The article “A Very British Famine” argues that Britain has become dangerously dependent upon long and fragile supply chains for its food. We have assumed that supermarket shelves will always remain full, imports will always arrive, fuel will always be available and money will always buy whatever we need. Yet these assumptions rest upon an industrial system which is becoming increasingly vulnerable to energy constraints, financial instability, climate disruption and international conflict.
If these pressures intensify, food shortages are unlikely to appear first as complete starvation. Instead, they will emerge as empty shelves, rationing, rising prices, shortages of particular products and growing difficulty in obtaining basic necessities. Those with money may still struggle to buy what is simply unavailable.
The conventional response is to imagine that government will somehow rescue the situation. But national governments can only redistribute what already exists. If there is insufficient food entering the country, no amount of administration can create supplies that do not exist.
Many people assume that communities would then depend upon charity. That may happen for a time, but charity is not a stable economic system. It relies upon surplus. As surplus disappears, charity also becomes increasingly difficult.
Localism offers something entirely different.
In a localist society, people do not depend primarily upon gifts from strangers. They depend upon the productive capacity of their own locality. Food is grown locally because local people require it. Skills are shared because neighbours depend upon one another. Land is used productively because idle land becomes an unaffordable luxury. Security comes from participation rather than from dependence.
This is not a moral argument. It is simply the way societies have organised themselves whenever large-scale systems have failed.
As imported food becomes less reliable, more land will have to return to cultivation. Gardens, orchards, smallholdings and unused land will once again become productive. Families will rediscover skills which industrial society allowed them to forget. Local food processing, storage, repair and distribution will all become valuable occupations.
In such circumstances, local cooperation is no longer an act of generosity. It becomes ordinary economic behaviour. People work together because everyone benefits from reliable local production.
This is why localism should not be presented merely as an attractive political philosophy. It is the natural outcome of a society adapting to physical limits. As national systems lose resilience, local systems gain importance.
The future is therefore unlikely to consist simply of greater hardship. It is more likely to involve a gradual transfer of responsibility from distant institutions to local people themselves.
That transition will not be easy. It will require changes in land ownership, education, planning, farming and local enterprise. But once the old assumptions no longer hold, the direction becomes increasingly obvious.
Localism is not charity.
It is the practical means by which people secure food, livelihoods and prosperity when large systems can no longer guarantee them.
Before reading this article I expected it to be another of Tim Morgan’s thoughtful essays. Instead, I found a substantial work that is closer to a short book than a blog post. At approximately 18,000 words, it took me about five hours to read carefully and absorb its arguments. It is not something to skim. It deserves to be studied.
Tim Morgan brings together the ideas he has developed over many years into a single, comprehensive explanation of how the economy really works. His central argument is deceptively simple. The economy is not created by money. It is created by energy being used to transform raw materials into the goods and services on which civilisation depends. Money is simply a claim on that real economy.
From this foundation he develops several important conclusions.
The first is that economic growth has not ended because of poor government policy or temporary crises. It has ended because the surplus energy available to society is declining. As more energy has to be used simply to obtain energy, less remains available for everything else. Rising living costs and slowing prosperity are therefore structural, not temporary.
Second, Morgan argues that conventional economics mistakes money for wealth. GDP measures financial transactions rather than material prosperity. Expanding credit and creating more money cannot create the physical resources needed for genuine economic growth. The financial economy has become increasingly detached from the physical economy on which it ultimately depends.
Third, he explains why technology, including artificial intelligence, cannot escape physical limits. Every technological system requires energy, minerals, water and manufacturing capacity. Technology can improve efficiency, but it cannot abolish the laws of physics. Claims that innovation alone will restore endless growth ignore these material realities.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the article is that it provides a coherent framework rather than a collection of isolated observations. Readers who have sensed that housing, pensions, public finance, energy, inflation, food prices and environmental pressures are somehow connected will find an explanation of how these issues arise from the same underlying causes.
From a localist perspective, the implications are profound. If prosperity increasingly depends upon secure access to real resources rather than expanding financial claims, then resilient local economies become far more important than global financial growth. Communities that shorten supply chains, conserve energy, rebuild local production and strengthen local relationships are likely to prove far more resilient than those dependent upon ever-expanding international systems.
Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, this article represents one of the clearest and most comprehensive explanations of surplus energy economics currently available. It rewards careful reading, but it demands concentration. I found it one of the most significant pieces Tim Morgan has written. It is long, detailed and challenging, but it provides a framework for understanding many of the problems that otherwise appear unrelated.
Modern politics usually assumes that the nation-state is the natural way to organise society. Large central governments, national economies, giant corporations and mass systems are treated as signs of progress. Yet in several parts of the world, there remain peoples whose traditions developed in a very different direction. Two particularly interesting examples are the Basques of the Pyrenees and the Kurds of the Middle East.
Although separated by geography, language and history, both societies display features which resemble localism.
The Basques inhabit areas on both sides of the Pyrenees in Spain and France. For centuries, their mountain geography encouraged strong local identities and relative independence from distant rulers. Villages, valleys and small towns became important social and economic units. Shared grazing land, local forestry, cooperative labour and mutual aid were common features of life.
Even today, the Basque Country retains strong traditions of local identity and cooperative economics. The Mondragon cooperative system in northern Spain became one of the largest worker-owned economic systems in the world. Rather than concentrating wealth into distant shareholders, many businesses were designed around worker participation, local employment and community benefit.
The Kurdish experience is different but also contains localist features. The Kurds are spread across several countries, including Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. In northern Syria, during the breakdown caused by war, Kurdish communities developed a system sometimes called “democratic confederalism”. This approach attempts to place power at the level of neighbourhoods, villages and local councils rather than concentrating it entirely in a central state.
In both cases, there is a distrust of over-centralisation and an emphasis upon the locality as the foundation of society.
There are several reasons why such systems emerge.
Mountain societies often evolve local structures naturally because geography limits central control. Communities become more self-reliant because transport is difficult and outside assistance is uncertain. Shared survival encourages cooperation. Local knowledge becomes valuable. Families and communities remain economically important.
In addition, societies under pressure often reorganise from below. When distant systems become weak, expensive, or ineffective, people increasingly turn to local solutions. Food production, practical skills, informal exchange and mutual support regain importance.
This may become increasingly relevant in the future.
Modern industrial economies were built during a period of abundant fossil fuel energy and rapid economic growth. Large cities, long supply chains and huge administrative systems became possible because cheap energy allowed enormous complexity. However, if economic growth slows or reverses, societies may gradually move back towards smaller-scale and more local forms of organisation.
The Basque and Kurdish examples suggest that localism is not merely a political theory. It may instead represent a recurring social pattern which appears whenever people seek resilience, identity and practical control over daily life.
Importantly, localism does not necessarily mean isolation. Both the Basque and Kurdish approaches involve networks of local communities cooperating with one another. The emphasis is not upon complete separation but upon beginning with the locality rather than with the distant centre.
Perhaps this is one of the most important lessons for the future. As large national systems become increasingly strained by debt, energy costs, infrastructure pressures, and social fragmentation, the locality may once again become the most practical and human-scale level at which society can function effectively.
In that sense, the Basques and the Kurds may offer glimpses of how societies naturally reorganise themselves when large systems begin to weaken.
Many of Britain’s large country houses and estates are now proving difficult to sell. Properties valued above £2 million, especially those with extensive agricultural land, often remain on the market for long periods. The traditional pattern of ownership has weakened, while the cost of maintaining such estates continues to rise.
Yet this situation is not new. It has happened before, and we already know some of the answers.
After the Second World War, many estates were broken up or sold because they could no longer be sustained in their historic form. Some were lost entirely. Others survived by adapting. At the same time, a parallel tradition of planned settlement had already demonstrated a different path, through the work of industrial families such as the Cadburys at Bournville and the Rowntrees at New Earswick in York.
Bournville and New Earswick were not housing estates in the modern sense. They were carefully designed localities. Housing was integrated with gardens, green space, schools, village halls, shops and community facilities. In the case of the Rowntree model at New Earswick, there was a strong emphasis on social wellbeing, walkability and everyday self-sufficiency within the settlement. These were not places designed simply to accommodate population. They were designed to support life.
After the war, however, this tradition was largely displaced by standardised large-scale development. Estates were broken up, land was absorbed into mass housing programmes, and the idea of integrated local economies was gradually lost. Housing became separated from work, food growing, shops and community structures.
Now, as country estates struggle to find buyers, the same question returns in a new form.
What if these estates were not sold as single assets, but reimagined as long-term planned localities?
One model would be for the estate owner to obtain outline planning permission for a limited number of dwellings. The land could then be divided into generous self-build plots, each held on a very long lease, while the freehold remains with the estate owner as long-term steward of the land.
The people likely to be drawn to such a model would not be conventional housing buyers. Many would be individuals leaving senior professional or corporate roles, often through redundancy or early retirement. They may have capital, but they are seeking stability, autonomy and a closer relationship with place rather than a return to large organisations.
Each household would have space to build a durable home, with substantial gardens capable of supporting food production, workshops, studios and small enterprises. In this way, the settlement would not simply house people. It would enable them to become productive within the locality.
