Gentle Decline 1/27: Managing & Meandering

Hello. This is Week X of the lockdown, and X isn't me forgetting to fill in a number, but indicating that I don't know what number to fill in. There are also X weeks left, and X appears to be a startlingly large number, at least as far as my going-places-and-seeing-people urges are concerned. So we proceed, J. Alfred Prufrockishly, with each day closely resembling the day before. Most of this issue concerns life and living in an environment of declining oil, bearing in mind that my version of how things will be is only one view, and almost certainly does not represent the future.

However, first, I've been doing a lot of walking lately, exploring parts of Maynooth which I haven't otherwise done. And in parallel, there's an excellent passage in a recent issue of Kneeling Bus, which goes:

"the parts of the city that aren’t defined by consumption are specifically what’s still open. [Rem Koolhaas'] Junkspace is closed and we can only occupy the interstitial spaces between establishments searchable on Yelp. The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn. The primary way we experience much of that space under normal circumstances is by passing through it on the way to somewhere else; now, momentarily, that “somewhere else” isn’t available. The official act of reopening cities will signify the reintegration of space and the economy, but when that finally happens, hopefully, we’ll remember what we learned during this time—that the two aren’t as inseparable as they seem."

Looking at the pass-through, somewhere-else spaces is interesting. Maynooth is in some ways an odd town; it's been here for along time, and has a fair bit of historical significance, but about 90% of it is less than 200 years old. Indeed, I think about 80% of it is less than a century old, and a good bit of the wandering I've done has been through estates that were constructed, at earliest, in the 1970s, and some much more recently. I've found shortcuts I didn't know existed, and I've found a number of fruit trees - mostly apples, some others - to which I can get access in autumn. Some of that is because the housing estates were laid down over older terrain, so that there are cottages and houses and odd turns of road that show vestiges of older occupation. One estate has a sort of ghost of an old road running through it, which right at the back of the estate turns into a real road of a very rural sort, and runs for another 700m or so to a dead end for field access. There are a few houses along it that aren't housing estate material at all.

There are a few places on the far side of the town to which I haven't been yet; they're up for exploration in the next few weeks. And there's one office/light-industrial estate which I've been in before, but never really stopped to pay any attention in, so that might merit a look around.

Of course, this walking and local focus is a good rehearsal, as it were, for the declining-and-post-oil future I'm expecting. Let me expand on that a bit. For the first stretch, in Ireland, we were allowed travel more than 2km (which went up to 5km on the 5th) only for food shopping, medical care, and other essentials. Otherwise we're supposed to stay at home, and within that 2-and-then-5km limit for exercise. It is possible, according to some stuff I've seen passing by on Twitter, to cycle 28km within that 2km limit, without significantly recrossing your path, assuming you're in a dense enough urban or suburban area. People are mostly obeying this. Since there's a general advice to avoid other filthy humans, shopping trips are being kept to a minimum - one a week is pretty solid.

What I'm seeing is far more local activity. People are out walking, or they're doing gardening or yardwork. They're stopping to chat (at 2m distances, for the very most part), and they're doing bits of house renovation that they've been meaning to get around to for, by the looks of things in some cases, years. But essentially, they're here in Maynooth in a way that many of them have never been. Indeed, I'm coming to realise that I have not really spent proper time at home in this house before, because I've never had the chance before. Evenings barely count, weekends are often elsewhere, holidays are almost by definition elsewhere. And the same is true for nearly everyone around here, with the important exceptions of stay-at-home parents, disabled folks, retirees, and the unemployed, for whom not a lot has changed except that everyone else is now home too.

This is something we could expect from a future in which less oil means less mobility. And for the most part, that's not necessarily a bad outcome. For thousands of office workers, there is no need to be in the office - virtually everything I've done as a marketer for the last ten years has needed a computer and a net connection, and otherwise could be anywhere. Over the last few weeks, the weird fixation that middle management have on being able to see the people that report to them has been pretty conclusively demonstrated to be unnecessary. So a lot of people could be at home, whether that's in suburbs or dormitory towns, or further afield. The difference between "could work from home" and "have to work from home due to oil price or pandemic conditions or weather" is merely attitude.

We also have the necessity I've mentioned before for more local food production. Oil enables moving food around easily over frankly silly distances, and that's going to wind down as oil gets more expensive. This will hit out of season foods first - Peruvian asparagus year-round, and so on. Then heavy or bulky foods, which is a lot of them. Local food production means more people working in non-urban areas, and for similar reasons, nobody's going to be commuting over long distances to a farm job.

