Untitled Document

Essays related to the CSCC

We Are No Longer in Oz

Dorothy, Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man were shocked when Toto pulled back the curtain in the Emerald City to reveal the Great Oz to be a modest, slightly apologetic small man at the controls of a huge special effects machine.

We are discovering much of the economic dazzle and flash we have grown up with - the entire lives of Baby Boomers - has been created by special effects, just like Oz.

In recent years, easy credit, sub prime mortages, the feeding frenzy amped up by exotic financial devices have spawned an even more spectacular short term boom of economic activity embedded within the larger decades long boom. Boom has turned to bust world wide and hundreds of millions of people are severely affected.

There is plenty of blame to spread around but the fact is, the vast majority of Americans have participated and benefited in many ways from this game show economy. Easy money with minimal accountability has trickled if not flooded in many directions creating tens of millions of every day jobs and more than a few fortunes. It is coming to an end.

Credit is drying up. Money at home and in business requires far more careful management, property values are falling, retirements funds are contracting, many familiar products are not selling and many jobs that fabricate, retail and service those products will go away.

The Big Three auto makers are on the ropes. Local RV manufacturers are struggling to stay afloat. Across the country, more people are deferring health care and skimping on prescription drugs, universities are challenged to maintain current levels of academics and services, garage sales are proliferating, luxury hotel use is falling off, small and large contractors are looking for work when before work was coming to them. Retailers from Neiman Marcus to Wal Mart are slashing prices long before the traditional pre Xmas shopping season to stimulate sales.
There is a steep upsurge in counseling used by people with out of control credit card debt.

And that's only the beginning.

Our economy has been on jet fuel for decades and easy money is only part of the story. Abundant cheap oil, relatively tranquil global relations, an unusually benign climate and healthy ecosystems have combined to allow a remarkable explosion of human activity during most of our lifetimes. All that is changing.

Converging global trends will likely make the immediate financial crisis look like only the first act. Oversized homes, a globalized economy, the basic ingredients of suburbia – cars, roads and cheap mobility; jet freighted fruit and vegetables from 5000 miles away, all manner of luxury and convenience and a lot more we take for granted, are not sustainable.

Our affluence and way of life has been built on sand, not bedrock. We are close to peak oil - as global demand overtakes global supply, expect unprecedented disruption at home and abroad. The United States peaked in oil production in 1970 and now imports two thirds of its petroleum needs. For every four barrels of oil pumped world wide currently, only one barrel is discovered. Peak discovery of new oil fields occurred fifty to sixty years ago.

An important concept in energy economics is Net Energy Gain. Fifty years ago, for every one unit of energy invested in oil, fifty to one hundred units were returned. Now, the energy returned is less than 5 out for one invested and shrinking. The easy oil is in steep decline. Many countries that were exporting oil are now importing oil such as the US, Norway, Indonesia, Libya and many others. Global competition for oil resources is growing along with military spending world wide, closely related phenomena.

Updated studies on climate change consistently displace previous studies as greatly underestimating the gravity of the problem. The American West has experienced a boom in population and agricultural for the past fifty years. We are finding the climate that permitted that boom is changing to a much drier regime. Already, many of the boom towns of the South and Southwest are experiencing water stress and some people, canaries in the coal mine, are leaving those places for greener locations to live. Arid and semi arid areas all over the world are expanding. Meanwhile, over a billion people in the world do not have access to clean water.

The environment- clean air, fresh water, functional habitats, oceans, soil, forests are overall in steep decline world wide. There is increasing tensions over water use in many of the world's river basins such as the Tigris Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, the Ganges, Mekong, Colorado. The liklihood of armed conflict over water is increasing. The world's most important fisheries are in steep decline. Industrial logging for timber and plantation agricultural is destroying habitat and water resources in both tropical and temperate areas. The human economy is dependent on the natural world and the natural world is being severely degraded for the sake of growing populations and growing economies.

Another fundamental characteristic of the economic system is external costs. An external cost occurs when we buy something or use a service and the price we pay does not cover the entire cost of producing, consuming, using and disposing of the item. For example, the external costs of oil are many. Prospecting and extracting oil damages the environment and often at the same time degrades the livilihoods of the people where the oil comes from. Moving the oil by ship or pipeline can lead to oil spills. US foreign policy is energy centric and billions are spent each year on military strategies to safeguard access to oil. [Google US Foreign Policy Doctrine and read about the Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush Doctrines. They are all about strategic US interest in oil.]

