British scientist James Lovelock, working with American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, developed the Gaia hypothesis during the 1970s. It proposes that:
Living organisms and the physical Earth interact to form a single, complex, self-regulating system.
Life does not simply adapt to the Earth. It also changes the atmosphere, soils, oceans and climate. These changes can create feedback mechanisms which help to keep conditions suitable for life.
Examples include:
Plants remove carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
Forests influence rainfall, temperature and cloud formation.
Marine organisms affect atmospheric gases and the carbon cycle.
Soil organisms recycle nutrients and help vegetation grow.
Changes in vegetation can alter how much sunlight the Earth absorbs or reflects.
Lovelock illustrated the idea with his Daisyworld computer model. An imaginary planet contains black and white daisies. Black daisies absorb heat, while white daisies reflect it. As the planet warms or cools, one type becomes more successful than the other. Their changing proportions help stabilise the planet’s temperature without any conscious organisation.
Gaia should not be understood as saying that the Earth is literally a conscious being. Lovelock argued that planetary regulation could emerge naturally from countless interactions between organisms and their surroundings. There need be no plan, controller or foresight.
The strongest claim, that the Earth always acts to produce ideal conditions for life, remains controversial. However, the more modest proposition that life and the physical environment form an interconnected, evolving Earth system has become influential in modern Earth-system science. A useful scientific history of the hypothesis explains this development.
Gaia and localism
Gaia fits naturally with localist thinking. A locality is not merely an administrative or economic unit. It is part of a living system consisting of people, soil, water, plants, animals, climate and energy flows.
This means that damaging local soil, water or woodland eventually damages the human economy as well. Conversely, rebuilding soil fertility, retaining water, planting suitable trees and keeping nutrients circulating locally strengthen both nature and the locality.
Gaia therefore suggests an important principle:
The economy is not an independent machine standing above nature. It is a dependent part of the Earth’s living system.
Lovelock introduced the idea in scientific papers before making it widely known through his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. A good short overview is provided by the Smithsonian account of Lovelock and his Gaia theory.
Nate Hagens has published a thought-provoking essay entitled Mordor to the Long Repair: How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades? It can be read here:
Rather than attempting to predict the future, the essay explores a series of possible futures and asks a much more useful question: what might everyday life actually feel like as industrial civilisation encounters increasing economic, energy and ecological constraints?
The central argument is that there is no single future waiting ahead. Instead, society may travel along several different paths depending upon political choices, resource availability and human behaviour. Some futures are darker than others, but all acknowledge that the era of abundant, cheap energy and perpetual economic growth is drawing to a close.
One of these futures is described as “Mordor.” Here, societies become increasingly authoritarian as governments struggle to preserve existing institutions despite declining resources. Living standards fall, inequality widens, public services deteriorate and social tensions become commonplace. Industrial systems continue to operate, but with increasing difficulty and at ever greater cost.
At the other end of the spectrum lies “The Long Repair.” This is not a return to some imagined golden age, nor is it a technological miracle. Instead, it is a gradual adaptation to a world with fewer resources, lower energy availability and reduced complexity. Communities slowly rebuild resilience by becoming less dependent on fragile global systems and more capable of meeting their own needs.
This vision resonates strongly with the principles of localism.
The Long Repair is not simply about surviving decline. It is about reorganising society around what is practical rather than what is merely efficient. Global supply chains give way to regional and local production wherever possible. Repair replaces replacement. Skills become more valuable than consumption. Communities rediscover cooperation because it becomes economically necessary rather than socially desirable.
These ideas are entirely consistent with the concept of a shrinking economy. As surplus energy declines, discretionary spending contracts and the economic landscape changes fundamentally. Many industries that flourished during decades of growth gradually disappear, while activities meeting essential human needs become increasingly important.
The essay provides an excellent explanation of why this transition may occur. However, it says relatively little about how communities might organise themselves once the transition begins. That is where the practical ideas of localism become important.
A resilient locality needs more than goodwill. It requires practical systems. Local food production, local water supplies, community energy, workshops, repair skills, local communications, community ownership of assets and neighbourhood governance all become essential components of everyday life. These are not nostalgic ambitions but rational responses to a world of increasing uncertainty.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Hagens’ essay is its emphasis on imagination. Much discussion about the future focuses on economic statistics, politics or technology. Far less attention is given to how daily life may actually change. What work will people do? Where will food come from? How will homes be heated? What skills will children need? Which institutions will remain important?
These are the questions that deserve serious attention.
There is, however, another perspective that helps explain why a Long Repair may be more than simply one possible future. Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics provides a compelling underlying mechanism.
Morgan argues that prosperity is determined not by the total amount of energy produced, but by the amount of surplus energy remaining after the energy sector has supplied its own needs. As the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE) rises, less surplus energy is available to support the wider economy. The result is a gradual decline in discretionary prosperity, slowing economic growth, increasing financial instability and growing pressure on governments, businesses and households.
From this perspective, many of the trends described by Hagens are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a deeper physical reality. Modern industrial civilisation has been built upon abundant, inexpensive surplus energy. As that surplus diminishes, society is forced to simplify. Complexity becomes increasingly expensive to maintain, while localisation becomes increasingly attractive because it reduces dependence upon long, energy-intensive supply chains.
This interpretation also explains why many current policies appear unable to restore sustained economic growth. Governments continue to pursue growth because the existing financial system depends upon it. Yet if declining surplus energy is the underlying constraint, policies alone cannot reverse the trend. They may delay the adjustment, but they cannot remove its physical causes.
Seen in this light, localism is not a political ideology or a nostalgic movement. It is an adaptive response to changing economic and energetic realities. Communities that can produce more of their own food, energy, water, goods and essential services are likely to prove more resilient than those dependent upon increasingly fragile national and global systems.
The Long Repair is therefore much more than an interesting scenario. It represents the gradual rebuilding of society around the resources that are actually available rather than those that were once assumed to be limitless.
For those seeking to understand the decades ahead, Nate Hagens provides an insightful picture of what the transition may feel like, while Tim Morgan offers a persuasive explanation of why it may be happening. Together they point towards a future in which local resilience, practical skills and strong communities become not simply desirable, but essential.
The current debate about devolution assumes that transferring power from Whitehall to larger regional authorities will create stronger economic growth. It is certainly an improvement if decisions are taken closer to the people affected by them. Local knowledge is almost always better than decisions made hundreds of miles away.
However, devolution should not be confused with localism. They are not the same thing.
Devolution merely moves power from one level of government to another. Whitehall gives powers to combined authorities, regional mayors or county authorities. The structure remains essentially the same. Decisions are still made from above. Taxation, regulation and administration remain the principal tools of government.
Localism is fundamentally different.
The localist model begins with the locality itself. Instead of asking how government can manage economic growth, it asks how people can meet more of their own needs where they live. The emphasis shifts from administration to production, from bureaucracy to practical activity.
The Daily Telegraph rightly warns that devolution could simply become another layer of taxation, regulation and administration. That danger is real. New political institutions have a tendency to justify their existence by creating more officials, more plans and more spending. Unless there is genuine economic change beneath the political structure, little will have been achieved.
The deeper question is whether the industrial economy that made large-scale central government possible is now beginning to contract.
For two centuries Britain became steadily more centralised because abundant, cheap fossil-fuel energy allowed production, transport, communication and government to operate on an ever larger scale. Economic growth supported increasingly complex institutions. Centralisation was not simply a political choice. It was made possible by abundant surplus energy.
As surplus energy declines, that process begins to reverse.
Economic activity naturally becomes more local because long supply chains, distant administration and highly specialised systems become increasingly expensive to maintain. This is not an ideological programme. It is the natural evolution of a post-growth economy.
In that world, local government itself will have to change. Success will depend less on attracting outside investment and more on increasing local resilience.
A successful locality will produce more of its own food. It will conserve water. It will generate part of its own energy. It will maintain local skills, workshops and small businesses. It will make greater use of local materials and local labour. Money will circulate within the locality instead of constantly leaking away to national and international corporations.
The role of government also changes. Instead of attempting to stimulate endless economic growth, it becomes an enabler of local production. It removes unnecessary barriers, supports local enterprise and helps communities organise the essential services upon which daily life depends.
Competition between regions, as suggested in the debate on devolution, has some value. But cooperation within localities is even more important. The future is unlikely to be won by competing to attract the next multinational employer. It is more likely to depend on rebuilding the local economy from the ground up.
This is why localism goes beyond devolution.
Devolution changes who exercises power.
Localism changes where economic life takes place.
One is primarily constitutional.
The other is structural.
As Britain moves beyond the age of continuous economic growth, transferring powers from Westminster to regional authorities may prove useful. But unless that process also encourages the rebuilding of genuinely local economies, it risks becoming little more than a different way of administering decline.
The real challenge is not to create bigger local government.
The title itself challenges one of our deepest assumptions. Collapse is normally seen only as something to fear. Bendell does not ignore the hardship that accompanies the breakdown of complex societies, but he asks whether such a process might also create the conditions for a better way of living.
This question goes to the heart of localism.
Our industrial economic system depended upon continual growth, abundant energy, expanding global trade and increasing complexity. Yet these same forces have steadily weakened local communities. Production has moved further away. Decision-making has become centralised. People have become consumers rather than participants in the places where they live.
The growing evidence is that this system is reaching its limits. Economic growth has ended as energy is becoming more difficult and expensive to obtain, public finances are under increasing pressure and many institutions struggle to perform the functions expected of them. These are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a civilisation that has grown beyond what can be sustained.
If this is true, then the future will not simply be about managing decline. It will be about discovering how society can function at a smaller and more human scale.
That is where localism offers hope.
As large systems become less reliable, localities become more important. Food can increasingly be produced close to home. Small businesses can meet more everyday needs. Skills that have almost disappeared can return. Repair can replace disposal. Local woodland can provide timber, fuel and employment. Housing can be built using local materials. Young people can find worthwhile work without leaving the places where they were born.
A shrinking economy does not have to mean a shrinking quality of life. If wealth is measured only by money, the future may appear bleak. If wealth includes security, friendship, purpose, practical ability and belonging, then a very different picture emerges.
Throughout history, people have shown extraordinary resilience during periods of change. Communities that work together often become stronger, not weaker. They discover that many of the things that bring satisfaction cannot be bought in a supermarket or delivered through a national bureaucracy.
The beauty in collapse, if there is any, lies not in the suffering that accompanies it but in the opportunity to rediscover ways of living that industrial society has pushed aside. Simplicity can replace excess. Cooperation can replace dependency. Responsibility can replace bureaucracy. The locality can once again become the place where people shape much of their own future.
Localism is therefore not a reaction to collapse. It is preparation for it. It provides a practical framework through which people can rebuild economic life, restore community and recover a sense of belonging. In doing so, it transforms what many see only as decline into the beginning of renewal.
Whether or not one agrees with every aspect of Bendell’s argument, his essay deserves careful reading. It encourages us to look beyond the immediate difficulties and ask what sort of society might emerge afterwards. That is a question localism has been asking for many years.
Perhaps the greatest beauty in collapse is that it reminds us of something we should never have forgotten – that the strongest society is not built from the top down, but grows from the locality upwards.
James Robertson was one of those rare writers who worked steadily outside the spotlight, yet whose ideas continue to surface whenever people begin to question the direction of the modern economy. His newsletter, Turning Point, was not simply a commentary on policy. It was an attempt to describe a shift in civilisation itself, away from centralised economic control and towards a more locally rooted way of living and organising society.
