Don't worry be happy

“It made it easier because we had no choice. Or we did, but the choice was will we cry or will we work. There was a strong desire to lie down and cry, but we decided to do things instead.”

This quote is from an agronomist interviewed by Bill McKibben in his article "The Cuba Diet" (Harper's, April 2005).

There was a story from the AP Wires today about how successful urban farming has been in Cuba, which allowed people to plant their own food and keep most of the profit (80%). So it seems that Cuba definitely has "crunchy" down, though they still have far to go for the "con" or freedom part:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FARMING_HAVANA?SITE=TNJAC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

The thorny question raised by McKibben is whether it is possible to have "Cuban" semi-sustainable agriculture, which does not rely on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, without an oppressive, authoritarian regime that has the power to impose certain ways of life. Granted, some communist regimes forced their people to starve in the wake of natural disasters (case in point: North Korea), but in the case of Cuba, the government chose to be accountable to its people and allowed limited privatization which enabled the country to get through a period of shortages and intense deprivation, and now has made the population on the whole healthier, thanks to the increase of vegetables in their diet, with improved lifespans.

I hope that democracy is compatible with their capacity to transition peacefully into a more limited economy and get through these periods of shortages. But I can also imagine a situation where those of means retreat behind bunkers, protected by private armies, in an explicit of militarization of the gated community, while the poor and destitute multitudes prey on each other in between waiting for air-drops of soylent green.

If Charlton Heston couldn't save us...

Re- Stone Age, etc.

I wish Rod would be a bit more specific about all this talk about collapse. I can see two basic interpretations, although I suppose there is a wide grey zone in between:

1. The survivalist nightmare/dream: Gasoline suddenly becomes unavailable, the electricity goes off, the government falls over, and central authority breaks down. Mass violence breaks out, and the populations falls by 95%+ within 5 years.

2. The end of excess: Everything is permanently much more expensive. There is no more cheap foreign travel, and cars are just for the rich, like in about 1920. Diet is mainly cabbage, cheese and potatoes. Farmers go back to using horses. Coalmines reopen. Electricity is expensive, and generated by coal, wind and nuclear. There is a choice between rationing, like England during WW2 or Cuba today, or 19th-C poverty for the poorest classes. People dig out their WW2 dig-for-victory and recipe books.

In case 1, the most important factors affeting your well-being are (i) being well-armed, although not necessarily in terms of conventional fire power (where do you get new bullets?), and (ii) being more than a fulltank of gasoline from a big city. I guess New Zealand is probably about the best place on earth to be, although parts of the USA are pretty close seconds. The full-tank-of-gasoline bit rules out anywhere in the UK except offshore islands and the furthest bits of NW Scotland. For those who survive the first few years, the most important thing is having old-fashioned rural-working-class skills - being able to deliver calves, shoe horses, snare rabbits, lay bricks, fix roofs, etc.

In case 2, money may be the most important factor, although the strains due to such a situation could result in some sort of socialist revolution (Marxists argue that the working classes have been bought off by rising living standards), in which case having money would probably be the worst bet. Europe would probably do better than North America, having better public transport, and traditions of homegrown food production. Perhaps eastern Europe, especially countries like Poland that were spared the worst of Communist collectivisation, would do best, as they have less far to fall, and the change would make less difference.

Case 2 seems much more likely, but I sometimes wonder what it felt like to be a well-to-do Roman in some city in England or France in 390. You feel that the world you know will last forever, yet a generation later it has crumbled, and the population has crashed by 90% or more.

On an academic level, if case 1 were to happen, what do you think society would be like 100 years later? I expect most of Europe and eastern N America would be like Europe about 700 years ago - peasants and feudal kingdoms. What would central and western USA be like? - nomadic herdsmen, perhaps?? If Jared Diamond is right, in "Guns, Germs and Steel", about Australian soil having no natural fertility, and being entirely dependent on chemical fertilisers, it is quite possible that the Aborigines will end up getting their continent back.