transcribed by Miranda Huey
Els Cooperrider: I'm very happy to be able to tell you that we have Julian Darley back with us. Of course, he was one of the guests interviewed on the documentary The End of Suburbia and we had such a good discussion last week. Money systems, financial systems, economical issues are something that a lot of us are not very familiar with, that we can necessarily grasp it that quickly. So we have him back today.
Now, The Party's Over is a series, it's a program, all on the topic of peak oil, and the reason we're worried about peak oil is simply that we are reaching peak oil, which means that we're going to go on a decline here within a few years by most predictions, and since we are a nation that's desperate to maintain its quality of life and economic productivity, war over access to diminishing supply of oil is a reality, as we speak. There will be more wars over oil unless the U.S. and other industrialized countries act now to develop alternatives to their dependence on oil. Unfortunately, our leaders in government are doing next to nothing about this, so it's up to us, the people, the citizens, to prepare ourselves for the inevitable consequences of running out of oil.
So, this is not a show about doom and gloom, it is instead about opportunity, where we must pay attention and definitely come up with a plan, and such plans are actually happening, and Julian Darley is always also involved in that. Let me just quickly say to those of you who are just joining us, and those of you who did not have an opportunity to listen last week, Julian is a British environmental philosopher who researches and writes about non-market and non-technology based responses to global environmental degradation. He is also engaged in piloting such responses. In order to further both dissemination of ideas and pilot projects, Julian runs an internet broadcasting station which is globalpublicmedia.com, develops open-source web database sites for non-profits and civil society organizations, and is currently writing a book on how and why we need global relocalization of the economy, society, and culture. And, I want to thank Julian for coming on board. Hello, Julian.
Julian Darley: Hello.
Els Cooperrider: Thank you so much for coming back. I will just give a quick wrap-up of what you talked yesterday and please add to it, because I'm sure its not complete. But, on our last program, Julian Darley explained the overall problems we'll encounter as oil and gas supplies run low. Our entire economy is based on oil, and especially how we produce food, and how we transport food and everything else. Although there are other energy options out there such as coal and nuclear power, these options are heavily subsidized and may not have an energy profit.
In other words, the energy put in to get the energy out is at a negative. Since our economy is dependent on oil, and our economic activity will inevitably slow down as oil runs out, this could lead to an unemployment Holocaust, as Julian Darley told us last program, unless we restructure our economy and substitute human muscle power. To make matters worse, we have a pathological money system based on economic growth, because the chief driving force of the money system is based on debt, which in turn expands the money system. Since we dropped the gold standard in 1971, our currency is solely based on faith. In order to pay our debt, we have to print more money, and create more debt to be able to pay the interest. This system requires growth to function. Julian, do you want to take over?
Julian Darley: Yes, that was great. Let me just also say that coal and nuclear are revolting options whether they're economic or not. It's clear that coal is a disastrous form of energy, and it has been since we in Britain basically first started burning it in quantity in the 17th century, and I think nuclear is a really vile option because, for several reasons, but mainly because its going to leave future generations, and ours, actually, with a waste problem we just cannot solve. We haven't solved it. I'm not sure that we ever will. I don't think its solvable, so I think coal and nuclear should be out. We should never have started them. We clearly have. And they are going to grow massively this century.
Coal and nuclear are said to be what I call the cyanide solutions. They are already growing, particularly coal. So, I think, that's something to add on that. And I think, yes, the currency system has gone haywire since the gold exchange standard system was shut down by Nixon in 1971, but I'm no advocate of a gold standard. It's just that it seems to have been marginally better in some ways than other systems, although, if you stick to a gold standard system, that will get you into trouble as well, as Churchill and many others have found out. So, what this sets up is the idea that I'm afraid that we've cooked up a lot of a really rather lousy systems over the last few hundred, few thousand of years. What one finds is that you can do lots of things in the short-term, and then they go wrong, and some other things in the medium-term, and then they go wrong. But what we're not very good at, I don't think this is ironic.
We've only had 10,000 years practice at an agricultural based civilization. It turns out that it's not long enough to have figured out the problem. I'm not being ironic or facetious. I really think that's true. It's not long enough, and, as we'll see, and as we are seeing, we don't seem to have very much more time to try and figure this one out, having got ourselves into a terrible bind with 6 and a half odd billion human beings and resource problems including getting into trouble with all kinds of things, not just oil and gas. So, one of the things that we need to challenge is really the way we think of reality, and, I've got – I don't normally do this on the radio, but last time I really took up the whole hour just talking about various kinds of systemic problems, and I was extremely keen to take listener questions, and also to give a reasonably in-detail answer, to the amount one could possibly do. So, this time around, I want to most of the time, if we can, on just the questions. For that reason, there are a couple more things I want to explain.