The importance of Bournville and New Earswick lies in showing that this is not a new idea. It is a recovered one. Both demonstrated that when land is treated as a framework for life rather than a commodity for maximum short-term extraction, it naturally produces mixed, resilient and human-scale communities. Shops, services and shared facilities are not add-ons. They are part of the structure of the place itself.
A modern estate-based model could extend this principle. Alongside housing plots, there could be space for village shops, workshops, small service providers and shared facilities. The aim would not be density for its own sake, but the re-establishment of a complete local economy within walking distance.
For the estate owner, the advantage is continuity. Instead of a one-off sale to a large developer, the freehold remains intact, and the estate continues under long-term stewardship. Income is generated through the sale of long leases and structured estate management, while the identity of the land is preserved across generations.
From a localist perspective, this approach has wider significance. It keeps wealth, skill and decision-making anchored in the locality rather than dispersing them into distant corporate systems. It also builds resilience, because people are less dependent on a single employer or institution and more connected to one another within a shared place.
The post-war experience of estate fragmentation, combined with the planned village tradition of Bournville and New Earswick, points towards the same conclusion. When land is organised as a living structure rather than a commodity, it can support stable and productive communities.
The unsold country estate may therefore not represent decline. It may represent an opportunity to recover a British tradition of settlement design that integrates housing, work, shops and land into coherent localities once again.
Many of the ideas now associated with localism were championed for decades by John Papworth. Although never a household name, he spent much of his long life arguing that human beings flourish best in communities small enough for people to know one another and to take responsibility for their own affairs.
His own life was remarkable. Born in London in 1921 and brought up in an orphanage, he experienced poverty, loneliness and hardship from an early age. He left school young, worked in a variety of jobs, served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and later studied under the influence of the great social thinker R. H. Tawney. It was Tawney’s suspicion of excessive centralisation that helped shape Papworth’s outlook for the rest of his life.
Like many people of his generation, Papworth experimented with different political ideas. He spent time in both the Communist and Labour parties before becoming disillusioned with large institutions and bureaucracies. He increasingly concluded that the central problem of modern society was that decisions affecting ordinary people were being made by distant organisations which neither understood nor cared about local circumstances.
This led him towards a philosophy which today would be recognised as localism. He believed that power should be dispersed rather than concentrated. Villages, towns and neighbourhoods should have far greater control over their own futures. Local economies should be encouraged. Citizens should participate directly in civic life rather than merely vote every few years and leave everything to professional politicians.
Papworth was not simply a theorist. He edited journals, organised campaigns, advised political leaders, stood for Parliament and served as a parish councillor. He spent time in Zambia advising President Kenneth Kaunda during the country’s early years of independence. Throughout these varied roles he retained a consistent belief that healthy societies grow from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
His views have considerable relevance to contemporary localism. Many of the problems discussed today – the decline of local high streets, the concentration of economic power, dependence upon distant supply chains, the remoteness of government, and the weakening of community life – were concerns he identified many decades ago.
Papworth argued that larger organisations are not automatically more efficient or more humane. As institutions grow, they tend to become increasingly detached from the people they are supposed to serve. Decisions become standardised, local knowledge is lost, and citizens become passive recipients rather than active participants.
These arguments resonate strongly with the localist response to the shrinking economy. As energy becomes more expensive, public finances come under pressure, and national systems struggle to maintain previous levels of service, there is renewed interest in local food production, local enterprise, local care systems and stronger community networks. Papworth would probably have regarded these developments not as a retreat but as a rediscovery of human-scale living.
Perhaps the most important lesson from his life is that localism is not merely an economic programme or a political reform. For Papworth it was fundamentally about restoring human relationships. He believed that people are happiest and most responsible when they belong to communities where their actions matter and where they can directly influence the decisions affecting their daily lives.
In that sense, John Papworth was not simply an advocate of local government. He was an advocate of a society built upon human scale. As the limitations of large centralised systems become increasingly apparent, his ideas appear more relevant today than when he first advanced them over half a century ago.
The governance of the United Kingdom in the 18th century was not a tidy, centrally managed system in the modern sense. It was instead a layered and uneven structure built up over centuries, in which local authority, customary law, and national power coexisted. If one is interested in modern localism and grassroots governance, it is one of the most instructive periods in British history.
The surviving medieval structure: manors and parishes
In the 18th century, the basic unit of rural life in much of England was still the parish, alongside remnants of the manor system.
The parish was both an ecclesiastical and civil unit. It was centred on the parish church, but it also carried responsibility for poor relief, minor road maintenance, and local order. Overseers of the poor were appointed under the Poor Law system to administer relief to those in need. This made the parish a surprisingly powerful grassroots institution, because it directly managed survival-level support.
Alongside this sat the manor, a legacy of feudal organisation. The manorial court still existed in many places, although by the 18th century its power was declining. It handled minor local disputes, land transfers within the manor, and issues such as trespass or encroachment. The lord of the manor retained influence, but much of the system had become more procedural than coercive.
So yes, both parish governance and manorial courts still existed in the 18th century, though they were evolving rather than dominant in the medieval sense.
Hundreds and county structures
Above the parish level was the hundred, an older Anglo-Saxon division grouping several parishes together. By the 18th century, hundreds were largely administrative relics. They still existed on paper and were occasionally used for legal or taxation purposes, but they had very little active governance function.
More important was the county, administered through the Quarter Sessions courts. These were central to 18th century local governance.
Quarter Sessions: the real engine of local government
Quarter Sessions were held four times a year and were run by Justices of the Peace, who were usually local landowners appointed by the Crown. These courts handled a wide range of functions:
local justice and petty crime
licensing (such as alehouses)
infrastructure such as roads and bridges
administration of local taxes (rates)
oversight of parish officials
In practice, the Quarter Sessions system meant that governance was heavily decentralised in execution, even if authority ultimately derived from the Crown.
This is a crucial point: Britain in the 18th century was not locally democratic in the modern sense, but it was locally administered.
The absence of elected local councils
One of the most striking differences from today is that there were no elected parish or county councils in the modern democratic sense.
Local governance was:
informal in parishes (through vestries, often controlled by local elites)
judicial-administrative at county level (through magistrates and Quarter Sessions)
The vestry meeting, held in the parish church, was effectively the closest thing to a local council. In some places it was “open vestry” (ratepayers could attend), but in many it became “select vestry”, controlled by a small group of local property holders.
So governance was local, but not broadly democratic.
What this tells us about “grassroots power”
If we strip away modern assumptions, the 18th century system reveals something important: local governance functioned because responsibility was embedded in place, not because it was elected.
Key features included:
Decisions were made close to the problem
Local knowledge mattered more than national policy
Administration was carried out by people who lived in the same community
Cost burdens (poor relief, roads) were directly felt locally
But it also had clear limits:
Power concentrated in landowning classes
Poor representation of ordinary people
Uneven standards between parishes
Reliance on informal authority rather than accountability
Lessons for modern localism
For those thinking about grassroots governance today, the 18th century model suggests three key insights.
First, effective local systems do not necessarily require large bureaucracies. The parish and Quarter Sessions system was relatively simple, yet it managed roads, welfare, and local order for a growing population.
Second, localism without democratic inclusion tends to concentrate power. The system worked administratively, but not equitably. Any modern version would need broader participation than 18th century vestries allowed.
Third, resilience came from proximity. Problems were handled where they arose, by people who understood local conditions intimately. This is the strongest argument in favour of localism then and now.
Conclusion
The 18th century United Kingdom was not centrally planned in the modern sense, nor was it locally democratic in today’s sense. It was a hybrid system: national authority at the top, but substantial administrative power embedded in parishes, manors, and county magistracies.
For modern localism, the lesson is not to recreate that world, but to understand its underlying principle: governance works best when responsibility is rooted in place, and when decisions are made as close as possible to the people affected by them.
∙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.
“I have this sense of acceleration towards some kind of crisis, so there’s a need to sort of encapsulate SEE knowledge before things start breaking loose. The former might be conceit, the latter might be unduly fearful, but I don’t think so. I sense a kind of disintegrating rationality, which I might be wrong about but, again, I don’t think I am.”
These are striking words. Tim Morgan is not given to sensationalism. His work has consistently attempted to understand the economy through the lens of energy, rather than through the comforting assumptions of conventional economics. When someone so measured speaks of acceleration towards crisis, it is worth paying attention.
Many people sense that something is changing. The institutions which once appeared solid seem increasingly fragile. Political systems struggle to address long-term problems. Public debate becomes more polarised and less rational. Confidence in expertise declines, yet simple answers fail to convince. Economic statistics may continue to report growth, but large numbers of people feel less secure, less hopeful and less connected than previous generations.
Morgan refers to a “disintegrating rationality”. By this he means not simply disagreement, but a loss of the shared assumptions that enable societies to make coherent decisions. The financial system becomes detached from physical reality. Governments promise outcomes that cannot be delivered. Consumers are encouraged to expect ever-increasing material abundance, even when the energy basis that once supported such expansion is weakening.
If this analysis is correct, then a period of disruption lies ahead. It may involve financial instability, shortages, political upheaval and a painful recognition that the age of effortless prosperity is ending. Such prospects naturally provoke anxiety.