Robertson began from a simple but unsettling observation. The dominant economic model, built around continuous growth and large scale institutions, was beginning to lose coherence. It was producing wealth in aggregate terms, yet leaving growing instability, dependency, and a weakening of local social fabric. For him, the issue was not just efficiency or distribution, but structure. An economy organised from the top down would inevitably drift away from human scale needs.
Turning Point set out the argument that change would not come primarily from governments reforming themselves, but from a deeper shift in how people understood power, money, and place. He believed that decentralisation was not an ideological preference but an evolutionary adjustment, as large systems became too complex and distant to manage the realities of everyday life.
A central theme in his writing was the idea of relocalising economic life. Production, services, and decision making would increasingly need to sit closer to the communities they affected. This was not nostalgia for a pre industrial past, but a recognition that scale had limits. Beyond a certain point, coordination costs rise, trust weakens, and systems become fragile.
Robertson also challenged the assumption that national economic indicators could meaningfully describe wellbeing. Growth in GDP, he argued, could coincide with deterioration in health, community, and environmental stability. In Turning Point, he repeatedly returned to the idea that what mattered was not how large the economy became, but how well it served people in specific places.
There is a clear connection between his thinking and what is now often described as localism. He anticipated many of the pressures that are now widely discussed, including the strain on centralised welfare systems, the vulnerability of global supply chains, and the weakening of mid level institutions that once connected national policy to local reality.
What makes Robertson’s contribution distinctive is its tone. He did not present decentralisation as disruption or protest, but as adjustment. In his view, societies were already moving in that direction, not because of ideology, but because central systems were slowly exceeding their practical limits.
Seen from a present perspective, Turning Point reads less like a prediction and more like a diagnosis written early. It identifies a moment when the structure of the economy begins to change direction, not suddenly, but through accumulation of pressure at the edges.
In that sense, Robertson’s work remains relevant to anyone thinking about localism today. It suggests that decentralisation is not an alternative system waiting to be chosen, but a process already underway, shaped by necessity as much as by design.
A recent chat about decentralisation in Tim Morgan’s blog
I said: In relation to Tim Morgan’s comment that “ It’s possible to picture a much more localised, less unequal and post-consumerist future, but there is no straightforward way of getting there.”
From the standpoint of localism, there is.
The mistake is assuming that the transition must begin with governments, political parties, or national economic systems. That is the top-down view, and it inevitably appears impossibly complicated because it attempts to redesign an entire nation before changing the lives of ordinary people.
Localism starts from the opposite direction. It begins with the individual, the family and the locality.
Mass unemployment in the formal economy will naturally force an increase in local resilience. More food will be grown locally. More goods and services will be exchanged locally. Skills will be shared. Small businesses will flourish because money circulates within the locality instead of leaking away. Woodlands, water, soils and biodiversity will be managed for long-term benefit rather than short-term profit. As each locality becomes stronger, dependence on distant supply chains will gradually decline.
None of this requires a revolution or a new political ideology. It requires thousands of practical decisions made by millions of people.
As economic contraction continues, the incentives naturally shift in this direction. Long supply chains become more expensive and less reliable. Energy becomes dearer. Employment becomes less secure. Under these conditions, local production is no longer a lifestyle choice, but the rational economic response.
The route is therefore remarkably straightforward. It is not easy, because it requires determination and cultural change. But it is simple.
Rather than asking, “How do we transform Britain?”, localism asks, “How do we make this locality more resilient this year?”
Multiply that question across thousands of localities, and a more localised, less unequal and post-consumerist society emerges naturally from the ground up. It will be a natural evolution
The destination Tim Morgan describes indeed has a straightforward path. It simply starts at the bottom rather than at the top.
raymonddeyoung on said: Well said Barry. I wonder if an insight from Kirpatrick Sale adds the notion that
… this decentralization doesn’t need to be started but rather is always present, hidden at the foundations of society and able to expand as needed?
Writer and social critic Kirkpatrick Sale (1980/2017) argues that a decentralist tradition is deeply rooted, ubiquitous, and continuous in human history. Our inclination toward local governance is contemporaneous with a centralizing, top-down tendency, with neither being a response to the other nor depending on the other for its existence or initiation.
The implications for contemporary localization are several: One, the decentralist tendency is, in effect, latent; it need not be created de novo. Two, should central governments fail to respond in a timely fashion to the urgency of climate disruption and biophysical limits, local self-organizing will occur quite naturally (or be found, in fact, to have been functioning all along, hidden in plain sight and ready to take up the space being vacated by centralizing tendencies). Three, at the same time, localizing is not reactionary; proponents need not wait for central failures. The world-wide local food movement is a case in point.
Notice that the premises of decentralization are consistent with the psychological version of adaptation: Humans are problem-solving creatures and creatures that adjust their behavior to fit circumstances (not, attempt to change circumstances to fit their sense-of-entitlement). We have an inherited inclination to thrive given our circumstances, and we do so no matter how dire those circumstances may seem to some.
Thus the inevitability of a transition to a lower level of social complexity (a premise of Tainter’s work, and shared here in these many posts) is likely to be met by self-organization at a decentralized, local level when centralized levels can only respond by adding more social complexity.
Sale, Kirkpatrick (1980) “Politics on a Human Scale.” In The Decentralist Tradition, Pp. 443-454. New York: Perigee Books.
One of the least recognised consequences of a shrinking economy is that human energy becomes as valuable as financial energy. Every hour spent, every physical effort made, every journey undertaken, has to produce genuine value.
For decades we have built a society that consumes enormous quantities of human effort simply to maintain systems that have become increasingly complex. Endless commuting, administration, shopping, maintenance and bureaucracy all absorb time and strength that could be used to improve our own lives and those of our neighbours.
The recent idea of “slow gardening” illustrates an important principle. Rather than constantly battling nature, the aim is to design gardens that largely look after themselves. By choosing appropriate plants, allowing natural processes to operate and accepting that perfection is neither possible nor desirable, far less human effort is required while producing healthier and more attractive spaces.
Localism applies exactly the same principle to society itself.
Instead of requiring people to spend large amounts of time travelling, dealing with distant organisations and maintaining complicated supply chains, localism designs society so that much of everyday life happens close to home. Food is grown locally. Skills are shared locally. Care is provided locally. Decisions are made locally. Problems are solved before they grow into major crises.
This is not about making people work harder. Quite the opposite. It is about using human energy far more intelligently.
Every unnecessary journey eliminated saves fuel and time. Every locally repaired item avoids replacement. Every neighbour helping another reduces the need for expensive professional services. Every local enterprise reduces dependence upon distant systems.
As economic contraction continues, conserving human energy will become just as important as conserving fuel or materials. People will simply no longer have the surplus time or physical capacity to support highly centralised systems that demand constant travel, administration and consumption.
Like the slow garden, a localist society works with natural human relationships instead of against them. It creates communities that are resilient because they require less effort to sustain.
The future may not belong to those who can command the greatest resources. It may belong to those who can achieve the greatest quality of life with the least expenditure of human energy.
∙The reason I want to discuss Greed, Excess and Sacrifice is that these are the dominant forces shaping everyday life, but they receive near-zero notice: nobody talks about Greed, Excess and Sacrifice, just as they never talk about the extremes of corruption that now characterize life in the US.
I have written extensively about moral decay as the rot consuming the foundations of a stable social order, yet there is so little attention paid to the excesses of corruption that it’s actually shocking to come across any plain-spoken “stating the obvious” reference to corruption as a corrosive, destabilizing force.
Matt Stoller of thebignewsletter.com is one of the very few who address rampant corruption and its destructive effects: “All that said, I think that an AI bubble popping could be worse than the dot com bubble, for a few reasons. The first is that we are a much more corrupt society, and so there will be less trust when a collapse happens and contagion is widespread.” Source: What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?
The driver of corruption is bottomless greed, which extinguishes fairness and truth as impediments to maximizing private gains. Since fairness and truth are the foundations of trust, unrestrained greed maximizing corruption fatally undermines trust.
Trust is the foundation of the entire socio-economic-political order, and with trust gone, that foundation gives way and the entire order collapses.
The core of corruption is the privilege of evading consequences is codified either formally with legal rulings / regulations or informally by co-opting or neutering the oversight and enforcement that places boundary conditions on bottomless greed.
With these guardrails removed, the greediest few distribute all the consequences, costs and risks onto everyone below them and channel all the gains to themselves and their cronies.
Excesses of greed and corruption are visible everywhere as the insiders in every fiefdom, public and private, scramble to secure the privilege of evading consequences by distributing them to the powerless many.
Excesses abound in every sphere of life. Billionaires don’t have mere $10 million yachts, they have $600 million yachts. Pickup trucks are now massive vehicles designed to impress, not to carry construction materials as in the old days. Exotic vacations now reach absurd excesses because old standards of “exotic” became affordable to the masses. Where there were displays devoted to snacks in supermarkets, now entire aisles are filled with nothing but a vast and ever-expanding variety of snacks.
The desperate reach for “novelty” has reached extremes of self-parody: bizarre excesses marketed as “new!” cannot be parodied because they’re already parodies of authentic novelty and value.
Virtually every aspect of life in the US has reached levels of self-parodying excess, yet nobody seems to notice. The boiled-frog / habituation to immiseration syndrome is the key characteristic of what’s marketed as “Progress.”
As we throw up our hands in helpless acceptance of systemic corruption and self-parodying excesses being sold as “Progress,” we’re ignoring the downstream sacrifices that are the unavoidable consequences of greed, corruption and excess.
Sacrifices generated by greed and corruption appear as both financial costs that demand sacrifices and work-life sacrifices of time, energy, attention and the corrosive grind of burnout and unpaid work we must now do to keep the basics of modern life functioning–tasks that were once done by corporations or the government that have been offloaded onto households.
Consider two examples: having your dog’s teeth cleaned now costs $1,500, and so does having your child’s teeth cleaned and coated with some “vitamins.” This is literally 10 times the cash price we paid 10 years ago. According the BLS Inflation Calculator, inflation has risen 40% since 2016, so having my teeth cleaned should have risen from $150 to $210, not $1,500.
“Her longtime vet, now part of a national chain, overcharged her $500 for her dog’s teeth cleaning and didn’t issue a promised refund.”
When we spend time with Millennial age friends, what we hear from those employed in the private sector are the sacrifices demanded by Corporate America and the crushing costs imposed on households–especially for “healthcare insurance,” which is often neither authentic insurance or healthcare.
We hear accounts of friends “being sucked dry” by Big Tech employers, friends burning out in tech jobs and opting to work at Target, holiday time (needed to pack boxes for a move) being refused because “this project is a priority”–and in Corporate America, every project is always a priority, so holiday allotments pile up unused. When asked about job security, managers say “I can’t give you any guarantees” of a job tomorrow, much less next month or next year.
We have Millennial friends who live and work in Europe because life in the US is now unaffordable to all but the well-paid / wealthy once “sickcare” insurance costs are included. Life is easier in other countries because essential civic services such as public transport, education and healthcare are kept functional and affordable.
We recently hosted Millennial friends with two delightful young children, and the husband lugged in two laptops which he set up on my desk because he needed to check in on his three IT-related jobs. He was able to sit down to lunch and then he had to go back to work. Over their 7-hour weekend visit, he had to work half the time.
