My attention was caught this morning by a headline in the NYT Saying that the Finance Ministers were more worried about the food crisis than the credit crisis.
History tells us that they are correct. The Ancien Regime in France staggered along for decades with all sorts of debilitating failures. The system, like ours, had become unresponsive to core problems, had overspent on foreign wars, had become financially bankrupt and had coddled the super rich versus the lower classes.
But the regime continued. Until a food crisis.
These problems were all compounded by a great scarcity of food in the 1780s. A series of crop failures caused a shortage of grain, consequently raising the price of bread. Because bread was the main source of nutrition for poor peasants, this led to starvation. The two years previous to the revolution (1788-89) saw bad harvests and harsh winters, possibly because of a strong El Niño cycle[11] caused by the 1783 Laki eruption at Iceland[12]. The little ice age was also affecting agriculture: many other areas of Europe had adopted the potato as the staple crop by this time, whereas the French generally refused it as a dirty food or the devil's food. The potato was more resilient to the colder temperatures during the little ice age and also could not be easily destroyed by scorched earth warfare[13]. A normal worker earned anywhere from 15 to 30 sous a day while skilled workers received 30 to 40 sous. A family of four would need about 2 loaves of bread a day to survive. The price of bread rose by 88 percent in 1789, going from 9 sous to 14.5/15 sous[citation needed]. Many peasants were relying on charity to survive. The peasantry became a class with the ambition to counteract social inequity and put an end to food shortages. The 'bread riot' evolved into a central cause of the French Revolution. Mass urbanization coinciding with the beginning of the industrial revolution led residents to move into French cities seeking employment. French cities became overcrowded and filled with the hungry and disaffected. The peasantry suffered doubly from the economic and agricultural problems.
Not eating, seeing your family starve is the tinder for revolt.
The peasants do not lead the revolt, but they generate the energy.
As we think of the scale and the permanence of our system, think back as to how Europeans would have seen the permanence of the monarchy and aristocracy in 1789. On the day that Bastille fell, Louis wrote in his dairy "Rien" Nothing had happened of note for him that day. We cannot imagine our system not being here anymore. But I think that we are on the edge.
Oil/energy, food, the credit system - the foundations of our world are all in full over-stretch - the lever for a tip is I think the weather. Who can have confidence that the weather will be kind to us.
I feel as if we are all in some Chekov play. Sitting around in our Dacha in the country talking about the joys of a return to Petersburg. When all around us vast storm clouds are gathering that will sweep all our lives and how we live away.
So what can we do?
I think that John Robb is onto the only idea that has any chance - Local Resilience. I was in Ukraine in 1997. Under the Soviet System, power was maintained by Moscow by designing in dependency locally. There was never all the parts of a functioning system in any region. You had to depend on Moscow to be complete.
At the heart of local resilience are 2 items - energy and food. If you have to depend on others for these - you are fucked.
The power and energy distribution systems are incredibly vulnerable in North America and in Western Europe. Western Europeans are dependent on Russia for their marginal energy now. We take this for granted as being OK!!
We in North America depend on a grid that is at breaking point. I recall in Montreal 30 years ago, a break in one major line from Labrador, putting the whole city into the cold and dark. The same happened in Wellington NZ for weeks in the summer! Imagine being cut off from electricity for more than a week and living in a big city!
My fear that there is no local energy future for those that live in the big cities. They exists because of the grid. There is no alternative. But for a place like PEI there is.
A distributed power system is essential to cope with the global break that will occur. On PEI we could have a system that was self sufficient. Not all about wind either. Nearly every river has a dam that had been used for a local hydro system. Here is Scales Pond.
What if we had an Energy Independence Plan? What if part of that plan was to refurbish our hydro system that used to supply a lot of local power? Hydro, wind, biofuel, horses! Yes horses. We could not only cope, we could do well.
On PEI, the good news is that, if we got serious, we could be energy self sufficient in 10 years. What a project! Think of the jobs. Think of how it would feel. Think of what it would mean.
So what about food? We are OK on PEI surely?
Here is the reality. We on PEI, a major farming community, have 2 days of food in the food distribution system. Think we cannot have starvation here? Shut the bridge for 10 days and see what happens. See how farcical our situation is?
