(Radio Host, Tarik Abdelazim - TA): Julian Darley (JD), are you with us?
(JD): I am with you.
(TA): Hello, good, thank for joining us, all the way from California.
(JD): Oh, from Vancouver, Canada, it's near by, as the jet flies.
(TA): Oh, all right, and the accent gives it away.
(JD): It's does rather, from London England, ultimately.
(TA): Oh, wonderful, well thank again for joining us here, WHRW Binghamton University. Julian, I was wondering if you could provide a little bit of commentary on the movie "End of Suburbia", now, did the Post Carbon Institute produced this?
(JD): No, I wish we had it, it's such a marvelous film, and I was once a film maker, I would had been very proud to have made this film, but the critics for making the film goes to Barry Silverthorn, the producer and to Greg Greene, the director, these are two Canadians who live in Ontario.
However I can claim a little bit of credit, in this way, I did an interview, a radio interview, which is still available on GlobalPublicMedia.com with James Howard Kunstler, now the author of "Long Emergency" and previously the author of many fine books about the dysfunctionality of cities and the person who I'm long admired and I was immensely pleased when I realized that he knew about Peak Oil, so I interviewed him a long time ago now, I guess more than two years ago and this audio interview inspired Barry Silverthorn, who then teamed up with Greg Greene and inspired them to create this film "The End of Suburbia", because James Howard Kunstler give such a thorough attack on suburbia and it's many problems and he knows a great deal about it, and it's history, and that was …
(TA): … that's how the inspiration continued.
(JD): Yes, and then I did a little bit of work on the film, I helped Greg Greene set up some of the interviews, and I was there for several of the interviews and of course I'm actually interview in the film, so I have a small part, actually in it and of it, as well has having sort of preceded it, if you like.
(TA): Well, wonderful, let me ask a question here, we see Kunstler made many references to Peak Oil, but most commonly, at least recently, we've seen that connected to the Iraq war, this take a very different approach to it. We're taking about suburbia life style, and kind of relying on two Canadians to tell us about the collapse of the American dream.
(JD): Well…
(TA): If you could explain exactly, what is the movie about, and what are some of the main thrusts of the piece.
(JD): Right, Well, It's not inappropriate that Canadians should be brought in this up, because Canada supplies so much energy to America, right, it's the largest exporter of petroleum to the U.S. and of natural gas by far, so there's some appropriateness, and I should also mention the Post Carbon Institute is the largest distributor of the film as well, so if people would like to buy it, there is no doubt, a local outlet, which I will strongly encourage of course, but also you could buy from Post Carbon Institute by going to PostCarbon.org.
One of the thing that's so interesting about the film, it that is show, how and suggest how a declining petroleum production will actually have an impact and the defects that many many people are all too familiar with our ill suburbia, so I think that's what make it's so compelling, it take something and illustrate it, it quite funny in places, show some of the history of how suburbia came into being and some us those things and talk about the things that will go away when cheap and easy petroleum is no longer there to fuel our cars basically, that's part of the essence of suburbia, suburbia didn't begin with cars, it began with railways actually, and suburbia began even before the discovery of petroleum in the U.S., but certainly suburbia is now dependant, north American suburbia is generally dependant on cars, not rails.
So I think that's the most important things to say about it, yes of course the film goes thru some of the basic supply side problems, by which I mean, how petroleum is discovered, how it's extracted, produced and how various characteristics, geological, technical, economics combines together to produce this curve of raising production, peaking and then inexorable falling away and of course, it's not the raising or the peaking that's the problem, it the falling away, it's the declining production and the fact that there's nothing you can do to bring you back up to peak again, and worst still, everything you do to slow down, the decline only make the final decline all the worst, so we shouldn't be kind to use technological tricks to do that, we should be accepting our fate as it were.
(TA): Well, perhaps, I could also ask you a question just about policy, in the United States, the Congress has moving forward in energy bill…
(JD): … or backwards
(TA): … (laugh) Exactly, precisely, thank you, and that there is very little inherently different from one might expect, with basically an oil tycoon in the White House, what exactly ...
(JD): … Well, a failed oil tycoon
(TA): … (laugh) … one who's need a lot of friends and help.
(JD): … That's right, he was a subsidised oil tycoon.
