Gentle Decline 1/6: Equality & Economy
Hi. It's been a bit, but holidays are like that, and then the beginning of the year is like that, and then January is like that, and so it goes. I'm grabbing some time to put this issue together, but the time is coming in bits and pieces, so please forgive some degree of rambling and mild incoherence. I know I had a point when I started, and I think I found it a few times along the way too.
I've been thinking a lot about gradualism, which is the label I use - and have almost certainly explained at you before - for the belief that there is no such thing as sudden change. Examine any threshold in history, and you will see signs of happening well before it happened, and a wake of effects and aftershocks and knock-on events following it for years. The only things which don't have the precursor effect are a small subset of natural disasters - tsunamis, meteor strikes, and the like. Even volcanoes give some warning, usually.
So if we look around, we should be able to see some signs of the things I expect to happen - summarised here as economic and geopolitical effects from anthropogenic disaster - already happening. "Anthropogenic disaster" is a big category, and I've already included Brexit in it, so I'm giving myself lots of wiggle room there; maybe let me try to narrow that down a bit. We know climate change is a thing. We know that climate change is caused, for the most part, by emissions from fossil fuel, and to a lesser but measurable degree by agricultural outputs. We don't seem to be able to stop either of those, largely because a small set of rich and powerful people are becoming more rich and powerful by not stopping them. But in looking around, we should be able to see other processes that are in the same runaway state because of rich powerful people benefiting from not stopping them, and we can look at what's happening with those, and make some predictions.
The core item we can look at here is the economy itself. It should, in many ways, be the first indicator of runaway processes that are permitted (or even intended) to continue because they lead to an accumulation of wealth and power. And as that accumulation of wealth, in particular, this being economics we're talking about, continues, the money - imaginary and all as it is - has to come from somewhere. This is of necessity going to be clearer in the less equal societies of our world, but while I would imagine that there's plenty of evidence of this already in India and the Middle East, where you have fabulously rich oligarchs and incredibly poor people in the same place, the media and effects I am familiar with happen in the West. So let's look west.
The stock markets are nice and healthy (although some investors are making some concerned noises), houses are at record prices in many places, and the rich are getting richer. But...
In the US, there are food shortages on college campuses. This is not to say that the cafeterias don't have food, or that there are issues with supply chains getting food to where students can buy it - it's that the students can't afford to buy the food that's there. There are lots of reasons for this - high rents, high costs of living, an inability to work sufficient hours to bring in enough money while studying, and so on. There are colleges which are opening food pantries. "Food pantry" is a genteel sounding label for what is, at the root of it, a rather unpleasant concept - the idea that enough people on a college campus are going sufficiently short of food that it makes sense for there to be a service, with storage and staffing and so on, which gives it away in order to bring them up to the mark of, hopefully, 'enough'.
These are college students. They're predominantly first-generation students, from poorer backgrounds, or with some other disadvantage (such as, one suspects, not being white enough). But they're still people who are in college, who would be expected by our normal standards to be reasonably able to get along. Maybe, the stereotype of twenty years ago says, they drink too much in the first few weeks of term, and live on ramen for the last three. But in 21st century reality, they've been on ramen throughout the term, can't afford to drink, and are down to ramen every second day at some points. If, by the way, you've been thinking of the US as a more classless society than the UK or Ireland, try suggesting ramen as a meal to prosperous Americans - they actually recoil. A friend of mine who is close to finishing her PhD in a fairly prestigious US university notes that a number of her cohort have managed to stay going solely because the postgraduate lounge provides bread and peanut butter.
This isn't unique to the US, of course. Pick any company in Dublin whose staff average under 40 years of age, and which employs more than 50 people. These are people who are moderately well paid - not to the standards of Google, say, but at or above average salaries for the country. Interview each of those people as to where they live right now. A good 40% of them will be in shared housing of some kind. Another sizable percentage will be living with their parents, either still or again. And there will probably be one or two at any given point in time who are sleeping on a friend or relative's couch "while house-hunting" - in other words, they've moved out of one place, and are trying to find another they can afford, while temporarily being of no fixed abode. Food usually isn't an issue just yet, but if rents rise much more, it will be. And it's worth noting that in my own workplace, which matches the selection criteria above, 12 loaves of bread, accompanied by butter, jam, cheese and indeed peanut butter, vanish every week, along with a stack of biscuits and fruit. Some of that is, of course, because it's more convenient than leaving the building for lunch, but I think some of that might be illusory.
It was pointed out to me recently (I don't remember by whom, and I've no idea where they got the concept) that one of the qualifiers for inclusion among the bourgeoisie is that you no longer live from paycheck to paycheck. The bourgeoisie is substantially less populous than I've been led to believe, and it's definitely decreasing.
But overall, we can say that we're seeing issues with food poverty and homelessness in some very unexpected places. And if we're seeing them there, what's happening in the places we'd actually expect to see them? Well... if you're not aware of the rise of homelessness in Ireland, you really haven't been paying attention to the news. But again, it's a peculiar sort of homelessness, whereby people are "in the system", they're mostly being provided with some accommodation, and the number of people visibly sleeping on the streets hasn't changed massively - although it has gone up. But much of the accommodation provided is in B&Bs or hotels - or even AirBnBs - and some of the people who aren't sleeping on the streets are sleeping in their cars. So people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale are having a markedly rougher time, but in a weird way, that's still invisible.