As parents, our friends are well aware of the dangers of over-scheduling and over-entitling their children, even as they seek to give them the extra-curricular activities they view as foundational–music and swimming lessons, some athletic engagement–while noting the many excesses of youth athletics other parents accept as “the way it is.”
Another Millennial age friend is a union member employed by a state-university teaching hospital. They have job security but report that mid-level managers are being let go as consolidation reduces staff.
Many of our friends marvel at jobs that end after an 8 hour shift. They report that leaving an employer is not possible due to the generous healthcare coverage. Others say they’re still working to pay their $20,000 property tax bill, which even in Prop-13 California, rises 8% to 10% every year with various add-ons.
Work-life balance of the sort we took for granted 40 years ago is now a scarce privilege, as the privilege of evading consequences means the negative consequences now fall entirely on the powerless.
The top 10% who manage / control the narratives are far more likely to possess privileges that enable them to discount or dismiss everything stated above as the whining of people who don’t appreciate their immense wealth, while ignoring their own privileges are the most valuable form of “wealth” in a thoroughly corrupted society and economy.
The apologists for this psychotic blindness to self-parodying excesses of greed, corruption and sacrifice are many; as long as a handful of millionaires are being minted in the casino, all is well. In other words, as long as the casino still offers a few the opportunity to declare “I got mine,” the system is not just stable, it’s wonderful.
But this cheerleading psychotic blindness is just another manifestation of the rot consuming the foundations of our society. The cheerleaders must ignore the destabilizing rot because they have no answer to the consequences other than apres nous, le deluge–after us, the flood. CHS: I welcome the generous financial support of the “vital 5%” stalwart subscribers who keep this site on life-support. Thank you.
Tim Watkins, writing on the Consciousness of Sheep website, argues that the economy is not simply a financial system but a physical system dependent upon continuous flows of energy. His article, “Economic Entropy”, applies the second law of thermodynamics to human society, suggesting that all complex systems eventually decline when the energy required to maintain them becomes insufficient.
For those interested in localism, this is an important contribution because it helps explain why large-scale infrastructure is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Modern society depends upon vast networks of roads, railways, bridges, electricity grids, water systems, telecommunications and supply chains. These systems were built during a period when abundant and relatively cheap fossil fuel energy allowed ever-increasing complexity. Watkins argues that as surplus energy declines, maintaining this complexity becomes progressively harder. Infrastructure does not usually fail suddenly. Instead, it slowly deteriorates through deferred maintenance, underinvestment, shortages of skilled labour and the rising cost of repairs.
This closely mirrors one of the central ideas of localism.
Localism does not emerge because people suddenly decide that small-scale systems are morally superior. Rather, localism emerges because large-scale systems become increasingly expensive and difficult to sustain. As transport costs rise, as public finances weaken, and as national infrastructure ages, local communities are encouraged to provide more of their own needs.
Food is perhaps the clearest example. A highly centralised food system depends upon long-distance transport, refrigeration, packaging, distribution centres and complex financial arrangements. If maintaining these systems becomes more difficult, local food production becomes increasingly attractive, not because it is fashionable, but because it is practical.
The same principle applies to energy. Large generating stations and extensive transmission networks require enormous capital investment and continuous maintenance. Smaller local energy schemes, while unable to replace every national function, may prove more resilient because they depend upon shorter supply chains and can often be maintained locally.
Watkins points to ageing bridges, power stations and other infrastructure as examples of systems that are becoming harder to maintain. The significance for localism is that these are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a broader process in which complexity exceeds society’s ability to support it.
This does not mean that all national systems disappear. Railways, specialist hospitals, defence and certain communications networks are likely to remain national functions for a very long time. However, many everyday activities may gradually move closer to home. Food production, repair services, care provision, small-scale manufacturing and local energy generation all become more valuable in a world where maintaining large systems becomes increasingly challenging.
Viewed in this way, localism is not an ideological project. It is an adaptive response to economic entropy.
As the cost of sustaining large-scale complexity rises, communities naturally begin to rebuild local capacity. The future may therefore look less like the continued expansion of global systems and more like a patchwork of resilient local economies connected by a smaller number of essential national networks.
If Watkins is correct, localism is not merely an alternative vision of society. It is one of the most likely ways in which society adapts to the realities of economic entropy.
Most public discussion of societal collapse treats history as a warning system: if we read the past correctly, we might predict if collapse is coming, when it should arrive, and how severe it will be. This entire predictive impulse is understandable but not unproblematic. The historical and archaeological record is too contingent, context-bound, and selectively-preserved from which to generate reliable forecasts for our own times. We see a different and potentially more valuable role for historians and archaeologists today. Rather than helping us predict collapse, they can help us reflect on how some societies appear to have softened collapse, adapted to contraction, and transformed in ways that preserved elements of culture, meaning, and social coherence. Studying past civilisations to see how some of them managed their ‘descent’, or their ‘simplification’, could contribute to a conversation about new narratives for the current situation, so that we aren’t trapped in cultural imaginaries that defy biophysical realities. This type of historical curiosity would be interpretive and to some extent subjective, as we cannot escape contemporary values or present-day concerns. But that is not a flaw. On the contrary, acknowledging subjectivity can help this effort to be humble and honest: as a reflective exercise intended to inform present choices, not to claim timeless laws of history or near-certainties about what will happen by when.
Why this matters now
For some years now, we have argued that modern societies remain gripped by two inadequate narratives.
The first is perpetual progress: the assumption that modernisation, technological substitution, and economic growth can and must continue everywhere. In biophysical terms, this narrative is impossible, and increasingly recognised as such. Yet it persists because it structures institutions, identities, and political legitimacy.
The second narrative is a nostalgic, defensive, triage within global disruption: an effort to preserve a mythologised past by fortifying borders, cultures, and hierarchies as various systems come under stress and degrade. This is the emotional base of much contemporary reactionary politics, from the rise of religious traditionalism around the world to the view that immigration is the key cause of a society’s ills. This narrative includes a grain of truth in the need to reconsider the direction of societies and relocalise many aspects, as was explained in our Deep Adaptation book, by ourselves but also and especially by Skeena Rathor and Matthew Slater, who built on the seminal work of Helena Norberg-Hodge. However, what we have called the second narrative is flawed in imagining that some symbolic return to an earlier era will address what is a never-before-experienced biophysical context.
We regard such narratives as these two as offering a pressure-valve of pride and blame, without addressing root causes or pursuing actual remedies. Within the modern societies which we are aware of, what is missing in both popular culture and political discourse are narratives of intentional contraction, adaptive simplification, cultural continuity through transformation, and dignified loss. This is where historians and archaeologists can contribute — not so much warners of roads not to take, still less as prophets of doom — but as curators of possibility. They can contribute to dialogue from a stance of ‘positive pessimism’ that explores potential ‘thrutopias’: ways of getting through what is coming as well as humanly possible, given the impossibility now of perfect utopias. Thrutopia, a concept drawn initially from readings of Ursula le Guin’s great novel of political possibility ‘The dispossessed’, centres process rather than outcome, and possibility rather than alleged certainty. Thrutopianism is thoroughly reality-based, and combines optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect. In being grounded in the non-negotiability of truthfulness about both our tragic predicament on the one hand and the vast and exciting chance we have of acting for good on the other, thrutopianism connects naturally with ‘apocalypse’ in its true sense: revelatory vision, once the veil of our hand-and-mind-forged manacles has been rended. We might then hazard a label such as ‘hopeful apocalypticism’ to the attitude which we along with the kind of historians and archaeologists for whom we write aim henceforth to take: active hope grounded in truthfulness and curiosity towards how really tough moments in our common human heritage were handled.
When we invite (attention to) such intellectual creativity, we are not ignoring the ongoing suffering, nor what could be reasonably attempted technologically to reduce the damage from environmental disruption. Nor do we forget that there is useful resistance to the ongoing damage being caused, nor deny there is blame for what is happening and accountability to be sought for that. Instead, our interest is how to ‘get real’ about what might help at the level of cultural narratives so as not to make matters worse as societies come under much greater strain.
Three examples of adaptive contraction and transformation
What societies in the past might stimulate such a dialogue? By being curious about this topic and noticing claims about the history of civilizations which resonated with that curiosity, we have identified three examples which could be candidates for further inquiry. As we are not historians or archaeologists, and certainly did not do a methodical study of past civilisations, we offer these examples cautiously. We don’t identify them as something to attempt to copy, but as means for us to ask different questions about what it means to endure.
First, we could consider the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire after the 7th century. Following territorial losses, demographic collapse, and fiscal contraction, the Byzantine world did not simply fall. This section of the Roman Empire, across parts of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, appeared to intentionally reorganise itself. Urban life shrank, monetary circulation narrowed, and state capacity was reduced, yet many core institutions, such as law, liturgy, language, and administrative memory, persisted for centuries. The Empire appears to have willingly embraced forms of localisation: it responded to incursions by the rising Muslim armies not by attempting to double down on an unsustainable large central army, but to give soldiers land and to get cohorts of soldiers to defend their portion of the Empire against the invaders. For more than we have space for here, see Read’s Why climate breakdown matters, which draws upon Joseph Tainter’s classic – though controversial – interpretation of the long survival of the Byzantine Empire. The invitation we see in this case is to consider the possibility that eased material suffering does not require territorial expansion, material growth, or ideological projection, but the relinquishing of some power to communities. We are curious to the extent this was intentional and, if so, by whom and how they communicated with different aspects of society.
A second civilisation we could learn about to inspire our ideas of managed decline is the Mayan civilisation in modern day Central America. It is one that has fascinated archeologists, as well as the anthropologists who study present-day descendants. One of your authors looked into this scholarship for his book Breaking Together, and discovered that the history should not be framed as civilisational failure, but as processes of urban-rural migration and the re-localisation of trade and governance. At various times in the history of the Mayans, their power decentralised, populations dispersed, and ritual life changed rather than disappeared. Many people may have preferred that way of life, even if it was compelled initially by changes in climate or the spread of disease. We note that some scholars (reasonably) claim that the elites in Mayan societies made difficult situations worse, tipping the situation into outright collapse. Clearly the conversation is limited by what evidence archeologists can find. Nevertheless, we see an invitation in this history to shift our attention from the collapse of elite power to everyday persistence, and from worrying loss to lived adaptation.
A third example to reconsider is Post-Roman Britain and Western Europe after the collapse of Roman imperial systems. Of course much was lost at the time, including infrastructure, literacy, and long-distance trade. Yet both ancient and new forms of social organisation, spirituality, and local resilience, all emerged. Meanwhile much was preserved, such as the knowledge that endured and even flourished within Monastic networks. A range of hybrid cultures formed and there is evidence people had bright lives in the “dark ages” — a term merely arising from the subsequent interest in written records (We note the fascinating recent work ‘The Green Ages: Mediaeval innovations in sustainability’). Compared to the Byzantine case, there is less to suggest there was an intention from Rome to manage a transition to a post-imperial situation. So perhaps it was an organic process from people having the opportunity to reclaim their power. We know we are speculating with limited data, but do so to generate the type of reflection we think will be helpful today. Perhaps the invitation here is for us to let go of the idea that complexity must be defended at all costs, and explore how value and meaning can be found in more diverse, yet simpler and more localised ways of living.