So we have some indeterminate number more people staying close to home. Next is the question of where home is. With non-location-specific and rural work increasing, there's no real need for so many people to live near major urban centres. There will be a definite flow of population from the city out to rural areas - as long as they have infrastructure enough to have broadband internet connections. Since people are also going to have to move inland for reasons of sea-level rise, and many of our urban centres - not just for Ireland, but worldwide - are coastal, that's going to be a double pressure on the more rural inland areas. This isn't necessarily a good thing from an environmental perspective, mind; while reduced emissions will be great, biodiversity needs more land returned to a wild state, and increased rural population and local agriculture go against that.

So now we have more people at home, and home is on average more rural than it used to be. This will inevitably mean that there is more service industry needed in rural areas, whether that's food service, as in restaurants and takeaways, or hairdressers and barbers, or car and machinery repair. Retail will also be necessary, although there will be some changes in what is sold; see below for more on that. Having large shops in county towns will just about work, but there's going to be a point in the transport costs where shopping in the local village has a definite financial benefit, assuming prices are fairly constant.

It is possible, though I don't think it's overall very likely, that buying produce hyper-locally (as in, walking or cycling distance, direct from the farm) will be definitively cheaper, because the farm then doesn't have to pay to transport those goods. That said, it may be cheaper anyway, because fewer stages in the supply chain means fewer cuts being taken. At the moment, it would definitely be more profitable for many farms to sell to the consumer directly than to go through the chains to the supermarkets - but there's currently little willingness on the customer's part to go the extra distance when they can easily get everything in one place (pandemic-related supply chain issues illustrate this). Village and small-town markets (which might still be greengrocers rather than outdoor markets) might be a mid-point on this - the point being that the supply is local, not coming through national warehouses.

A corollary of this is that food in cities will be more expensive. This is also somewhat true right now, but not at a level most consumers notice, and it's more due to the rent that city businesses need to pay than to transport costs. Transport costs rising will probably - as populations in cities migrate slowly out - decrease rents for city businesses, but also decrease footfall and actual sales, so the overall effect might result in food prices decreasing a smidgen at first, and then increasing. Because few retailers - or more precisely, retail accountancy departments - want to decrease prices, it might look very like an increase with a delay instead.

I mentioned car and machinery repair above. One of the side effects of oil being cheap is that oil products are cheap, and by oil products I mean plastic. Plastic is so cheap that when something breaks, it's cheaper to replace it than to repair it. This is partly because plastic is also difficult to repair - it's considerably easier to produce a new part via injection moulding or 3D printing than it is to fix up an existing damaged part. As the cost of plastic itself rises, people are not going to want to replace things as often, and so more durable materials will re-enter use (except, perhaps, for medical devices, as Sorcha noted in the last issue). Wooden and metal objects can be repaired more easily, so there will be new markets in local repairs.

Indeed, that use of non-plastics will mean a fairly broad change in what's sold at many levels of retail. A lot of the cheaper clothes we have today are made from fabrics at least partially composed of plastic. A lot of footwear is also partially plastic. Bags, coats, hats (where people are civilised enough to wear them), and so on as well. As plastics leave the market - again, this will be a slow process - natural materials like linen and wool will return. Those are almost by their nature more expensive, but they're also more durable and repairable. So in the longer term, we'll see fewer, higher-value transactions for clothing, footwear and accessories that last longer. This might also lead to a decrease in off-the-shelf clothing sales, and an increase in tailoring, as what currently looks like the height of luxury in clothing becomes more of a necessity. Essentially, if more of what you're paying for in an item of clothing is the material, the labour costs involved in tailoring are reduced in proportion.

There's also the prospect of second-hand markets increasing. At the moment, very little of the stuff we own is worth selling on when we're done with it. This is an absolute anomaly in most of history. Up to about the 1950s, it was fairly possible, if you were moving from one country to another or over a similar long distance, to sell everything you owned, and buy new (or other second-hand) stuff at the destination. Throughout the medieval and Renaissance eras, and to a fair degree through to the early twentieth century, this had what we would see as an odd effect on finances - namely, that something you bought was not money gone, it was mostly just money stored in a different form. Even in clothing, a not-worn-out garment could be sold for most of its original cost. Furniture was nearly as good as currency, since it mostly didn't wear out (bare wood acquires patina, and becomes rather more comfortable when worn, rather than wearing out). Beds were valuable enough to be written explicitly into wills. So with more durable goods returning, we can expect to see more circulation of existing goods, too.

