Читать книгу Muddling Toward Frugality - Warren Johnson - Страница 6

PREFACE TO THE 2010 EDITION

What a difference three decades can make.

Muddling Toward Frugality came out at a time when Americans were ready to deal with the first energy crisis. The cartoon character Pogo had said “We have met the enemy and he is us,” the Yellow Pages blossomed with ads for solar companies, and President Carter called for increasing car mileage to 48 mpg to end oil imports. With U.S. oil production declining since 1970 and no reasons for OPEC to reduce its price, there were plenty of ideas for getting by with less oil. They folded in easily with the environmental movement that led to the passage of the Clean Air and Water acts and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The momentum reached me when a friend who had left an academic post to work for a small environmental publisher asked me to write a book after a talk I had given, “Paths Out of the Corner.” The timing couldn’t have been better, since Muddling came out just as high oil prices were driving the economy into a recession. Unemployment went up to ten percent, but interest rates went over fourteen percent when there were not banks overseas with huge amounts of dollars to borrow to jump-start the economy. The result was my “fifteen minutes,” as Andy Warhol put it, with invitations to speak around the country and interviews on radio and television, including Good Morning America. I spent an evening with Ted Turner, who liked the book enough to run ads for it in open slots on his new Cable News Network. Those were the good times when our society was willing to think about how to get by with less oil to keep the economy from being ground down by scarce money and jobs.

That ended abruptly in 1984 when the Saudis opened the spigot of their vast reserves to drive oil prices down to $20 a barrel. The free market economy had worked its magic, and the country was happy to get back to the ways that had worked so well for so long. We avoided the need to muddle through by biasing the economy toward growth in every possible way. This began with tax changes and incentives, but soon moved toward stimulus bills to create jobs and, when that grew expensive, to expanding home ownership with easy mortgages. The rapidly growing debt this entailed did wonders for the economy but led to the financial crisis in 2008. The recession that followed would have been caused by oil prices rising past $140 a barrel if the subprime mortgages hadn’t derailed the economy first.

The result now is that we are worlds away from where we were when Muddling came out, with a huge public debt and little or no discussion of using less oil when that would slow our weakened growth economy. The most striking effort to protect the economy is the virtual blackout of information about world oil production being stable since 2005. This may help in the short run but has ominous implications beyond that, of spreading unemployment as less energy becomes available. Even at the time of this writing in 2010, high federal stimulus spending has not created the hoped for jobs, in part because stable world oil production does not permit it, at least without driving oil prices up. What is needed is a way to create jobs without using more oil, but rather than thinking about that, we are driving ourselves further into the trap of an economy that cannot provide the jobs we need. We are acting as the tragic hero, seeking the holy grail of unending growth but leaving our descendents with depleted oil fields and ruinous debts.

If Muddling Toward Frugality is as relevant today as in 1978, it is because the challenge we face is basically the same. The difference is in our circumstances, which are more “laborious” and “desperate,” as Muddling warned if we resisted living more frugally. This is especially in our use of oil, which is the lifeblood of our urban industrial economy because of its critical role in transportation. But with rising global demand for oil and few replacements on the horizon, let alone the emerging factor of global warming, we have little choice but to begin moving toward greater use of renewable forms of energy. We may disagree over how much oil is left in the ground, but not over the fact that that only the renewable forms of energy can sustain civilization indefinitely. In the historical sense, there is little question that the fossil fuel era will be a “flash in the pan” of lives supported with renewable energy.

There are thoughtful people who, sensing that our way of life is unsustainable, are taking steps to consume less and save more—the first steps in sustainable directions. But ironically, these steps will reduce the number of jobs that makes the recession worse. The question is how to put people to work while using less energy. The only way of doing this that I have been able to find after forty years of searching is the one mentioned in Muddling, of providing assistance to those who would like to create sustainable ways of life. If this could be accomplished, a sustainable economy would emerge (over a very long period of time) that reduces the dangers the mainstream economy is facing, especially unemployment and debt. Instead of a deepening recession that torments everyone, new opportunities would be created for those who would like to begin building ways of life that have long-term evolutionary potential.

Unfortunately, this is not the kind of policy that would be readily accepted in this society. It may be necessary to wait until further growth is clearly no longer possible before such assistance will be accepted as the only way of dealing with rising unemployment. The issue would not be one of cost, since the assistance would have to be quite modest to assure that the ways created could be supported with renewable forms of energy. It would be a fraction of the cost of creating jobs in the mainstream economy, which under the 2009 stimulus program is $200,000 per job created. Even if successful, these new jobs would still increase the demand for oil that in turn drives its price up. All such efforts could be halted if sustainability replaced growth as the goal. The federal budget could be balanced even as the building of sustainable ways of life get under way.

It is the young who would be most attracted to such opportunities, since the value they create would be useful all their lives. Others would be attracted for different reasons—philosophical, religious, social, or ecological, in part because of the promise of shared values that facilitate cooperation. Extended families would be most apt to benefit from this, but all efforts will expand the meaning of sustainability, of making life good in social, emotional, and spiritual ways, rather than the material and competitive of the present. Those with a genius for making simple lives good will become the heroes of the new American Dream, hopefully in the ways of the comic hero, of enjoying the world as it is and every day for what it has to offer.

It is when an opportunity is available to all that creativity is most apt to flourish, since everyone can respond to it in their own time and ways. The decisions made will increasingly reflect what is referred to as the “real economy,” of what people actually need, rather than what must be consumed to provide jobs in a growth economy. There will be a movement toward nearby resources that can support life with less transportation, from decentralization to rural areas to recentralization in urban neighborhoods. All will be on a more personal scale than in an overgrown economy struggling against decline. The sustainable economy will be the warmer, more generous opportunity that grows more practical as fossil fuels grow scarcer.

It has been said that true courage is to see the world as it is and to love it. We find this hard to accept with the persistent belief that we have moved to a higher plane of human development, one that has little use for the customs of the past. Sustainable ways will mean recovering the more universal qualities of humankind, of cooperation rather than dominance, stability rather than growth, and concern for the well-being of all rather than the primacy of the self.

Our circumstances are unique, so the task ahead will be unique too. But we should have the time to relearn how to do things with our own hands again, how to pull families and communities back together, to raise happy and well-adjusted children, and to allow our elders useful and agreeable lives. Although some changes will be awkward, most will be comfortable, simply because they have a better “fit” or sense of “rightness,” of going with the grain of human nature.

It was the capacity to work together that enabled cultural evolution to take us beyond the struggle for survival of natural evolution, and in cultures that were preserved with the close human relationships that are the main source of happiness. Everywhere there will be opportunities for healthy work that strengthen ties with others and with nature. We will be exchanging the grand achievements of a large-scale technological society for modest accomplishments on a more human scale. We will once again be a part of humankind’s great journey.