Q: In a very short period of time Post Carbon Institute has spawned a rapidly-growing movement promoting global relocalization. How has this movement changed since it began and where it is heading?

JD: Just like Post Carbon Institute, the Relocalization Network grew out of the need of the day and of the decade. It started out as a group of the walking worried trying to come together to start doing things that would address the situation beyond just hand-wringing and spending very interested and engaged hours looking at the developing petroleum and natural gas supply situation.

People said, “This is serious. We’d better do something. We’d better start collaborating.” That was when the first outpost or local group was born. The Relocalization Network has since been undergoing extraordinary growth, to more than 110 groups in 11 or 12 countries in not much more than a year.

One of the things that we’re not is a social movement. I think we have to be much more than that. We’re trying to help reconstruct, reengineer, rebuild, and where possible reform the provision and protection system.

Global relocalization is an integrated broad-based idea of self-reliance and interdependence. It doesn’t particularly favor one over the other but looks at some kind of balance. You can’t just relocalize one village, because say you manage to do it well and pile up a lot of resources, then other people will want those resources and they may not be fussy about how they get them.

Q: How can local economies become revitalized in the face of economic globalization?

JD: The answer is to produce locally. It’s what’s been our tag line: reduce consumption, produce locally. It’s really as simple and as complicated as that.

The complication comes from the fact that in North America and in Britain we’ve largely given up producing anything at all, locally or otherwise. We don’t make most of the vital stuff. It’s all coming in on ships from a certain couple of places in the Far East. It’s very stupid, it’s very cheap. And of course it’s very expensive for China, whose environment and social system is being wrecked in the process. It’s not sustainable.

I think globalization is a disastrous mistake. Economics is really one of the roots of this evil. It’s a dreadful system. As soon as you start thinking in terms of economics instead of in terms of provisioning and protection, then I think you’re lost. Economics, I’m afraid to say, has to be described as a form of legalized rape. We can’t reform it. We just have to stop doing it, and find some other way of provisioning and protecting ourselves.

No other animal operates economics. All the other animals and creatures and life forms have been around up to 3½ billion years, and they don’t operate economics. They operate provisioning and protection. They have to provision themselves and protect themselves, otherwise they’re out of business, and we should learn from that.

I don’t particularly think about how to reform economics. I think about the reforming of the provisioning and protection system. That’s a much easier way of looking it. Then the question becomes: to what extent can we provide what is needed locally, and with what effort? Then, although the challenge is very serious and considerable, you can then start saying, “Well, we’ve obviously got to start providing lots more of our daily needs locally.” Food is the obvious one, but so are furniture and clothing and paper, possibly energy, and your teacups, your water, and so forth.

Q: Are the relocalization groups beginning to have significant local impact?

JD: Groups can do education, they can show films, they can give talks, have discussions and dialogues, put on seminars, interact with local education establishments, with local universities and community colleges and so forth.

They can actually become involved in provisioning, looking at growing more food locally, becoming part of Community Supported Agriculture, for instance. There are all kinds of ways that a local group can help with and indeed become a formative active part of food provisioning and other aspects of provisioning.

Clearly the relocalization groups have helped with awareness. They have been an important part of some of these adoptions of peak oil resolutions in San Francisco and elsewhere. That’s one thing that’s going beyond awareness and actually getting something done, a rhetorical strategy to get something laid onto the municipal books which can allow other municipal actors, including elected ones, to actually use this as a tool and a lever.

Q: Are municipalities beginning to respond to the challenges of the energy crisis and the need for relocalization?

JD: They’re all asking each other what to do. But there’s a rumbling going on, and we’ve responded to that. We are now synthesizing what may turn out to be the first municipal energy vulnerability guidebook for professionals, which will be published this fall, a first pass at what is the latest analysis and action by municipalities.

But unless you can start to have some kind of decent working relationship with the municipality, it’s extremely hard to see how you can make much serious infrastructural progress. If you want to start a car share, you really need help from the municipality, or at least compliance. If you want to start a local currency, it’s much better to have help from the municipality or at least compliance, the more the better.

With many of these things—putting in wind turbines, doing an energy farm, building greenhouses, and so forth—especially where you’ve got mixed use live-work plans, the zoning may be flat against you. If you need to change the laws, it’s generally going to be the municipality that will do that. If the mayor or councilors or your board of supervisors are really keen on this—and it seems increasingly that some of them are—it’ll be so much easier to change zoning and laws, what can and can’t be done, and also to protect agricultural and forest land and change the way that we’re doing building.

Q: Looking at the kind of future that we face on this planet and the challenges ahead, it all seems very daunting. Some days does it look impossible to you? What gives you hope? What inspires you?

JD: It looks a bit worrying at times. I recently re-read William Catton’s book on carrying capacity, Overshoot, and I had the pleasure of having breakfast with him recently. I hadn’t really felt it before, but I think I know what people feel like now when they first read about peak oil and they don’t see any way forward. That was a useful and unpleasant feeling, from what I regard as probably the single most important book I’ve read in a decade or two.

Although I was very heavily struck by Overshoot, nonetheless it was an inspiration in the sense that it is a reality-based book. Actually, I’m inspired by reality. If we look at the principles and practices of the way life forms have endured, I think we can learn a lot from that and I think that’s very inspiring.

Inspiration is important. The work of other people and their writings—both in history and now—do inspire me. But generally they tend to inspire me towards what we can get done, how we can roll our sleeves up and get practical.

I think friendship’s inspiring. I think loyalty and people doing things to help each other is inspiring. I think altruism is inspiring. I find caring to be inspiring. And I am brought almost to tears by stories of people caring for other creatures, humans and otherwise, and receiving little reward. We should reward people for caring for people and things.

I tend to avoid the hope word, because I think it gets us into the wrong way of thinking. I try to think about being practical. Once you start being practical and doing certain tasks, especially doing them socially and not feeling isolated, the body releases chemicals into the bloodstream which make you feel better. To play a short piece on the violin or the piano, especially with somebody else, causes a peculiar effect on you that lasts for some time, and it is a satisfaction. You’ve actually done something, and the body rewards you.

Part of this is discipline. Whether you’re a business or a family or anything else, you do need a certain amount of discipline that orients you and what you’re trying to do. If you’re self-disciplined, you say “Well, I’ve just got to do it.” If you’ve got a child to look after, you may not be feeling great but you’ve just got to look after that child. It’s part of your duty, and that’s another old-fashioned word which you don’t hear mentioned very often.