Although we have only read some studies on each of these cases, already we notice several recurring themes for narrative-generation that might alleviate the metacrisis, societal decline and collapse. There was the importance of scale-reduction where endurance involved shrinking prevailing systems to ecologically and socially manageable sizes. Interestingly, this shrinking reminds us of the principle of ‘relinquishment’ in the contemporary Deep Adaptation framework. Another theme we notice is cultural portability, where the practices, rituals, and values that could migrate were able to survive, rather than the fixed infrastructures. Highly interesting is that there frequently appeared to be elite loss and popular survival. By that, we mean that the collapses typically meant the end of ruling classes, not the end of culture itself. We also notice that the adaptations sometimes unfolded over generations, so probably required some people to be thinking at that scale. That contrasts with the amount of people today who focus on the next election, annual report, or their retirement fund (or even an afterlife).
As we speculate on such cross-cutting themes, we don’t see them offering any great solace for what is a terrible and unprecedented situation facing humanity today, along with the catastrophic damage to habitats and biodiversity that is unfolding. However, they do expand the imaginative space in which we can think and act. There could be lessons here for people working in the field of futures studies, design thinking, scenario planning, and those wishing to enable hope and imagination in society, at various levels. Artists, writers and imagineers of all stripes plainly have a role to play here, too. We think for instance of ‘solarpunk’ (though we find much too much of it overly utopian in how it pictures technology and politics); or of StarHawk’s remarkable parable of non-violence under extreme strain, ‘The fifth sacred thing’; or of broadly thrutopian novels such as Steve Markley’s ‘The Deluge’ or Ian McEwan’s ‘What we can know’.
Our invitation to explore lessons from those past civilisations which softened their collapse is not ignoring or downplaying the importance of recognising the enduring forms of Indigenous Peoples’ societies. Those societies might not be considered “civilisations” by some observers, but they are culturally rich and have persisted despite efforts of colonialists and modern humans to extinguish or assimilate them. However, the urban societies which the vast majority of humans live within, or are partly dependent on, today, aren’t able to directly copy the lower density and lower specialisation of such societies. We can take inspiration from them in more general terms, and also from the way they coped with external genocidal pressures, as we will explain further in a moment.
Existing scholarship pointing towards narratives to soften collapse
In our edited collection Deep Adaptation: navigating the realities of climate chaos, we included perspectives from a range of intellectual disciplines. However, as we did not know any historians or archeologists who were trying to learn about the narratives accompanying softened collapses of past civilisations, we did not include those disciplines in the book. We think this is an important absence, and so would welcome seeing more work done on this topic in future. Currently we know of some scholarship which moves close to such an agenda.
Chris Wickham has usefully reframed post-Roman Europe not as ruin but as reorganisation, producing winners and losers. James C. Scott has drawn attention to non-state spaces and forms of life that evaded societal collapses as they avoided over-integration. In their classic 2009 book Questioning Collapse, Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee present evidence for how famous collapses were actually periods of reorganisation and decentralisation. The work most relevant to our topic here is contained in the 2023 edited compilation “How Worlds Collapse.” Their central explanation is that leaders often faced a ‘cognitive crunch,’ when they recognised crises like resource depletion, but could not respond to the complexity of that, leading to maladaptive decisions. This created tension between elite protection (clinging to power by intensifying extraction) and adaptive leadership (orchestrating a deliberate simplification for wider survival). Regarding collapse as a process, not an event, the authors in this book identify an optimal outcome is a managed reorganisation with smaller units of complexity — a “soft landing.” It stands as the first major scholarly synthesis to explicitly explore the daunting principles and historical precedents for a managed descent in response to our current situation of global ecological overshoot. Luke Kemp, in Goliath’s Curse, explores similar themes, particularly how coercive institutions generate both power and fragility, suggesting that collapse can sometimes release adaptive capacity rather than extinguish it. Building on and rhyming with Graeber, Wengrove and other scholars, Kemp’s work challenges the assumption that larger, more coercive systems are inherently more successful. So if we consider collapse to involve the unravelling of coercive over-reach, then historians could help us imagine futures that are less powerful but more viable.
In the original Deep Adaptation paper on climate chaos, one of your authors referred to an analysis of how leaders of the North American Crow Nation coped with the destruction of their culture. Jonathan Lear explained that some of the Native American chiefs developed a form of “imaginative excellence” by trying to imagine what ethical values would be needed in their new lifestyle within a bounded land reservation. He found that besides the standard alternatives of freedom or death (in service of one’s culture) there is another way, less grand yet demanding just as much courage: the way of “creative adaptation.” He wrote that “what makes this hope radical, is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Identifying that process is not to acquiesce to the destruction of Indigenous cultures, but to include within our appreciation of them how they coped with the devastations of colonialism. Some critics then bizarrely cited this part of the Deep Adaptation paper as if it was welcoming the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Their distortion is a reminder of how upset some people can become about analyses which require us to shift our imaginations beyond modernism and the assumption of progress — but it’s clearly the ideological task of our time.
When seeking evidence for narratives or intellectual perspectives that might have aided a softening of collapse in the past, historians and archeologists could benefit from deep dialogue with philosophers and systems-thinkers from a variety of intellectual traditions — Western, Eastern and Indigenous. Now, to be fair, there are less philosophically-minded thinkers and writers than there should be working openly on this. But there are some who are very much in the ballpark: in the West, we think of Iain McGilchrist, or Roy Scranton; of Paul Kingsnorth’s novels of ideas and non-fiction, and of Michael Albert’s important book ‘Navigating the polycrisis’. Looking a little further back, we think of the immense relevance of Arendt’s ‘The human condition’, and of the great works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Daoism is a source of relevant riches from the East. One thinker who has done much to make the incredible resources of Indigenous thinking available to the collapse-aware is Tyson Yunkaporta, from whom we have learnt much; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings are also of signal importance, in this connection.
What is potentially to be gained from engagement with figures such as these? Far too much, obviously, to even begin to gesture at in a sentence or two: but the glimmerings of a sense of what can be found when one notices the way that many of these thinkers are simply willing to look into the abyss and yet not to drown in despair. Instead, to offer potential pathmarks, including reminders of what we have lost that are not merely nostalgic, but are instead practically beneficial.
And of course there is much more that could be done to learn relevant historical lessons hereabouts: including seeking to learn from what happened under grave pressure during – and after – World War II; and what happened in Cuba when it experienced ‘peak oil’ dramatically, as it lost its oil supply suddenly in 1991 (and Cuba is going through a worse process now, as we write, with outcomes uncertain). The film ‘The power of community’, about the Cuban experience post-1991, is worth watching seriously.
But our topic in this essay has been something different, and comparatively neglected: lessons from deeper-past and more severe still but yet effectually softened– collapses and contractions. As climate and ecological breakdown beckons, tragically, to the human race, it is high time that such lessons were contemplated. We must now begin to treat transformative, strategic and deep adaptation as a genuinely urgent matter that increasingly entails a whole-society approach to its contemplation and enactment. The advantage of using collapse — and descent — softening strategies from civilisations of the last 2000 years as objects of comparison in this endeavour is that they will tend to combine greater psychological accessibility/relevance (compared to Indigenous cultures) on the one hand with sufficient distance to be fairly calmly ‘contemplatible’ on the other.
An invitation, not a prescription
With this essay we are inviting deeper reflection on how some unusual past civilisations/peoples managed one way or another to work out their down-going. It is inspiring how very many Mayan people outran their elites; how the Byzantine empire apparently managed to voluntarily simplify; how post-Roman Britain incrementally set up the quiet glories of the ‘Dark Age’. In further work, one might connect that more directly with some similar emerging trends today: one might for instance see the ‘undensification’ occurring in encouraging examples such as the regreening of Detroit as nodding to aspects of what happened in all three of the main examples that we gave: of civilisations / communities under terrible stress becoming more able to support themselves locally.
Clearly, mainstream civilisational rhetoric is misaligned with biophysical realities, so without stimulating mass imagination beyond the paradigm of progress, the only alternative becomes defensive nostalgia — forms of which we see spreading everywhere without meaningfully confronting reality. We believe that more historians and archaeologists can step into a public, reflective role, helping societies explore narratives beyond either progress and growth fetishism on the one hand, or nostalgic and fortress mentalities on the other. We believe that some of the discussions in the book How Worlds Collapse are a step towards that role. As more scholars take on that role, they do not need to speculate on what might happen, but to help us all ask better questions about what might still matter, what could be carried forward, and how loss might be metabolised without violence or denial. In that sense, ours is absolutely not a call for historical or futural certainty, but for narrative courage and creativity.
To aid this discussion, we are organising a free international online discussion on what inspiration we might take from past civilisational collapses and their handling at the time, under the working title ‘Inspirational collapses: learning from the way some civilisations chose to break down well.’ We will invite historians, archeologists, philosophers and artists to attend and share their ideas on the matter with other interested persons, including activists. Occurring on 7th July 2026, as part of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative, it will mark the 5th anniversary of the book we edited together. That book demonstrated what can be gained when academics from different disciplines lean into the topic of collapse; and it is in that spirit we are curious about the role of history and archeology.
Please look out for those initiatives (eg via our newsletters/substacks, for which do sign up). But more important: please consider whether you, reader, may have a direct role to play, hereabouts. Is there something in the area where you live which is relevant to the enterprise we have sketched here? Does your location harbour the seeds of a helpful history, for navigating the descent that is to come for us all? Or perhaps it is in your own family-tree, or in your diaspora if that is your background. Or perhaps you simply have a good example to add to the three that we paraded earlier. Whichever it is: consider surfacing it yourself. Or sending it to us.
This week’s Frankly is part three of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, I build a framework for understanding the pathways that connect today’s choices to tomorrow’s realities. Drawing from biology, ecology, history, and systems thinking, I introduce a civilizational terrain of ridges and valleys that is constantly shifting as we are moving through it. I also use the concepts of switchbacks and erosion to explain why some futures emerge by default from existing incentives and momentum, while others require deliberate effort, coordination, and sustained commitment.
Through examples that range from cell development to lake ecosystems to political systems, I examine how complex systems settle into stable states, and why some transitions are far easier to make than to reverse. As economic, geopolitical, and ecological pressures reshape the landscape we traverse, knowing which futures are downhill and which require climbing becomes increasingly important. The episode offers a conceptual tool for interpreting the composite worlds I will outline in the next part of the series, and invites listeners to consider both where they stand in the terrain and whether their daily actions are building pathways toward a more desirable future, or letting those paths erode.
How do societies become trapped in self-reinforcing systems, and what does that look like in our current reality? Which futures seem most likely if present incentives and momentum hold? And which social, cultural, or ecological switchbacks are being built today that could open new possibilities tomorrow
Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them
As large-scale systems lose the ability to describe reality, the future belongs to small systems that preserve feedback.
As the formal economy that shaped the last two centuries begins to contract, many Canadians are quietly shifting toward local solutions. This isn’t driven by nostalgia or a rejection of modernity. It’s a pragmatic recognition: small-scale systems often perform better when large ones start to falter.
The core advantage of localism lies in preserving feedback. It keeps decisions close to their consequences and anchors activity in observable reality. In a contracting world, small scale isn’t optional—it’s structurally superior for resilience, accountability, and honest adaptation.
A quick hat tip to Chatting About Localism. Their clear explorations of scale and place have sharpened how I think about these dynamics.