I mean, there are a couple of hundred more things that it would be great to talk about, but I just want to spend about 7 or 8 minutes pointing out a couple of other things which may also be as surprising as the money system, if you're not all that used to it. So, I made a couple of notes here, and I'm just going to read from them. They are notes which are going towards a new book, Relocalize Now!, which will be out in the fall, in the autumn, published by New Society Publisher, and, so, I'm just going to read these as quickly but as clearly as I can, and I hope people will see why this fits in. So, I think we need to challenge and question a number of things that we take for granted, and see some really rather important things differently. And in general, I think what we must question, what we think of as "normal life", we know in many ways it can't go on like this forever. And some of us believe this means making some big changes very soon if we go on trying to keep up all aspects of “normal life”.
As we move deeper into climate change, and the peak and decline of oil production, and natural gas in North America, we must find and develop new systems to cope with the future. One of the best tools that we could have but don't develop or use as we really ought is critical thinking, and the ability to see and understand patterns. Now, it's vital that we increase our ability in and use all critical thinking, and also knowledge of patterns. We really don't do this very much. And by critical thinking, I mean asking difficult questions about apparently ordinary things. And by pattern knowledge, that means trying to see how things fit together, and where they've come from. In practical terms, we should be trying to understand how things are connected together.
This is sometimes the same question as, “Where do things come from?” A Really vital question. If we know how things are connected or if we know that better, we can start to decide whether they should be really disconnected and how other things should be reconnected or newly connected, and it's absolutely vital to understand as many of our connections as possible, and evaluate them, use judgment, decide among them. Are they good or bad? Now, this may sound very abstract, so I want to give you two very concrete examples of two systems we usually think of as absolutely contradictory. And the first one, I'll go into it at a bit more length because we're more familiar with it, and I think this is one of the huge problems we face. So, the first example is something that most people, although perhaps not listeners to this radio station, but most people think of as just ordinary, like breathing the air. And that ordinary, breathing-the-air thing is capitalism. This is the system, we are told, and many believe, it's the savior of humanity, and it has an almost religious quality to it in that people have a complete faith in it.
But I want to suggest that it is a disastrous system, and is actually one of the chief reasons why we are facing the kind of mess that we see shaping up before us. And my second example will point to the fact that I don't think that the traditional other solutions we're offered in the shape, in particular, of communism, are any better, either. I'm not going to say much about that, but I want that to be very clear. We've cooked up a series of bad systems, and I think we've got to work on some new ones. And, in this book, I don't have time to go into what I regard as the awful history of capitalism, and unfortunately I can't even recommend one single definitive history of capitalism, I wish I could, and I don't want to go into why that is, but if there was one, I'd tell you want I thought it was. But I think, this history has really been developing for several hundred years.
It's not been going on just since the Industrial Revolution, and sometimes the Industrial Revolution is erroneously dated to the mid-19th century. It really began in the early 17th century in Britain. So, in point in fact, it's possible to say that capitalism has been developing more or less since the time of feudalism in Britain, which you could say started about a thousand years ago, or something like that. One of the many key features of the development of capitalism is the way it pushes ordinary people off what was common land, or it takes their land away from, takes their land away from them, takes away from them that which was theirs, or at least they had access to. The situation wasn't always pretty. I'm not saying that for a second.
However, people who had at least access to some plot or a plot of land which is reasonably productive were in a lot better position than people that had no access, and that's the condition that most people find themselves in now, both in the industrialized world and the not-industrialized world. The history of capitalism shows that it systematically develops and legalizes a system of greed, theft, and violence. It is impossible to deny this, it seems to me. Effectively, at its simplest formulation, it is a stunningly effective method of stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Now I know this is not the usual way that capitalism is described, but even a brief look at its history, I think, confirms this. However, it has proven extraordinarily stable and adaptive. This is something that has been denied by some of the usual kind of critics, but it has. It's just the truth. It's been stable and adaptive. But I think this has been achieved in great part from plunder and destruction. In other words, some parts have remained stable and adaptive and other parts have been destroyed.
