Reducing the global metal metabolism through anti-car, post-work degrowth
Metal trouble in Greenland; Power Metal: a missed opportunity for degrowth; car-free rural living; the present future; toward a utopian ethnography of the imagination
Metal Trouble In Greenland
Every mining operation is ecologically destructive and creates health risks for locals, but the senseless drive for ever more economic growth continues despite the harm. Citing concerns over radioactive dust contaminating air, drinking water, and sheep farms, the government of Greenland denied Energy Transfer Minerals' (ETM) permit for an open pit mine on the top of the mountains near the town of Narsaq. The mine's would-be targets are terbium and neodymium, metals used in wind turbines and electric cars.
ETM is invoking a retaliatory Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a set of investment rules created by the World Bank “to protect foreign businesses from state corruption and theft, but it is increasingly being used to sue governments that bring in environmental laws to meet climate targets or protect biodiversity and the environment”. The Guardian conducted an explosive investigation into 1,400 ISDS cases and found that $84 billion USD has been siphoned into fossil fuel corporations, squeezed from penalities imposed on governments trying to protect the planet from harmful projects. Wall Street lawyers agree to represent mining companies for free as long as they get a share of the project's profits.
Public bribery is used by corporations under normal conditions. Projects are promoted as creators of jobs and other economic benefits. Mining companies fund the construction of sports halls and parks. They make donations to art galleries, libraries, universities. They make sure everyone is aware of their good deeds so they can more easily obscure the real reason behind their operations: the accumulation of money in the executive's hoard. Local life quality declines as toxins build up in the surrounding environment. Statistics of rising cancer rates and pictures of deformed animals are hidden behind more public bribes. Umberto Eco writes in Censorship and Silence that if he was scandal-ridden, he would set off a bomb at a police station. The explosion would be on the front page of the newspaper. His scandal would be on a page few bother to read. Bombs aren't necessary. Oversized novelty cheques work just as well.
When public bribery fails: extort. ISDSs empower corporations armed with lawyers and a corrupt legal frameowkr to suck money from democratically elected governments in mob-like shakedowns: “take our poison or pay.” EMT claims to have sunk $100 million into the Narsaq project already and seek a compensation roughly ten times Greenland's annual budget – an infuriating figure based on estimated profits plus interest. Since Trump's election and his insane call to annex the island, ETM's stock value has increased.
I attended Dismantling Petrocultures the other day, a webinar organized by Entertainment + Culture Pavilion. A presentation by The Climate Propagandist used the metaphor of an abusive boyfriend/husband to describe how fossil fuel corporations promote their products. Society is seduced into consuming poisonous products and the advertisements tell us we can't live without them. You can watch the whole thing here. This same tactics are deployed by any industry that seeks public approval. Lately it's been the case for the green transition. Mining corporations claim we need to sacrifice ecosystems on the alter of transition, but the underlying reason is to maintain cash flows and social hierarchies. In the realization of a degrowth society with its downsized economic metabolism, transformation would be restorative not destructive.
EMT's ISDS exposes the corporation's disdain for consent. They want what they want and won't take no for an answer, like any abuser. Embedding consent into the mining approval process worldwide (as the World Bank was able to do with the ISDS) could salvage the green transition from its doomed trajectory. The relevant government would organize referendums that the applicant corporations pay for. The people would vote after a campaign period and approval would be granted if and only if the project receives 100% “yes” with 100% voter turnout. If a corporation wants approval, they'd better convince everyone. Perhaps it would trigger a return to the commons.
Power Metal: A Missed Opportunity to Bring Degrowth Into the Global Critical Metals Debate
Power Metal: The Race For the Resources That Will Shape the Future by Vince Beiser is a look at the devastating ecological and social conditions that make our everyday electronics possible. For anyone engaged in this topic, it's likely nothing new. The strength of the book is that it brings together stories spanning the globe, linked by our seemingly endless appetite for metals. From child miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo risking their lives ripping cobalt out of the ground to gangs in South Africa raiding power stations and electric lines for copper, destabilizing the country's power grid and murdering unarmed security workers.
In the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth, lithium mines have an unquenchable thirst for water and the local people are worried about the future of the land that their ways of life depend upon. In Siberia, the world's largest nickel mine is killing the Boreal forest. American investors search for new schemes to increase their wealth – like seabed mining that risk deep ocean ecosystems only recently discovered in a rush to document it all before it's destroyed.
Flipflop sandalled recyclers in Nigeria sift through mountains of garbage imported from Europe, the USA, and Canada searching for electronics containing valuable metals. They smash cellphones open with rocks, rip out the insides, and exchange their findings for cash. They melt plastics and metals in open pits and inhale toxic fumes. Toxins leech into the ground water. The local people become sick. Beiser follows a precarious and self-described scrapper around Vancouver picking through garbage containers in search of precious metals to sell as scrap, like the Nigerian recyclers. All of this is done to meet the global demand for metals.
One of the reoccurring messages in Power Metal is a call for more mining, recycling, and manufacturing to America, to weaken China’s control over the market. Beiser admits environmental movements have pushed mining out of the country, but suggests that it is exactly this pressure that has forced the industry to adopt more environmentally friendly practices. That’s what the industry want people to believe anyway.
The book uncritically argues that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will improve the environmental standard of mining. Startups claim they will be able to locate metal deposits using AI to analyse information from known metal deposits. Beiser seems a bit sceptical of AI's capacity here. For a more critical look at AI see Feeding The Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I. by Callum Cant, James Muldoon, Mark Graham. Here two of the authors give a presentation about the book.