Other external costs of oil include the air and water pollution caused by automobiles, traffic fatalities, lost time stuck in traffic, the ugly urban environment built for automobiles. Even public health costs such as obesity, type two diabetes, cardio vascular disease can be linked to the automobile culture that often requires people to drive miles from where they live to where they work and shop, rather than walk of bike. When a person buys a gallon of gas, these costs and many others do not figure in. Instead, individuals, public health, social well being, the environment, foreign relations all pay.

If one were to look at a pie chart of the US economy by sector, one can see that large wedges of economic sectors of the pie chart exist to repair the damage caused by other sectors. Tens of millions of American jobs exist to repair the damage caused by tens of millions of other jobs. External costs are an enormous and dishonest subsidy that is essential for global capitalism to function.

The stability of social and economic systems world wide as currently organized, depends on infinite growth of producing, buying and consuming. Growing populations have growing material expectations. Given the emerging trends and realities, those expectations cannot be met. World wide, we see emerging a condition for a systems failure - an economy in irreversible contraction will lead to unprecedented social upheaval. Lane County will be no exception.

We will need courage, wisdom and heart to choose the most benign science, culture and technology we know and leave behind a familiar but sinking ship along with its immense cargo of unhealthy products, shallow distractions and grade school mythologies that have betrayed us. They cannot serve us well in a very different future.

If we choose, the financial crisis can be a benefit. It can be embraced as a wake up call . What better opportunity to redefine personal, family and community priorities – a new set of goals, ideals and action plans are called for that are healthy, timely, challenge our positive potentials and uplift our spirits. A holistic response to the challenges of our time means all those challenges are mediated simultaneously.

Eugene and Lane County have a wide range of impressive assets to help us meet a changing world. We are rich in diverse non profits, faith community, food resources, service groups, education, governmental organizations, neighborhood associations, business, water and forest resources and more.

The sum of these groups working together can be far greater than the parts acting alone. Productive collaborations between some of these organizations have already occurred such as the Churchill Community Garden where Food For Lane County, 4 J School District and the City of Eugene have combined to create a wonderful neighborhood garden that provides a place for local people to grow food but also offers opportunities to learn about gardening and a place for kids to learn about Nature and growing food.

We can expand on the Churchill model in many ways and not only for growing food. The new vision is to create more and diverse collaborations in the community and county to broaden the variety of needs and services we can localize such as finance and investment, product replacement, local manufacture, refurbishing/recycling, regional food, education for a localized way of life, preventative health care, changes in land use to name only a few.

Communities of faith and neighborhood associations should be taking a leadership role in greening our community. Both have cohesion, important civic values, communication infrastructure and both have a presence in all parts of town.

Thats My Farmer and The Grass Roots Garden are two great examples of faith communities taking initiatives that benefit the entire community. Faith communities have values and ideals that are a perfect match for changing times. Imagine the classrooms and kitchens of churches, synagogues, mosques becoming places of education; in effect, community centers for learning the new civic and hands on skills of living within our means - closer to home.

The city's neighborhood program is another tremendous community asset. There are existing communication channels, city staff, modest budgets plus an increasing civic awareness of what neighborhood organizations can grow into. Eugene's neighbooods have a great deal to contribute towards eco logical culture change. They can help facilitate vital land use changes within the neighborhoods such as property conversion and Block Planning that are doorways to a vast realm of civic uplift, neighborhood scale economics and eco logical living.

A civic structure is needed to facilitate learning the skills and managing the process of adapting to a far more downsized and localized way of taking care of our needs. Think of a Eugene “peace corps” with decentralized “green teams”, based on existing neighborhood associations.

The green teams would include representation from the neigborhoods, business, non profits, public health, faith, education, the city to name a few. They would be charged with the nuts and bolts of implementing the goals and vision of both the particular neighborhood and the broader community. Horizontal communications between green teams and central coordination would insure best use of Eugene's diverse civic assets.

The city neighborhood budget should increase to pay for a city wide green team program. It would consist of coordinator who would oversee a green facilitator for each neighborhood. Each facilitator would help bring “closer to home” skills and knowledge to the neighborhood through a speakers bureau, workshops and trainings for citizens can learn from existing organizations such as the County Extension Service, EWEB, Climate Masters, Permaculture, School Gardens and many others.

Our world is rapidly changing and we will not successfully adapt using the same thinking as before. Unsettled times also present new opportunities that can bring out the best in us as individuals and as a community. We are becoming part hospice and part mid wife. We are no longer in Oz.

Jan Spencer (www.suburbanpermaculture.org) writes and speaks throughout the Northwest on ecological culture change.