If you look at the total system, it's not so great. But of course, we don't look at the total system, we just look at our little bit. And our little bit in the English speaking world, if you're doing all right, looks okay. So, there are a number of reasons to think that this system is now highly vulnerable. I want to mention just two of those reasons and neither of them have anything to do with Marx, who I think, and I'm afraid, in my opinion, has really set us back a long way by offering us a quite wrong diagnosis of capitalism. I won't go into that now, either. There is some literature on that, and we will be covering some of this, although it will be very compressed, in our new book, Relocalize Now. The first reason that capitalism is in trouble is the same reason as for any other growth-based system. So any growth-based system, including communism, and these other kinds of socialism and social democracy, they'll all get into trouble, because they're growth-based on a limited planet.
Capitalism must keep expanding or collapse. I mentioned, and Els summed up, one of the chief reasons for this need to expand, and that is the money system, which has to keep growing, or it will collapse. But whereas, in the short run anyway, you can create more money, create more debt, and print money, in a physical system, which is what we live in, the economy itself, which consists of molecules and actual stuff, that actual stuff needs to be dug out of the ground, made into things, and endlessly moved around, and apparently so do we need to be endlessly moved around, too. And all that requires, of course, minerals, soil, and water, and absolutely critically, it requires energy, and as most listeners to this program will know, perhaps and some debt, as Els has already summed up, the energy supply is now very likely to decline before 2010 because peak oil and decline means, because it's the largest form of energy used on the planet now, means that the entire energy system itself will also go into decline. It's also the most important energy system as well. It's going to shape all industrial system to the core. All of them, whether they be capitalist, communist, or any other flavor you like, but those are the two main ones.
So it looks very sure that this great system, or we think it's great, many people do, is going to be shaken for this reason, at least. There are many, many other things to challenge it, a rather obscure one which I don't think many people have come across, and that is that you need final formulation. And I say final formulation not in the gain in the sense that “Oh, well, this is the end of capitalism. It must be, you know. It's about time, we've had enough of it.” but because before neo-liberalism, which has been developed in the last 20-30 years, not a term always used by those who do it, but nonetheless, it's their formulation. By definition, it's conceptually the limit of what capitalism can be, and I'll explain what that means in a second. But, this form of neo-liberalism reaches its own physical limits. They're slightly different from the energy limits. Now, neo-liberalism wants everything to be a trade and it wants everything ultimately to be bounded by contracts.
One writers says on this, “The perfect liberalist would like to buy his cup of coffee by the microliter and negociate a contract for every microliter of that coffee.” That will be a lot of delicious contracts. I'm sure that will please the legal profession. But we've already, in point of fact, expanded many systems of trading into 24 hours already. And, like it or lump it, there just aren't more than 24 hours in a day and 365 days a year. I think some things stop for Christmas and a couple of other days, but we've really virtually reached the limits of the amount of time there is in a year to trade. Financial markets carry on automatic transactions almost instantly, basically all the time. And, so, it's becoming impossible physically to trade any faster. Now this is very serious. One approach is, and the other point is, one approach is a situation with a cost associated with all these trades actually outweighs any supposed, and already highly questionable, benefits which might accrue. And you have to ask to whom these benefits accrue anyway?
So what this comes to mean is that the final stage of capitalism as neo-liberalism is by definition just that, the final stage. And, when the market expands into everything, it diverges almost completely from reality. And what that means is, because you've become obsessed with markets, obsessed with trades, obsessed with transactions and contracts, you're no longer remotely concerned with producing anything at all that people might actually need. You're just producing transactions, and I think if anybody disbelieves this, just look at Enron. There's dozens of examples, and I don't wish to just pick on Enron. Enron was actually, supposedly an energy company, but really it was just a trading company. They became completely disconnected from reality and we know what happened to them, and many others, too.
All the kind of derivatives and options on options, and options on derivatives that exist are a symbol and a real artifact, the way the market is effectively now going completely mad. It's a bit like Scarface, Al Pacino at the end of Scarface, totally coked up, going mad, and nothing seems to stop him. In the end, he does stop. Now, this is a very dangerous situation, and even on its own, if it were left like this, it would lead to the demise of the system, if it wasn't changed. However, when I said capitalism was adaptive, I meant it, and I think, at a certain stage, people will begin to see this, and they will start trying to take corrective action, and I don't know what that corrective action would be.
So, no one can pretend, I think, that it will just collapse itself under its own weight, I think that was vast mistake that Marx made, and I think we shouldn't repeat that mistake. It was a very clever system, I just think it's a very cruel, dreadful system, and it is the system which is systematically strip-mining and draining the earth, and its people and creatures of basically life itself. It's coming to that in the end. Now, just to finish up with this, the other example which I promised from a system I would normally regard as contradictory, contradictory, but in point of fact, just another material system, and in my opinion, not really contradictory in all that many ways at all, but towards the end of the 1980's, Mikhail Gorbachev realizes, as people inside the Soviet Union were, that the Soviet Union was in deep trouble, had many structural problems, different from our structural problems, but not all of them. He started trying to dismantle some of the more unfortunate parts of the huge state industry, but the interesting thing is he wasn't able, for whatever reason, to build up the replacements fast enough.
