Is the Desire to Relocalize Merely Aesthetic?

Last week, peak oil analyst Stuart Staniford wrote an essay on the Oildrum critiquing the relocalization movement which has arisen in response to the threat of peak oil. In a nutshell, Staniford argues that relocalizers—who Staniford rather derisively calls “reversalists”—are incorrect in their belief that imminent declines in oil availability will cause modern industrial agriculture to become untenable, requiring large numbers of people to relocalize and return to rural communities.

On the contrary, Stanford argues, high oil prices have, so far, benefited rather than harmed industrial producers. Given the importance of food, he says, even higher oil prices would imply that industrial producers will simply be able to outbid the urban poor for fuel indefinitely. He then accuses “reversalists” of “wishful thinking” and “nostalgia for the past,” and concludes by saying that “urbanites worried about their future should not be looking to buy or rent a smallholding as a solution to their problems—industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and there is no way to compete with them except by becoming one.”

The post produced one of the longest and most interesting discussion threads on the Oildrum to date, as well as a thoughtful response by Sharon Astyk, a small farmer who is a chief advocate for the relocalization movement (Astyk’s writings put forward a persuasive case for widespread rerualization as a necessary response to peak oil and climate change. Dmitry Orlov and Jeff Vail responded as well, criticizing Staniford for linear extrapolations and confusing correlation with causation, respectively.)

The specifics of the argument aside, to me the most interesting thing about the debate was how it highlighted the way certain deeply embedded tacit ideas inform so much of modern thinking. In particular, several comments in the thread referred to the “nostalgic” or “aesthetic” nature of the relocalization movement, as if those supposed sentiments alone were enough to disqualify it from serious consideration. Astyk herself refers to James Howard Kunstler’s anti-modernist bent and death-of-suburbia predictions as “as much aesthetic, and tied to a larger critique of modernist cultural movements, as they are practical”—the implication being that the intellectual attempt to bracket out so-called “aesthetic” concerns is valid, scientific and appropriate. Taken for granted in this approach is the notion that the “aesthetic” and the “practical” exist in separate, non-overlapping spheres; and we know which is more important.

It would be hard to overstate how deeply this bias runs. Ours is profoundly utilitarian age. And yet, if the concept of peak oil proves anything, it’s that this most “utilitarian” civilization in history is paradoxically one of the most blind. How can we, who are so practical and scientific, have failed to notice that we were careening toward the edge of this cliff? And is it possible that our conditioned insensitivity to so-called “aesthetic” concerns is, in fact, a big part of the problem?

Critiques of mechanistic reductionism were common in the early part of the 20th century, in the works of existentialists of every stripe as well as those of philosophers like Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Lewis Mumford. Later, a number of quantum physicists also questioned the mechanistic view of the world, perhaps most prominently David Bohm. Nobel prize winning biologist George Wald suggested the universe itself must in some way be programmed for life, “that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff.”

But the idea that aesthetic concerns might be a clue to the functionality of a system is an uncommon perspective in the present age, to say the least. We are all, for the most part, living amidst a functional belief system in which matter is inert and the activity of nature is viewed mechanically; and which therefore, by default, relegates value—aesthetic or otherwise—to a secondary and wholly subjective role. You can say that American suburbia is ugly, but that’s just your opinion, isn’t it?

One notable exception to this paradigm is found in the work of the great architect Christopher Alexander. In his recent four-volume synthesis, The Nature of Order, Alexander explains the significance and troublesome implications of the mechanistic fallacy. “Strictly speaking, the facts of physics and astrophysics do not imply that the universe is meaningless. But the way these facts are presently drawn . . . does suggest—even strongly imply—that the world is meaningless,” he writes.

“During the last three hundred years we have succeeded in building up an astonishing view of reality. This is a picture in which the parts of the world are to be viewed through mathematical models or mechanisms . . . We have a level of control of our physical destiny that would have astonished our ancestors in virtually any past period of human history . . . All in all we have succeeded in building successful models of the matter in the universe and its behavior, in a way that is wonderful and powerful. It is a collective achievement of an order incomparable with almost any previous human achievement . . . .

And yet, there is something wrong! . . . In order to create this effective scientific world-picture we had to use a device: the intellectual device of treating entities in nature as if they were inert, as if they were lumps of geometric substance, without feeling, without life—in effect, merely mechanical elements in a larger machine.

