cut off from both sugar exports and oil imports when the Soviet Union collapsed around 1991.

CLIMATE DESTABILIZATION?
Many environmentalists and energy watchers say we must develop local resources to feed ourselves. Would that make us less flexible if extreme weather events make local production impossible for a few years, say by drought? Won’t we need large food flows to cope with climate change? Bradford isn’t saying the whole economy of food exchange will disappear. My guess is that we will still have areas specializing in wheat or rice for a market.

Of course, with climate change maybe we won’t just move toward the nearby country, but move toward the cooler Poles, or to high elevations. Is that in a more distant future, or is that a whole new aspect of the coming mass migrations?