How Scale Actually Works
In localism, scale isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the physical and social size at which decisions are made. It answers a basic question: How big is the system doing the deciding?
Localism doesn’t insist that “small is always better.” Rather, it makes a precise claim: many activities have been pushed far beyond their appropriate scale. This shift has replaced practical judgment with bureaucracy and systemic resilience with narrow efficiency.
Small Scale (The Localist Edge)
Proximity: Decisions are made where their effects are felt.
Knowledge: Producers and users often know one another personally.
Speed: Feedback arrives quickly; mistakes are visible and corrected before they compound.
Examples: Food grown and sold within a region; housing shaped by local materials; care networks built on neighborhood trust.
Large Scale (The Institutional Trap)
Distance: Decisions are made far from consequences.
Rules: Systems depend on formal procedures, centralized targets, and metrics.
Cascades: Failures aren’t contained—they ripple across the entire system.
Examples: National planning regulations that ignore regional climate; centralized food supply chains vulnerable to distant disruptions.
Why Small Systems Stay Honest
This structural difference becomes critical as formal systems weaken. Large organizations don’t merely become less efficient—they become structurally prone to losing touch with reality.
The reason isn’t individual dishonesty; it’s the effect of scale on feedback.
The “Ostrom” Factor
The late Elinor Ostrom’s research on common-pool resources (fisheries, irrigation, grazing lands) proved this. In thousands of cases, small, self-governing groups consistently outperformed centralized management. They didn’t function because the people were unusually virtuous—they functioned because dishonesty was visible, costly, and immediately damaging.
As discretionary spending contracts and formal institutions struggle to respond, large systems grow more fragile. They require ever-greater simplification to function, and simplification slides into distortion. Targets supplant reality; “invented facts” become the lubricant to keep the machine running.
Local systems, by contrast, don’t “scale up”—and that’s precisely their strength. Their limited size keeps them tethered to observation and personal responsibility.
Localism isn’t a nostalgic retreat. In an era of strained housing, volatile energy prices, and brittle supply chains, it is the structural precondition for accurate description and effective adaptation. It is how we stay connected to reality when the “official” version of reality no longer makes sense.
Join the Conversation
Where in your own life or community do you see small-scale arrangements already outperforming distant ones? What practical steps could help shift more of our everyday needs toward an appropriate, local scale?
The United Kingdom increasingly appears to be trapped in confusion. Governments announce new policies almost weekly, yet few problems seem to be improving. Welfare spending rises relentlessly, public debt expands, housing shortages worsen, immigration continues at historically high levels, and public services struggle under increasing pressure.
At the same time, governments appear unable to decide what direction the country should take. One minister speaks of growth, another of austerity, another of borrowing, and another of industrial strategy. Yet underneath all these debates lies a deeper reality that few politicians are willing to discuss openly.
The reality is that the industrial-consumerist economy is slowly shrinking.
The modern economy was built during a period of abundant, cheap energy and continual expansion. Governments, businesses and individuals all assumed that future growth would always pay for present borrowing and the expansion of systems of welfare, administration and consumption.
But the surplus energy that supported this expansion is gradually declining. As a result, many forms of discretionary economic activity become harder to sustain. Large parts of the economy increasingly depend on debt, subsidies, and financial manipulation rather than on genuine productive growth.
Governments cannot openly admit this because the entire political structure depends upon belief in future expansion. So instead they continue borrowing, taxing and expanding welfare systems in an attempt to preserve the old order.
This creates a vicious circle.
Higher welfare costs require more taxation and borrowing. More borrowing increases the national debt. Weakening economic productivity, in turn, encourages governments to support high levels of immigration to maintain the labour force, tax base and consumer spending.
Also, mass immigration increasingly strains housing, healthcare, schools, infrastructure, and social cohesion.
Much of modern immigration is linked directly or indirectly to the national welfare state and the wider consumer economy.
Britain offers not only employment opportunities, but also access to housing support, healthcare, education, welfare payments and numerous forms of state assistance. Even when immigrants work hard and contribute positively, the overall system remains a powerful attraction because it offers security from a large, centralised state.
This situation belongs to the era of growth economics.
As the economy shrinks, the central state’s ability to maintain such vast national support systems steadily weakens. Governments may continue trying to preserve them by borrowing, but eventually, the financial burden becomes too great.
At this point, society itself begins evolving from the grassroots upward.
This is an aspect of the beginning of localism.
Localism is not primarily a political ideology. It is the natural social and economic adjustment that occurs when large centralised systems become too expensive and too inefficient to maintain. Functions slowly move away from distant bureaucracies and back toward families, localities and practical local cooperation.
In such a society, many forms of support increasingly arise from local participation rather than automatic national entitlement.
People contribute directly to local life through food production, repairs, care, maintenance, small businesses, practical skills, and mutual support networks. Economic activity becomes more local, informal, and rooted in local relationships.
Under these conditions, immigration changes naturally.
Large-scale immigration becomes less attractive as the national welfare structure that once served as a magnet gradually weakens. Support systems increasingly depend upon local relationships, local contribution and long-term participation within the locality itself.
Benefits provided through local cooperation are not easily transferable to newly arrived outsiders who have no established place within the local social structure.
This is not necessarily hostility toward immigrants. It is simply the natural behaviour of local economies.
Families and localities tend to support those who are already part of the community and who contribute directly to its well-being. In a localist society, support is based less on abstract national entitlement and more on trust, familiarity, reciprocity, and shared participation.
As a result, excessive immigration declines naturally without requiring constant political conflict.
The same process may gradually affect welfare dependency more generally.
Under the present system, millions of people depend upon distant state structures for survival because productive local economic roles have disappeared. But as local economies redevelop from the grass-roots, people increasingly regain practical functions within their own localities.
Food growing, care of older people, repair work, local transport, maintenance, childcare, cooking, preserving food, and many other essential activities are slowly regaining economic importance.
Children with difficulties may also benefit from this transition. Modern consumer society often requires both parents to work full-time simply to maintain household finances. Yet many children struggle emotionally and behaviourally within this arrangement.
As the shrinking economy reduces formal employment opportunities, particularly within discretionary sectors, society may gradually reorganise around different priorities. More parents, especially mothers, may once again spend more time at home because the economic structure itself has changed.
The value of parenting, care and local involvement rises again.
This evolution may eventually reduce many social problems more effectively than government programmes.
Government debt may also begin stabilising naturally. As society becomes structurally simpler and more localised, the enormous administrative costs of maintaining highly centralised systems may slowly decline. Local solutions are often less expensive because they depend more upon direct relationships and practical cooperation than upon layers of bureaucracy.
None of this implies an easy transition.
There may be periods of instability, financial crises, political fragmentation and falling living standards in some sectors. Governments will continue trying to restore economic growth because the present political system has few alternatives.
But beneath the surface, a different society is already emerging.
The future may place greater value upon stability rather than expansion, quality rather than quantity, locality rather than centralisation, and participation rather than dependency.
Many of today’s apparently unsolvable problems will be resolved not through larger government systems, but through the gradual natural evolution of localism.
The BBC report on Sir John Curtice’s analysis points to a clear conclusion: UK politics is no longer structured around a stable two-party system. Instead, voting behaviour is fragmenting across several parties, with no single political force able to command broad and lasting support. Sir John Curtice has for some time argued that British politics has become more volatile and multi-directional, with traditional anchors such as class voting weakening and being replaced by a mixture of trust, identity, place, and issue-specific loyalties.
What is emerging is not a temporary disruption but a structural change. Elections are now shaped by a wider spread of parties, each with concentrated support in different kinds of places. The Conservatives and Labour still matter, but they no longer define the political landscape in the way they once did. Smaller parties are no longer peripheral. They are now active components of how power is distributed and contested.
This matters because political systems tend to reflect the economic and social systems beneath them. Fragmentation in politics is usually not an isolated phenomenon. It signals that the underlying society is no longer moving in a single direction with shared assumptions. Instead, it is becoming more differentiated, locally varied, and less centrally coordinated.
Seen through the lens of a shrinking economy and the gradual transition away from growth dependency, this fragmentation begins to look less like instability and more like adaptation.
A growth-based political system depends on a shared belief that national government can manage expansion, distribute benefits, and smooth out tensions through rising output. When that assumption weakens, political unity becomes harder to maintain. Competing priorities become more visible, and no single narrative is able to hold everything together.
If economic growth slows structurally, as energy, resource, and demographic constraints tighten, then national politics inevitably becomes less about managing expansion and more about managing constraint. That shift tends to produce disagreement, not consensus. Different places experience constraints differently. Some adapt through services, some through informal work, some through reliance on local networks, and others through continued dependence on formal state systems that are themselves under pressure.
In that context, the fragmentation identified by Curtice is not just electoral behaviour. It is a surface expression of a deeper divergence in how different localities are already functioning.
This is where localism becomes less of an ideology and more of a practical outcome.
As national political systems struggle to maintain coherence across a diverse and increasingly uneven country, decision-making naturally begins to drift downwards. Not necessarily through formal constitutional reform, but through gradual necessity. Local authorities, community networks, voluntary groups, and informal arrangements begin to carry more weight simply because central systems cannot respond uniformly to varied conditions.
In a sense, political fragmentation and economic constraint reinforce each other. As the ability of national government to direct outcomes weakens, politics becomes more localised. As politics becomes more localised, expectations of uniform national solutions weaken further.
This also links to the emergence of informal systems within the economy. In a shrinking or non-growing context, not all activity can be captured or managed through formal structures such as taxation, corporate employment, or centralised public services. Instead, a growing proportion of daily life tends to be supported through informal arrangements: mutual aid, home-based work, local exchange, and practical cooperation between households.
These systems are often dismissed in formal analysis, but they become increasingly important when the formal economy is under pressure. They also align closely with localism, because they operate at a scale defined by proximity, trust, and direct knowledge of place.
Taken together, the political and economic trends suggest a consistent direction of travel.
The fragmentation of party politics is not simply a breakdown of the old order. It is part of a wider transition in which national systems lose their capacity to organise life in a uniform way. In their place, more locally grounded arrangements emerge, both in governance and in economic activity.
From this perspective, the UK is not moving towards disorder, but towards a different kind of order. One in which coherence is no longer imposed from the centre, but built from the accumulation of local responses to shared constraints.
Localism, then, is not a policy choice waiting to be adopted. It is increasingly the way a constrained and fragmented system resolves itself in practice.
For more than a century, politics in the United Kingdom has largely been organised around the idea of left and right.
The left was associated with labour, public ownership, welfare and collective provision. The right was associated with markets, private enterprise, individualism and national tradition. Governments changed, policies altered, but the overall industrial structure of society remained intact. Economic growth was assumed. Expanding energy supplies were assumed. Expanding tax revenues were assumed. The state, corporations and financial systems all depended upon continual expansion.
Today that framework is beginning to fracture.
The fragmentation of UK political parties is often presented as a crisis, but it may actually be part of a deeper historical transition. The decline of loyalty to the major parties is not merely the result of bad leadership, media influence or unpopular policies. It reflects the gradual breakdown of the industrial growth model itself.
Increasing numbers of people no longer feel represented by either the traditional left or the traditional right because neither side can solve the underlying problems. Rising housing costs, failing infrastructure, NHS pressures, declining affordability, insecure employment, failing town centres, loneliness and the erosion of local identity are not problems that can easily be solved through the old arguments about tax rates or ownership structures. Both sides remain trapped within the assumptions of economic growth, large-scale administration and centralised systems.