And this is one of the grave situations he faced, and one of the reasons I think, why he lost power and why the Soviet system crumbled in the way it did, it wasn't the only reason, and I think the US had a great deal to do with it, and it was deliberately trying to destroy it, but that is in no way to suggest for a second that the Soviet system wasn't in all kinds of trouble on its own anyway. So, this is a big lesson. If you start dismantling and disconnecting from something, you'd better understand what you should be connecting and reconnecting, in other words, what you should be using to replace this, otherwise, you will have very, very unhappy people, well, in fact, you will have people who can potentially starve.
Els Cooperrider: Well, that's great.
Julian Darley: Just one last little thing. At least by analogy, this is what we face. Having a disconnect from one thing, we must connect and replace it with other things. And, this really means a vital infrastructure. And we call that new replacement infrastructure a parallel public infrastructure, and it's part of a larger task that Post Carbon Institute, my institute, is trying to help build. We're trying to help build that new, parallel public infrastructure as part of the proces of global relocalization.
Els Cooperrider: Mm-hmm. Well, that was excellent. Thank you, Julian. If you're just joining us, this is KZYX Philo, KZYZ Willits and Ukiah. I'm Els Cooperrider, host of The Party's Over, and our guest today is Julian Darley, director of The Post Carbon Institute. Author, also, of the book, High Noon for Natural Gas, and soon to be released book, Relocalize Now. And, we're talking about economic systems as oil supplies dwindle, and growth will inevitably reverse. Now, Julian, as a new replacement infrastructure, which you just coined here, that phrase, which I'm really not familiar with, but I understand your explanation.
On the last show, you were talking about the unemployment holocaust as, unless we restructure our economy, and you were talking about substituting human muscle power for, I suppose, oil-driven or gas-driven power. Could you explain how such a scenario would work, because companies who hire people realize that they pay more for human power than they do for, say, oil power.
Julian Darley: That's absolutely right, and that has been a feature of the development of capitalism over the last several hundred years, and one of the main things it's been trying to do has been driving to drive out all human labor and replace it entirely with machines. But, those machines don't run on thin air. They run on energy. And, one of the things that is going to happen is those machines, at a certain, at stages in the future, will start to become expensive to run on just the energy. Now, I don't think that's going to happen frightfully soon, to be honest. By the time it does, there won't be time to do anything about it, and replace it with these other things, which is one of the reasons why those who think that oil peak and decline is real have to start taking these replacement systems very seriously now. It takes a long time to build infrastructure.
Els Cooperrider: Mm-hmm.
Julian Darley: So, normal corporations, which are pathological in my and other people's opinion, too, are not going to do this. I just don't – there's just no way they're going to do it. They're not going to change the nature of what they are, and indeed, I don't think there's any need for corporations, and many of your earlier American presidents would agree with me, too. In fact, I think, Adam Smith, oddly enough. He didn't think that there was a need for corporations, and in my opinion, there really isn't. So yes, normal corporations I think we can really safely say aren't going to do this, so we've got to create other entities to provide our vital needs.
Now, if it costs more, more corporations aren't going to do this. And we are going to go on needing all kinds of things, especially things made out of metals and glass, but particularly metals. We've been using metals for nearly 10,000 years, one of the earliest cities in the world was close to a source of copper, and it was the chief trading place for copper, and, incidentally, for volcanic glass, something called obsidian. That's pretty close. So, that's interesting in and of itself. We find metals very useful. I don't see how we can manage anything like civilized life without them, and a good few other things, too.
So, we've got to take back the means of production so that we start making some of the objects, in fact, many of the vital objects that we made ourselves. We're working on something called community-supported manufacturing. That's one aspect of it. We like that idea, but there's nothing to stop it being private or public, and it's certainly, there's going to be a core for democratic manufacturing. All these things are going to be possible, and essentially, what that means is, starting to make, once again, locally, in your locale, in your region, depending on the size and the complexity of what it is, those things that we used to make. Even 30 years ago, in a place called Sheffield in England, they're still making large quantities of steel, and I think that was true in America, too. A jolly messy business, and we have to do it more cleanly, and I also think we need to do it without digging up more iron ore where we can, and goodness knows we've got enough steel in the world, especially in the form of cars, and we should doing literally recycling and reusing of a lot of steel and iron.