According to Alexander, numerous tacit assumptions follow from this world-view including: the belief that what is true is only the body of facts which can be represented as lifeless mechanisms; that matters of value are subjective; that matter is inert, “blindly following laws of combination and transformation”; that art has “no deep importance in they physical scheme of things . . . and “the intuition that something profound is happening in a great work of art is, in scientific terms, meaningless.”

But none of these tacit assumptions is true, says Alexander. The universe is not inert but full of “life”—a word which transcends its biological meaning and can be applied to the crashing of ocean surf, the stark subliminity of a mountain range, or the heart-rending beauty of a great work of art. Furthermore, the “life” of any particular scene or moment is for Alexander a function not of subjective states of mind, but of objective, geometric structures which interlock to create a “wholeness”.

Present day conventional wisdom responds to such statements as hopelessly sentimental and unscientific, but according to Alexander, they can be empirically verified. Remarkably, he claims to show that when asked properly, human beings are able to distinguish relative degrees of “life” and “wholeness” (in an urban scene or work or art, for example) with a very surprising degree of consistency—across class, age and culture.

Alexander lists an approximate fifteen geometric qualities which work together to create wholeness and life. Those properties are universally present in nature and natural transformations. They are virtually universal in the architecture and urban forms of pre-modern cultures. However, they are notoriously absent in our world of sleek glass skyscrapers, six-lane highways and mega-malls.

What this argument would seem to imply is that the realm of “feeling”—of which the categories of aesthetics and nostalgia are a part—is not secondary, but central, a matter of life and death, a subject which has to do with the deepest existential questions about a society. The brutal ugliness of so much of modern society—and the alienation, depression and psychopathologies it provokes—is not accidental but a result of worldview which treats all of nature and human beings as machines, and all questions of “value” as superficial gloss.

To put in another way, if the vast majority of people agree when asked that a strip-mall is “lifeless” (whereas an old-fashioned town or village is full of life), it seems fair to ask what the practical implications of that perception are. The depressing ugliness of the modern world is usually defended as a necessary result of progress. Strip-malls are seen as in some way more functional than a locally owned corner shop in a traditional, walkable neighborhood.

But while the strip-mall may be more functional in some ways for some people (the economy of scale gained by a mass chain) it is, in myriad other ways, profoundly dysfunctional. In a world of strip-malls it is no longer possible to walk a block for a loaf of bread; public space is destroyed; the chain-stores of which strip malls are composed siphon money from the local economy; etc. Not to mention the destruction of pubic space, the health problems of obesity, the dangers of accidents, and the pointless depletion of finite resources and the destabilization of the climate—all of which comes from a auto-dependent society of which the strip-mall/box store/parking lot world is an integral part. Is it possible that the perceived ugliness of this world is more than just coincidental with its non-functionality?

Alexander’s colleague, the mathematician Nikos Salingaros, makes a strong case that this is so. In his book A Theory of Architecture he shows how modern architecture and urban planning has destroyed the “fractal hierarchy” which is present in nature and traditional building. “Fractals define a scaling hierarchy that is complex at every level of magnification,” he writes. By eliminating the smaller, human scale, modernist architecture in particular creates both an aesthetic and a practical problem simultaneously; in fact, the two issues are inseparable.

Many critics, Salingaros tells us, have recoiled at the ugliness of arch modernist Le Corbusier’s destructive architecture and urban plans. But, he writes, the plans’ “fundamental fault is not an aesthetic poverty so much as a structural poverty: a lack of organized complexity, a toxic disconnectedness.” Salingaros ends by calling for a “newly adaptive architecture of connectivity,” as a way to restore human habitats.

What does this all have to do with the question of industrial agriculture and the future? Well, for one thing, it is hard to imagine anything organized on a less human scale than industrial agriculture, whose toxic effects are easily visible not only in objective measurements of human health and environmental degradation, but in “aesthetic” reactions to everything from the tastelessness of supermarket produce to the visceral disgust we feel when we learn the details of industrial scale meat production.

The modernist architects of the early 20th century sold themselves and their designs to the world as harbingers of “progress” and “science.” By implication, those nostalgic sentimentalists who opposed their work on aesthetic grounds were anti-progress and anti-science. But as Salingaros, Alexander and others have shown, the architectural norms of hulking glass and soulless concrete plazas were neither scientific nor progressive; they were totemic. To a certain extent the modularity and geometric banality of modern architects served the needs of 20th century mass-industrialization, but even there, one wonders to what degree those benefits were exaggerated by propaganda and power of abstraction and ideology rather than real efficiencies of scale.

