And there are undoubtedly millions of indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers, people who live closer to their landbases than us children of empire, and evn perhaps trees, who are breathing a collective sigh of relief, and even cheering with all their hearts at each and every step of collapse. Oil and capital have fuelled the seemingly unending march of ‘development’ (so called), pushing people away from the land that has sustained them for 100s of generations, oppressing, exploiting, turning living creatures and in fact the whole web of life into consumer durables, with built in obsolescence, channeling everything – food, people, metals, fuel, water etc, into the ever growing dead zones we call cities.

But, peak oil, round one, and the chaos it has initiated in an economic system that needs huge amounts of energy and unlimited growth (impossible on a finite planet) to exist, has slowed down the devastation in many parts of the world. Its not enough, though.

This culture of empire, this system of death, the forces of darkness, the matrix, whatever you want to call it, is so hugely destructive of all things good – everything from joy to clean water to freedom, anything that can’t be commercialised is destroyed and anything that can will be until it is just a shadow of its former self, a plastic replica of the real thing – that we MUST help bring it down by all means necessary.

The empire thrives on war, and suffering, and is at war with nature. It even wages war on its own citizens, enslaving us, poisoning us, forcing us to suppress our own human natures, our instincts, our joy as living breathing beautiful animals.

The systems own unsustainability is helping to bring it down, and I appeal to all people of conscience, everyone who cares that this planet should be able to sustain life, all who refuse to be cogs in a damned infernal devastation machine. Rise up. Do what you can against the life destroying machine we call civilisation.

Stop buying stuff – particularly food from far away or in packaging. For too long we have been conned into thinking that vegetarianism, or green consumerism will make a difference. Industrial agriculture makes deserts. Full stop. Plastics and other ‘products’ makes poisons. It doesnt matter what the food is, if it has been grown far away, transported, packaged, sprayed, poisoned…. it does you little real nutritional good, and leaves a trail of devastation in its wake.

Plant food forests, rewild, use your time to help repair some of the damage done, and learn from your landbase – watch and it will tell you what it needs to regain its health. As empire contracts more and more damaged places will be abandoned. Nature can repair herself, amazingly, but with a little help from us, planting pioneer nitrogen fixing species, perhaps digging swales to retain water in dry areas, simply planting tree seeds, we can speed up the healing process while directing our local habitats to produce perennial food crops for us.

It wont be easy. Extricating ourselves from empire will be hard for most of us, born into this system, addicted to toxic foods, drugs, lifestyles, habits… but the whole sorry experiment is unsustainable and will fall, even without any help from us, in time, so to start extricating ourselves now will not only help bring down the beast, but is sound advice.

For a time, we may well find ourselves straddling both worlds, a natural world of trees and fresh from the plant foods, freedom and joy of life, while still having to give our pound of flesh to the devil, still having to submit to the boss and pretend to be good little citizens. This can be incredibly difficult, becoming easier and undoubtedly worthwhile when the global supply lines fail as they will, its just a matter of time. Life will become increasingly hard for the citizens of empire, although this may be almost directly proportional to the relief felt by billions of humans and animals as empire slows down, while those of us who has already started living a low carbon, community sufficient (self sufficiency in local communities) and lower energy life will find it easier going than many.

And finally, as the structures of empire become irrelevant, we’ll need to start dismantling them to help nature reclaim – particularly dams that stop the flow of the earths arteries. There are many ways we can help push this poisonous system into collapse. Use your imagination.