So, this is the kind of thing, looking back to our basic things we need: chairs, furniture, knives, forks, and then at the top end, solar cells and wind turbines. We are, in fact, in conversation with somebody in Virginia about setting up a small machine shop to actually make wind turbines locally and in America. And, for anybody else listening to this on the internet, by locally, that means wherever you are. It doesn't have to be America. Wherever you are, you should be making this stuff locally, up to and including your energy harvesting machine, including micro hydro machines. Now, this is no small undertaking. So, this is the kind of thing that we mean. Once you start rebuilding your light manufacturing capability, you are then able at least to choose whether to use human muscle, or a certain amount of machinery, but in the knowledge that one day, the energy for that machinery is either going to be very expensive, or if you're producing it locally, it might be quite limited.
Els Cooperrider: Mm-hmm.
Julian Darley: Solar panels don't work very well at night, wind turbines are absolutely lousy when there's no wind. So, one of the things that our parallel public infrastructure is going to need to do is provide the storage so that you can get electricity, for instance, which we're certainly going to find vitally necessary for a long time to come, really going to need some electricity at night and some electricity when our locally produced or locally harvested power is not working, so that's just one of the many functions of a parallel public infrastructure.
Els Cooperrider: Uh-huh.
Julian Darley: So that's the kind of thing. What it looks like more and more, without the electricity part, because electricity wasn't really a feature of life before 1850. If you turn the history books back even to before the Second World War, and particularly in Europe before the Second World War, you get a much better idea of what this used to look like. It's not impossible, indeed, until a hundred years ago, this is how we did life. One of our tasks is to pick the better bits and try to avoid the worst bits, because there's plenty of bad in all this, from centuries in the past.
Els Cooperrider: Yeah, that's great. We have calls coming in, so folks, if you would like to make a comment or ask a question of Julian Darley, please call 895-2448 or 1-800-499-7117. Hello, caller, you're on the air.
Caller 1: Well, yes, very good topic. I wanted to agree with your guest. If you look back in time, when I was young, say around the Second World War, it was a nation, China, which had, I believe it had over half a billion people at the time and nowhere near the technology that it enjoys now, and yet those people lived out their daily lives and went about their business and so forth. So, it is possible. I mean, if you try to answer the question, is it even worth trying to construct a different world, it is possible. People have lived in a different world in the past, but I'm going to do what the author says and do some critical thinking here.
Does he really believe that you can make a transition from where we are to a world that has much more expensive energy without a ton of hurt? If you look at our government, it's partly been viewed as the huge transfer payment system, so that we have adequate social net, social security net. So, what happens to all of that? That all liven off – that's just the icing on the cake. And, in my own experience in life, like in a corporation, there's lots of ideas floating around, and they're trying to grasp the future and be ready for it. And, a lot of times, you do the analysis, and it is true, if there's something that's crunching and constricting, and it is real, then you say, “Well, we're all going to get to point B. It doesn't matter. That's just the reality of it.” And a lot of times, people come forward with all these ideas that really mess up your life, and it might be better if we were all just turned loose, free, to make out the best we can in the transition. So, just a couple of ideas. Thank you.
Els Cooperrider: Okay. Thank you for your call. Let's give Julian a chance to answer that.
Caller 1: Okay. Bye-bye.
Els Cooperrider: Bye-bye.
Julian Darley: Thank you very much for that very interesting series of questions. Yes, the Chinese civilization is one of the longest on the planet. And, I must say that they would have been living a lot better in the 20th century if it hadn't been for us British, particularly with our opium wars in the 1840's and the 1850's. When we forced them to import opium, basically to screw their society up, amongst other things, so that we could keep buying cheap tea from them. There's a lot more to it than that, but what we did to the Chinese was absolutely vile. Absolutely vile, and they would, I think, unquestionably have been better off without the British. Are we going to make transitions without a lot of pain and suffering?
I wish I could tell you that I thought that it was highly likely that we would. I don't see how that could happen. I mean, I do see how it could happen, but in a world, frankly, which faces aggression and violence and glorifies competition at every possible level, doesn't much like cooperation unless you're at the top of a corporation, when they do plenty of cooperating, including cartels, but not only that. And, of course, America is full of guns. This is my big worry for America. I don't really like to go into this too much on the air, because it's a very dangerous subject, but America is full of guns and we know what happens when there are resource shortages. Very often people get violent. And it's one thing to have a knife, it's quite another thing to have a gun, and I really fear for that. I wish the Americans would take the guns out of society but I know that's not going to happen.