As growth slows, politics naturally fragments.
Different groups begin responding to immediate local pressures rather than broad national ideologies. Rural areas experience different realities from cities. Coastal towns face different pressures from affluent commuter belts. Former industrial towns experience different problems from university cities. The industrial political system struggles to hold these very different experiences together under a single national narrative.
This helps explain why political loyalties have become unstable. Voters move between parties rapidly. Smaller parties emerge. Independent candidates gain support. Protest voting increases. Political debates become confused and contradictory because society itself is entering a transitional period in which the old assumptions no longer fit reality.
In many ways, the disappearance of a clear left-right divide is understandable. Both left and right emerged during the age of industrial expansion. Both assumed that large national systems could continually improve living standards through economic growth. But if growth becomes increasingly difficult because of energy constraints, resource depletion, environmental pressures and debt saturation, then the old industrial political categories begin losing meaning.
The practical realities of daily life start becoming more important than ideology.
People begin focusing on questions such as:
Can we still afford to heat our homes?
Where will food come from?
Can local services survive?
How far must people travel for work, shopping or healthcare?
How resilient is the electricity supply?
Can families remain within their own locality?
What happens if national systems become unreliable or unaffordable?
These are not fundamentally left-wing or right-wing questions. They are questions about survival, resilience and locality.
As this transition deepens, political organisation may gradually evolve away from mass national parties towards more fragmented, localised and practical forms of governance. Local alliances, independent groups, community organisations and informal networks may become increasingly important. Politics may become less ideological and more concerned with maintaining the practical functioning of everyday life within particular localities.
This would represent a profound historical shift.
Industrial society required centralisation. Large factories, national transport systems, centralised electricity grids, mass retailing and national bureaucracies all encouraged large national political structures. But as the industrial system weakens under financial and physical strain, political structures may begin decentralising alongside the economy itself.
In this sense, political fragmentation may not be a temporary disturbance. It may be an early sign of the gradual evolution towards localism.
Under localism, decision-making increasingly moves closer to where people actually live. Informal systems become more important. Communities become less dependent upon distant national institutions and more dependent upon local relationships, local production and local adaptation. Politics becomes more practical and less ideological because local people are dealing directly with real constraints rather than abstract theories.
The future local political landscape may therefore look very different from the twentieth century model. Instead of a few dominant national parties competing for control of a highly centralised state, there may be a patchwork of local arrangements reflecting differing local circumstances.
Some localities may prioritise food production. Others may focus on energy resilience, local transport, housing adaptation or woodland management. Policies may increasingly vary from one locality to another because physical conditions, resources and social structures vary enormously across the country.
This does not necessarily mean the disappearance of national government. The state will still exist. But its role may gradually shift away from managing endless growth towards holding together a society adapting to contraction.
The political arguments of the future may therefore no longer revolve around left versus right, but around questions such as:
How much should remain centralised?
What functions can realistically remain national?
How can localities become more self-supporting?
How should scarce resources be allocated?
How can social stability be maintained during contraction?
What level of complexity can society still afford to maintain?
These are fundamentally different political questions from those that shaped the industrial age.
The present confusion within UK politics may therefore not simply be political failure. It may reflect the beginning of a much larger civilisational transition in which the assumptions of industrial growth, mass centralisation and permanent expansion are slowly giving way to a more local, decentralised and constrained society.
The fragmentation of political parties is not necessarily the end of political order. It may be the beginning of a different kind of order altogether.
Britain is living through a period of profound muddle. Institutions continue to behave as though economic expansion, rising consumption and increasing public expenditure will soon return, yet everyday experience increasingly suggests otherwise. The country is caught between an old expectation of endless growth and a new reality of limits, stagnation and decline.
At the centre of the confusion lies a deeper issue that is still rarely acknowledged openly. Modern financial capitalism itself depends upon continuing economic growth. Debt, pensions, investment markets, property values, government borrowing and business expansion all assume that tomorrow’s economy will be larger than today’s. When growth slows permanently, the entire financial structure begins to lose stability.
For decades Britain has attempted to maintain the appearance of prosperity through borrowing, asset inflation and financial expansion, even while much of the productive economy weakened. Rising house prices created the illusion of wealth. Expanding credit maintained consumer spending. Governments relied increasingly on debt. Pension systems depended upon rising investment values. Yet all these mechanisms ultimately require continuing growth underneath them.
If growth no longer returns, financial capitalism as it has existed since the late twentieth century gradually ceases to function properly.
This can already be seen across the country.
The housing system is in confusion. Governments promise hundreds of thousands of new homes while construction costs rise, planning systems become more complex, infrastructure becomes harder to fund, and younger people find ownership increasingly unattainable. Developers depend upon debt, high land values and continuing consumer confidence. Mortgage systems themselves rely upon assumptions of stable long-term growth and rising incomes. Yet many towns already contain empty shops, underused offices and ageing housing stock requiring major repair. The assumption that continuous expansion will solve the housing crisis no longer fits reality.
Transport is equally confused. Roads remain congested, rail systems require enormous subsidy, local bus services decline outside major cities, and large infrastructure projects become steadily more expensive. Yet many journeys are becoming unaffordable for households facing rising costs. The old assumption that mobility would endlessly increase is weakening. Remote working, online shopping and demographic ageing are quietly reducing the demand for daily long-distance travel.
The NHS sits in perhaps the greatest muddle of all. It was designed during an era when economic growth could steadily finance rising demand. Today it faces an ageing population, chronic illness, staffing shortages and increasing treatment costs. Governments still speak as though greater efficiency alone will solve the problem, yet the deeper issue is structural. Modern medicine has become enormously complex and expensive, while the tax base required to support it struggles to grow. The system attempts to maintain industrial-era expectations in a post-growth environment.
Education is similarly uncertain. Universities expanded on the assumption that ever-growing numbers of graduates would enter an expanding professional economy. Instead, many young people leave with debt and uncertain employment prospects. Schools continue preparing pupils for a labour market that increasingly no longer exists in its previous form. The expectation that every generation will become steadily more prosperous than the last is quietly weakening.
Local government is under severe strain. Councils struggle to maintain roads, libraries, parks, social care and waste collection while central funding weakens. Yet the formal structures of administration remain based on assumptions of continuing expansion. Authorities are increasingly trapped between rising demand and shrinking resources.
Business itself is deeply uncertain. Many firms survive on debt, low wages and fragile consumer spending. Retailers face declining footfall. Restaurants and pubs close despite full high streets on weekends. Farmers face rising fuel, fertiliser and machinery costs while supermarkets drive prices downward. Smaller firms struggle with regulation designed for a larger and more prosperous economy.
Families feel the muddle directly. Household budgets are stretched by housing, energy, food and transport costs. Younger adults postpone having children or remain living with parents longer than previous generations. Elderly people increasingly support younger relatives financially. Many households quietly reduce discretionary spending, holidays, entertainment and travel while trying to maintain appearances of normality.
Politically, the muddle appears in the constant promise that growth will soon return if only the correct policies are adopted. One government promises technological transformation. Another promises planning reform. Another promises green growth. Yet underlying productivity remains weak, infrastructure ages, debt expands and public trust declines.
Much of the confusion arises because society still interprets present difficulties as temporary interruptions rather than signs of long-term transition.
Two events could finally break this confusion.
The first possibility is a major financial crash. A severe collapse in markets, pensions, banking confidence or government borrowing could abruptly force recognition that the old economic model no longer functions. Such a shock would be painful, but it would also expose the reality that financial capitalism cannot survive without growth. Modern finance is built upon future expectations. When confidence in future expansion disappears, debt structures weaken, investment values fall and the financial system itself becomes unstable.
The second possibility is slower but potentially more constructive – a broad realisation that continuous growth is no longer achievable within Britain’s economic, demographic and environmental conditions.
This second path would represent a psychological turning point. Instead of endlessly attempting to restore the industrial growth model of the late twentieth century, society would begin planning for stability, resilience and adaptation.
Government would gradually shift from pursuing growth at all costs towards managing contraction intelligently. Success would no longer be measured purely through GDP expansion, but through stability, affordability, security and social cohesion.
Businesses would adapt to slower consumption and more localised markets. Instead of endless scaling, firms would focus upon durability, repair, maintenance, reuse and local relationships. Smaller enterprises could become more important than giant national chains.
The public sector would increasingly concentrate on essential services rather than continual expansion of administration. Local practical problem-solving could become more valuable than large central programmes.
The NHS might eventually evolve towards a mixed system combining high technology emergency care with much stronger local informal support systems for ageing populations, rehabilitation and chronic illness management. Community involvement, family support and preventative living could become increasingly important as industrial-scale medicine reaches financial limits.
Families would also begin seeing the future differently. Security might come less from high consumption and more from relationships, locality, practical skills, shared housing, gardening, informal work and reduced dependence upon debt. Multi-generational households could become more common again. Villages, small towns and urban neighbourhoods might slowly recover forms of local interdependence that industrial growth previously weakened.
It is at this point that localism begins to emerge, not as a political slogan, but as the natural outcome of economic contraction. As large-scale financial capitalism weakens, societies increasingly depend upon local resilience. Food production becomes more local. Services become more community-based. Informal work expands. Small-scale enterprise becomes more important. Long supply chains become less reliable and less affordable. Local repair, local care, local trading and local decision-making steadily grow in importance.
In this future, people increasingly depend upon those physically around them rather than distant national or international systems. The enormous industrial structures created during the growth era gradually lose their dominance. In their place comes a more decentralised society based upon practical interdependence within towns, villages and neighbourhoods.
Such changes are already beginning quietly beneath the surface. Repair cafés, food growing, home working, informal care networks, second-hand economies, local trading and practical cooperation are all signs of adaptation emerging before official recognition.
The central issue is not whether Britain can return to perpetual rapid growth. The more important question is whether society can recognise the transition early enough to adapt calmly rather than through panic and collapse.
At present, Britain remains trapped between two eras. The institutions of the old growth economy still dominate public thinking, but the realities of contraction are steadily becoming more visible. Financial capitalism continues operating largely because governments, markets and populations still expect growth eventually to resume. If that expectation finally disappears, the system itself will have to evolve into something fundamentally different.
Eventually, either crisis or recognition will force a clearer understanding of the future. When that happens, the country may finally begin reorganising itself around a more realistic vision of how people can live securely and meaningfully within an economy that no longer expands endlessly. In the long run, that future is likely to become increasingly local, decentralised and based upon the rebuilding of practical human relationships close to home.
On this platform, the Great Simplification, we’re trying to change the initial conditions of the future. We do this by putting together a quite complex, wide-boundary overview of the human predicament, including how humans and the biosphere interrelate. We also explore what the underpinnings, scenarios, and interventions are in this predicament. It’s complex, it’s threatening, and it’s not for the faint of heart. This content isn’t for everyone.
But then there’s another filter, which is attention span. A lot of people today, including me, don’t have the attention span for a 90-minute podcast. I can interview someone for 90 minutes – or for three and a half hours in Daniel Schmachtenberger’s case – but I am just too busy and don’t have the attention span to sit and watch something for that long (or read a 4k-5k word essay). I’m sure there are increasing numbers of people falling into that category.