Recently I’ve begun compiling a list of things to be cheerful about. Here are some items that should bring a smile to any environmentalist’s lips:
• World energy consumption is declining.
That’s right: oil consumption is down, coal consumption is down, and the IEA is projecting world electricity consumption to decline by 3.5 percent this year. I’m sure it’s possible to find a few countries where energy use is still growing, but for the US, China, and most of the European countries that is no longer the case. A small army of writers and activists, including me, has been arguing for years now that the world should voluntarily reduce its energy consumption, because current rates of use are unsustainable for various reasons including the fact that fossil fuels are depleting. Yes, we should build renewable energy capacity, but replacing the energy from fossil fuels will be an enormous job, and we can make that job less daunting by reducing our overall energy appetite. Done.
• CO2 emissions are falling.
This follows from the previous point. I’m still waiting for confirmation from direct NOAA measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it stands to reason that if world oil and coal consumption is declining, then carbon emissions must be doing so as well. The economic crisis has accomplished what the Kyoto Protocol couldn’t. Hooray!
• Consumption of goods is falling.
Every environmentalist I know spends a good deal of her time railing both publicly and privately against consumerism. We in the industrialized countries use way too much stuff — because that stuff is made from depleting natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) and the Earth is running out of fresh water, topsoil, lithium, indium, zinc, antimony…the list is long. Books have been written trying to convince people to simplify their lives and use less, films have been produced and shown on PBS, and support groups have formed to help families kick the habit, but still the consumer juggernaut has continued — until now. This particular dragon may not be slain, but it’s cowering in its den.
• Globalization is in reverse (global trade is shrinking).
Back in the early 1990s, when globalization was a new word, an organization of brilliant activists formed the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) to educate the public about the costs and dangers of this accelerating trend. Corporations were off-shoring their production and pollution, ruining manufacturing communities in formerly industrial rich nations while ruthlessly exploiting cheap labor in less-industrialized poor countries. IFG was able to change the public discourse about globalization enough to stall the expansion of the World Trade Organization, but still world trade continued to mushroom. Not any more. China’s and Japan’s exports are way down, as is the US trade deficit.
• The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is falling.
For decades the number of total miles traveled by all cars and trucks on US roads has relentlessly increased. This was a powerful argument for building more roads. People bought more cars and drove them further; trucks restocked factories and stores at an ever-growing pace; and delivery vans brought more packages to consumers who shopped from home. All of this driving entailed more tires, pavement, and fuel — and more environmental damage. Over the past few months the VMT number has declined substantially and continually, to a greater extent than has been the case since records started being kept. That’s welcome news.
• There are fewer cars on the road.
People are junking old cars faster than new ones are being purchased. In the US, where there are now more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers, this represents an extraordinary shift in a very long-standing trend. In her wonderful book Divorce Your Car, Katie Alvord detailed the extraordinary environmental costs of widespread automobile use. Evidently her book didn’t stem the tide: it was published in the year 2000, and millions of new cars hit the pavement in the following years. But now the world’s auto manufacturers are desperately trying to steer clear of looming bankruptcy, simply because people aren’t buying. In fact, in the first four months of 2009, more bicycles were sold in the US than cars and trucks put together (over 2.55 million bicycles were purchased, compared to fewer than 2.4 million cars and trucks). How utterly cool.
• The world’s over-leveraged, debt-based financial system is failing.
Growth in consumption is killing the planet, but arguing against economic growth is made difficult by the fact that most of the world’s currencies are essentially loaned into existence, and those loans must be repaid with interest. Thus if the economy isn’t growing, and therefore if more loans aren’t being made, thus causing more money to be created, the result will be a cascading series of defaults and foreclosures that will ruin the entire system. It’s not a sustainable system given the fact that the world’s resources (the ultimate basis for all economic activity) are finite; and, as the proponents of Ecological and Biophysical Economics have been saying for years, it’s a system that needs to be replaced with one that can still function in a condition of steady or contracting consumption rates. While that sustainable alternative is not yet being discussed by government leaders, at least they are being forced to consider (if not yet publicly) the possibility that the existing system has serious problems and that it may need a thorough overhaul. That’s a good thing.
• Gardening is going gonzo.
According to the New York Times (”College Interns Getting Back to Land,” May 25) thousands of college students are doing summer internships on farms this year. Meanwhile seed companies are having a hard time keeping up with demand, as home gardeners put in an unusually high number of veggie gardens. Urban farmer Will Allen predicts that there will be 8 million new gardeners this year, and the number of new gardens is expected to increase 20 to 40 percent this season. Since world oil production has peaked, there is going to be less oil available in the future to fuel industrial agriculture, so we are going to need more gardens, more small farms, and more farmers. Never mind the motives of all these students and home gardeners — few of them have ever heard of Peak Oil, and many of the gardeners are probably just worried whether they can afford to keep the pantry full next winter; nevertheless, they’re doing the right thing. And that’s something to applaud.

But wait, before our cheering becomes an uncontrollable frenzy, we should stop to remember that most of these developments are due to an economic crisis that is taking a huge toll. With the possible exception of the last item on the list (and maybe some of those bicycle purchases), we’re not talking about voluntary behavior that’s evidence of forethought and collective intelligence. Whatever gains in sustainability these trends signify have come at an enormous cost in terms of unemployment, homelessness, and lost retirement savings.