(TA): What exactly, I mean in Post Carbon Institute, what will you suggest is, some of the most pressing issues that, or suggested policies that we need to be looking at right now?
(JD): Think about supply lines, think about these enormous long supply chains for almost everything you can imagine, especially for foods, which is one of the most, heavily, traffic if you like or transported goods on the planet, this is completely stupid, our supply lines are much more fragile that we realized, for everything, including for gasoline too, and for electricity.
And we're going to find that these supply lines, not only start to cost us a lot more, because the raw material start to cost a lot more, but there are going to break in unpredictable and funny places.
For a while we'll be able to fix these up and make them keep working again, and after a while it start to break semi-permanently and we'll start seeing shortages of things that we're not just used to, outage of power, and live is going to get very bumpy and very strange, so the basis of our policies, it's what we called "Global Relocalization", which means relocalizing, bring back into the local, the producing of local need by local people in locally own business and locally own farms using nearly none or preferably no petroleum products and no natural gas products, and the global part means doing this relocalization on a large and integrated scale.
So it's essentially going backwards, I means, that's more or less, what's in front of us, the industrial revolution is reaching a peak right now and it's about to go into reverse, and people says: "Ah, you know, we got to go forward and progress, and this is now, we can't possibly go backwards", nonsense, we are going backwards, it's happens to every other civilizations that peaked and going into decline, very often in fact, almost invariably for the same reasons, they run out of resources, that's what's going to happens to us, so the trick will be to do what very few other civilizations had managed to do, and that's to plan to contract, we need to contract our economy and relocalizing is the way to do it, because otherwise as our economy inevitably contract as you really considers the fact that an economy is really, fundamentally about the processing of energy, not money, it's energy that make the world go' round and their economy go' round, in rather stupid circles in my opinion.
As that energy decline, the economy will inevitably decline, which means it will contract and in a situation where most of us don't grow most of our own foods but have to pay money for it, the unemployment that will result from the contracting economy is going to have ghostly effects including people will find themselves unable to pay for the things they really need, which include foods, it will also means shelter and access to mobility and many many other things, and think of health care and retirement and all these kind of things from which we depends on money for.
So it's going to be absolutely vital to face up to the unemployment which is going to follow, the difficulties with foods, the difficulties with the whole of our infrastructure system, which I'm afraid is stupidly built on access to cheap petroleum and natural gas and also coal, we'll going to have to, as quickly as possible, start rebuilding what we called a parallel public infrastructure, which is basically a low energy infrastructure system which required little energy to built and maintains, these are the kind of things which should be focused on, and once again, lot's of the answers lie in the history books, but they don't lie in our contemporary manuals and businesses and what people get to be taught in their MBA's courses and frankly largely what they get taught in the whole "rubb" of wreckage of the educational system.
So it's not impossible in principle as someone fear that with so many people used to consuming so many resources, it's not really possible in this form, but I do believe if we start planning for this, a lot of things will becomes possible, if we don't plan for it, I'm afraid nature is going to deal with us, the same way that nature deal with every other species that get into a population bloom and get themselves into overshoot, which is what we are now, in other words, I'm afraid we get cut down to size, and I think we should try to avoid this happening in an uncontrolled way.
(TA): Well, I appreciated, the way you bring this to the listeners attention, in that, if we want to talk about economic, we also have to deal with the ecological aspect, we have to talk about politics, we have to talk about cultures, social, there is no way to dissect these different aspects of our living situation, because you constantly refers to food, but right now we are seeing among other industries a trend toward macroscale and we're also seeing, if you say that there might be historical lessons in our past, there're still remains some countries and some localities that practiced that low energy agriculture, but those are been devastated right now, aren't they?
(JD): Yes, well, we're turning most of those nations into slave nations, we British have been at it for longer than perhaps most everybody else and we got the ethics of a pretty nasty state of perfections and I'm afraid the U.S. as sort of perfect it, if you like, and do it in a nice gloss of green wash and P.R. to covered it all up…
(TA): … I think, we're trying to beat you, a record there.
(JD): … You're doing a pretty good job (laugh), not that our record was not ghostly enough to start with, I'm ashamed to say, and we gave name like globalization and economic and free trade, these are the words we used to covert this hideousness that we're doing all the poorer and less industrialized countries, we're basically raping them and extracted them, and as we will expect, because I'm afraid that economic is a strip mining system, and when strip mine one place and wreck that, well you're going on to the next one.