Els Cooperrider: No, its not. [chuckles]
Julian Darley: Unfortunately
Els Cooperrider: Not anytime soon.
Julian Darley: Not anytime soon, I'm afraid.
Els Cooperrider: Well, the lines are all lit up. Did you want to take another call?
Julian Darley: Well, let me just say one quick thing about the social security system. Absolutely right. I mean, I think the social security system in the US is absolutely lamentable, anyway. I think there are tens of millions of people who would say, “Wasn't working for them, that's for sure.” But one of the questions is, “Why on earth do we need social security system?” and we will always need systems to help people stay alive and live reasonably decently, but one of the things I favor is giving people access to a bit of land, a bit of productive soil. That is, I believe, going to be one of the keys to a future that has a little less pain in it and teach people how to grow things on their bit of land, either for biomass or for food.
We're going to need many more trees. We're busy chopping them or mostly chopping them all down. So, I think, that is an absolute key. If we give people some access to some soil and the knowledge how to work it, or else they can rent it, but not give it away, then I think that will be a vast step forward that is possible. It's very tricky, but that at least is possible, otherwise we're always going to be stuck with these kinds of social security systems, which can always be attacked. They always will be, I'm afraid. So, yes, it's some money to help people, but ultimately, let's get people furnished with the things they actually need, because you can't eat money, and it won't keep you very warm. You need a decent house, you need food, you need love, you need shelter, you need health. You need things to help you stay healthy.
Els Cooperrider: Yeah. [chuckle] So right. Thank you for that. Let's take another call. Hello caller, you're on the air.
Caller 2: Hi. Thanks. Great show. I wanted to ask your guest. I'm diligently trying to work towards this transition that's less painful for my kids, and one of the ways that I'm trying to do it is by trying to bring back certain natural human rights that I think were usurped that help this situation come about. And that is, when we switch to petroleum in this so-called industrial age, and turned away from farming for raw material feedstocks and then went into the ground for those feedstocks, as your guest has pointed out. We've kind of just assumed that folks didn't have the right to grow plants.
Governments starting outlawing plants, and a plant that we've been growing for 10,000 years at least, as a species is cannabis, hemp. It's one that could help really, replace the dependency on some of these things that come out of the ground, deep in the ground, like oil and whatnot. And, I'm wondering does your guest think it's, agree with me that it's pivotal, not just to get that ground to grow things on, but to be able to reconfirm the basic, natural, fundamental rights to grow the most useful crops that we can in order to compete. I think, like, back then in the 30's, when they were just coming around with technology that would make these certain crops that I'm talking about more easily processed and more competitive with other raw material feedstocks. That's when they put the clamp down and said, “You can't grow them anymore.”
And I know we've had recipes, my grandpa used to go to Henry Ford's Trade School when he was a kid in the 30's and they had recipes back then to do plastics, bodies for cars, even cases for transmissions and etc. from composite materials, from agriculture. And I think that it's not just that we need the ground, but we also have to reconfirm these certain basic, natural human rights. Governments can't outlaw plants.
Els Cooperrider: Okay, caller, I'm going to ask Julian to see if he can answer your question, because I would like you to – yeah, thanks a lot. All right.
Julian Darley: Yeah. The outlawing of hemp has got a convoluted history, and I don't know all the details of it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't for good reasons. I think it had to do with paper and forests and I think Hearst was involved, somewhere in there. There's no question that there are many plants it would be very useful to grow, and it's very unfortunate that this particular one, hemp, is connected also with a plant which connects into the global drug industry, one way or another. Yes, you can grow it yourself, too, for that.
So, it's quite possible that was an excuse, the fact that it contains THC, which I don't think is of any use for anything other than making people high. That is a very unfortunate connection, and it would be a good thing if one could disconnect the drug-inducing part. I know it has its uses for people who have multiple sclerosis and things like that, but as you said, it's an easy stick to beat a dog with, is that one, and it would be much more useful if we could use it to grow what we needed to, to furnish ourselves with useful biomass, particularly for making ropes and fuels and all kinds of materials can be made out of various things. In places like Turkey and Austria and India, and other countries like that, are expanding growing all kinds of things to try to make into materials that we should need. I agree that we should be able to grow useful things, to try things out again.
We have got to be careful just on the biomass question that we don't start double and triple counting our land, because we need it to grow food, we must also, this is a little side note, they're doing this in most places. We must also give land back to forests because nature needs the forest and we need the forest, so we're going to get into all kinds of difficulties. This is one of the reasons we must use much less if we actually go into the idea of using much less, then all the experiments we might want to try have a much higher chance of success if we don't need to use very much of them. But if we try to go on with industrial life as the way we are, then it's pretty clear we'll hit all kinds of limits, including the amount of land and decent soil we've got.