Take all this to its tragic extreme. What if a billion humans died over the course of, say, the next ten years from starvation or swine flu? That would take a lot of pressure off natural systems. There would be more space for other species to flourish, and consumption of natural resources (oil, coal, water, and so on) would decline dramatically, improving the economic prospects of the survivors. So from a certain perspective this unimaginable nightmare might be seen as a good thing — though hardly anyone who actually experienced it would likely see it that way.

Parenthetically, it’s worth noting that this whole line of thought may be dangerous. Some free-market PR hack from the Cato Institute is likely reading along right now just as you are, trying out headlines for a press release. “Environmentalist delights in economic collapse!” might be a good one, or “Environmentalist wants billions of humans to die!” One way to avert that kind of backlash is to keep mum about the fact that economic contraction actually does have benefits, and so far most other environmental writers have been playing it safe in that regard. I’ve crossed the line here, so watch out. I might get us all in trouble.

Now back to our theme. At its core, the dilemma is this: We humans have overshot Earth’s carrying capacity through overpopulation and over-consumption, and have created all sorts of other problems in doing so (such as climate change). But nature will take care of all these difficulties. Overpopulation will eventually be solved by starvation and disease. Over-consumption will be reined in by resource depletion and scarcity. Climate change will take longer to fix, maybe thousands or millions of years — assuming we don’t turn Earth into Venus.

But nature’s ways of solving our problems are not going to be pleasant. And so the enormous, overriding question confronting our species during the remainder of this century will be, Are we humans capable of getting out ahead of nature’s checks so as to proactively rein in our population and consumption in ways we can live with?

Boil down all the environmental literature of the past century, and that’s the essence of most of it. So far, that literature has not had its desired effect: our species has continued to expand both in numbers and in per-capita impact.

But the items outlined above suggest that we’ve turned a corner. It’s no longer a matter of nature “eventually” providing checks on humanity’s boisterous expansionism. That’s starting to happen. And it’s not yet due to climate change: yes, we are indeed seeing potentially catastrophic impacts in terms of melting glaciers and so on, but those by themselves have not tempered the economic juggernaut. Instead, it is resource depletion that has begun to slow the freight train of industrialism. Over the past two or three years, high energy prices burst the bubble of unsupportable property prices and pulled the rug out from beneath the teetering financial derivatives market.

That’s what the whole Peak Oil discussion has really been about. It’s an attempt to identify the key resource whose scarcity will tip the global economy from growth to contraction.

But wait: this essay was supposed to help us look on the bright side. The discussion’s getting kind of dark here.

Okay, my point is this: we have reached the inevitable turning point. The growth trance that has gripped the world for the past several decades is in the process of ending. Even if we get short periods of economic growth, that growth will be in the context of a significantly contracted economy and will only be temporary in any case, as Peak Oil and other resource constraints will quickly damper increasing economic activity. Gradually, as “recovery” gets put off for another month, another year, another few years, people may begin to realize that the expansionary phase of the era of cheap energy is finished. There are of course no guarantees that the public and their business and political leaders will indeed finally “get it,” because the urge to hang onto the growth illusion will be very strong indeed. But if the misery persists, there’s at least a chance that understanding will finally dawn in the collective mind of our species — the understanding that we must get out ahead of nature’s checks and deliberately reduce the scale of the human enterprise in ways that maximize the prospects of both present and future generations.

But all won’t automatically come to that conclusion on their own. A fundamental change in our comprehension of the human condition will depend on more and more public intellectuals articulating the message of deliberate adaptation to limits, so that the general populace has the necessary conceptual tools with which to mentally process their new circumstances. We will also need far more people working on practical elements of the transition. Those will be ongoing needs — a growth opportunity, if you will pardon the irony, for smart and articulate young people interested in making a difference. And they’ll be most successful if they find ways of framing needed behavior and attitudinal changes in ways that are attractive and inviting — as the Transition Initiatives so brilliantly do.

So in that sense, when I say “Look on the bright side,” no irony or sarcasm is intended.

Its the end of the world as we know it, and its up to us to say ‘basta!/enough!’ to those who would make us mindless consumers and slaves, enough to the devastation of our planet in the name of money, and to decide what kind of world we want to live in, start creating it while doing everything in our power to help kill this monster that has been imposed on us.
Just do it!

Having lived on a smallholding, gradually reducing our shopping and increasing our self-sufficiency, for the past 5 years, I have been told time and again how ‘lucky’ I am. Many many people would love to live this life, but are fundamentally slaves within civilisation. The danger of earth hour and similar events, is that people are encouraged to do a token gesture, thereby feeling better about themselves and their lives, without taking a proper honest look at their lives, or doing anything that will make a difference.