(TA): … let me ask you a question, now, because all of this could be somewhat despairing, so maybe we can finish more on a hopeful note (JD: yes), one thing that I found very promising, is Alice Waters, edible education movement, in which she's trying to bring, green gardens and agriculture to public high schools and has worked extremely successful in California and this is very quickly gaining pace throughout the nation, do you have any other specific examples, that you might be able to share with the listeners, that suggest this isn't an impossible dream, but than in fact, it is being practiced.
(JD): Yes, I've just written the latest chapter for our new book: "Relocalize Now !", which is coming out in the fall, in the autumn, and this chapter is about something we called "local energy farm", and I think this is incredibly exciting.
We're interesed in local everything, basically, relocalizing manufacture, relocalizing money, relocalizing control of our money, or local energy bank it's something that we're developing, but at the moment all of these things are ideas although they are actually fast becoming of being, but the one of them which we already have an example of existing is the idea of a local energy farm and there is one in England, thank to an extraordinary fellow called Tony Marmont and you can find an interview with Tony Marmont, right now on Global Public Media.com and he talks about his energy farm which he spends 30 odd years creating, and his energy farm consists of solar PV, solar cells, couple of wind turbines and a lake which he created about 30 years ago which access the storage system for when there're spare electricity or at night when there're no solar or when there're no wind blowing, and it's an extraordinary thing.
It's in the middle of England and I'm proposing to people to joint with us to start creating local energy farms all over North America, in fact the same thing would in anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world that's got some sun and some wind preferably, and some opportunity to store water in a small controlled kind of a way, in millponds as they used to be called, these local energy farms will become the pump, the literal metaphor for driving motor for local money system for our relocalized manufacturing and it will combined with food farm a local energy farm should also be a food farm too and certainly it will be there to create energy crops, to make bio liquid, bio gas, bio mass, all these kind of things, you'll create a suites of these different primary energy sources and these ways of storing energy to make.
I think, an extraordinary thing that we'll be able to give us the median scale energy that we will need in a reliable fashion to get to relocalize manufacturing without having to rely on the existing grid, the electricity grid which is a very problematic thing, it's more or less closed in many places to renewable electricity and of course it's break from time to time, it's in a very wobbly state if we did the beneath, so I encourage people to go and look at PostCarbon.org and sign up for our newsletter, sure will I've been mention this newsletter which is actually do out this evening as we speak and talk to us about local energy farms.
I will also say, the other thing is, we have a marvellous example of people can start now, we'll also help some do, car co-ops, cooperative car sharing, we have the world largest and I think a wonderful example of this, in Vancouver, started by an extraordinary woman called Tracey Axelsson and the Vancouver co-operative auto network has about 100 cars and about 2000 members, that means one car for every 20 peoples and as each car doesn't travel much more than the average amount for a North American car, it means more or less get your car's miles travel down by a factor of 20, and you can do it overnight.
If you already have a car co-op and if you don't, it's absolutely vital to start one, we will help you in combination with the Vancouver Car Co-op, they got all the software, the manuals they've written these up and developed this over, and nearly 10 years period now and it's an absolutely amazing thing to do and once you do it, by getting rid of your car, the money that's made available by selling your car can then pump prime the local energy bank, the local energy farm, can be used to support manufacturing and all the other things that we're things that we're talking about in global relocalization.
So this is a very terrific thing to do, and it cut your energy demand at a stroke, without loosing mobility, obviously it's critical not to loose mobility in a world which we built so stupidly requiring too much mobility, it is a vital transitory step and thus assuming anything to it, it built core, put it's in structure, it help people to start people to start working with each others, it's a much more democratic system and it can provide much needed cash to pump primly the other things, so I strongly recommends Car Co-ops and looking at the one in Vancouver, which already exists.
(TA): And I was just going to say, you can find the information about the car co-op at your website as well, Postcarbon.org?
(JD): Yes, all of this information, is available at postcarbon.org, some of it is also available in my book about the natural gas crisis, which is called: "High Noon for Natural Gas", that's been about out, about a year, the last chapter almost doesn't mentioned natural gas because to get down gas consumption is very difficult, you must get your whole energy consumption down and frankly start changing one's entire living arrangement, which is not an overnight effort, all indeed is an individual effort.