Isn’t the same thing true of industrial agriculture? Numerous studies have shown that on a total output basis, small-scale organic farming is at least as productive as its industrial counterpart, and as organizations like SPIN farming illustrate, it can be profitable even on land covering less than an acre. And as Sharon Astyk points out, this is in a system which disadvantages small farmers in both the developed and the developing world (through a relative lack of subsidy in the former and burden of taxation in the latter). Staniford’s analysis notwithstanding, it seems at least plausible that the putative benefits of industrial agriculture are a bit oversold.

None of this answers the question of what will happen to agriculture when world oil production really begins to decline. But maybe the question should be turned around. Given that industrial agriculture and suburban sprawl are based on scales which are so unnatural in both organic and human terms—so disconnected, so structurally compromised—maybe the proper question should be, how is something so dysfunctional sustained? So far the answer has been: with massive financial capital, huge expenditures of energy, and sheer force of will. What will happen when at least two of those three forces start to dry up? Maybe we should look to aesthetics to give as a clue.

Comments

[Kiashu]

It's interesting to me the different perspectives that dreadful boring article of Staniford's has prompted people to reveal. I think that what I've said here - http://greenwithagun.blogspot.com/2008/01/relocalisation.html - about the simple practicalities of it all (eg, if the urban poor are priced out of the food market, are they a) just going to let themselves starve, or b) begin localising their agriculture?) remains true, but your own perspective on the aesthetics of it is also true.

Ours is indeed a very utilitarian society, but a short-sighted one, like the ones implied in so many philosophical dilemmas, the four starving men in the boat with room for just three, and so on.

The new is always good, the old always bad, any movement in any direction is forward movement - "progress" - any who stand in the way of "progress" are evil or at best silly, and so on.

Sad stuff. As you say, even those who question the way the world is don't question these base assumption of New Is Good. It's all rather Brave New World.

[Lakis]

I read your essay; what you present seems to be, all-in-all, the most likely outcome for where we’re going. Stuart’s point about the poor urbanites being outbid for fuel did seem to leave a gaping logical hole, as you and others pointed out. When food prices get expensive enough, people will grow gardens, as they always have, whether or not they’re able to supply all of their calorie/grain needs.

It occurred to me after reading the posts on Jeff Vail’s latest installment on this debate—and your essay—that there is a lot misperception and confusion about what reloclazation even means. On the one side, it’s (as you say) a “barefoot hippie’s dream” and on the other a Pol Pot forced march to starvation (a particularly odious comment, in my opinion). Reality will probably play out much as you suggest, with smaller farms, closer to the cities, not necessarily the permaculturalist polyculture dream (though I would like that) but farms with fewer inputs, etc. Unless of course ideological blinders get in the way and we end up doing something very stupid politically, in the name of progress or something else. Which cannot be ruled out.

Thanks for the comment.

[Mauricio Babilonia]

Excellent essay.

One could shoot an enormous hole in Mr. Staniford's argument simply by asking in what sense industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and whom precisely benefits from that efficiency? Helena Norberg-Hodge has argued that the Green Revolution had less to do with feeding the world population than with repurposing industrial capacity following World War II. A quick glance at Big Agra's balance sheet (particularly with respect to grain and biofuel subsidies) and the chronic starvation problems in poor nations could lead one to wonder whether she may be on to something.

If any aspect of industrial agriculture could certainly be considered efficient, it would be its rate of topsoil depletion. The jury is still out on whether that's a beneficial efficiency.

[Caryl Johnston]

Very fine piece. You might be interested in seeing my "Metaphysics of Quality" website - an exploration of the concept pioneered by Robert Pirsig - http://meta-q.blogspot.com/

One of the best things Jim Kunstler ever said - "Ugliness is entropy made visible." This could be the basis for a whole new esthetic.