Lets face it, most of us have grown up within the empire/civilisation with very little contact or experience of food growing. The transition to a more sustainable society, is not going to be easy for most of us. Growing food is hard work, and even the hands-off systems of permaculture and no-dig raised beds are hard work to set up and the personal changes we’d need to make to live with nature will not necessarily come easy.

Making this lifestyle harder is the fact that we are not able to remove ourselves completely from civilisation. Many of us have mortgages or rents to pay, which means we must generate cash – which the industrial food machine has made close to impossible from small farms. I have a few chickens, as an example, whose eggs end up costing me more than supermarket eggs. They are fantastic eggs, far superior to any industrial factory eggs, and I could reduce my costs if I had more time to put into growing food for my chickens – time that now goes to making a cash income to pay our few bills.

I guess what I am saying is that we are all slaves to some degree in this system. People who are still totally reliant on empire for their necessities are likely to find earth hour appealing as they can get a warm glow without any comfort zone infringement. What we need, though, is to take stock, look at the situation and start freeing ourselves from that slavery. This system is in the process of crashing, the earth needs it to crash, the human race needs it to crash. Dependent slaves will be going down with it – leave your lights on and use that hour to research heritage veg seeds, permaculture, rainwater harvesting or some other skills that will help in the local, organic, hand-powered reality.

Those of us further down the line also could do well to honestly look at where we stand. I look around my farm/home and see far too many external inputs. Breaking old habits is perhaps the hardest thing to do, especially when those habits have been with us all our lives, and are reinforced by everyone around us.

Things have to change, and the longer we resist that change, the harder it will be for us. If we wait until the decision is made for us, either through financial collapse due to peak oil, or food scarcity due to climate catastrophe (both hapening already) it will be no fun. If we avoid hard work and hardship now, it will accumulate for later.

On a positive note, permaculture systems do get easier with time, as perennial food plants get established, and life generally gets easier on the farm as we get used to the work, the different diets, different hours, and self-motivation. It should all get easier too, as the system collapses and perhaps demands for our time and cash disappear.

By growing stuff now, instead of buying it, we are also hastening the economic collapse, which in turn pushes others into a different culture, as jobs vanish and businesses disappear. Civilisation is a worldview, and is supported by our confidence in it. If enough of us find our way back to the land, refusing to waste our lives in factories and offices, those same factories and offices cease to be economically viable and disappear.

Ten thousand years or so of civilisation have gotten us here, we can’t expect quick fixes to work although you may well find that home grown food immediately improves your health.

The only way to change society is to start living what you want society to be like. Its up to you and me to stop buying things from far away or big companies, or that we can make or grow ourselves, and to reclaim our lives. It is unlikely to be easy for any of us, but it will be worth it.

In this way the complications which are about to enter our lives as the fossil fuel age winds down will move us away from the one-dimensional, disconnected, simplified life we now lead, and toward a richer life in which objects and people call upon us to care for them much more deeply than we have in the past.

["Able to respond" = "response-ability".--CB]

Some advocates for a sustainable future claim that the fulfillment of their vision will result in a simpler, healthier, happier existence when compared to our current consumption- and status-oriented unsustainable present. They may very well be right about healthier and happier. But will that sustainable future seem simpler to the individual?

The bright green high-tech globalized future imagined by some may result in lives that will seem no simpler than what we currently experience (that is, assuming we could achieve such as future). But a future characterized by a reversal of globalization and a return to more regional and local economic activity, or relocalization as it is often called, may actually make life suddenly much more complicated than we are used to. Let me explain.

Right now the relationship that most people have with their electricity and heat providers is simply a monthly bill. Their participation in the system amounts to flipping the light switch or adjusting the thermostat.

Their food is provided primarily by the chain grocery store, and their gasoline is available from ubiquitous service stations which sit on many corners of our cities and along every highway.

The software on their computers is neatly bundled to provide an all-in-one, ready-to-use solution acceptable to the vast majority of computer users.

Even the trash and recycling are hauled away on a regular schedule by a municipal or private hauler.

How might that change in a relocalized world? Currently, few people are involved very deeply in the provision of their most critical services: food, fuel, communication, waste disposal and recycling. But a relocalized world would probably mean a more complicated existence. Instead of having others simply take care of these things for us, we would have to become much more actively involved.