Yet history suggests that periods of breakdown can also become periods of renewal.
The extraordinary growth of recent decades has brought many benefits, but it has also carried heavy costs. Communities have weakened. Families are scattered. Work has become insecure and often meaningless. High streets have emptied. Craft skills have disappeared. People possess more goods than ever before, yet loneliness and dissatisfaction remain widespread.
A future with lower material consumption need not be a future of misery.
Indeed, it could become an opportunity to recover things that prosperity itself has eroded.
More local production could strengthen local economies. Repair could replace waste. People might know the origins of their food and the names of those who produce it. Skills once regarded as obsolete could regain their value and dignity. Neighbours might depend upon one another again. Time could become less dominated by consumption and more available for family, friendship, creativity and public service.
None of this means romanticising hardship. Poverty, insecurity and injustice must be resisted wherever possible. The transition will require wisdom, fairness and compassion. Those with the least resources must not be left to bear the greatest burdens.
But if the era of expansion is indeed drawing to a close, we should not assume that human flourishing ends with it.
For generations we have tended to equate prosperity with wellbeing, as though more wealth automatically produces better lives. Increasingly, the evidence suggests otherwise. Beyond a certain point, the relentless pursuit of growth can diminish the very qualities that make life worthwhile.
The future may therefore prove to be a paradox.
We may have less, yet value it more.
We may travel less, yet belong more deeply to the places where we live.
We may own fewer possessions, yet recover skills, relationships and purposes that consumer abundance has obscured.
The decades ahead may ask much of us. They may require resilience, imagination and mutual support. But they also offer the possibility of rediscovering what genuine prosperity means.
If Tim Morgan is right about the crisis, the story does not end there.
On the other side of excess and illusion may lie a society that is poorer in material terms but richer in human terms. Less affluent, perhaps, but more secure. Less wasteful, but more appreciative. Less driven by the demands of endless growth, but more attentive to the needs of people and place.
That would not be a tragedy.
That would be progress of a different and better kind.
The outcome could be a society with less prosperity as we have recently measured it, but a far higher quality of life. And that, in the end, would be good.
William Cobbett remains one of the clearest early voices arguing that real social strength comes from the locality rather than distant power. Writing in the early nineteenth century, he observed a country being reshaped by industrial expansion, financial speculation, and the growing dominance of London over rural life. What he saw was not progress in a simple sense, but a shift in control away from households and villages toward large, impersonal systems.
His most practical expression of this outlook appears in Cottage Economy. It is not a theoretical work. It is a manual for living: how to keep a cow, how to bake bread, how to brew beer, how to make the most of small plots of land, and how a household can remain materially independent without constant reliance on external suppliers. In modern terms, it is a handbook of localism before the word existed.
Cobbett’s central idea was simple. A society is strongest when ordinary people can meet their daily needs close to where they live. Once food, fuel, and basic production move away from the household and the locality, dependency grows. With dependency comes vulnerability, not only to price but to political and economic decisions made far away.
This thinking aligns closely with what is now often described as localism. Cobbett did not use that term, but he clearly understood its foundations. He believed that the enclosure of common land, the consolidation of farms, and the rise of urban wage dependence were not neutral developments. They altered the balance of power between people and place. The more people depended on wages from distant employers, the less control they had over their own survival.
In his writing, the cottage is not sentimental. It is an economic unit. The smallholding, the garden, the local craft skill, and the ability to produce food and essentials at home are not hobbies but safeguards. In this sense, Cobbett anticipated many later arguments about resilience, sustainability, and decentralised economies.
What makes Cobbett particularly relevant today is that his concerns reappear whenever large systems become strained. When transport networks, energy systems, or financial structures become expensive or unstable, attention often returns to the question of what can be done locally. Cobbett would recognise the pattern immediately. He would argue that reliance on distant supply chains always carries a cost, even when times appear stable.
There is also a social dimension in his work. Cobbett valued independence not only as an economic condition but as a form of dignity. A household that can produce part of its own food and meet some of its own needs is less exposed to pressure and more able to choose its own way of living. This overlaps with modern localist thinking, where the emphasis is on reducing unnecessary dependence on large institutions where smaller-scale provision is possible.
However, Cobbett was not proposing isolation. His world was still connected through trade, markets, and national structures. His argument was about balance. The locality should provide the foundation of life, while wider systems should support rather than replace it.
Seen through that lens, Cobbett becomes less a historical figure and more a continuing reference point. His work suggests that whenever economies expand to the point where people lose contact with the means of everyday survival, a correction becomes likely. That correction often takes the form of renewed interest in local production, local skills, and local responsibility.
In that sense, Cobbett’s writing still speaks to present conditions. It reminds us that localism is not an ideology imposed from outside, but a recurring response to the simple question of how people secure their daily needs when large systems become distant or fragile.
Most people assume that food comes from fields and farms. In reality, much of it comes from natural gas.
This uncomfortable truth lies at the heart of growing warnings about an oncoming food crisis. Modern agriculture does not simply depend upon sunshine, rain and fertile soil. It depends upon vast quantities of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, produced using enormous amounts of energy. Remove that energy, and the food system itself begins to falter.
The invention of the Haber-Bosch process in the early twentieth century transformed the world. By extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere and converting it into ammonia, humanity was able to manufacture fertilisers on an unprecedented scale. Crop yields rose dramatically. Populations expanded. It is estimated that almost half the people alive today are fed because of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.
Yet this apparent triumph concealed a dangerous dependency.
Ammonia production requires natural gas. Gas is both the raw material and the energy source. When energy prices rise sharply, fertiliser plants reduce output or close altogether because production becomes uneconomic. This happened during the recent energy crises, when fertiliser factories across Europe curtailed operations.
Senior figures in the industry issued stark warnings. The chief executive of one of the world’s largest fertiliser companies warned that the world was facing a food crisis. Others pointed out that half of global food production depends upon fertilisers that can no longer be taken for granted.
The chain of events is simple enough.
Energy shortages lead to reduced fertiliser production.
Reduced fertiliser availability leads to lower application rates by farmers.
Lower fertiliser use leads to lower crop yields.
Lower yields lead to food shortages and rising prices.
But there is another step in the chain that is too often ignored.
When food becomes scarce, those with money can continue to obtain it. Those without money cannot.
If governments simply allow the market to determine who eats and who goes hungry, scarcity falls most heavily upon the poor. Wealthier households may complain about rising prices, but they can often absorb them. Poorer households, already spending a larger proportion of their income on essentials, are forced to cut back. Nutritional quality declines. Meals are skipped. Hunger becomes concentrated amongst those least able to protect themselves.
History teaches this lesson repeatedly. Famines are not always caused by the complete absence of food. Often they arise because people lose the means to command food through the market. Scarcity becomes an issue of entitlement as much as supply.
This is one reason why rationing emerged in Britain during the Second World War. The purpose was not merely administrative control. It was to ensure that limited supplies were shared fairly and that the rich could not simply outbid the poor. The Ministry of Food recognised that shortages and uncontrolled prices would leave many people unable to obtain enough to eat. Orderly distribution at fair prices became a moral necessity as well as an economic one. Britain’s rationing system ensured that everyone received a basic entitlement and, in many poorer households, nutrition actually improved.
For most people in Britain today, the possibility of food rationing seems unimaginable. It belongs to black-and-white photographs and memories of another age. Yet if fertiliser shortages were severe enough to reduce harvests significantly, governments could once again face the same dilemma.
Without rationing, the poor suffer first.
With rationing, hardship is shared.
The remarkable fact is not that rationing might return. It is that a highly sophisticated society could once again be discussing it because of interruptions in the supply of natural gas.
This should force us to reconsider the assumptions upon which our food system rests.
Britain imports a large proportion of its food. Even domestic production relies heavily upon fossil fuel inputs, global supply chains and industrial methods dependent upon synthetic fertilisers. We have built a system optimised for efficiency under ideal conditions, but one possessing limited resilience when those conditions change.
Localism offers another way of thinking.
It does not promise complete self-sufficiency. Nor does it seek to abolish trade. Rather, it asks whether each locality should possess enough productive capacity, knowledge and organisation to weather disruptions beyond its control.
A localist Britain would encourage market gardens, allotments, orchards and smallholdings. It would support smaller farms serving nearby communities. Skills in cultivation, food preservation and seed saving would once again become ordinary parts of community life rather than specialist hobbies. Local food processing and distribution networks would complement national systems rather than disappear entirely.
No local system can eliminate every hardship. Yet local food production can soften the blow. A locality that retains productive land, practical knowledge and mutual obligation is less likely to see its poorest members abandoned to the impersonal logic of the market. Neighbours know who is struggling. Communities can respond before hunger becomes starvation.
Critics may dismiss such ideas as nostalgic. Yet dependence upon industrial fertilisers was itself an historical development. For centuries communities fed themselves using rotations, composting, animal manures and intimate knowledge of local conditions. Modern science has taught us much, but resilience has been sacrificed in pursuit of scale and efficiency.
The choice before us is therefore not between progress and the past. It is between vulnerability and resilience.