Does this mean that big supermarkets will go out of business? I think it's pretty likely. The biggest chains run on just-in-time supply chains and narrow enough margins; they leverage their all-under-one-roof nature to pressure suppliers and producers into low prices. If the margins are narrowed further - or eliminated - and their suppliers and producers can get better prices via local sales, then their prices need to rise, and that begins to reduce the attraction of convenience. But you can bet they're going to fight hard not to disappear, and use every bit of leverage and competitive advantage they can get along the way, so it's not going to be a quiet disappearance, and will undoubtedly have some weird second-order and third-order effects. ("Prove you haven't visited any local markets and get a 20% discount in Tesco!"; "Bring us your receipts from local shops, and we'll give you half their value back in M&S store credit!")

This will also change our diets, at least a bit. If we can't get those Peruvian asparagus, we're going to have to eat what's in season locally, and what's been preserved from other seasons. Now, as long as greenhouses and grow-lamps are a thing, the local seasons can be munged a long way. We don't traditionally grow much in greenhouses in the Isles, or at least not nearly as much as in the Netherlands, which has about 5000 hectares under glass, but that can change. Some plants just don't do as well in artificial conditions, though, and it's quite hard to produce tree fruits out of season.

Next up are other energy needs. It seems reasonably likely that solar and wind power will provide enough energy for electricity grids to function. That might also cover irrigation and a number of agricultural needs, and provide for electric tractors (already appearing, but not really covering all needs). Heat is the odd one out; despite average temperatures going up, we're still going to need heat in winter, and producing heat from electricity is quite expensive - hence the supplies of oil and gas that many places use. Those will disappear gradually, and we may see more use of wood-burning, which will require more firewood. Firewood is a thriving industry already, and by its very nature tends toward sustainability; there will likely be more of that. However, that can't scale very far - there is no possible way that enough firewood can be grown in Ireland to provide heat at the level we're used to. So we adjust to colder houses and wear warmer clothes (the historical solution, broadly), or we insulate better (Scandinavia and Canada can demonstrate), or we find more efficient ways to heat from electricity. I expect a combination of the latter two.

So, what can individual people do to get ahead of this? In summary: move to a rural or near-rural area, reduce your travel needs as much as you can, reduce your use of oil (and other fossil fuels) in heating, install solar panels and wind turbines (and learn as much as you can about how to maintain them - indeed, if you want a new career that does already exist and is only going to increase, that's your signal), and start reducing the amount of plastic stuff you buy. If you're inclined to do so, learning how to repair particular materials (welding, patching, darning, dowelling, and so on) with an eye to doing so for money is not a bad way to go. Looking at agricultural opportunities in your new rural area can also be useful - while you might not want to do fieldwork, farms will need accountancy, IT (including websites and technical marketing), and all the other things that any other business needs. The more farms diversify, the more support they're going to need.

That does raise the question of diversification. It is possible, right now, for a farm to produce nothing but one crop. Or, in view of the needs of crop rotation, which can only be partially overcome with artificial fertilisers and irrigation, three, one of which might be a fallow crop of some kind, that gets ploughed back in. That works because current transport means the market is worldwide. As transport distances decrease, that market becomes smaller. There is a point in this where there is no point in shipping, say, cabbages, over long distances, so that one farm is now producing more cabbages than can be sold in its available market. It can reduce its land holdings, and produce only the cabbages it can sell in that market, or it can diversify into also selling peas, or onions, or whatever. Over time, this can - not necessarily will - result in farms that do a little of everything; the "mixed farm" of history up to the early twentieth century. This limited distance to market idea can be seen in restaurants and coffeeshops today (or at least in non-pandemic conditions); there's a veritable froth of different stuff being sold.

However, because we live in an era of technical capability and gig economies, there's inevitably going to be a level of short-term work superimposed on this. Imagine a website that collates produce orders, matches them with suppliers, and uses algorithms to move an army of gig-working (or maybe even properly employed) cargo-bikers, delivery people, porters and very-short-term-warehousers around getting the produce from farm to consumer. There's plenty of stuff to be done in areas like that; much of it stuff that I haven't (and nobody else has) though of yet.

I don't think any one profession or job is going to disappear. We have the concept of stockbrokers and "high finance" now, and it's unlikely that it's going to go away without a significant cultural turn. For the foreseeable future there will always be lawyers and estate agents, sales people and HR managers, and all the apparatus of business. But the proportion of people who will engage in those will change. And at the same time, we had the concepts of the rightful nobility and of absolute monarchy, and they went away too, sometimes quite quickly. I do think, though, that with the demise of fast, cheap transport and cheap, disposable plastic, we'll see a rise in local activity and what are now termed crafts.

This issue brought to you by a refined beans and rice recipe with the correct sausage, further book deliveries, coffee, and early summer meadows with bounding dog. In the next issue (thanks to Alex for getting me started), I'm intending to look at a variety of new high- and low-tech aids for environmental and declining oil situations. If you have stuff in that line that you know of, fire it this way.

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