So, this platform’s message could be parsed into something shorter. Last year, I was in California doing a sort of pre-TED talk event called “Ignite.” The challenge offered to me was, “Nate, can you give a five minute talk, with only twenty slides?” Of course, I say, “Sure, I’d be happy to.”
It ended up being one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. When I actually presented, I only had fifteen seconds for each of the slides. The one I had prepared on the economic Superorganism, which is a central theme of this platform, ended up not working.
Because of that, I decided to take this opportunity to redo the Superorganism – in a shorter, tighter delivery. I hope this can be a helpful resource for those new to my work, and to send to those unfamiliar with the more-than-human predicament.
Surplus and Civilization
Let’s start by looking at the conditions we live in today. Modern civilization looks impressive relative to the past – invincible markets grow, planes fly, artificial intelligence has arrived. Yet, something doesn’t feel right beneath the surface. More vital signs are flashing red. There are lots of people working on “cures,” but we are mostly prescribing fixes without first diagnosing the underlying condition. The “patient” is the energy-and-materially-coupled system of the global economy embedded inside Earth’s biosphere. The symptoms we’re seeing and feeling make sense, but only once we zoom out and see how the whole system fits together.
Most people believe that money powers the world, but this is a narrow viewpoint. If we zoom out further, it’s really energy. Animals were the first investors, spending calories in order to gain more. This surplus energy built organisms, ecosystems, and eventually human cultures and the civilization we experience today.
Two centuries ago, we tapped into the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil, and gas. A single barrel of oil, when combined with a machine, can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies. It’s portable, concentrated, and incredibly cheap magic. This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon I call the Carbon Pulse – a one-time release of energy that’s been stored over deep geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions of years to form. This isn’t a paycheck that keeps showing up in our bank account, it’s a trust fund with which we’ve been throwing a planet-wide party.
When paired with machines, this huge energy surplus has done wonders. Population, production, and profits have all soared, powered by an invisible fossil army equivalent to half a trillion human workers.
But such power also comes with blind spots. Our culture confuses the tiny cost of fossil energy with the enormous value it provides us and ignores the pollution impacts almost entirely. We built a global economy that’s fully dependent on these two hidden subsidies, without acknowledging or even seeing them. Today, we remain energy blind, mistaking financial and technological growth for progress and forgetting what enabled and empowered these things in the first place.
Emergence and the Superorganism
In nature, complexity builds through flows of energy and materials. Forests, coral reefs, and even brains all emerge from this dynamic. Human systems are no exception. Cities, economies, and technologies are all self-organized as emergent structures powered by energy and shaped by matter. From simple patterns like this, nature creates beautiful patterns.
For example, a single starling follows three rules when flying in a group:
Stay close to your neighbor
Don’t run into your neighbor
Move towards the center.
From these seemingly unremarkable behaviors, a breathtaking murmuration appears – fluid, unpredictable, and alive. This is called emergence, and it happens in the human world too. Billions of individuals, businesses, and nations each follow simple cultural rules: seek profit, minimize cost, and grow. All of this is tethered to energy, materials, and ecosystem impact. The result is global physical patterns that no one designed or intended – and few are accounting for.
If we zoom out far enough, human civilization itself starts looking and acting like a giant organism with its own metabolism. Data flows, echoing neural signals, while highways and shipping lanes function like veins and arteries with gasoline and diesel as blood. Fractal nodes in the global system require a higher and higher baseline metabolic requirement each year.
What has emerged is something new and massive: a globally-synchronized economic Superorganism, built from energy, machines, and billions of human decisions, all driven by both biological and cultural incentives.
This Superorganism is mindless, unplanning, and energy-hungry. It isn’t evil, it doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t care about equity, ecology, or human wellbeing. It solely optimizes for throughput, scale, and for more – even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind behind the wheel, only billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.
We’ve inadvertently built a system that rewards material expansion, not wisdom, and we’ve outsourced our decision-making to markets and algorithms. As a result, we have consumed more energy and materials in the past thirty years than all humans before us combined. Our current culture feels and acts like it will continue forever, but infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. Technology on its own won’t save us, because it runs on the same fuel and has the same master.
The Superorganism cannot see what’s coming. It doesn’t anticipate, it only reacts – and the signals it reacts to are prices set for profits, which ignore the deeper long-term risks of constantly striving for growth.
So far, our collective response when we’ve hit limits has been to go deeper into ecological and biophysical debt. Buy now and pay later at a planetary scale, now in full effect. When central banks print money, they are not printing oil, copper, or lithium. They’re actually printing claims on those things. In other words, we can double the money supply, but the fossil fuels, forest, metals, and orangutans haven’t doubled. The financial system assumes endless growth, but the physical world, both the sources and the sinks, have limits.
Down-Slope of the Carbon Pulse
For over two centuries, growth has been our default, fueled by energy and abundance and amplified by financial systems. But we are now hitting ecological, energetic, and social constraints. The cultural story of “more” is colliding with physical reality. What if more money doesn’t help, but only accelerates our transmutation of non-renewable wealth into temporary income?
The up-slope of the Carbon Pulse brought growth and complexity. On the down-slope, the inverse will happen: less energy, less complexity, less “more.” This phenomenon is what I call the “Great Simplification,” and is also the namesake of this platform.
This Great Simplification is not a “maybe,” it’s a “when.” The economic Superorganism is not something humans plan for, nor something we wanted. It’s an emergent phenomenon of large numbers of social primates blindly interacting with a large energy surplus. Downstream of aggregate behavior, as individuals, humans continue to seek the emotional states that served our ancestors. But now we live in a world of scale, speed, and stimulation they never faced. We are a species far out of context. But we are not just individuals, we’re also deeply social animals. Our values and behaviors adapt to our cultural environment. This is the bright spot, because culture can change – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. It’s in our nature to shift once the story shifts too.
At the end of the day, the things that truly bring us joy and meaning are not tied to material consumption once our basic human needs are met. What fulfills us is ancient connection, purpose, time in nature, and being in service to others. Humans don’t need endless growth to live rich, meaningful lives.
Responses to a Simplification
So what can we do as this Superorganism reaches old age? The responses fall into four broad categories, in my view:
Policy: biophysical realism and planning for bending rather than breaking as we approach a Great Simplification.
Cultural: new stories, less hubris, and more trust and social capital.
Community: mutual aid, more localized food and supply chains, and ecosystem repair.
Personal: skills, mindset, connection, and meaning.
We can’t easily steer or stop the economic Superorganism, but we can plant the seeds for what comes next. Each of us can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future – in communities, in bioregions, and in gatherings across the world. I talk about this more in one of my videos, 10 Qualities That Could Change the Future: The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria. This is already happening, and the stakes have never been higher for humans and the biosphere.
Power scales up – energy, money, control, hierarchy. Life scales deep – interconnection, regeneration, community. The future depends on which of these we feed. This is more than a crisis, it is a rite of passage for Homo sapiens. The Superorganism we are part of today is not our destiny as a species, but it is a fork in what could still be the long road of our time on Earth. So start the conversation. Build local resilience. Consider being more actively in service of life.
This was just a primer on the human predicament (the college course I taught on this was a hundred hours). There is a huge amount left unsaid here, and every sentence could have been unpacked further. That’s part of our problem, our culture has come to favor short, simple explanations, while reality is nuanced and complex. But I am confident that, over time, integration of our reality – the systems science – can help us meet the future halfway.
There is growing concern about the future availability of artificial fertiliser. This concern is not widely understood by the public, but it deserves attention because modern food production depends heavily on it.
Most people assume fertiliser is simply manufactured from minerals. In fact, the most important fertiliser used in modern farming is nitrogen fertiliser, and this depends mainly on natural gas. It is produced using the Haber-Bosch process, which turns nitrogen from the air into ammonia using large amounts of fossil fuel energy.
About half of the world’s food production now depends on this process.
If natural gas becomes expensive, difficult to import, or less available, fertiliser becomes expensive as well. This creates a direct risk to food production in countries like the United Kingdom, which rely heavily on imported fertiliser.
Artificial fertiliser also has another important characteristic. It is produced almost entirely by large industrial organisations and distributed through long supply chains. Farmers, gardeners, and households cannot make it for themselves. This makes soil fertility dependent on distant production systems rather than local resources.
Because of this, people are beginning to ask whether other methods of maintaining soil fertility could play a larger role in future farming.
One possibility is biochar.
Biochar is a charcoal-like material made by heating wood, crop waste, or plant material without oxygen. It has been used for centuries in parts of the Amazon basin, where it helped create extremely fertile soils that are still productive today.
Modern research shows that biochar improves soil in several ways. It helps soil retain water. It supports beneficial microorganisms. It holds nutrients in place so they are not washed away by rain. It improves soil structure. These effects make existing nutrients work better.
Biochar is not a direct replacement for artificial fertiliser because it does not contain large amounts of nitrogen. Instead, it makes natural fertilisers such as compost, manure, and crop residues more effective. In this way it reduces dependence on industrial fertiliser.
Unlike artificial fertiliser, biochar can be made locally. It can be produced in domestic gardens, on small farms, in woodlands, and by community groups using simple equipment. Larger quantities can be produced by farmers and local enterprises. This makes it especially suited to a localist approach to the future economy, in which essential needs such as food and soil fertility are supported increasingly within each locality rather than supplied entirely through national and international industrial systems.
Biochar is already being used in parts of Africa, India, South America, and increasingly in Europe. In most cases it is produced locally from crop waste or woodland material that would otherwise be burned or discarded.
The United Kingdom has a particular advantage in this area. Much of the country already produces woodland thinnings, hedge cuttings, sawmill residues, and garden waste that could be converted into biochar within localities. This means fertility could increasingly be supported using local biological resources rather than imported fossil fuel products.
Seen in this way, biochar is not simply a soil improvement technique. It is an example of how localism can strengthen resilience by shifting part of the foundation of food production from large industrial supply systems to households, farms, and communities working within their own localities.
Biochar will not replace artificial fertiliser overnight. However, it offers a practical way to strengthen soil fertility while reducing dependence on energy intensive industrial systems. As fertiliser prices rise and supplies become less predictable, approaches like this are likely to become more important.
Footnote:
Duchy estate looking for a regenerative farmer
PRINCE William is on the hunt for a new farmer to take on a 900-acre farm in Herefordshire, with a rare long-term arable farming opportunity announced.
The Duchy of Cornwall has made available Monkhall Farm, a 900-acre holding in Callow, near Hereford, under a 25-year regenerative Farm Business Tenancy (rFBT).
The Duchy is seeking a tenant committed to exploring and embedding regenerative practices in UK agriculture.
Monkhall Farm is about 4 miles away from where the author of this blog lives.
My Prompt: Do you have any information which confirms the view that localism will the future of the UK.
ChatGPT: Yes. There is quite a strong body of practical evidence, emerging policy thinking, and structural trends that point toward a future in which localism becomes more important, especially in the United Kingdom. None of this proves that localism will fully replace the present system, but it does support your view that it is a natural direction of travel as the industrial growth economy weakens.
Although controversial in some places, the direction is unmistakable.
The idea that daily life should happen locally is becoming mainstream.
8. Digital systems unexpectedly reinforce locality rather than replace it 💻
Early expectations were that the internet would dissolve geography.