Take food. A relocalized food system means more food grown locally, of course. At a minimum that implies a different distribution system which would likely involve building a relationship with one or more local growers or at least the owners of the farmstands that service them. It might also mean growing food in one’s own yard, a vastly complicated task for the uninitiated.

How about fuel? If your community installs its own wind or solar power, you may at the very least have to contribute funds in advance of actual power production. But you might also install solar panels on your house or in your yard. You might even be involved in installing a wind generator in your neighborhood or your subdivision. And, these sources of power require maintenance, of course. For example, the solar cells on your roof or mounted on your lawn would need periodic looking after as would batteries used to store that energy for later use.

What about communications? As the computer and the Internet become the avenues of most communication, how could mere mortals be called upon to maintain the infrastructure and programs that make them possible? This is actually already happening in a small way. Growing up alongside the multinational software behemoths are the “open source” and “free software” movements. The software produced by these related movements require the active collaboration of their users who do everything from suggest improvements and new features to actually writing the code for such improvements and features. It’s a layer of complication that most computers users do not experience today.

As for trash and recycling, it is certainly conceivable that in the not-to-distant future composting could become obligatory in some communities. I can attest that it is not as simple as throwing garbage into a box. To successfully compost one has to understand how to achieve the proper carbon-nitrogen balance among others things. More complications!

What these complications really mean is that each person is taking on more responsibility for his or her own critical needs and the critical needs of the immediate community. That can have many positive effects as people in communities get to know and trust one another in a way not currently necessary or encouraged. It can also mean more resilience for every community as the production of the necessities of life become more decentralized and thus less vulnerable to disruption by, say, a crop failure in some distant place.

Implied in this decentralization is a rebuilding what James Howard Kunstler calls the local networks of retail and wholesale trade which existed before the devastation wrought on them by the national, big-box retailers. This is yet another complication that will require the active involvement of individuals in each community–not only those who seek to establish businesses based on slowly reviving local networks, but also from others who must make a conscious effort to patronize these establishments to help them succeed.

All of these things mean more, not less thinking. They are in some ways vastly more complicated than what most of us are used to. Up until now we have been largely content to let governments and large corporations fashion solutions for our basic needs, often without much input from us. This has led to a hugely complicated globalized system, but one which we rarely experience as such.

We have been sold the idea that a life filled with “low-maintenance” objects and processes is better than one filled with objects and processes that require our frequent attention. But as psychologist James Hillman has said, this is really an escape from care of the objects and processes most important to our existence. For it is in caring for things both animate and inanimate–the soil, the solar panel, the house we live in, the neighbor we live next to–that we come to love and understand their nature and experience them more fully. We also become connected to their pain or at least the pain we feel when even inanimate objects in our lives are in disarray.

In this way the complications which are about to enter our lives as the fossil fuel age winds down will move us away from the one-dimensional, disconnected, simplified life we now lead, and toward a richer life in which objects and people call upon us to care for them much more deeply than we have in the past.

Many of us who are already growing food, and taking active parts in the provision of many of our own needs, are finding it incredibly hard at the moment. Trying to earn money to pay bills etc, at the same time as running a smallholding is effectively living two lives, and can be very exhausting and disheartening.

But the reality is that a real life, growing food and all the other activities that civilisation has encouraged us to let someone else take care of, is far easier and liberating than earning a wage. And I believe we would be less inclined to allow our waterways to be polluted, as an example, if we could see that was where our drinking water came from – rather than just out of a tap.

We have been conned out of our responsibilities, and in doing so have lost so much. To reclaim that responsibility can be daunting, but is truly empowering and liberating. Dismantling civilisation is as much to do with freeing ourselves as it is about stopping the devastation to the natural world, and the collapse gives us an opportunity to make those badly needed changes to our lives.

Its too late for civilisation – and why would we want to keep it going anyway? – but it’s not too late for humanity to start living simply again, but with a greater level of complexity of responsibility.

I’d been meaning to write an article about the joys of the humble pumpkin, simply because they are so fantastic for keeping. Hard skin heirloom varieties keep in a cool room for several months, without any kind of processing.

This article by Jason Bradford summarises several methods of how to store foods without boiling. As well as growing pumpkins and other crops that keep, we also grow parnips and other root crops that will stay in the ground until we want to eat them, and perform most of the ideas that Jason documents.

