Teaching the importance of Oil in Schools?

[Cavegirl]

Well there's a challenge. You'd best set out what you think the "magic and miracles" are and what your alternative is.

 

The impetus is on Sibon to define the concept of how 'magic' and 'miracles' will save us because it his him/ her that believes they will occur.

 

I think our priorities ought to be research into:

 

1. The food system- as we agree, there is currently no method available for producing enough food to feed 65 million people in the UK without cheap oil. This must be addressed. Food growth needs to be re-localised and everyone capable would need to participate to some extent. The size of farms would need to be greatly reduced and many people would need to leave the cities and move back out into the countryside. As I say, food growing need not revert back to 'Dark Age' methods as you put it if farms are well designed.

 

2. Reverting industrial landscapes into either arable land or woodland. A large survey needs to be performed so that people can ascertain which parts of the land are safe to grow food on following the dismantling of industrial complexes. Woodland can be grown on areas deemed unsafe due to soil toxicity.

 

3. The fisheries need to be restocked and carefully managed until natural levels are restored.

 

4. The coastlines need to be cleaned up and de-polluted as these provide lots of food for very little work.

 

5. The transport system- we need to focus upon creating a sustainable non-oil based public transport system that can link large suburbs to cities and can also interlink cities.

 

6. Home heating- we need a sustainable non-oil based method of heating homes. Woodland regeneration and management may provide part of the solution, but new technologies would also need to be sought. Renewable energy alternatives could also provide a short term solution.

 

7. Disposal of nuclear material and safe dismantling of nuclear power stations. A lot of consideration needs to be put into how this can be acheived without access to cheap oil and our current infrastructure.

 

8. Setting up local currencies that can be used in case the national currency hits hyper-inflation or collapses would also help to off-set some of the issues.

 

These are some of the areas that I think need to be prioritised as they provide the necessities of food, shelter and safety as well as necessary transport links. Some would be easier to acheive than others.

 

For what it's worth I think it's impossible to regress back to the Dark Ages, society always develops and evolves. Perhaps the majority of progress will be made in terms of how we change our attitudes to the environmnet and to our lifestyles and sense of responsibilities and our sense of happiness and community rather than the progress of technologies and consumerism, but this doesn't need to be a scary or bad thing. I think a good model to keep in mind would be Sweden or Norway or perhaps Cuba (which has already been forced to undergo a peak oil transformation due to embargos and survived) rather than Dark Age Britain.

[Tony]

Thanks for outlining some thoughts. We would agree on the overarching principles behind a few of them as I too suspect that food and water is as pressing as energy.

 

I'm a fan of nuclear, though I worry that politicians think its a hotter potato than it really is and as a result we are now in urgent need of many gW of energy fast and only nuclear can provide that. It goes without saying that the appropriate safety and environmental measures should be in place but I do have confidence that tomorrows technology and techniques will take care of today's problem.

 

Local currency is a novel idea that I'd never considered past community use. Please tell us more.

[Cavegirl]

Local currencies are developing in quite a few places across Britain (and indeed the world- particularly Canada and the US) at the moment. One of the more advanced systems is Totnes, which is a Transition Town (ie a town that has already developed and begun to implement a post-oil energy and development plan).

 

This is what the website says about the currency-

 

The benefits of the Totnes Pound are:

 

* To build resilience in the local economy by keeping money circulating in the community and building new relationships

* To get people thinking and talking about how they spend their money

* To encourage more local trade and thus reduce food and trade miles

* To encourage tourists to use local businesses

 

We hope that at a later stage additional benefits could include supporting the start up of new social, ethical and environmental businesses.

 

Their site found here http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/totnespound/home has a section explaining how it works.

[Longcol]

Totnes is full of ageing hippies who've done quite well for themselves - bit like Hebden Bridge up this end of the country.

 

Not the hardest place in the world to introduce those concepts.

[Cavegirl]

Totnes is full of ageing hippies who've done quite well for themselves - bit like Hebden Bridge up this end of the country.

 

Not the hardest place in the world to introduce those concepts.

 

The point wasn't 'what is Totnes like?' it was 'tell us more about local currencies' though wasn't it?

 

It's a start and there are many other towns, including Sheffield (though this city is lagging behind many others), that have begun to develop post-oil strategies and are moving forward on these agendas.

 

I think you're right that it's not the hardest place to introduce a local currency. It's compact and has a strong sense of community already. However, larger cities like Sheffield can benefit from their experiences in learning what works well and what doesn't as the currency develops.

[Longcol]

 

It's a start and there are many other towns, including Sheffield (though this city is lagging behind many others), that have begun to develop post-oil strategies and are moving forward on these agendas.

 

 

Links please to anything that is working on anything other than a micro scale.

[Cavegirl]

Links please to anything that is working on anything other than a micro scale.

 

Why don't you add something useful or informative to the discussion instead of either personally attacking the people who are or trying to come up with petty ways to put the discussion off-track. I'm getting very bored of you.

 

I have come up with a link for you, but you've annoyed me very much. I think I'll stick to discussing it with reasonable people like Tony who know how to disagree with someone graciously.

[Cavegirl]

Links please to anything that is working on anything other than a micro scale.

 

Here is a link to a paper about the Argentinian LETS scheme which used the RGCTM as its currency when Argentina's economy collapsed.

 

http://www.sustecweb.co.uk/past/sustec93/93-14.html

 

The "Red Global de Clubes de Trueque Multireciproco", literally "Global Network of Multi-Reciprocal Exchange Clubs" or more simply "Global Exchange Network", grew into a large-scale grassroots response to economic, social and political changes in the country, with the purpose of re-inventing the market and reintroducing people that had been excluded by the domestic effects of economic globalization.

 

They found the original LETS system too unwieldy as it grew so they changed to a mutual credit system instead.

 

Their currency is now accepted in 500 systems nationwide.

[Longcol]

Why don't you add something useful or informative to the discussion instead of either personally attacking the people who are or trying to come up with petty ways to put the discussion off-track. I'm getting very bored of you.

 

I would come up with a link for you, but you've annoyed me too much. I think I'll stick to discussing it with reasonable people like Tony who know how to disagree with someone graciously.

 

 

 

OK let's stick to "local currencies" in a bit broader sense.

 

Perhaps the most succesful examples in this country have been mining communities during the miners strike, or the co-operative movement. To some extent credit unions were the last example of this.

 

All relied on a great deal of communality - almost a monoculture - in the areas where they operated.

 

Same reason they might work in a Totnes - but hardly likely to be universally applied.

 

I think we need bigger ideas that will only come from somebody seeing a real business opportunity.

[Cavegirl]

I did find you a link, I decided not to be as petty as you have been.

 

I think that if the national currency collapses again then everything will need to be localised anyway, certainly until things re-stabilise. Food and water provision will certainly be mainly of local concern. Having small local city wide or sub-regional wide currencies in place before that happens could be of huge benefit. These things can tick away nicely in the background until they're needed so one could be set up straight away in Sheffield. As Totnes suggest it enables people to trade locally without any money leaking out of the system- so it remains in Sheffield and benefits Sheffielders.

It may be that in a post- oil society it becomes necessary to try to link local currencies together again, but this could be done gradually and with the knowledge gained from other places have already experimented and tried it.