This summer I have been following The Archdruid Report, a blog by John Michael Greer. Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) Greer has been blogging about the end of the Industrial Era and the coming of the Deindustrial Society. Greer is lucid when he talks about economics:
Over the last few weeks, my posts here on The Archdruid Report have tried to sketch out a way of understanding economics that doesn’t contradict the laws of physics or the evidence of history. Perhaps the central concept I’ve been developing along these lines is the sense that there is no such thing as “the” economy in any human society; there are, rather, three economies, each of which follows distinctive rules.
The primary economy, in this way of looking at things, is the natural world itself, which produces something like three-quarters of the goods and services on which human beings rely for survival. The secondary economy, which depends on the primary one, is the collocation of labor, capital plant, and resources extracted from the primary economy that produces the other quarter or so of the goods and services human beings use. The tertiary economy, finally, is the system of social processes by which the products of the first two economies are allocated to people. This can take many different forms, of which the one most familiar to us is money.
“The Economics of Entropy.” July 29, 2009
For several years my friends have been disquieted by the prospect of peak oil, and I have watched The End Of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream and Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fall of Industrial Societies. I am, however, a science fiction reader, so I just don’t get too stressed anymore by “the end of the world as we know it.” –Besides, I’ll most likely be dead before everything goes to Hell.
But seriously, I have been thinking lately, that Peoria is well situated if the oil wells do run dry. We have the Illinois River–if we don’t let it become mud flats. A fully loaded barge can carry as much cargo as a thirty-four mile convoy of semis. We do have coal. We can make soy diesel. The core of the city is walkable. We still have railroad tracks. We do have farmland. The Shoppes at Grand Prairie will most likely be abandoned, but we can probably maintain a comfortable standard of living here.
This week John Michael Greer confirms my intuition. Greer has just moved from Portland, OR to Cumberland, MD. Greer says “Cumberland is a quintessential Rust Belt town.”
Founded in the 18th century along one of the most important transport routes linking the east coast to the interior, it became by turns a canal center, a railroad hub, and a thriving industrial town where factories powered first by water and then by local coal anchored an economy lively enough to make Cumberland the second largest city in Maryland. From its red brick factories and faux-medieval county courthouse to its distinctive local beers – Queen City Brewery was the big name here until it went under in the Seventies – it’s hard to think of a detail of the old American industrial heartland that wasn’t present and accounted for.
But when Cumberland’s economy collapsed, the population dropped almost 50%.
The conventional wisdom these days holds that towns like Cumberland have a future only if they can find some way to catch the coattails of the booming (well, formerly booming) economies of the two coasts. Cumberland city boosters have done their level best to follow that lead in recent years, with tourism and the arts scene as focal points, and they’ve had modest success so far. If I’m right about the future of America and the rest of the industrial world, though, they might want to consider raising their sights a bit, because the tide of history that left Cumberland and so many towns like it high and dry may just be turning.
Cumberland is in the north Central Appalachians, not far from Amish country in Pennsylvania and just across the river from West Virginia. The big cities of the East Coast are only a few hours away by train. Greer and his wife Sara are betting:
More energy-efficient transport modalities will tend to replace less efficient ones because they, and thus the goods they ship, will be more affordable; equally, diseconomies of distance will tend to outweigh economies of scale and foster the reemergence of regional economies. Among the likely beneficiaries of these changes are the towns that thrived best in an earlier, more regional economy — those that are well served by rail and water transport, surrounded by farming regions that don’t depend on irrigation, not too far from major markets, and provided with ample and inexpensive real estate for the factories and warehouses of a downscaled and relocalizing industrial economy.
That sounds like Peoria to me. Maybe we don’t want to convert every warehouse on the riverfront to loft apartments just yet….