[Lakis]

Mauricio –

The idea that the Green Revolution was less about feeding people than about post-war industrial capacity is fascinating; it plays off this tacit assumption that at some level, all technological innovation is progress, even if we accept that there are “trade-offs” (i.e., okay, industrial agriculture may be promoting cancer, dead-zones in the gulf of Mexico and strip-mine the topsoil, but hey, we’ve all go to eat!). But what if there’s really no trade-off, and we could have done the whole thing with smarter organic etc. (not to mention permaculture, and so forth), and the whole industrial agriculture game is really all just about certain narrow agendas? Something to think about.

Caryl –

You know, I haven’t read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance since high-school . . . but I was thinking about it in the context of this subject. Maybe I should pick it up again. I’ll definitely check out your essays.

Thanks for your responses.

Lakis

[DC]

As a student in a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program this essay makes a lot of sense to me, and definitely fills a void of perspective left by the other 3 mentioned essays on relocalization. I see 'ugliness' in things which are non-functional, not of human scale or disconnected with their surroundings and the inhabitants. I remember the awful view looking down at the bits of forest and thousands of massive farm plots in Ontario transitioning into the seemingly endless tarmac & cement when flying into Toronto, and thought a more mixed arrangement would likely be much more appealing at ground level as well.

[Diablevert]

Hmmmm....so people who find beauty in modernist architecture are just wrong, in your view? Such buildings, and the larger aesthetic of which they are exemplary, is sterile and soulless and this is a verifiable fact, not merely an opinion or sentiment? Interesting.

What do you do with, say, the Italian futurists? (Or the Jetsons? :)) or social realism, which would seem to synthesize two things (the celebration of individual human labor v. the celebration of industrial progress) which your argument would seem to take to be antithetical?

[Lakis]

I agree that the critique of modernist architecture is more controversial than the critique of say, a suburban big-box store. However, I believe that the writings of the “great” modernists themselves betray their own awareness of how soulless their buildings were (Le Corbusier, for instance, saying that buildings were “machines for living”). Is it a coincidence that late modernism was called “Brutalism”? For an interesting perspective on this, check out the debate Christopher Alexander had with Peter Eisenman in the early 1980s:

http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm

Eisenman (who I guess is a “deconstructivist”, whatever that means) talks about deliberately making people uncomfortable in his buildings—that is his desired effect. Whether that is a humane or even sane goal for the built environment—you be the judge.

I think a great deal of “admiration” for modernist and post-modernist monstrosities is more about propaganda and shock. In my experience, people may find such work “interesting”—especially when it is patronizingly “explained” to them. But deep or moving, or comfortable, or human or “alive”? Of course you are free to disagree.

But check out the work of Alexander and Salingaros for more on this (I’m really just repeating what they have said better).

As for social realism—I’m afraid that’s just an Orwellian neologism. That architecture is totalitarian, through and through—calling it “architecture for the people” is as absurd as calling saying the so-called “neo-classical” architecture of the Nazis harkens back to the ancient Greeks. Nothing human-scale about it. Futurism is an interesting case about which I plan to say more at some point, but in general the ideology falls into the same camp.

It is ironic to say the least, that people today defend modernism as just another style which one is free to like or dislike; but when the modernists’ major works were being built, the modernist themselves had nothing but scorn for older architecture and anyone who appreciated it. This attitude was used as justification to destroy many buildings, and in the case of urban planning, whole cities. (Check out the destruction of the original Penn Station in New York). Now the processes and materials and assumptions of modernism are conventional wisdom; but I believe that conventional wisdom in this case is deeply flawed.

[Diablevert]

Well, you begin to persuade me. I like me a Stanford White urban cathedral as much as the next gal. I am not, perhaps quite as willing to toss modernism out with the bathwater, however. For my larger point is simply this --- there's more than one aesthetic in the world. Your respond to those who sneer at relocalization as merely a nostalgic and aesthetic fetishization of the past by suggesting that the aesthetic conceals a moral value system. But if taste is virtue, what does that make those whose tastes are different? For they do exist...

[Lakis]

Of course there are different architectural styles, and wide-ranging aesthetics. But what Alexander and Salingaros argue is that what’s important is the underlying geometry of the built environment. The way Alexander defines this in The Nature of Order goes far beyond classical ideals of “the golden ratio” and so forth. It’s difficult to summarize all of their work, but let’s just say it emphasizes connectedness, strong centers and appropriate levels of scale.