Our food system is designed to make fries for the global market. Our whole livestock sector has collapsed because it was designed to sell to the global market.
READ MY LIPS - there is no future is aiming for a global food market in meat of fries. There is however a local market that will be more secure. Part of what we have to do is to accept this and to then design a string local system that will connect growers to buyers and make it easy for both.
Eating local is not just a hippie new age idea - it's a strategic essential. We can do this. We can decide that food security is important and design, as with energy a mixed and deep local system.
The key will be as I said a local system but also I think a shift to hyper local. Part of this will involve I think urban agriculture.
Ukrainians have a lot of experience of living in a farm paradise and starving because of systemic failure. Their survival strategy - everyone has a Dacha plot - a 1/4 acre intensive food garden.
On Friday in the late 1990's, the buses would be crammed with women going out to tend the plots. Without this, they would have starved. The Cubans did the same after Russian aid was cut off. Their agriculture was like PEI's. They grew a commodity crop, sugar and tobacco for export.
When the Russians could no longer buy and no longer give them oil in return - Cuba was facing collapse. The response was to get behind the most exciting urban agriculture system in the world today.
Cuba is just like PEI. It had lost the ability to feed itself in exchange for a commodity that ended up having no value. Overnight, it had to prevent starvation but had no money to buy food from outside. Cuba had only one choice, grow local or die.
We will be faced with this I am sure.
Want to find out how to do this, go to Cuba.
On PEI as part of the "Independence Strategy" we have to really get behind a local market system that will pull local production up and create the back bone of our insurance policy.
I am loving the new government's idea of One Island. I think that this is a precursor to "Independence Day" when we actively plan to become independent of the industrial system that holds us in thrall.
It's more than money. When a society as a whole feels that they have lost their place, its health and will collapse.
Reflect for a moment please on this slide. What is shows is the effect of losing control, power and status on health. The death rates for men in Russia shot up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What happened? The loss of a sense of control and power.
We know from Dr Marmot's work, that this is the single most important determinant of health. We see here that this applies not just to a workplace or a city but to entire societies.
I think that our "SYSTEMIC DEPENDENCY" on PEI is the most powerful force that we have that is driving so many to have such poor health, learning and social problems.
The research shows that individual resiliency is largely driven by societal resiliency.
Look at how Cuba with a very low GDP shines in health compared to the major economies of Latin America.
What this slide shows is how Japan began to feel powerful again in the world after its defeat in the war. As it felt its power, look at how life expectancy climbed.
If we want to reduce the threat to our society by healthcare costs that are out of control, if we want to protect our society from the risk of the upcoming energy crisis and food crisis, then we can make the largest contribution by looking at becoming more independent as a society.
This one, but complex act, fixes all. As we as a society become more independent and resilient, so do we as its citizens.
Here is Dr Marmot talking about the collapse of health in Eastern Europe after ther fall of the Soviet Union
.. look at what's happened to Central and Eastern
Europe. Whole societies change radically, incredibly quickly. If we
look at life expectancy in Central and Easter Europe, let's say, in
1970, so twenty-five years after the end of World War II, and we look
at the countries in Central and Eastern Europe compared with the
countries of Western Europe, the democratic countries, then life
expectancy was fairly similar, east and west.
It was always a bit lower
in the former Soviet Union, but fairly similar. And then what happened?
Over the last two decades of the Communist period, life expectancy for men, particularly, actually declined in Central and Eastern Europe, actually got worse, whereas it got better year-on-year in the West. So the gap between east and west increased. And then post-1989, things changed dramatically. Life expectancy took a tumble, got very much worse, very quickly in the former Soviet Union, particularly in Belarus, in the Ukraine, and in Russia. Life expectancy after the initial drop started to improve in the Czech Republic, in Poland, and then a bit later in Hungary. So you've got this playing out.
Now, whole countries don't get changes like that because of changes
in genetic predisposition......
That was what led me to ask if maybe the same set of factors are going on. The whole idea that lack of control over your life, lack of opportunity to participate socially in a meaningful way, could affect whole societies, not just people, depending on where they were within the gradient within a society, was really rather powerful. It suggested that the way we ought to think about health policy should change.