If the warnings prove exaggerated, stronger local food systems will still bring healthier communities, stronger local economies and a renewed connection between people and the sources of their nourishment.
If the warnings prove correct, and energy shortages do trigger fertiliser shortages, harvest failures and rationing, localities that have retained the capacity to feed themselves will face the future with greater confidence.
Food security cannot be left entirely to distant markets, fragile supply chains and the fluctuating price of natural gas. The ability to nourish a community is not merely an economic activity. It is one of the first responsibilities of any civilised society.
The coming food crisis, should it arrive, may teach us a lesson we have long forgotten.
The road from the gas field to the dinner table is far shorter than we imagine.
And the road back to resilience begins in the locality.
Britain’s railways have once again become the battleground for a much larger argument. The Daily Telegraph article, “Labour’s rail nationalisation dream hurtles toward disaster”, presents the looming difficulties facing Great British Railways as a test of whether the state can successfully manage major industries. Yet perhaps the deeper question is not who owns the railways, but whether we have reached the limits of maintaining an industrial infrastructure that society can no longer afford.
The bizarre story of the “ghost train” from Manchester captures something of the absurdity of our predicament. A six-hundred-seat train departed empty to ensure that rolling stock would be available elsewhere, while passengers were left behind. Such incidents appear to confirm the failures of management, whether public or private. But they may also reveal something more profound. The system itself has become so complicated, so interconnected and so stretched, that rational decisions within one part of it produce irrational outcomes for those who depend upon it.
For decades Britain has debated whether railways should be privately operated or publicly owned. The arguments have become ideological. Supporters of nationalisation speak of public service and integration. Advocates of privatisation point to efficiency, competition and innovation. Yet both camps share an assumption that the existing scale of the railway network must somehow be preserved and expanded.
That assumption deserves examination.
The industrial age created infrastructures of astonishing complexity. Railways, motorways, airports, national electricity grids, water systems and telecommunications networks were built during periods of economic growth, abundant energy and confidence in continual expansion. They require constant renewal, enormous capital investment and highly specialised skills. Their maintenance costs do not stand still. As systems age, they often become more expensive to sustain.
The experience of HS2 should have taught this lesson. What began as a grand vision of modernisation became a symbol of spiralling costs and diminishing returns. Each additional mile demanded vast expenditure. The promise that ever larger projects would deliver prosperity appeared increasingly hollow.
Railways themselves face similar pressures. Tracks wear out. Signalling systems require replacement. Bridges age. Rolling stock must be renewed. Staffing costs rise. Passenger expectations increase. Yet the financial resources needed to satisfy all these demands may no longer exist in sufficient abundance.
The argument, therefore, may not be about state ownership at all. Public ownership cannot repeal economic reality. Nor can private ownership magically create resources that society does not possess. Changing the name above the door does not alter the underlying arithmetic.
Localism suggests another way of thinking.
Rather than assuming that every industrial structure inherited from the twentieth century must continue unchanged, communities may need to ask which systems remain essential and which have become unaffordable luxuries. Some railway lines undoubtedly perform vital functions. Others may represent attempts to preserve patterns of life shaped by an era of cheap energy and endless growth.
This is not an argument against railways. Rail transport remains one of the most efficient means of moving large numbers of people and goods. But it is an argument against the belief that bigger systems, more centralisation and ever greater complexity necessarily constitute progress.
Local economies depend less upon long-distance commuting and more upon opportunities close to home. If work, education, healthcare and recreation become more rooted in locality, the pressure on national transport systems may diminish naturally. The need for thousands to travel vast distances every day is itself a consequence of economic arrangements that separate people from the places where they live.
Perhaps the real lesson of Britain’s railway difficulties is that industrial civilisation has entered a period of choosing rather than expanding. The challenge is no longer how to build ever more elaborate systems, but how to simplify wisely and humanely.
Politicians may continue to argue over nationalisation versus privatisation. Yet future generations may judge that debate to have missed the central issue. The question was never simply who should own the railways. It was whether society had the means to sustain every inheritance of the industrial age.
In that case, the future lies not in preserving all infrastructure at any cost, nor in abandoning people to isolation, but in reshaping our way of life around what can be maintained locally, affordably and resiliently.
The ghost train leaving Manchester may prove to be more than an administrative embarrassment. It may stand as a symbol of an age trying desperately to keep moving along tracks laid down for conditions that no longer exist.
Raymond Williams is not usually listed among the great advocates of localism. His name is more often associated with cultural studies, literary criticism and socialism. Yet many of his ideas point directly towards a localist understanding of how society works and how it might be renewed.
Born in the small village of Pandy, near Abergavenny, in 1921, Williams never forgot the community in which he was raised. His father was a railway signalman and Williams grew up in a place where people knew one another, shared experiences and understood their interdependence. Although he later became a professor at Cambridge University, the values of his childhood remained central to his thinking.
Perhaps his most important contribution to localist thought was his idea of the “knowable community”. He argued that communities are strongest when they are small enough for people to understand each other’s circumstances, strengths and needs. In such communities, responsibility is personal rather than bureaucratic. Decisions are informed by local knowledge rather than distant assumptions.
This idea appears most clearly in his novel Border Country. The story follows a man who leaves his Welsh border village to become an academic in England. Returning home, he discovers that the life of the community he left behind possesses forms of wisdom and understanding which cannot easily be measured or recognised by central institutions. The rhythms of work, neighbourliness and shared memory create a richness of life which large organisations frequently overlook.
For localists, this insight is of profound importance. National governments and large corporations often treat people as statistics, consumers or administrative cases. Policies are devised at a distance and imposed uniformly across places with very different histories and needs. Williams reminds us that people are not abstractions. They belong to particular places and relationships.
In The Country and the City, Williams examined the changing relationship between rural and urban life. He showed how economic power increasingly shifted towards large centres of administration and commerce, while rural communities were often viewed merely as resources to be exploited. Yet he rejected sentimental nostalgia. He did not argue that the past had been perfect. Instead, he sought ways in which the strengths of local communities could be preserved and renewed within a changing society.
His unfinished work, People of the Black Mountains, perhaps comes closest to a localist history. Set in the landscape around his native district, it traces the lives of ordinary people over thousands of years. Rather than focusing on kings, governments and military leaders, Williams looked at the people who worked the land, built communities and passed on practical knowledge from generation to generation. History, he suggested, is made from below as much as from above.
There are differences between Williams and some advocates of localism. He remained committed to the idea that national institutions have an important role in securing fairness and opportunity. He did not seek complete local independence. Nevertheless, he consistently argued that large institutions should support communities rather than dominate them.
At a time when many people feel powerless in the face of distant political and economic forces, Raymond Williams offers an alternative way of seeing society. Strong communities are built through shared experience, mutual responsibility and local knowledge. They cannot simply be created by legislation or managed through bureaucracy.
For those concerned with localism, Williams provides an important reminder that the health of a society depends not only upon the efficiency of its institutions but upon the vitality of its knowable communities. The future may depend less upon building ever larger systems and more upon recovering the human scale at which people can genuinely participate in shaping their own lives.
Long before localism became a recognised movement, Leopold Kohr was arguing that most of the problems of modern society arose from one simple cause – excessive size.
Kohr, who spent many years teaching in Wales, became famous through his book The Breakdown of Nations. Published in the 1950s, it was a direct challenge to the prevailing belief that bigger nations, bigger cities, bigger organisations and bigger economies were naturally superior. Instead, Kohr argued that whenever any institution became too large, it became difficult to manage, increasingly bureaucratic, and ultimately destructive.
His central idea was remarkably simple. Problems that appear complex often have a common cause. Whether discussing war, poverty, political instability, environmental damage or social alienation, Kohr believed that the underlying issue was scale. Human beings can understand and manage small communities, but they struggle to control vast systems.
Kohr often pointed to the city-state societies of the past. He noted that many periods of cultural creativity, innovation and democratic participation occurred in relatively small political units. By contrast, large empires frequently became centralised, remote and oppressive.
This perspective has enormous relevance to localism.
Localism begins with the belief that many decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them. It recognises that local knowledge is often superior to distant administration. The local farmer understands the land better than a ministry in London. A local community understands its needs better than a national bureaucracy. A neighbourhood often solves problems more effectively than a remote government department.
Kohr would have recognised these principles immediately.
In modern Britain, many of the difficulties facing public services arise from attempts to administer millions of people through increasingly complex national systems. Health care, education, welfare, planning and transport all require huge bureaucracies to coordinate them. As these organisations grow larger, they require more managers, more regulations and more layers of administration.
The result is often a feeling that decisions are made by people who neither know nor understand the communities affected.
Localism offers an alternative. Rather than continually enlarging institutions, it seeks to restore decision-making to the smallest practical level. This does not mean abandoning national government altogether. Certain functions, such as defence, major railways and specialist hospitals, will always require wider organisation. However, many aspects of everyday life can be managed more effectively closer to home.
Kohr’s ideas become even more relevant in a shrinking economy.
The growth era of the twentieth century was built upon abundant energy and expanding consumption. Large-scale systems became possible because society could afford the transport, administration and infrastructure required to support them. As economic growth slows and resources become more constrained, the costs of maintaining vast systems increase.