The last chapter of my book: "High Noon for Natural Gas", the longest chapter 2 goes into lots of details, explains the problem with the money system and start talking about the many things we can do at a community level, at a group level, at a municipal level to start to face these problems, PostCarbon.org is a resource, my book: "High Noon for Natural Gas", which you could buy from PostCarbon.org or I hope get from your local library or from a local bookshop, the locally own independent bookshop is a wonderful to get this and the many other books such as: "Powerdown" by Richard Heinberg which I strongly recommend.
Richard is a collaborator and his part of Post Carbon Institute, these are all ways in which people could find more about this and GlobalPublicMedia.com is free, always free, in my point of view, it has I think the world's best interview's and video and audio and many of these things we're being transcripts too, with people controlling geology and many others taking about the oil and gas crisis and much else beside, we've needs much more general than just that, it's about the many environmental crisis and the planet change problems that we also face, so GlobalPublicMedia.com is something that we've created to help people face the future.
(TA): Do you have time for one more question? (JD: sure), we're talking with Julian Darley which is the director of the Post Carbon Institute, we always open our doors up to the Binghamton University Campus and we have a student, in environmental studies, Dennis (D), who'll love to pose a question to you, (JD: sure).
(D): Mister Darley, thank you, do you see the disconnection of humanity with their natural roots and nature as something that has to be reconciled before any of this sort of global relocalization can begin?
(JD): Yes an No, there's simply isn't time to go through any…, I don't wish to be disparaging, but some long winded spiritual process, there're just isn't time, if oil peak is already happenings now, as some of us think it is…
(D): … or it has already has.
(JD): … or it has already has, or it's boom beginning to bite now or into next year, there just isn't time for that kind of thing, and anyway, I've come to the believe that instead of changing your inner self, the trick is to change your actions, there's an old saying that goes: "tell me what you do, I'll tell you what you believe".
I believe our believe system will start to change our inner self, if you like wish start chief, after we changed our practices which is, the way around, I think it will have to be, so your point is well taken, we need to get back in contact with the soil, I means quite literally, we need to start growing thing, we need to understands that the foundation of our existence as land animal, is the soil, ok fish depends on the sea, that's obvious, but we depends on the soil, I think, we kind of forgotten that…
(D): … Absolutely.
(JD): … so we need to put the soil first, who's wrecked, degraded, eroded, destroy, built-on, toxified, poisoned, our vital, vital soil over a long period time, but we've gone particularly crazy in the last 30 to 50 years…
(D): … With the petrochemical revolution.
(JD): … so, the hideous green revolution, which is really on oil and gas revolution…
(D): … The petrochemical revolution.
(JD): … Yes, it was a petrochemical revolution, we're nearly 100 % dependents now for our industrial foods, on oil and gas, that situation has to change, the sooner we change it, the better our rules in the game, waiting for geology to do it for us, as it will certainly will, we've got to, actually I know it's sound crazy, we've got to stop building on our prime soil, the so called development work, stop building road and houses on our prime soil, we've got to let that be used by nature and by us, for food production, again food for nature and food for us.
(D): Aren't larger corporations responsible for much of our disconnection with the land, because they've taken their pyrotechnical buddies and they have manipulated agriculture in such a way that, in 1890's farmers were the majority of the population, at this point, farmers because it's becoming a factory farm system, possibly 8, maybe 5 % of the population in the U.S. particularly, it's seem to be that the corporations are in control.
(JD): Well, how to began, the answer is yes and no, and for instance in Britain, we felt from 12% on the land at the start of the second World War to about 2%, and I think that 2% is about the same number in the U.S., they're things that are often similar in the English speaking world, yes and no to the corporations, sure the corporations are in control, and yes they went to a lot of troubles to get there.
But I ask you this: "Who buy the stuff from the corporation?", anybody who own a car, has bought the device from a corporation, probably using a loan from a bank, who's another corporation, anyone who own a house, probably has a huge mortgage, once you own a house and a car, especially the house hook into a mortgage, and you're hook into the bank, and you have a big debt with credit cards and mortgage comes in and so forth, once you do all that, you've giving them your power…
(D): … Economic slavery.