Okay, back to the subject of preservation. My favorite is drying. Not everything does well with drying, but some of the most abundant fruits and vegetables, such as apples and tomatoes, perform well. This year my farm devoted a lot of effort towards drying and the associated equipment. In California I can take advantage of low summer humidity. Many foods can simply be placed on screened trays outside (see top image). Towards the end of the summer and early fall as the day length shortens and relative humidity increases, drying may require more concentrated heat. A couple friends of the farm build specialized food drying cabinets with a heat collection chamber, and these did a fantastic job.

This is what one of the driers looks like. The black box at the top holds the screened trays of produce. The slanted front piece is a heat collector. Here is a good web source for descriptions and plans of solar cookers, dryers, root cellars and stills.

This solar food dryer looks amazing, and we do plan to build something similar in 2009, to enable us to dry foods for preservation without any heat-source other than the sun.
In the affluent west we have been stupidly complacent regarding cheap abundant energy. This should never have happened, energy is valuable and should always have been treated as such. Solar cooking and drying is possible in most parts of the world, at least some of the time. In many places it is almost always feasible, particularly in hotter southern areas, that never had the luxury of energy wastage. I would like to see this kind of appropriate technology taken up all over – it just makes sense.

You do not have to shop at supermarkets, and in fact in most cases you do not have to shop. We can make a difference and in fact, it is the actions of individuals, people who just do what they feel is right without looking to see if anyone else is following, that have made all the positive changes in history.

The credit crisis is permeating its way through the economies of the world. Farmers who normally borrow money for seed and fertilisers, retailers who borrow money to stock their shelves, lorry drivers who borrow to fill their tanks – all are finding it hard to get that credit, and all are part of the chain that brings food to the consumers. We may well see famine in the west next year, due to the finance crisis, and yet most people do not see this catastrophe coming, while many that are aware are unable or unwilling to change their lifestyles in any meaningful way, that could ensure food in their homes next year.

The era of consumerism is coming to an end. The worst scenario could be widespread empty shelves overnight, and all the social upheavals that could cause. Although I think this is unlikely, it is very possible in small areas, and the best we can expect is ever increasing prices, pushing many staple foods out of the financial reach of poorer sections of society.

We need to be aware that this is on the horizon, and to start asking ‘what can I do’ in a realistic way, seriously trying to find answers. Even people in apartments could be growing foods in tubs and guerilla gardening, or cooperating with others who do own land, or approaching local authorities to suggest that council land could be used for growing food.

Even if people in authority, or other local landowners aren’t responsive to your ideas, every time these subjects are raised its another time they have been pushed into the spotlight. This is being called a recession now, but we need to keep telling people that this is more than a recession. We need to keep shouting that this is the end of the world as we know it, and in fact climate change dictates that we MUST end the world that we grew up with, as it is killing our planet.

This is not a time to feel powerless. It is a time where we need to think sideways, find local innovative solutions, force friends and neighbours to cooperate, and in cities to start turning every available inch of under-used land to grow organic food.

Some ideas won’t work, while some will, but we dont have time to feel self pity or disempowerment. We all need to become permaculture social activists.

Having spent most of my adult life working for Catalyst Collective and volunteering in many roles for Radical Routes, I thought I’d post here a little about food co-ops, but also about the role that co-ops could possibly play through peak oil transition and in a post carbon world.

This is a weekly food shop, cooperative style – a model of food distribution where neighbours work together to take control of their local supply chain. The system is simple: find a supplier, buy in bulk and collectively cover the costs. Smaller co-ops will only buy what participants have ordered, whereas larger organisations operate as markets or even set up their own shops. Some of these “community” co-ops invite customers to become members. You pay a nominal fee to be able to shop from it, or have a say in how it is run. Others are more informal and open to all. There are also “workers’” co-ops, which are often much larger organisations, where paid employees share all key business decisions.

The concept, of course, is far from new, but it’s proving increasingly popular. “Interest is definitely growing,” says John Atherton of Co-operatives UK, an organisation that supports cooperative enterprise across Britain. “We’re seeing rising numbers of buying groups and community shops. It’s a trend that is set to continue.”

The motivations are many: fears about food security; food inflation; the power of supermarkets; the bruised image of capitalism; a lost sense of community.

Across Britain, food co-ops are sprouting up in school halls, community centres, farm sheds or even your neighbour’s front room – anywhere, in fact, where rent is free.

“I use the term ‘trust trading’,” says Dan Dempsey, manager of a project establishing food co-ops in Wales. In essence, he says, it’s about a return to traditional routes of trade: reconnecting farmers with communities, and countryside to cities; paying a fair price and avoid markups by middlemen.