Under these conditions, local solutions often become more practical than national ones.
Local food production reduces transport costs. Local energy schemes reduce dependence on extensive networks. Local businesses keep wealth circulating within the community. Local care systems can often provide support more efficiently than distant bureaucracies.
Kohr believed that the future would belong not to ever-larger institutions but to societies organised on a human scale. People are more likely to participate in decisions when they can see the consequences. They are more likely to cooperate when they know one another. They are more likely to feel responsible for their surroundings when those surroundings remain within their understanding.
Perhaps the most important lesson from Leopold Kohr is that progress should not be measured by size. Bigger is not necessarily better. A society can become wealthier, more complicated and more technologically advanced while simultaneously becoming less manageable and less humane.
For localists, this insight remains as important today as when Kohr first expressed it. The future may not belong to the largest organisations or the most centralised systems. It may belong to communities that rediscover the advantages of living and working at a scale that human beings can understand.
In that sense, Leopold Kohr was not merely a critic of bigness. He was one of the earliest and most profound advocates of what we now call localism.
A recent report from the Tony Blair Institute warns that Britain is facing the prospect of a “lost generation”. More than one million young people are now classified as NEET – not in education, employment or training. The report describes this as a catastrophic failure and warns that, unless action is taken, one in six young people could find themselves in this position within a few years.
The figures are alarming. Britain now has one of the highest rates of young people detached from work and education in Europe. The report identifies a number of causes. Entry-level jobs have disappeared. Apprenticeships have declined. Mental-health problems have increased. Welfare systems often provide income but little meaningful route back into participation. Many young people become detached from work at an early age and never recover their place in society.
The proposed remedies are familiar. Reform welfare. Expand employment support. Improve access to healthcare. Strengthen vocational education. Introduce grants and incentives for employers. All of these may help at the margins. Yet they remain rooted in the assumption that the economy of the future will once again provide sufficient conventional jobs to absorb everyone who seeks them.
That assumption deserves questioning.
For decades Britain has organised itself around the expectation of continuous economic growth. Larger businesses, greater specialisation and increasingly centralised systems were expected to generate ever more employment opportunities. Young people would move away from their localities, obtain qualifications, enter national labour markets and pursue careers within expanding organisations.
But what if the era of abundant growth is drawing to a close?
The disappearance of entry-level work may not be a temporary malfunction that can simply be repaired through better policy. Automation, artificial intelligence, rising costs and economic contraction may mean that the traditional ladder into employment is steadily being removed. If so, attempting to recreate the employment patterns of the late twentieth century may become increasingly difficult.
Localism points towards a different response.
In a localist society, participation is not measured solely by holding a formal job within a national labour market. Young people become contributors to the life of their own locality. They help produce food, care for older residents, maintain community assets, assist local enterprises, repair equipment, develop practical skills and participate in networks of mutual support.
Many of these activities have been displaced by large-scale systems. Yet they remain essential to human wellbeing.
A shrinking economy may paradoxically restore opportunities that industrial growth removed. Smaller enterprises require adaptable people willing to undertake a variety of tasks. Local food production needs labour. Care for an ageing population becomes increasingly important. Repair and reuse replace disposal and replacement. Skills are passed from one generation to another through practice rather than certification alone.
In such a setting, young people are no longer defined by whether they occupy a place in a national employment database. They acquire purpose, responsibility and belonging through contribution to the communities in which they live.
This does not mean abandoning education or rejecting all forms of national support. There will always be a role for specialist training, healthcare and wider institutions. But the emphasis shifts. Instead of asking how to return every young person to an increasingly fragile labour market, we ask how localities can once again become places where everyone has a valued role.
The tragedy of the NEET crisis is not simply that young people lack jobs. It is that many lack connection, usefulness and hope.
The report rightly warns against writing off a generation. Yet perhaps the greatest danger lies in believing that the only answer is to rebuild the very systems that created the problem.
Localism offers another possibility. As economic growth slows and national systems struggle under mounting pressures, local communities may naturally reclaim functions they once performed themselves. In doing so, they can provide what many young people most need – meaningful work, practical skills, intergenerational relationships and a recognised place in society.
The “lost generation” need not remain lost.
It may become the generation that rediscovers the value of locality, contribution and belonging.
The NEET crisis is undoubtedly a warning. But it may also be an indication that Britain is approaching a turning point. The future may not lie in finding enough jobs within an old model of growth. It may lie in rebuilding the local foundations of society so that everyone, especially the young, has the opportunity to participate in the life of the community.
Deschooling Society, published in 1971 by Ivan Illich, remains one of the most challenging books ever written about education. Yet despite its title, it is not really a book about schools. It is a book about how modern industrial societies organise knowledge, power and dependence.
More than fifty years after it was written, many of Illich’s ideas appear surprisingly relevant to the emerging localist movement and to the realities of a shrinking economy.
Illich argued that modern societies had become dominated by institutions. Schools, hospitals, welfare systems, transport systems and many other large organisations increasingly took over functions that had once been carried out by families, communities and individuals. As these institutions expanded, people gradually lost the confidence and ability to organise many aspects of life for themselves.
His criticism of schooling was therefore part of a much wider criticism of industrial society.
According to Illich, schools had become less concerned with learning and more concerned with certification. The possession of qualifications became more important than the possession of knowledge. People increasingly came to believe that learning could occur only within formal institutions and under the supervision of approved professionals.
Illich questioned this assumption.
He believed that people learn continuously throughout life through experience, observation, work, conversation and participation in their communities. A child helping in a workshop, a gardener teaching neighbours, an elderly resident sharing local history, or a farmer explaining soil management are all forms of education. In many cases they may be more practical and more relevant than classroom instruction.
This idea has obvious parallels with localism.
Localism places great value on local knowledge. Every locality possesses skills and understanding that are often overlooked by national systems. Retired craftsmen, gardeners, builders, farmers, cooks, engineers and volunteers hold enormous amounts of practical knowledge. Much of this knowledge is difficult to capture in textbooks but can be passed directly from person to person.
Industrial society tends to replace these local knowledge networks with centralised systems. Expertise becomes concentrated in institutions. Learning becomes standardised. Local variation is discouraged.
Illich saw this as a loss rather than a gain.
One of his most important ideas was the creation of what he called “learning webs”. Today, we might describe these as networks through which people can find others willing to teach and learn. Long before the internet existed, Illich imagined systems that would connect people according to their interests and skills rather than according to age, examination requirements or institutional structures.
Modern technology makes such networks far more practical than they were in 1971.
A localist society could make extensive use of learning webs. A person wanting to learn food preservation could be connected with an experienced neighbour. Someone interested in repairing bicycles could learn directly from a local mechanic. Young people could acquire practical skills from local producers and artisans. Knowledge would flow through the community rather than being confined to formal institutions.
This does not mean abandoning schools entirely.
One weakness in some interpretations of Illich is the assumption that all formal education should disappear. In practice, many forms of advanced knowledge require structured learning. Medicine, engineering, science and other specialised disciplines depend upon rigorous education and standards.
Localism itself does not require the abolition of national educational institutions. Just as localism recognises the continuing need for national railways, specialist hospitals and telecommunications systems, it can also recognise the need for universities and professional training.
The question is not whether schools should exist.
The question is whether schools should be the only recognised path to learning.
Here Illich’s criticism remains powerful.
Many people leave formal education believing they are no longer learners. Yet some of the most valuable learning occurs throughout adult life. Local food production, home maintenance, renewable energy systems, woodland management, community care and countless other practical activities require ongoing learning outside formal institutions.
A shrinking economy may make these forms of learning increasingly important.
Industrial growth allowed societies to become highly specialised. As long as energy was abundant and economic growth continued, individuals could rely upon distant experts to solve most problems. But if economic contraction becomes a long-term reality, communities may need to recover many practical skills that have been lost.
Local food production, repair skills, building maintenance, water management and local enterprise all depend upon knowledge that is often acquired informally rather than through formal qualifications.
In this sense, Deschooling Society may be viewed as a handbook for cultural resilience.
Illich was asking how people could become less dependent upon large institutions and more capable of organising their own lives. That question sits at the heart of localism.
His vision was not anti-learning. Quite the opposite. He wanted learning to become more widespread, more accessible and more integrated into everyday life. He wanted knowledge to circulate freely through communities rather than being monopolised by institutions.
Many localists would recognise this ambition immediately.
The local economy of the future may depend as much upon the sharing of knowledge as upon the production of food or energy. Communities that can teach themselves, adapt themselves and pass skills between generations will be more resilient than communities that depend entirely upon distant systems.
For that reason, Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society deserves to be read not simply as a critique of education but as an early exploration of ideas that later became central to localism.
Its message is that learning belongs to people, not institutions. In an age of economic uncertainty and increasing dependence upon large systems, that message may be more relevant today than when it was first written.
In relation to localism, Deschooling Society is not a blueprint but a highly compatible companion. It supports the localist belief that communities possess valuable knowledge and that many essential skills can be learned and shared locally. Where localism differs from some interpretations of Illich is that localism would generally retain national institutions where they remain genuinely necessary, while seeking to rebuild local capability wherever possible.