The Nature of Order is filled with examples of buildings and artifacts that Alexander feels have “life”, from a vast range of times and places—from Tibetan monasteries to Nubian doors, to great mosques, to Shaker furniture, to an old Pennsylvania barn in the snow. He includes a very few modern examples—a few early Frank Lloyd Wrights, the Golden Gate Bridge.

However, most modern architecture fails to achieve real life for various reasons, having to do with a modern-day master/plan mass production/bulldozing approach to building which obliterates connectedness and the human scale.

This is not a critique about a particular school of architecture or a particular aesthetic. Le Corbusian/Bauhaus modernism happens to have been very influential and is a good example of what went wrong. But faux-colonial tract houses and McMansion/spawl fail just as spectacularly as modernist icons—for the same reasons.

[Kiashu]

Certainly in principle organic polycultures could have fed people as well as the Green Revolution; but in practice not. Organic polyculture requires a lot of skill, and stability of land ownership; but there'd never be enough teachers, and with urbanisation, indentured labour and so on in India and Africa, there was no stability of land ownership. Whereas the Green Revolution could happen with no skill or knowledge at all from the farmers, and with ownership changing weekly.

McMansions fail as cultural icons because cultural icons have to last. I don't know about the ones in the US, but here Down Under they've found that each requires "major work" (defined as "costs over $5,000") within three years. If we built no more from today, in a generation they'd all be gone.

[Lakis]

Your point would imply that our real limiting factors are social and political (education, land ownership, etc.). That’s quite interesting, and very different from the deterministic view one often hears.

The general shoddiness of all new construction is amazing; it really does seem like we’re building a world with no future.

[Kiashu]

Nothing is inevitable, events and trends come out of human decisions and conditions. Given human nature and various conditions, some things are more or less likely, but nothing is inevitable.

It was not inevitable that the Green Revolution would feed the world in the 1960s and onwards, while organic polycultures didn't. But given that spraying stuff onto land takes no skill and little effort, while the careful balance of different plants and watching the conditions of the soil takes skill and effort, and given that industrialised farming can be done on a piece of land you hold for just one season, while organic polycultures take years to become very productive - well, it was a lot more likely that GR would prevail than OP.

[Patrick]

Some people seem to think the following: "When food prices get high enough people start gardening, causing a mass exodus into the countryside"

Have you heard of rationing? During WWII food was rationed. Some people started gardens but there was no mass exodus into the countryside. In other words, when prices get too high the government steps in and rations food, allowing people to continue living in the cities. "Back to the land" is a romantic fantasy. The security, economies of scale, and other advantages of the city make it a much better place to be post peak-oil than a remote rural location. Just look at how well those rural places fared during the great depression.

Even the Amish go into town to buy things. Show me an example of a fully self-sustaining agricultural community in the USA. As far as I know there aren't any.

[Lakis Polycarpou]

Thanks for your comment.

The question of city vs. country is quite complicated for a lot of reasons, and I don’t think anyone can say for certain exactly how it will turn out.

Part of the problem is that we really are living in an unprecedented time. The percentage of the world’s population living in cities is now greater than at any time in history. Even as recently as the Second World War, a much larger percentage of the population was living in rural areas than today. Can current levels of urbanization—much less the trend of rapidly increasing urbanization—be sustained? I doubt it.

As for how rural areas fared compared to urban ones in the Depression, I’ve seen claims made on both sides. Doing further research on this is on my (long) to do list.

However, I would point out that while the coming energy crisis may resemble the Great Depression in the scale of its calamity, there are many ways in which our situation is fundamentally different, at least in the United States. In my limited understanding, the primary problem in the Depression was a scarcity of money, not resources. If the price of food collapses, it stands to reason that farmers will suffer, especially if their land is mortgaged and they must declare bankruptcy. It’s not clear to me that will be the case in a resource scarce time, when the Federal Reserve has the printing presses on full-throttle.

That said, inflation may apply to arable land as well, making escape from the city economically impossible once it really kicks in. It’s just hard to know.

You said that being in a city would be better than being in “a remote rural location”. Depending on your definition of “city” and “remote” I would agree with you.

Lakis

[shop jersey]

Looks like a Nightmare Before Christmas type of thing.

[Nike Soccer Cleats]

Now if you look at the history of the skyscraper, which is very short, and you actually look at how these things were serviced, it tells an interesting story. The first great skyscraper city, New York City, was originally basically a coal-based energy economy. And what you had at that time, in the period of let’s say between 1890 and 1920