Gentle Decline 2/17: Actions & Activity

In which the what-can-I-do-now question is addressed, even though nobody actually asked it. And there's some grim regard for knowledge work.

Hello. I had a conversation with someone a while ago, in which they said “I read Gentle Decline more for the sense of grim future than anything else; it’s not like I can do anything about it.” (This has been paraphrased and displaced in time enough that I think the original speaker won’t recognise it; if you do, I kinda-sorta apologise for not responding usefully at the time, and also for not-actually-quoting you).

And in true l'esprit d'escalier, I eventually arrived, weeks later, at “What you can do is what the whole newsletter is about.” But I accept that I need to be a bit clearer about that, and perhaps put some more emphasis on the you than the do.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is again the Gentle Decline enamel mug, which is hard-wearing and solidly thematic for your neighbourhood revolution meetings.]

As a sort of thing-zero, this is not what can be done to prevent the climate changing, or reduce the change. There’s lots of material on that elsewhere; we’ve known most of it for decades. This is about what you can do to get through the changes, yourself, in good order.

Part of the problem is that out of my 3 Rules, the first two (Move Inland and Grow Food) are difficult to do, and the third (Be Generous) rather depends on having been successful in the first two. Some of that is because I’ve compressed things too far, mind, so let me drop “Grow Food” in a glass and rehydrate it so we can have a better look. I might need to rephrase it.

What I’m really talking about here is “develop skills that will work for you in a world where climate change has had slow but large effects”. The growing of food is more about developing the skills to grow food than it is to grow food in the short term. At present, unless you have preternaturally green fingers, it’s far more economic in terms of the value of an hour’s work for most people to buy vegetables than to grow them. Notably, this is not true for potatoes and other very-low-effort crops, and it’s not true for soft fruits and other expensive crops. But I digress; never mind that right now.

(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

A lot of the people who are subscribed to this are knowledge workers, one way or another. The early subscribers I know in person; some of those who have come later I’ve corresponded with a bit, and I’m making a guess for some of the rest of you. By knowledge workers, I mean programmers, network engineers, marketers, writers, support people, sysadmins, and so forth. Your output, on a day to day basis, is information. I am one of you.

In a world where supply chains are shortened, fossil fuels are harder to come by, there are pressures of people moving from coastal regions, and infrastructure is damaged, knowledge work will be less valuable, and there will be fewer jobs in it.

I’ve had some argument on this point, so let me poke it a bit, and see if it still stands up. At the moment, in the West, or at least in the civilised parts of the West, it’s fairly easy to get hold of food. It’s not necessarily easy enough, and it’s not necessarily cheap; there are a hell of a lot more people going hungry in developed economies liek the US and UK than there should be. There should be none, being blunt about it. But still: relatively easy.

Where supply chains are shortened, food has to come from closer by. Asparagus from Peru, grain from India, apples and lamb from New Zealand, and so forth (from the Irish point of view, at least) - all those are going to have to go. The demand for those goods may increase locally, which will mean there’s more work in the relevant areas of agriculture, or those foods may become very hard to get, and there’ll be more demand for other foods, so there’ll be… more work in relevant areas of agriculture.

When fossil fuels are hard to come by, this will reduce mobility. I’ve written about the battery problem before, but basically: electric vehicles, which are the only practical way to travel long distances in the absence of fossil fuels, still don’t have efficient enough batteries for goods haulage or longer commutes. This will further shorten supply chains, so the effects I’ve described above will be accentuated, but it will also concentrate people more into the areas they live in. Less commuting, less travel in general. This will increase demand for local services, where people previously took advantage of specialists near where they worked. Local non-food shops will have greater footfall, greater demand for their goods. Luxury food shops will also have more demand - wine, chocolate, good coffee, etc (assuming these goods can be got at semi-reasonable prices). Certainly, some of this will be supplied by internet shopping and delivery, but many people like to see their luxury goods as they’re buying them. So demand will increase for local bookshops, laundries, key cutting, clothing shops, sports shops, hobby suppliers, and so on. And also for local delivery services, of course.

When there are pressures of people moving from coastal locations inland, there will be demand for new housing, roads, schools, and so on. Much of the service and education industries will be covered by the people who are moving, but they’ll need places to live and work. And where infrastructure is damaged, it will need to be rebuilt, and there’s demand for that, too.

None of that is knowledge work. Greater demand - in a situation where that demand can’t be served from elsewhere - means increased wages. Increased wages means people will move to that work, and the fundamentals of knowledge work depend upon network effects; there is less work for sysadmins if more people are growing food and building houses than sitting in front of computers. And the pressures of capitalism, and its “optimal” 4-6% unemployment rate, means that people who are in knowledge work will be pushed hard toward the higher-demand jobs. If they don’t have the skills for them, well, some of them will be that 4-6%.

(This has happened the other way around in Western economies in the last 80 years or so, as outsourcing to other parts of the world and the concentration of people in cities has reduced demand for these practical jobs.)

And it’s worth noting that this will happen in a relatively gentle version of climate change, where everything happens slowly and smoothly. So the very first thing you can do to make yourself climate-proof is develop some skills that are not knowledge work. I do not mean music or story-telling or community-building or game-running or other entertainment roles; these are still essentially knowledge work, and they are a direction that all the knowledge workers that want to keep doing non-physical work will try to go.

I mean food production, or cooking, or clothes making, or building, or carpentry, or engine maintenance (especially electrics), or wind-vane engineering, or butchery, or bridge-building, or any of a million other necessary practical skills.

In the event of a more catastrophic and sudden effect of climate - which is going to happen in some places - then those practical skills become even more relevant. There is next to no knowledge work without the internet, for instance, or without electricity, and it is virtually certain that there will be issues with both in some places. These will probably be short-term things, but your possession of practical skills will make you a lot more comfortable in that short term, without having to directly depend on people who do have those skills.

Essentially: if the power goes off tomorrow, and stays off for ten days, can you get by? This isn’t in terms of employment - your job will probably still be there when the power comes back up - but in day to day skills. Can you light a fire, cook on it, wash clothes, or at the absolute minimum, move yourself to to somewhere where there is power, when everyone else is trying to do the same? I would put money on, say, 1 in 3 people in the West needing to do these things at some point in the next few decades. And there’s a non-zero chance of some of that power-and-internet just staying off in some areas.

So, that’s what you can do: learn some practical skills. I may need to replace “grow food” with “learn practical skills” in my Rules - although I’d appreciate people’s thoughts on that. Drop me a line, let me know what you think.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) and allow me to keep on eating while I hammer on the keyboard and stare at the sky. Patreon is here, and for those thinking more of the one-time coin in the hat, Ko-fi is available. And the merchandise shop is here. Major research contributions in all issues by Cee.]