Part of the problem is that our concept of "poor" and "homeless" comes from visual media - photographs and TV. We expect "poor" to be indicated by 1930s-depression-era images of bare feet and grubby faces, wooden shacks and rubbish-strewn environments, ragged clothes and no possessions. But that's not how it is. I mean, it can be, but it's a very extreme case. Most people who are homeless still have the same clothes and possessions they had before, even if some of them are in storage somewhere like a friend's attic, are able to shower and even sleep fairly well, and are in good health considering the stress they're under. The fact that you can often, in the 21st century economy and manufacturing conditions, buy a pair of trousers for less than the price of a decent lunch, conceals this further. They just don't have a permanent place to keep their stuff and settle into. People who are very poor but not homeless may still have all of that _and_ a roof over their heads, even if only in the most technical of terms. So it is possible to go through your ordinary day every day for weeks and not encounter anyone who is "visibly" poor.
This gives us a false impression that the world is proceeding along much as it always has. It's not. The rich getting richer, the process of money in capitalism behaving like mass in physics and developing into black holes with event horizons, means that there's a counter-effect at the other end. Some of this is visible directly in economics, and some of it is coming out in the externalisation of cost that is environmental damage and climate change.
So all of this, thus far, is to say that if we're to look at how to deal with the effects of the anthropogenic disaster that is climate change, we are also going to have to look at how to deal with the effects of the anthropogenic disaster that is capitalism - because at the root of it, they're the same thing.
So along with recommendations for the environmentally sound approach of planting more trees and commuting by public transport, I'll be addressing a few things, of lesser or greater impact, that poke at capitalism as well. Not in any burn-down-the-banks way, because trying to instigate sudden change is usually detrimental to someone, often the instigator, but in ways that slowly take power and energy out of that system. And also, of course, ways to cope with the effects that are already in motion, which is the point to which I keep trying to stick and from which I am constantly wandering off.
Focusing a bit more, here's an article in Der Spiegel about coping with climate change. The second half is of more interest from my point of view, the first being the inevitable here's-what's-happening, in case someone had missed it. Part of what's in there details a new building or buildings in New York, the American Copper Towers. These things are built to handle floods - all of their critical infrastructure, including backup generators, is located well above flood level. There is also, unfortunately, a guy saying "New Orleans, with its location in the Mississippi Delta, isn't really suitable for settlement", which is... kind of hard to argue with, barring it's already there.
For an article about dealing with climate change, though, that's pretty short on actual concrete things an average person can do - it's all about architecture. So I'd like to start compiling a list. I'm going to split this into short-, medium- and long-term things, and with a bit on the end going "if you have money", which I do not, and don't really expect you do either, but it's good to have them there to inform thinking. I expect to include further, more refined versions of this list in future issues, so if you think I'm off-base in any of this thinking, let me know. In particular, I'm interested in stuff to go on the long-term list that doesn't require money.
Short-term
Normal environmental care: use public transport if it's available to you, recycle, reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Plant trees, or pay to plant trees. Planting trees is actually pretty easy, and I'll expand on that in a future issue.
Make sure your stuff isn't at flood levels. This is more applicable for people living in coastal cities than anywhere else, and I include your car or bike in its normal daytime parking spot in this.
Keep a small stockpile of food.
If you need prescription medicines, see if you can have some in hand, or at the least a repeat prescription you can fill at short notice.
Have at least a vague bug-out plan, in case of emergency, and have at least some agreement with friends who live at higher altitudes to crash on their couch or the like.
Donate to charities doing work with homelessness and poverty.
Medium-term
Live in places where all parts of the building are more than 10m above sea level, including the basement. Yes, I know this excludes most coastal cities.
Don't depend too much on savings, and only a little more on stocks. In times of inflation - which is one of the responses of economy to crisis - savings are not worth much, but active income is.
Consider the possibility of growing some of your own food - know where you could plant, where to acquire seeds.
Make sure you have clothing for colder or longer-term wet weather.
Learn to swim, if you can't.
Long-term
If you're buying land, and expect to leave it to your kids, go above 70m above sea-level.
Acquire a "post-apocalyptic skill set". This can usefully be outlined as "anything practiced before WW1", but I'll expand on this more in a future issue.
If you have money
Invest in solar power and other green tech, as well as coastal salvage.
Buy up land and plant forests.
Consider establishing intentional communities that are designed for resilience.
So having laid down the law thus, a couple of links of interest before I finish out:
With reference back to the Stockpiling Special: Post-Brexit supply chains in Ireland details some of the things we may end up being short on right here. Some of this thinking appears to have sunk in a bit more since I wrote about it, and I'm getting occasional queries from people about what, specifically, to stockpile, and what to do about use-by dates (get stuff with use-by dates a long way out; use the food with the earliest use-by date first, and replace it if you can; your stockpile should ideally be an active part of your food supply, not a static thing, and if you have things in there that you don't normally eat, consider not being daft).
Tor.com (an excellent site in general, and a force for good in SF/F, I think) has some stuff on classic SF about climate change. I'm not even slightly a believer in SF as a prediction of the future, but I'm very much in favour of it as a way of exploring thinking about things that might or will happen.
That's it for this issue. Feedback welcome, particularly in the area of the list!