This is a great idea, and I have been involved in the formation of several similar food co-ops. Ours started with a meeting of neighbours and friends, where one of us donated a back room (or in one instance their living room!) and we all contributed £10 or so to get our first order with a wholefoods co-operative. That was the motivation for us, in Hull, there were no decent wholefood shops, so we pooled a few quid each, and our labour, registered a worker co-op / compant structure, and ordered from the catalogue. Once a month the delivery would arrive, and a few of us would sort it all into smaller sacks, work out prices – we added 10% so the organisation would accumulate reserves and have its own capital.

There are several ways to run a ‘food co-op’ and several legal structures possible, if you decide to go down the legal structure route. On the most basic level you could do without the formality of a legal structure, and simply buy in bulk collectively and from suppliers that fit your ethics, although most large wholefood wholsale co-ops won’t sell to unregistered groups, as they feel this undermines local wholefood shops.

Or, as we did in Hull, you can register a workers coop, which is a basic company limited by guarantee, similar to many charities ie not-for-profit structures. The difference between a worker co-op company and a normal company is that employees, as defined in the rules, are the members and directors of the company. So there are no seperate shareholders reaping profits from the company purely because they have invested money. Those who do the work own and control the business, so it is effectively turning capitalism on its head. And of course, as you the workers are the owners and govern the activities of the business, you can include whatever rules you would like, regarding the activities of the business, whether it makes a surplus and what happens to it. I know of one coop that donates some of its income and time/skills to support eco-living projects in the area, and I would really like to see more small local coop businesses set up with the intention of supporting non-economic projects in their areas.

Unicorn Grocery , in the Guardian article, is a worker cooperative based in Manchester UK.

But, I think that most of the other groups in that article are food co-ops or consumer co-ops, where the people who buy from the co-op are its members, and get to either make the decisions for the coop at general meetings, or elect a management board to manage the day to day running of the coop. Most consumer coops also give their employees membership and more say in their own employment terms etc than conventional companies. Some of these coops only sell to members, while others are open to the public generally but offer perks to their members or discounts. The biggest consumer coops are The Co-op chain of food stores, CIS (insurance) and CWS (which is one of the biggest farmers in the UK). Many radical co-operators would argue that the Co-op Group have lost their way, and have neglected their membership base in the pursuit of competing with conventional supermarkets, and this may be true, but the Co-op is still better than most shops, and there is a lot of scope for activists to get involved in the Co-op to push it towards more ethical and loca behaviour.

In recent years, several consumer co-ops have been set up to save village post offices and shops, and because the shop is owned by the people who benefit from it, they tend to survive or even succeed where conventional businesses fail.

Another option is community coops, where a need is perceived by a group of people (beyond shops and consumers) and a project is set up, to be owned by the people that use the facilities. Examples of this are London Action Resource Centre:

A collectively run building providing space and resources for people and groups working on self-organised, non-hierarchical projects for radical social change. The resources of the building include meeting-space, library, shared offices, a roofgarden, banner and prop-making space and an action information area. If you’re interested in helping out with LARC, booking a meeting-space, or otherwise using the buildings resources, please contact us at the address above…

And Falmouth Green Centre:

Falmouth Green Centre is a community enterprise promoting sustainability.

Projects at Falmouth Green Centre raise environmental awareness and encourage community participation. They included the waste wood project (now closed) which re-used timber to manufacture wildlife habitat boxes and garden furniture, and a nursery project (still thriving) growing and selling organically grown herbs, wildflowers and native trees.

The grounds of the Falmouth Green centre operate as a community garden and feature a wildlife & woodland area, organic plots and an orchard. Regular practical volunteering activities take place on Mondays. The work of the centre supports social inclusion, providing volunteer opportunities and training for local people including the long-term unemployed, mental health users and people with special needs.

So far, so good. Worker coops, consumer coops, community coops. Each of these structures can be used to set up something useful, local, ethical and to help us build the world we want to see, while educating others about the environmental impact of industrial civilisation and capitalism. In many ways, setting up a co-operative company is using the tools of capitalism to improve life for ordinary people. There is also the option of housing coops, where the tenants are the owners and directors of the organisation. Again, when the tenants of the accommodation get to make the decisions that affect them, life can be so much better for those tenants, and surpluses generated from rents could be used for the planting of trees, the improvement of the accommodation, the building or purchase of more accommodation to house more people in decent & affordable housing, or rents could even be reduced!