Els Cooperrider: Mm-hmm. Well, the board is completely, the lines are busy, but if you can get a chance a chance to get in here, the numbers are 895-2448, 1-800-499-7117 is the toll-free number. Please keep your questions concise and short because a lot of people want to call in, so, you know, please keep it short. Thank you. Hello, caller you're on the air.
Caller 3: Hi. Thank you so much for this topic. I wanted to comment and ask a question also about the loss of commons, enforcing the economic systems and reliance on oil and also on the privatization of our place, time, energy sources, renewables, and commodities. And, just, my thought is that we're also, in terms of commons as relating to our time, reaching limits of time in a less cooperative environment where all our time is spent securing money enough to survive, resulting in planned isolation of individuals, where each of us requires our own car, computer, house, etc., and then supporting the infrastructure built to support the oil economy separating individuals and perpetuating the reliance on infrastructure, all coming back to the issue of the loss, ongoing loss of our commons. And, could you please speak to that?
Julian Darley: Yes, I think that's a very good analysis. And, one of the reasons why I talked about capitalism in the way I did was, and what I didn't mention was from early feudal times, or mid feudal times, began the awful system of enclosure that really got going in the 15th, 16th, 17th century and reached a crescendo in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and then spread to Europe. But this idea of enclosure is exactly that. It's taking away land from people, either land that they owned, by various means, buying or trickery, or else just occupying a common land and fencing it in, or hedging it in, as was done earlier on, and so people couldn't graze there.
Cattle, the forests, were likewise controlled so people couldn't go in and get the timber and the forests that they need to build things with, and especially, they used forests as a buffer, as a storage in the winter, and also the common land as well. They were gleaned, they had picked up what had been missed in the summertime, they needed the firewood to stay warm. So it's absolutely vital for thousands of years for people to be able to get to common land, land which was just left alone, to also to graze their cattle and sheep when they had them, which many did, and taking that away was one of the absolutely chief and most criminal, in effect, genocidal moves of capitalism. It didn't just start as capitalism. It started as enclosure.
It started as the rich trying to grab more from the poor, and then it slowly got codified into capitalism. Once you do that, it then produces a situation. What are these poor people to do? They can no longer feed and warm themselves. They can't house themselves. So, they either start stealing, which was exactly what Robin Hood was about, or else they have to go into the cities, and this is brilliant for the capitalists because it formed this huge swill of cheap, abundant labor who was absolutely desperate. In the city, you've got virtually no access to land, and probably none, so you're completely dependent on whatever you can buy, so then your money ties the whole population, and you've got a large force of unemployed people, and you can basically control them. One of the things that happened was, in the earlier centuries, essentially after the Great Plague when there was a shortage of labor, people just didn't want to work.
They worked for 2 or 3 days, some of the got paid quite well, and they wanted to enjoy themselves. Fancy that. And so this is to make the owners of labor, if you like, the people who are trying to run things, make them very cross, because they couldn't get enough people to work. Many earlier civilizations thought work was a bad idea for most of the time, and they wanted to enjoy themselves and really, that doesn't seem like such an awful idea to me, enjoying yourself. So this is all part of it. You enclose the land, kick people off it, shove them into cities, what else are they to do, forms an enormous urban population, who can then easily manipulated and they haven't got access to food, so it's an absolutely vital, basically 1,000 year system of quasi-genocide. It's not far off it anyway, it's a very unpleasant thing that we've done.
Els Cooperrider: Hmm. Okay, we have another call. Hello, caller. You're on the air.
Caller 4: Yes, good morning, Els. How are you?
Els Cooperrider: Fine.
Caller 4: Wonderful show, I'm glad you have this fellow on again.
Els Cooperrider: You bet.
Caller 4: I wanted to throw out another thought that you haven't addressed yet in the transition idea. Before we had the crown that would hold people together, or we had the cross, and now we're stuck with the dollar. What cohesiveness, or what idea would you propose that would help hold people together with a common goal? It seems that the traditional methodologies have all become corrupt in one form or another. It's great to have the thought that we need to get out of what we're in, but what do you do to replace a psychological and emotional construct that will help people work together and have a common goal? Thank you.
Julian Darley: That is an incredibly good question.
Els Cooperrider: Yeah. Thank you.