These disconnects from the real world and productive work have created a mindset in which doing something with money is all we need to do to get rich and preserve our wealth..
∙An old friend summarized the mindset of much of the developed world wryly and succinctly: “We don’t need the world, we only need money.“ In other words, we don’t actually need real-world sources of life’s essentials that are within our control or a functional biosphere because since we can buy everything we could possibly want or need with money. So, money is all we need.
We don’t care where the stuff we want/need comes from because it will always come from somewhere and be available in whatever quantity and quality we desire, as somebody somewhere will keep our stores and fuel tanks fully stocked and our electrical grid powered 24/7.
This disconnect between the complex mechanics of real-world manufacturing, processing and transport–a world of physical materials reconfigured by productive work–is understandable in a consumer economy of transactions of money where all the work, all the materials and all the consequences are invisible to the consumer plugging in an appliance, fueling their car and buying an item off the shelf.
An economy that favors assets and financial speculation as the means to acquiring wealth is also disconnected from the role of productive work in this invisible world of production and supply chains.
These disconnects from the real world and productive work have created a make-believe mindset in which doing something with money is all we need to do to get rich and preserve our wealth. I call this make-believe world civilizational psychosis, a mindset detached from reality for it mischaracterizes the relationships of the material world, productive work and currency / money.
This make-believe world in which money is all that matters is not a sustainable society or economy.
In this make-believe world, shape-shifting money is the solution to all problems. Common sense and history both support the conclusion that a financial system that must borrow from the future and pay interest on that rising debt to fund the present is not sustainable and will be replaced with some other arrangement one way or another.
All the solutions being bandied about are money-based: stablecoins, gold-backed currencies, etc. The idea behind all of these proposals is that changing money will fix whatever’s broken in a system that has lost touch with its material foundations and productive work.
This mindset explains the conventional conviction that all one has to do to live extremely well is navigate the coming collapse of the current money system (i.e. fiat currencies and credit) and emerge from the other side of the wormhole with wealth intact in some other form.
This mindset makes three implicit assumptions:
1. The real world will continue functioning perfectly despite the collapse of the current money system, ensuring fuel tanks are full, the electricity is on 24/7 and all the retail shelves are full of all the good things. 2. The majority who did not successfully navigate the collapse of the current money system and are now impoverished will passively accept their serfdom to the New Nobility who successfully emerged with wealth intact–or greatly increased (see #3). 3. Since the new form of money will be scarce–and this is the source of its value as a replacement currency–those who own it will accrue virtually all the “value” embedded in “money:” all those who held the old currency that’s now worthless will have zero “money:” those who own the new form of money will own all the scarcity value of the new currency.
If history is any guide, the distribution of those who manage to convert all their “old” wealth into “new” wealth is highly asymmetric, as the vast majority lack the means to manage the conversion on a scale where the resulting wealth is consequential. In other words, the rich tend to manage the conversion and everyone else doesn’t. So the rich get richer and everyone else is wiped out.
This has a corollary: since those who manage the conversion will emerge on the other side of the wormhole with wealth, “money” is no longer bound to work/labor: the wealthy have no need to generate value via work, they merely provide demand via spending their wealth.
None of these assumptions strike me as realistic, practical or desirable.
Let’s examine what happens to supply chains when fiat currencies (the current form of money) crash in purchasing power (i.e. hyper-inflation or loss of trust in the currency) and the replacement currency is a gold-backed currency.
Those favoring gold-or-commodity backed currencies tend to forget that scale is a primary characteristic of “money” used in global transactions. If the gold-backed currency (or cryptocurrency) in circulation can only fund 10% of the current global volume of currency transactions–around $9 to $10 trillion dollars a day–and 90% of the new currency is locked in domestic accounts and unavailable for global transactions–then this new currency can only grease 1% of the current demand for global currency trading.
The global supply chain system crashes because there is not enough currency outside the issuing entity to grease the immense daily trade in currency for trade, debt, speculation, hedging, etc.
The whole point of a currency backed by a limited commodity is that it can’t expand 10-fold overnight because that would reduce the purchasing power of the currency by the same factor.
In other words, a replacement currency must provide the same scale of not only currency in circulation but the same scale of liquidity available for global settlements of trade, debt, speculation and hedging–currently trillions of dollars per day. Anything less and the entire global trade / credit network freezes up.
Consider what happens to enterprises in supply chains who continued accepting now-worthless “old” currency. They’re now bankrupt, so whatever chains they were links in are now broken. Those enterprises that prudently held off accepting any orders until the situation settled down have nothing in the pipeline, so whatever chains they were part of are also broken.
Those who decide to only accept some scarce monetary substitute are sitting on their hands, as they’ve been outbid by more desperate dealers / traders.
In summary, if the current “money” dissolves, global supply chains immediately dissolve, too, and expecting a relatively limited volume of replacement currency with a tiny float to ramp up 10-fold while retaining its scarcity value is delusional, as the entire point of scarcity value as the basis of a currency is destroyed if the issuance jumps up 10-fold to handle global trade needs while the quantity of the underlying commodity remains unchanged.
The real world breaks down immediately, and nobody will restock the shelves that are now bare, or refill the fuel tanks that are now empty, or restart the grid.
As for #2, the impoverished and those hanging onto “middle class status” by a thread had hope in the old system because the shelves were still full. Now that the old money has dissolved and the shelves are empty, they’re not just impoverished, they have lost hope and are now angry. They are unlikely to view those who emerge from the wormhole wealthy favorably. They will likely view this as the penultimate form of unfairness and inequality and take action they reckon is appropriate, rebalancing the inequality by expropriation.
Telling them that they will now be able to turn their labor into real wealth down the road as serfs in a neofeudal arrangement is unlikely to persuade them that the New Nobility deserves its wealth and dominance.
As for the connection between the material world, productive work and money, there is no sustainable economy or society possible until these bonds are restored. The road to wealth must run through being productive in the material world rather than speculation. This has been lost in the current speculative mania and the associated civilizational psychosis that we “don’t need the world, only need money” and the best way to acquire that money is speculating in assets and money. (I discuss the connections of money and work in my book Money and Work Unchained.)
In summary: the idea that modifying or replacing currency / money will solve problems of corrupted values, perverse incentives, destabilizing asymmetries of wealth and power and the civilizational psychosis of “growth of consumption and profits at any cost” is illusory. We would be wise to ponder changing far more about how we live than our monetary system, which is a manifestation of corrupted values, perverse incentives, destabilizing asymmetries and civilizational psychosis rather than their source.
Reorganizing the monetary system to serve a sustainable social order is certainly part of the overall set of solutions, but that alone is not enough to fix what’s broken at deeper levels than what we use as money.
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.
Recent warnings from Government ministers that artificial intelligence could threaten employment and even undermine the welfare state may be seen by many as a crisis. Yet viewed through the lens of localism, they may also be an indication of a profound economic transition already underway.
For over two centuries, society has been organised around paid employment. People travelled to work, earned wages, paid taxes and relied on national systems for welfare, healthcare and pensions. Economic growth provided the fuel that kept this arrangement functioning.
However, if AI increasingly replaces human labour, that model begins to weaken. Government concerns are focused on the loss of tax revenues and the increasing cost of supporting people who are no longer employed. The result could be growing pressure on public finances and on the welfare state itself.
Localism suggests a different interpretation.
As employment opportunities decline, people do not simply cease to be productive. Instead, many begin to redirect their time and effort into activities that are useful within their own locality. Food growing, home maintenance, repair services, care for older people, local trading networks, community enterprises and small-scale self-employment become increasingly important.
Much of this activity may not appear in GDP statistics and may not generate significant tax revenue, but it still creates value. Indeed, throughout history many communities functioned successfully with far less dependence on formal employment than is common today.
The growing number of unemployed people may therefore become one of the drivers of localism. Rather than being entirely dependent upon national welfare systems, localities may gradually develop stronger networks of mutual support and practical economic activity.
This does not mean that national government disappears. Essential services such as defence, railways, specialist healthcare and national infrastructure will still require central organisation. However, the everyday economy of food, care, maintenance and local services may increasingly move closer to home.
In this sense, the rise of AI and the prospect of technological unemployment may accelerate a trend that is already visible. As the growth economy weakens, local economies become more important.
What appears to be a problem from the perspective of the national economy may also be a sign that society is evolving towards a more localised form of economic life.
The unemployed may not simply be the casualties of technological change. They may become the pioneers of the next stage in the development of localism.
One of the most curious features of the mainstream unsustainability debate is almost complete absence of reckoning with ‘population-as-obvious-driver’. The subject remains taboo, mustn’t go there. Even serious degrowthers avoid discussing actively degrowing the human population.
This is, as they say, regrettable.
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Unsustainability is about overshoot and overshoot is about humans consuming beyond nature’s recovery rate and dumping wastes in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity. In short, there are already too many people consuming and polluting too much. Need I note (again) that overshoot is, by definition, ultimately a terminal condition?
These are not casual observations that we can merely take under advisement, things that we might consider later if it doesn’t cost too much. In particular, if it is obvious the total human impact on Earth is the product of average impact per person and the number of people doing the impacting, why is population reduction not a major focus of sustainability survival planning?
