I want to weigh in on the relocalization debate that has been going on for the last several weeks on The Oil Drum. The debate continued with the ArchDruid’s mixed-metaphor weigh-in on Friday. I’ve finally got some coherent thoughts about this. My argument follows.

Mollison defines yield in terms of a system, which creates both product and energy yield. Since energy is not created, according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, energy yield is not truly a “net” but rather the surplus energy after the system’s needs are met. This is the key measure of sustainability in a general sense.

System yield is the sum total of surplus energy produced by, stored, conserved, reused, or converted by the design. Energy is in surplus once the system itself has available all its needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance.

Cheap oil has allowed us to create really big systems, so that current agricultural grain system yields need to be measured against a system that includes oil inputs from Canada, refining in Texas, potash from Canada, nitrogen from Venezuela, processing and shipping to markets all over the world. For all practical purposes this includes the entire global ecosystem. Whether this system is in surplus is a question for another post. The point is that the scale of the system has been driven by cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Therefore, the end of cheap energy will necessitate a reduction in scale of all operations, including agriculture, if it is to be sustainable.

To Staniford’s point that BigAg can continue under improved economic conditions due to Peak Corn, at some point this cannot be argued to be sustainable. There’s a price point that will be reached if it has not done so already. Mollison’s items about all the needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance seem to indicate, in a world where 1/6 of the population live in extreme poverty, that this point has already been reached.

Relocalization can be defined as an attempt to create sustainable systems at a much smaller, more human scale. This would apply to food, money, transportation, media and other “extensions of man.” It follows then that the scale and progress of relocalization is a function of energy supply. This is not to imply that this is a linear relation; the function is necessarily complex.

This realization leads to a further question about the mechanisms and strategies for achieving relocalization. “Planning” is clearly a term with a lot of baggage, so I prefer Mollison’s term “Design.” This will still make Market Fundamentalists twitch, but the fact is the current system has been historically designed in very specific ways. Again this is subject for a future post. The IMF is a case in point, if you need one.

Donald Norman, the usability expert says there is no such thing as “no design”: there is good design or bad design. So we should start designing for a future with a much smaller scale, and the relocalization movement is attempting to do this. To the extent that we employ conscious systems design, for example using Permaculture strategies, relocalization is not a “reversalist” approach.

An important follow-on question is the pace at which re-scaling and relocalizing must take place. I would argue that this depends on whether we are in a Code Red situation or whether there is yet time to design a controlled energy descent, especially in light of Global Warming.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Sustainability, Economics, Systems Thinking, Permaculture, Energy, Peak Oil, Transportation, Food System, Global warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.