Julian Darley: I can't give you a wonderfully worked out answer. I wish I could. I think you're absolutely right that the systems of belief and thought that we've developed, whilst they've been quite useful for some people in the short term, evidently, are in real trouble. I don't think there's an easy answer to that one. I do – I would say this, however. And it might be surprising but I think it might work, is that when you actually get back together with people, get to know your neighbor, start doing shared tasks.
I think, in the locale, you will develop forms of cohesion, and things that you will believe together. It may not be that there's a national or a large-scale one, but then you could argue the nation-states – one of the arguments is that nation-states were basically put together to do war anyway. It's not the only reason. That's one of the major things. So, maybe it's not such a brilliant idea anyway. But I think that's what happens. You get together with people, who especially people who you've got shared tasks with. They may easily be different from you in many ways, and some of the people we're working with, of course governments, too, hold very different political beliefs from mine. But some of these people are the people who are going to make the things, the machines and the tools that we are going to need, and so I'm very pleased to be working with these people, and I deliberately try to develop language and ideas that will appeal to more people other than just the usual people that you might imagine.
So that's what I think might happen. Get to know each other in doing tasks, and where we have time, in cafés and parks and clubs, but particularly shared tasks. I think if you get to know each other, we will form new ways of finding things that are common goals. After all, a common goal in a village is to have enough to eat. In an old-fashioned village, I think generally, you didn't want to let people starve. Rebuild the familial system. If one has a better sense of family and we are less isolated, I think we'll find more common goals that way, and maybe these giant structures of religion and capitalism and Marxism and communism, many of these giant structures aren't such good things, anyway, especially as they seem to lead to militarism, violence, and war anyway. I think it's an excellent question. I hope that's at least addressed in a little bit.
Els Cooperrider: I think so. All right, we'll take another call. Hello, caller. You're on the air.
Caller 5: Hello, couple of thoughts and comments from both my partner and I. We have college age children, and we're sending them to college so they can earn a living, and that's when we're not working. And that brings to mind that we have to change the culture to honor work and value just as much as we value the aristocracy and artists and everyone and all the ones that are put in a higher position and also as resources and energy become scarcer, and we have to rely more and more on human labor. I see a distinct and horrifying possibility of the reinstitution of slavery on a massive scale, and if you look at China and the prison system in this country and what is happening in Africa in the cocoa fields and other places, and if you might address those thoughts. Thank you.
Julian Darley: Yeah. Slavery, of course, hasn't gone away. I think, by some estimates, there is more now than there ever was. Very hard to imagine, not surprisingly, as people keep it secret, or tend to. I think this plays back into the idea also of the, what I call the unemployment holocaust, which is almost certain to result from the de-automation, the de-industrialization, and the loss of big energy.
This is why I want people, and I mean it, I would love people to start planning, to start thinking about this, because whenever we do start planning and thinking about how we're going to use our minds and bodies and what we do with them. We are going to see very, very ugly situations, of course violence and forced labor, you've mentioned the prison system of America is ghastly, for instance. So, this is just one of the many things we must do very serious planning and try to plan for the eventualities that we may not think are very nice, but are looking increasingly likely. So, it comes back to planning. As I said on some other occasion, it's really too late and quite pointless to panic. We must start planning.
Els Cooperrider: Yeah. Very good points. The phones are still lit up. I'm sorry, folks, we can't take any more calls. We're coming up to the end of the hour. Julian, thank you again for an excellent explanation of what we need to do and where we need to start and just a wonderful – I'm beyond words, it seems. But, it's been wonderful to have you on.
Julian Darley: Thank you. Can I just mention that some of this is talked about in High Noon for Natural Gas.
Els Cooperrider: I was going to mention that.
Julian Darley: It's a book about natural gas, it's in High Noon for Natural Gas. It's about the money system and many of the things we can start on and I talk about global relocalization in our new book, Relocalize Now, which is not out yet. But if you contact us directly, we can actually give you some preview material and talk about how you can start building what we call outposts or bringing your group into the network that we're developing so we can start building this new infrastructure that we'll need. That's postcarbon.org. If you go to postcarbon.org, you'll find more about this.
Els Cooperrider: Yes, it's been wonderful. I just finished reading your book, and I highly recommend it. That is High Noon for Natural Gas by Julian Darley, and you can find it at your local bookstore. That's where I – so, I suggest you do that. Look for a book coming out soon, Relocalize Now. Julian Darley, thank you so much for joining us again, here on The Party's Over.
Julian Darley: My pleasure.
Els Cooperrider: I hope we can contact you again.
Julian Darley: Thank you very much.
Els Cooperrider: Okay, thank you.
Julian Darley: Bye-bye.
Els Cooperrider: Bye-bye.
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