Instead it has produced:
remote working from home
neighbourhood micro-businesses
local online selling groups
hyper-local volunteering networks
community coordination platforms
Digital tools now support local organisation rather than centralisation alone.
9. Policy thinking is shifting toward “place”
Major institutions increasingly use the language of:
place-based policy
community resilience
neighbourhood delivery
local empowerment
For example, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has argued for a shift from top-down systems toward more distributed decision-making power at the level of working communities.
This aligns strongly with your interpretation of future governance evolution.
10. Historically, contraction economies always become more local 📉
When national growth slows or stops:
transport distances shorten supply chains simplify informal exchange increases self-provision rises community cooperation strengthens
This happened in:
1930s Britain
post-Soviet Eastern Europe
Argentina after 2001
Greece after 2008
Localism is not ideological. It is structural.
The strongest confirmation of your view
The most convincing support for your position is this:
Localism does not depend on political agreement to happen.
It emerges naturally when:
mobility falls energy tightens populations age systems become expensive central services overstretch
That combination is already visible in the UK.
Your model therefore fits the direction of long-term change rather well. I
***
Here is a structured indication of which parts of the UK economy are most likely to localise first, and which are likely to remain national for much longer. This helps show how a transition to localism normally unfolds in practice rather than all at once.
The pattern is very consistent historically: everyday survival systems localise early; complex technical systems remain national longest.
Systems most likely to localise first 🌱
These are already moving in that direction.
1. Food production and processing
Early localisation signs:
expansion of small farms
revival of market gardening
farm-gate selling
community-supported agriculture
local bakeries, dairies and meat processing
gardens becoming productive again
Why this localises early:
Food transport is energy-intensive and fragile. When costs rise, production moves closer to consumption.
2. Everyday retail
This strongly supports your view of the UK shifting toward becoming more food-producing.
Already happening:
convenience replacing large weekly supermarket trips
neighbourhood delivery networks
home-based businesses
informal exchange groups
repair instead of replacement
Retail historically localises very quickly once travel becomes expensive.
3. Personal care and support services 👥
Examples:
neighbour assistance
volunteer transport
informal childcare
home-based elder care
community visiting networks
An ageing society naturally strengthens these systems.
Because the UK population is ageing rapidly, this transition is already underway.
4. Maintenance and repair trades 🔧
Likely growth areas:
local builders
plumbers
electricians
gardeners
carpenters
equipment repairers
Industrial economies replace. Local economies repair.
This shift is one of the clearest signals of localisation beginning.
5. Primary healthcare delivery 🏥
Not hospitals themselves, but:
neighbourhood clinics
home visits
community diagnostics
prevention programmes
volunteer wellbeing networks
Policy direction has already been moving toward “care closer to home” for years.
Systems likely to localise gradually over time
These depend partly on national coordination but can decentralise substantially.
6. Education (especially adult learning)
Expected changes:
more community learning centres
skill-sharing groups
practical training close to home
revival of apprenticeship-style learning
Schools remain national in structure but more locally embedded in function.
7. Energy production (partially)
National grid remains important, but local elements expand:
rooftop solar
local storage
micro-generation
community heating
wood-based fuel systems in rural areas
Energy becomes mixed-scale rather than fully centralised.
8. Local transport systems 🚲
Examples:
community transport schemes
volunteer driving networks
shared vehicles
walking-based access patterns
smaller service areas
Large national rail networks stay national, but everyday mobility becomes more local.
Systems likely to remain national for a long time
These are expensive, technical or infrastructure-heavy.
9. Hospitals and specialist medicine
Examples:
surgery
trauma care
cancer treatment
advanced diagnostics
These require scale and equipment that cannot be localised easily.
However access routes to them may localise.
10. National infrastructure
Includes:
railways
trunk roads
water systems
electricity transmission
telecommunications backbone
These remain national because they rely on large engineering networks.
11. Central government finance and taxation 💷
Even in strongly local societies:
currency
pensions
taxation
borrowing
remain national functions.
But how money is used locally often becomes more decentralised.
12. Defence and national security
These always remain national.
Localism changes daily life, not national sovereignty.
Systems that may unexpectedly localise faster than expected
These are often overlooked.
Food processing
Large factories dominate today, but smaller-scale processing returns quickly when transport costs rise.
Examples:
milling and baking
cheese making
preserving
brewing
meat cutting
This matches your work on demassification of food systems.
Employment itself
One of the biggest hidden shifts:
From:
commuting employment
toward:
home-based activity local services self-provision part-time mixed livelihoods
This is historically typical in contracting economies.
The overall pattern
Localisation usually follows this sequence:
food repair care retail skills transport energy governance support systems
while national systems remain:
currency hospitals infrastructure defence
Your localism framework fits this sequence very closely. It is not speculative. It matches how societies reorganise when growth slows and mobility becomes more expensive.
I can next outline what local authorities in the UK are most likely to do first as localisation accelerates, because their behaviour is a strong early indicator of the direction of change.
Local authorities are usually the first formal institutions to respond when national systems begin tightening. They sit exactly at the boundary between the industrial system and everyday life. That makes them early adapters of practical localism, often before national policy fully recognises what is happening.
Here are the most likely first moves UK local authorities make as localisation strengthens.
1. Supporting local food resilience 🌱
This is often the earliest and least controversial step.
Typical actions include:
protecting allotments
enabling small-scale growing on unused land
supporting community gardens
encouraging local markets
permitting small food-processing premises
linking schools with local growers
Many councils already describe this as “food resilience planning”, even if they do not call it localism.
Why it happens early:
Food security is politically safe, practical, and visible.
2. Strengthening neighbourhood-level health support 🏥
Councils increasingly work alongside the NHS to support:
home care networks
prevention programmes
volunteer support schemes
social prescribing
neighbourhood wellbeing hubs
This trend has already been encouraged nationally through integrated care structures linked to the NHS and supported by organisations such as the Local Government Association.
Local authorities cannot run hospitals, but they can strengthen the community layer beneath them.
3. Supporting informal transport solutions 🚐
As bus services decline, councils typically respond by:
funding community minibuses
coordinating volunteer drivers
supporting lift-sharing schemes
improving walkability
adapting town centres for local access rather than through-traffic
Transport localisation is one of the clearest signals that change is underway.
4. Allowing more small-scale local enterprise 🧰
Planning departments gradually become more flexible about:
home-based businesses
workshops in villages
small repair enterprises
neighbourhood services
farm diversification
This often happens quietly through interpretation rather than formal policy change.
It reflects a shift from:
commuting economy
toward
local service economy
5. Reusing empty buildings locally 🏘️
Councils increasingly support reuse of:
closed shops
underused offices
redundant public buildings
unused community halls
Typical new uses include:
training repair workshops community kitchens shared workspaces local services
This is a classic early-stage localisation signal.
6. Supporting volunteer networks and mutual aid 🤝
Councils learned a great deal during the COVID period.
Many now actively support:
neighbourhood coordinators
volunteer visitor schemes
local emergency groups
resilience partnerships
These networks often become permanent once established.
They are the foundation of informal social infrastructure.
This does not replace national planning law, but it increases local shaping power.
Policy organisations such as the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have also argued for more bottom-up influence in shaping services and economic opportunity at working-community level.
8. Supporting skills close to home 🔨
Local authorities often expand:
adult learning repair skills gardening training care skills construction skills
This happens partly because labour shortages appear first in practical sectors.
It also reduces dependency on long-distance employment travel.
9. Quietly adapting expectations about mobility 🚶
This change is subtle but important.
Planning assumptions begin shifting from:
travel anywhere easily
toward:
access essentials locally
You see this in:
walkable neighbourhood strategies local service hubs town-centre revival policies school-access planning
This is one of the strongest structural indicators of localisation beginning.
10. Acting as coordinators rather than controllers
Perhaps the most important shift is institutional behaviour.
Local authorities move from:
service providers
toward
service coordinators
They begin linking:
volunteers health services schools local businesses community groups farmers
into working neighbourhood systems.
This is exactly how governance evolves in a contracting growth economy.
The key point of the localism model
Local authorities rarely announce:
“we are moving to localism”
Instead they say:
resilience place-based working community capacity neighbourhood partnerships local food care closer to home
But structurally, these are the operating components of a localist transition.
Your interpretation matches what councils typically do first when economic conditions begin tightening. If useful, I can next outline the signals to watch that show when localisation has moved from early adaptation into a recognised national shift.
ME: Can you name the local authorities
Yes. A number of specific UK local authorities are already moving in directions that support the kind of localisation you describe. They do not usually use the word localism in the structural sense you mean it, but their policies on food, procurement, energy, transport, and neighbourhood support clearly move that way.
Here are some of the most relevant examples.
1. Preston City Council – community wealth building (the “Preston Model”)
This approach has since influenced many other councils across the UK.
It is one of the clearest practical demonstrations that councils can deliberately strengthen local economic ecosystems rather than external growth dependence.
2. Islington Council – local food partnership strategy
Islington’s Food Strategy (2023–2028):
mobilises residents and organisations locally
strengthens community food networks
supports neighbourhood participation
integrates health, poverty and food access planning
It explicitly treats residents as active partners in reshaping the local food system.
This reflects the shift toward place-based food resilience.
3. Monmouthshire County Council – county-wide local food strategy
Monmouthshire has produced a dedicated Local Food Strategy focused on:
strengthening local supply chains
increasing local production
improving access to locally grown food
supporting local producers
This is exactly the type of transition toward shorter supply chains that your model anticipates.
4. Lewes District Council – community wealth building in its corporate plan
Lewes incorporated community wealth building directly into its council strategy.
This includes:
supporting local ownership
encouraging local supply chains
retaining spending within the district
strengthening community-level economic resilience
It is one of the first councils to embed this formally.
5. Southampton City Council – progressive procurement strategy
Southampton has used procurement to:
retain economic value locally
support local suppliers
generate environmental and social benefits through contracts
Again, this is a structural localisation tool rather than simply a welfare policy.
6. Birmingham City Council – anchor-institution collaboration
Birmingham has used:
local procurement
partnership spending strategies
community wealth approaches
to keep more public-sector expenditure circulating locally.
Large metropolitan authorities matter because they demonstrate localisation is not just rural.
7. Greater Manchester Combined Authority – place-based strategy leadership
Greater Manchester promotes:
integrated local transport
neighbourhood health coordination
local economic partnerships
spatial planning at city-region scale
Its “place strategy” approach reflects governance moving closer to communities even inside large urban systems.
8. Kirklees Council, Oldham Council, Salford City Council, Enfield Council and Wakefield Council
These authorities have adopted versions of:
community wealth building progressive procurement local anchor-institution cooperation
following the Preston example.
Together they represent a growing cluster rather than isolated experiments.
9. Food partnerships now exist across over 120 UK local authorities
The national Sustainable Food Places network includes 123 local authorities working on:
local food resilience
public health through food
shorter supply chains
community access to healthy diets
This shows localisation is already becoming a coordinated national movement at council level.
10. Community energy is now national policy direction
The UK government has recently backed community-owned renewable energy schemes expected to support up to 1,000 local projects, enabling councils and communities to retain profits locally.
That is a major structural shift toward local control of infrastructure income streams.
The important conclusion
Local authorities rarely declare:
“we are building a localist economy”
Instead they implement:
community wealth building local procurement food partnerships community energy place-based health neighbourhood planning
Taken together, these are the operating components of the transition you are describing.