(JD): … Sorry?
(D): …It's economic slavery.
(JD): … I agree, but we're complying with them, so if we can somehow get away, the first thing to do, if to get away from cars, it's so important, and where the car co-op can help, that start to disconnect you from that, if we can move back to cooperatively own, democratically own, properties which we tend to rent or lease, which is much more the case in Europe.
Then we'll start to break this hideous cycle of the house prices bubble, and the ownership obsession with owning houses, because all these things are driving us, this is what's driving us into slavery, we ourselves until we sold our house, about 2 or 3 years ago, we're spending more than our meager money on putting a roof over our heads and frankly we're doing that now, because our rents are so high, but this is an absurd situation, so yes, corporate control, as been building, actually it has been building for hundred of years, but it obviously gone mad, in the last 120, 130 years.
The corporations are not going to give up this control, so we must break the connection by stop giving them our money and we've even create a campaign called "Corporate Disobediences", which is entirely legal, it this says this, if you had inside the contract to give corporation your money, you don't have to give them your money, you can stop buying Coca-Cola, frankly you cut down, the amount the coffee you eat, stop buying so much industrials foods products and principally get rid of your car, because as long as you got a car.
I don't see you can complains about Exxon Mobil or Shell or all the rest of them, because you got a car and you're buying their products. Now it's true, that the infrastructure leave you very little choice, but there're a few choices left and we've got to get really practical, roll-up our sleeves, get proactive and start organizing, this won't happens as an individual level, it got to happens at the group level, at the community level, at the municipal level to create these news structures to allows us to get off the corporations and stop being so dependant of them, that, we can start to do, it won't be easy, but we've laid out enormous amount of this stuff both in theory and practice in this book: "Relocalize Now !", which will be out soon, you could actually get a preview version if you contact us by per PostCarbon.org and these things we are working on furiously and we are building a relocalization network to help people find out about this, to connect with each other and do this stuff, but believe me, we've got to do it, because it's sad to say, the government is not going to do it and I'm not one of these people that hate government.
I'm afraid we're stuck with so many people, we need government, the trouble is we need boot government, we need proper democratic government, which is full of problems and contradictions but I don't think anyone can pretends that's what one's got in motion with the English's petty world and many other places besides, so we've got to do it, they aren't got to do it, it's no good in my opinion calling on corporations or government to do this stuff, they're not going do, they're link together.
It's a form a fascism, although the term is rather unpleasant, but I believe it to be the case, the linkage of corporations and governments, they are controlled by themselves for their benefits, it's not for us, we've got to do this and that I believe is what we've to try to do, I means, I believe although this is all rather scary, there is no time to panic, we've got to roll up our sleeves and get practical.
We've got to do it, and by the way we've got to cuff up money, we can't build this on the cheap, so that means we've got to give something up and once again I comes back to the car co-op, if you got a car and you join a car co-op and you sell that car, you can realized anything up to 5, 10, $15000 which you then put in to the local energy bank, put together and pull it together, just think 10 people selling 10 cars, that's $100,000, that's not small change, you could do a lot with $100,000, you can't do very much with $10 or $100 unless you pull it all together.
So I blatantly ask people to join with us in funds raising to help do this thing, it's joining together, you mentioned the farmers in the 1890's that was unfortunately the tail end of a very interesting thing in America, the rise of the populist movement, which is really an agrarian revolution to try take back control, it's failed sadly, but there're lot of interesting lessons and there're a particular good book by a fellow call Goodwin about this.
I encourage you to look back 110, 120 years ago when America's were trying to fight back, they're stop then, but they're many lessons there, if we join together and coordinate and use the tool that we still got and, although it's not available for everybody, the Internet is still here and it's a very powerful organizing tool, let's use the tools while we still got them and join together and start cooperating and then I think we can do something and that's the only change I believe that we have to do anything about this.
(TA): Well, Julian Darley, thank you very much for an inspiration clearing call, you could feel that compassion and we certainly appreciated it and I think you've touch a very important part, if you could play a role for facilitate the communication between the isolated experiments that will be extremely helpful. thank again for taking time out to speak to us.
(JD): My pleasure, thank you for invited me.
(TA): All right, then have a good day, and I look forward to see more of your work.
(JD): Pleasure, thank you very much.
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