So far I have been looking at ‘conventional’ coops and their uses in the normal world as is today. But, as we are seeing peak oil unravel the economic world, and the need for so aspects of society that have been pushed further and further apart via globalisation, I see that co-operatives could play a huge role in relocalising and real democracy. Democracy isn’t achieved through the ballot box, but by who owns and controls the infrastructures of their daily lives.

Co-ops could be set up to collectively own transport. In a local world we won’t all need a vehicle, but our coop could own a van, a jeep, a car and 10 bicycles, all shared by the inhabitants of a village or street. A coop could be set up to buy solar panels or wind turbines to power a village. A coop could own a rotovator or tractor, that members can use when they need to. Or a biodeisel coop, where several growers donate a plot of land to grow sunflowers or maize to turn into deisel to power collectively owned tools.

It is unlimited. In the post carbon localised world we are going to need to share more, and coops could be formed to make the structure of that sharing work more smoothly, with terms and agreements made and formalised. Using consensus decision-making within co-operative structures we can learn who to make it all work, how to share and work together, because we have to.

I see co-ops springing up everywhere, fulfilling every kind of need, with a huge range of structure diversity and uniqueness, where the corporate landscape was one of monoculture, sameness and conformity.

The only limitations are the ones that are stopping the corporate monocultures and our imaginations. In many instances there may be little need of a legal structure, but I would argue that the co-op ‘movement’ has a lot of experience of meeting skills, collective decision making etc, that we can take what we find useful. In a local world every project or co-op will find its own right way, just as with permaculture principles you see what fits rather than forcing a mould to fit all. But co-ops have a history and sometimes it will make no sense to reinvent. While the world still has an economic system co-op legal structures offer much in the way of credibility (being a company strangely means you get taken seriously), limited liability so you dont lose your home if the business fails, clear cut definitions between what is the co-op and what isn’t, ability to pay wages etc. In fact a co-operative company is a legal person, and can do much that a real person can do. It is a ‘person’ that represents you its members, and exists solely for the benfit of you its members, and will do whatever you its members want it to. Basically you can use a coop to improve your life and the world around you, and at this time cooperative projects will be very useful to ease the transition into post peak oil world. I expect many things we take for granted, which are now arranged by govt or big corporation, will cease to function as the oil economy unravels. Small coop alternatives could take over.

Some more ideas, collectively run and owned:
orchards, local shops to sell members produce, farmers markets, power providers, water treatment, housing, healthcare, libraries, seedsaving, oil press…. anything in fact. The future is local and collective.

I do know of one housing co-op which is attached to a worker coop, where the tenants have a basic weekly income from the worker co-op even though not all tenants work for it, all profits from the worker co-op go to pay the mortgages of the housing co-op, tenants who work outside pay all their wages to the co-ops except theuir basic wage the same as the others, the co-op buys all the needs of the tenants who also get a travel allowance and clothes allowance amongst other things, the coop owns several vehicles and tools/workshops for use of the tenants. Basically everything is collectively owned, and all income is pooled, but the co-op takes care of all the members, even covering them all with private health insurance, and individuals receive allowances above their necessities so they have freedom tempered with responsibility to the community. It works.

For more information, CoopsUk registers co-ops, has paid staff to answer your questions, and is a membership organisation itself.
Radical Routes is a network of coops working for social change, and is connected to an investors coop, Rootstock, to raise funds to lend to its member coops.
Catalyst Collective is a coop that helps coops, and offers a far more affordable registration service for housing, worker and community coops.
Catalyst also has instructions on its website of how to register yourself as a co-operative company at Companies House, for the huge sum of £20. These co-op company rules can easily be modified to fulfill whatever other co-op objectives, and the worker coop rules have very wide-ranging objects, to allow the co-op to do whatever the directors/members wish. using the Catalyst models, perhaps modified, you should be able to set up whatever co-op project that is needed in your area.

I don’t know much about co-ops in the USA, but would love to hear from people across the atlantic, with information to share with our readers. I am sure the co-op option could be just as valuable in America. One idea is for people losing their homes to form housing co-ops to buy the homes from the banks to rent back to themselves – but I don’t know enough about US legal structures to know if this is viable, but I do know that there are a lot of co-operatives active in many areas of business in the USA. And there are many rural intentional communities, owned and run on a co-operative basis, many appearing like traditional villages from the outside.
Transition time is now, time to set up local ethical co-ops, to help us take care of ourselves?