“Unfair,” you protest, “not all humans are equal impactors.”
Quite true, so let’s get the inequality factor (and any taint of racism) out of the way. Data show that that the richest 10% of people are responsible for half or more of carbon emissions; the wealthy quarter of people account for 52% of resource consumption while the poorest quarter get by on only 6%. This means that, should the global community decide to act aggressively to reduce consumption/emissions by the necessary 44% overall, simple justice would demand that the wealthy take by far the greatest hit (~80% reduction per capita in North America).
Fair enough—though rather more easily said than done. The currently well-to-do are, er… inclined to resist. Income redistribution is, like population planning, taboo. Protected by wealth and associated political leverage, major vested interests, particulary the corporate oligarchs who run the world, won’t even discuss the inequality problem—except to insist we can grow our way to sufficiency-for-all.
And there’s another fly in the equality ointment—even a successful ‘great leveling’ would by no means relieve us of the population question:
· First, overshoot means that even if all 8.2 billion humans had identical lifestyles and ecological footprints, we’d still be in overshoot. Averaging impacts doesn’t reduce totals; material quality per se is not enough—we’d still have to reduce consumption by almost half.
· Second, in recent decades incremental increases in humanity’s (consumption based) ecological footprint and carbon emissions have been driven more by population growth than by increased incomes/consumption in almost all income categories; population growth is a major co-driver of overshoot.
· Third, billions of people in lower income countries (particularly in Africa) are justifiably striving to attain developed nations’ material living standards. But Earth, in overshoot, is not now sustainably supporting even present average levels of consumption; how could it be expected to cope were all 8.2 billion members of the human family living high on the hog? (Remember, we’re supposed to be reducing aggregate consumption; see first bullet point.)
· Forth, we’re actually headed for 10+ billion by the 2080s. Most of the projected population growth will occur in those poorer countries with the greatest material needs and expectations. This amounts to adrenaline for overshoot. What are the additional consequences for global heating and ecological stability? ‘Tipping points’, anyone? Still want to ignore population?
To raise overpopulation-as-issue and ask such obvious questions is not racist; it is simply acknowledging crucial realities and the associated moral dilemma.
Avoiding the obvious
Analysts and the world community actually have myriad reasons for skirting the population question—ancient religious prohibitions, fear of being labeled eco-fascist/racist, self-interested resistance to reform, fanatical allegiance to the perpetual growth ethic and growing science denial being among the most prominent.[1] In one way or another, however, most such excuses arguably spring from the deep ‘exceptionalist’ soil of modern techno-industrial (MTI) culture. To wit: Why be concerned about population? Humans aren’t animals, certainly not like the others; we stand above nature and don’t have to be concerned about natural laws. In any case human ingenuity (technology) will sever any population-to-resources link and solve the overshoot problem.
That’s the happy-clappy story we tell ourselves.
Too bad it’s merely a shared delusion. What goes on in our collective brain often has no grounding in reality.
The obvious flaw here is that H. sapiens not only is an animal, but is the major macro-consumer species in every accessible ecosystem on the planet (always at the expense of both our prey species and our competitors for available biomass). If the scale of material use and population were prime criteria, humans are the most successful large vertebrate ever to walk the Earth. The sheer weight of humans is ten times greater than that of all wild mammals combined. More broadly, the human enterprise has effectively merged (albeit destructively) with the ecosphere and is warping major geophysical processes from the climate and water cycles to landscape erosion. Quite the contrary record for a self-aggrandizing rapacious ape that claims to be detached from the natural world.
Just like the others
Which suggests it might be instructive to pay more attention to what we know about non-human population dynamics—there are plenty of examples of overshoot at work in other large mammal species.
For example, the graph at the top shows the trajectories of reindeer populations in the decades after a few individuals were introduced to the Pribilof Islands off Alaska early in the 20th Century. The islands were resource-rich and predator free. The reindeer, like all species’ populations enjoying favourable conditions, began expanding exponentially. From a handful of individuals in 1911, the St Paul Island herd ballooned to over 2000 individuals in under 30 years before going nearly extinct in little more than a decade. (The St George story was similar but less dramatic.)
The St Paul reindeer’s three decades of expansion provide a classic example of exponential (aka ‘geometric’) growth. This is a form of positive feedback in which each new generation adds to the breeding population ensuring that the next generation will be even larger than itself. The increasing steepness of the curve shows how such ‘compound interest’ accelerates population growth.
An exponentially expanding population has a constant doubling time. After a characteristically slow start in a new habitat, the St Paul herd reached 500 animals around 1931-32, had doubled in less than four years by 1934-35 and doubled again in the next four years, reaching its peak of 2048 animals in 1938-39. The population then crashed spectacularly—there were only eight survivors by 1950. The reindeer had overshot the regenerative capacity of certain lichens, a vital food source in winter. Depleted lichen = starving reindeer, particularly if the winter is exceptionally cold. Out-and-out starvation is one form of negative feedback due to overpopulation; the demise of animals weakened by hunger and succumbing to disease or foul weather is another.
On the upside, the collapse of an over-grazing animal population allows the habitat, particularly crucial food sources, to recover.
So, what have a bunch of starving deer on an Arctic island got to do with we humans?
Quite a lot, actually. For starters, as Malthus emphasized in 1798, humans are just as capable of geometric/exponential growth under favourable conditions as any other species. Malthus also reasoned that we are as potentially susceptible to starvation and other negative feedbacks when circumstances turn South (e.g., when crops fail or pandemics rage).
In this light consider Figure 1. This graph provides a low-resolution portrait of human population over the past 10,000 years, roughly since the beginning of agriculture.
Note that, despite the boost from occasional food surpluses, the population increase for 80% of this period was negligible, averaging only ~.04% annually. Starting from ~4-5 million, it took 8000 years for human numbers to reach just 232 million two millennia ago. The reason is fairly straight-forward; H. sapiens innate capacity for rapid geometric growth (positive feedback) was mostly held in check by local food shortages, constant territorial conflict, and disease (negative feedbacks).[2] As late as the 14th Century, bubonic plague killed off more than a quarter of the European population.
Nevertheless, the population kept growing at a slowly increasing rate. The real boost came with the Enlightenment (beginning in the late 17th Century) and subsequent scientific/industrial revolution. Humanity reached its first billion around 1820 then really took off, eventually on all continents, with improvements in public health and medicine (which reduced death rates) but especially with the exponential increase in fossil fuel-based technologies (which increased food production and access to all other resources needed to support the growing population). Together, these cultural factors enabled humanity to realize its maximum biological capacity for exponential population growth for the first time in human evolutionary history.
Note that the human population trajectory over the past 100 years is a geometric replica of the 30-year explosion of the St Paul reindeer herd (differing only in population size and because the human animal has a longer generation time). By 1927 the human population had reached two billion; we doubled to four billion in ~47 years by 1974-5; the next doubling to eight billion in 2022 also took 47 years (note the constant doubling time).[3] In short, the upslope of the human population growth curve has the same shape as that of the St Paul reindeer herd to peak.[4] It’s nature’s way.
It’s also ‘nature way’ for negative feedback to cut in and strengthen as a population approaches carrying capacity (which depends on habitat productivity and related factors). Figure 2 compares unconstrained exponential growth (2a) with so-called ‘logistic growth’ (2b), the idealized damping of positive feedback by the gradual onset of negative feedback. As population density increases in a specific habitat, so too does competition for food and space; with more crowding, communicable diseases and parasites spread more easily thus increasing mortality; a dense population of prey species attracts predators, increasing the death rate (and producing higher populations of well-fed predators). In theory then, the growth of a population of interest should slow asymptotically as it nears carrying capacity [Figure 2 (b)]. In practice, populations of typical slowly-reproducing mammals like humans tend to fluctuate in the vicinity of long-term carrying capacity as habitat and complex ecological relationships change.
But not always, in extreme cases, particularly in simpler systems such as reindeer on predator-free St Paul Island, the fluctuation may be a dramatic, even terminal, population crash.
Which brings us back to thinking about humans and how far to take our reindeer analogy. The St Paul reindeer population plunged rapidly after reaching peak, but does that say anything important about the human future?
It’s complicated.
Indeed, the human socio-political-ecosystem is vastly more complex and potentially more resilient than was the St Paul Island ecosystem. For example, mainly due to social negative feedbacks,[5] human fertility is actually falling (to the consternation of economists and most governments). The world population is currently expanding at ‘only’ ~70 million people annually, a rate of .85%/year, down and still-declining from the 1963 maximum of 2.2%.
In some ways this is encouraging—one might argue that humanity is gradually approaching peak population and will level off at or below carrying capacity as in Figure 2(b). Conventional wisdom (e.g., United Nations population projections) has it that our population will peak at 10.3 billion in the mid-1980s and then begin a controlled decline to 10.2 billion by 2100. It could be that all is well—crash avoided, airbags unnecessary.
But that’s not the whole story. UN and other conventional population projects are rooted in exceptionalist thinking. They are based entirely on ‘endogenous’ data, e.g., age- and sex-specific mortality rates and average female fertility all abstracted from biophysical reality. There is no consideration of ‘exogenous’ or external factors, the possibility of significant negative feedbacks from the ‘environment’, broadly defined.
Which brings us to Figure 3 (borrowed from my most recent previous post) which includes a should-be-alarming alternative scenario. Note that this graph incorporates Figure 2 (a) and (b). It acknowledges that human carrying capacity is a practical concept, that at any defined average material standard of living there will be a maximum sustainable human population.[6]
Figure 3 presents the recent human population trajectory as an exponential/geometric growth curve which has, indeed, begun to slow and approach peak (first half of solid red line). However, it also indicates that this peak far exceeds pre-industrial sustainable carrying capacity (dotted horizontal black line). Technology has taken humanity far into overshoot which means that our large and growing population is living and expanding by depleting even self-replenishing resources, from fish stocks and forests, to arable soils and groundwater reserves, and by polluting air, soil and waters beyond natural assimilation rates. In doing so, we are causing global heating, destabilizing climate patterns, extinguishing hundreds of other species and otherwise reducing Earth’s productivity and livability. (As I write this much of the Northern Hemisphere including Western Europe is suffering record heat waves. A third of humanity—more than three billion people—may be forced outside of our species’ historic ‘climate niche’ by century’s end). Global heating brings an increasing risk of wide-spread disease and pandemics—recent measles, hantavirus and ebola outbreaks underscore this point—as well as local energy, food and water shortages.
In short, the evidence suggests that exogenous negative feedbacks are rapidly returning as an additional significant factor in human population dynamics. Trump’s war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which has broken crucial global supply chains for petroleum, natural gas, urea fertilizer) is providing a preview of a possible global future of chaos and suffering that will eventually visit millions/billions of people as resources run down and limits are breached.
What might have been
Note that an actively intelligent species, one that accepted its niche in the natural world and understood population and systems dynamics[7], would have self-managed to ensure that its population followed the sigmoid growth curve gradually slowing growth to equilibrate (fluctuate, actually) in the vicinity of long-term carrying capacity (Figure 3, solid green line). Maintaining a civilization at a reasonable material standard yet within the productive capacity of its supportive ecosystems is called “one-planet living”.
As matters stand, MTI civilization is a victim of culture-wide self-deception. We have blown the opportunity to optimize or ‘green line’ human life on this single planet Earth. Other eco-oriented demographic analyses agree that Earth cannot support even the present population without a transformation of mainstream MTI cultural beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours. Resource depletion, ecosystems destruction and destabilization of global life-support functions have reduced long-term bio-productivity and, with it, human carrying capacity[8] whatever the preferred material standard—and this corrosive process is obviously continuing.
The likely outcome is a ‘great simplification’ of MTI societies, much as was projected by the business-as-usual scenario of the original 1972 Limits to Growth report and several follow-up studies of real-world post 1972 trends. Are we prepared for major economic contraction and accompanying population ‘correction’?
We have too long downplayed the population question. The best humanity can now achieve as we come off peak, is to track the dotted red line (Figure 3) and work toward stabilizing our population within the much-reduced productive means of nature. Should we succeed, future generations will live at numbers well below pre-industrial carrying capacity (dotted black line). This assumes we don’t render ourselves extinct in the resource and habitat conflicts that will accompany the coming implosion (total systems collapse segment of the solid red line).
Epilogue
There are no secrets about any of the above. The threats posed by advanced overshoot fills academic journals and even recent policy analyses; ecologists have studied many boom-bust cycles in nature; the unique elements of human population dynamics are well known; policy makers are well-versed in all sides of the (un)sustainability story. Yet quirky MTI culture still denies the population problem.
All of which goes to show, once more, that macro-scale (corporate, national, geopolitical behaviour) is rarely guided by mere facts and analysis unless the latter support existing mythology, economic narratives, development policies and, of course, our governing elites. The modern ‘system’—MTI culture—has acquired a momentum of its own, powered by innate behavioural tendencies; religious doctrines; equally fantastical cultural narratives (e.g., human exeptionalism and infinite economic growth); powerful influencers; privileged self-interest; emotional resistence; willful blindness and a large dollop of popular indifference/ignorance.
The coming implosion should therefore hardly come as a shock. It is the inevitable product of a defective cultural algorithm combined with human cognitive maleability. The most recent ten generations of modern humans (out of ~17,000 generations) have lived mostly unaware that these are truly exceptional times. MTI peoples have been mesmerized into thinking that continuous economic and population growth are normal and ‘to be continued’; in counter-fact, the past 200 years of fossil-powered growth is the most anomalous period in human history and is ‘to be curtailed.’
The human population went way up; it will come down.
Perhaps some will find comfort in knowing that, one way or another, the next century will see a return to normalcy. Conceivably, like St Paul Island, our Earthly habitat will eventually recover from humanity’s over-grazing.
The seeming inevitability of the transition does not, however, relieve the present generation of responsibility. This is no time to relax; we theoretically still have a choice between acting in ‘normal’ ways that facilitate a fast and brutal collapse or of exercising our much-vaunted high intelligence by coming together cooperatively to manage a controlled and humanely equitable soft landing.
Where would you put your money?
[1] Actually, and perversely, we’re not exactly ‘skirting the population question’. Many high-income countries are actively promoting pro-natalist policies to maintain or grow their populations in the face of declining fertility.
[2] Positive feedback occurs when a change in a systems variable generates further change in the same direction (deviation reinforcing). Negative feedback occurs when a change in a systems variable results in suppression of change in the same direction (deviation counter-acting).
[3] The instantaneous population growth rates actually increased initially during these periods rising, in humanity’s case, to a maximum of 2.2%/annum in the early-mid 1960s.
[4] The compressed time scale and steepness of the curve obscures this fact.
[5] E.g., greater economic freedom for women, improved family-planning education, increasing availability of pregnancy prevention technologies, concern about bringing children into an unstable world, etc.
[6] The numerical maximum can vary substantially. All else held constant, Earth could support more people at a modest material standard than if we all choose to live high on the hog (apparently the MTI default position).
[7]H. sapiens did actually understand all this but, being above nature, chose to ignore mere biology.
[8] Bio-productivity or biocapacity is a quality of ecosystems and should not be confused with carrying capacity which is always a population number. The two variables are related, of course—a highly bio-productive habitat (e.g., temperate grasslands) will support more people at any defined material standard than will a comparably-sized low-quality habitat (semi-arid scrubland). (See also Note #6.)
The recent concern that Britain’s housing wealth may be in danger of collapsing raises a much deeper question. What happens if the economy itself continues to shrink?
In a shrinking economy, the fundamental assumption behind ever-rising house prices begins to weaken. Housing values ultimately depend upon what future buyers can afford to pay. If incomes stagnate, secure employment becomes scarcer, borrowing becomes more difficult and younger generations possess less disposable income, the pool of buyers capable of sustaining high prices gradually contracts.
This does not necessarily mean a sudden crash. More likely is a long period of stagnation in which house prices fail to keep pace with inflation. In nominal terms prices may appear stable, but in real terms housing wealth steadily declines year after year. Britain may already be moving in this direction.
A shrinking economy would also change the role of housing itself. During the growth era, property functioned as an investment asset. People expected capital gains. Buy-to-let investors expected rising values. Governments quietly welcomed rising house prices because they created a feeling of prosperity.
However, if economic growth disappears, housing increasingly reverts to its original purpose – shelter.
That change could have profound consequences.
The first consequence would be psychological. Much of Britain’s middle-class security is tied to property values. Pension planning, inheritance expectations and retirement assumptions all depend upon housing wealth remaining high. If prices stagnate or fall, many households may discover that what appeared to be wealth was largely a paper valuation dependent upon continuous market optimism.
The second consequence would be political. Governments have repeatedly intervened to support house prices through low interest rates, mortgage schemes and planning restrictions. Yet in a shrinking economy governments themselves become poorer and more indebted. Their ability to support asset prices weakens. Eventually economic reality may become stronger than political intervention.
The third consequence concerns localism.
If housing ceases to be viewed primarily as an investment, local communities may begin to think differently about land and property. The emphasis shifts from maximising exchange value to maximising usefulness. Empty buildings become potential workshops, local enterprises, food production facilities or housing for younger families. Land ceases to be merely a financial asset and becomes part of the productive life of the locality.
This would represent a major cultural shift. For decades Britain has measured success through rising property values. Yet from the perspective of a shrinking economy, permanently rising house prices are actually a sign of increasing unaffordability and growing dependence upon debt.
The irony is that falling or stagnant house prices may be painful for those who expected continual gains, but beneficial for future generations seeking somewhere to live. Many younger people already regard high housing costs as one of the greatest barriers to family formation, financial security and independence.
If the shrinking economy continues, Britain may eventually be forced to choose between preserving housing as a speculative investment or restoring it as an affordable necessity.
The housing market was built during an age of growth, expanding credit and rising consumption. If that age is ending, then housing wealth may no longer behave as it did before.
In that case, the future may not be a dramatic collapse, but something perhaps more significant – the slow transformation of housing from a financial asset back into a home.