Feeding The Machine isn't explicitly anti-AI. The authors illuminate the working conditions of people who make AI possible, such as low wage data annotators living in informal settlements in Kenya, trapped in the mind-numbingly repetitive job of clicking on images for ten hour days to programme AI's image recognition ability. These workers along with Amazon warehouse workers are increasingly subjected to AI surveillance designed to maximize productivity. The authors warn that this technology will soon be rolled out in every workplace. Everyone will be under the watchful eye of AI. To fight for better working conditions across the globe, Cant, Muldoon, and Graham call for a global worker's movement uniting engineers in Silicon Valley and London with annotators in Kenya and Philippines, Amazon warehouse workers, data centre workers, and artists. Power Metal and Feeding the Machine are complimentary books as AI is an expanding technology that demands ever more metals and Feeding the Machine neglected the working conditions of miners that enable AI.
Feeding The Machine doesn't discuss degrowth and neither does Power Metal. Beiser endorses degrowth practices, like the right to repair, the abolition of built-in obsolescence, and consumption reduction. There is no explicit section in Power Metal dedicated to ideology, but despite a few hints of degrowth, Beiser comes across as a green capitalist. That doesn't mean the book isn't worth reading. For a thorough discussion of degrowth, see The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan. I will write about this book later.
The Possibilities of Car-free Rural Living
In Power Metal, Beiser singles out electric cars as a significant driver behind metal demand. After a convincing argument against cars, Beiser capitulates and betrays the anti-car proverb: in the denouncement of cars don't advocate for them. I'm sure this was an editorial decision or an attempt to strike a balanced appeal to the well-motored public.
Beiser's weakness: he is a car owner. He transitioned from being a two car household in LA to a one car household in Vancouver. He owns a car because it’s the only way he can imagine getting groceries for his family of four. He muses that maybe an electric cargo bike would work instead. A friend of mine is a food stylist in Vancouver. She hauls food and equipment to and from the studio on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day, all without a car. She walks and she brings things on the bus. If you don't have a car, you make it work. Groceries for a family of four? Go together, fill everyone's backpacks. Humans have lived without cars for our entire history with the exception of the last few decades. We can live without cars again.
Beiser wrongfully claims it's necessary to own a car in suburban and rural area. Regional public transportation networks and improved biking and walking conditions in the countryside will reduce the number of cars in urban areas. This problem is often overlooked by urbanist.
In Germany, license plate numbers contain an abbreviation for the region where the car is registered. OL for Oldenburg, for example, though OL accounts for the greater Oldenburg region as well. When I'm out and about in Oldenburg I see that many license plate numbers contain WST for Westerstede or CLP for Cloppenburg, the larger rural regions surrounding Oldenburg. This is probably true for most cities. People from the surrounding areas drive to cities to shop, run errands, and work. I read on a small note at the Futurium in Berlin that the average German drives an outrageous 60 kilometres per day. Seeing the congestion and smelling the diesel fumes in the air, I don't doubt it for a second. The rural to urban car commuter is probably a bigger source of emissions than inner-city motorists.
I'm often visiting Sandhatten, a village in the OL area outside of Oldenburg. There are three main ways to get to Sandhatten from Oldenburg without a car. One is to bike (or walk) along the Hunteweg, a scenic 200 kilometre trail along the entire length of the Hunte River over farmland and through forests. It's about 20 kilometres to Sandhatten from Oldenburg this way with little interference from cars.
Another option is to take the bus to Kirchhatten, a town two kilometres from Sandhatten. Segregated walking/biking paths and farm roads connect Kirchhatten and Sandhatten. A bus used to run through Sandhatten from Kirchhatten, but that route was cancelled. My wife and I were usually the only people on it. We used to be able to take a train to Sandkrug (another town) and that same bus to Sandhatten. The train still runs, but not the bus.
I've biked the Hunteweg to Sandhatten, but I usually take the bus to Kirchhatten and walk the two kilometres. It's a pleasant walk away away from the busy Sandhatter Straße, but even that’s not too bad. The third option is to take the train from Oldenburg to Huntlosen. Huntlosen’s station is about six kilometres west of Sandhatten and there is no regular bus. As from Kirchhatten, a walking/biking path connects Huntlosen to Sandhatten, but six kilometres is more suitable for a bicycle.
All three of these routes take more time than driving a car directly, provided there are no traffic jams. There isn’t much of a time difference for a person traveling from Oldenburg to Kirchhatten or Huntlosen by car or by public transit. It’s the extra two or six kilometres after the bus or train that increase travel time.
Work creates time scarcity and we turn toward speedy technologies to make up lost time. The rapid pace of modernity has done a number on our patience. Taking public transit means traveling on the system’s schedule and being early for everything. Few people want to leave home 20 minutes earlier for the job that they hate, but cars don't erase space and time either. It's only slightly more convenient to walk to a car parked somewhere nearby than it is to walk to a bus stop.
The slowdown of society and reduction of working hours are crucial challenges for the realization of a degrowth society. Alternative values emerge from slowing down that should be emphasized by degrowth advocacy. A 20 kilometre bike ride from Oldenburg to Sandhatten is worthwhile because it's travel without exhaust emissions, a good amount of exercise, and an interaction with the landscape not possible in a car or on the bus. If people continue to be overworked, there'll be no time to slow down and benefits from slow living.
Car-free rural living is entirely possible with an intentional approach to rural development such as bicycle/walking paths; rural grocery stores; community self-sufficiency (such as subsistence gardens); and decent access to well functioning and affordable (or free) public transportation.
A few years before we got married my wife lived with her parents in the middle of nowhere, about 30 kilometres north of Brandon in Canada. One time I biked out to visit her and took the dirt machinery roads farmers use to access their fields. At some point the road disappeared, absorbed by farmers sewing every inch of available land. I backtracked to the gravel shoulder of Highway 10 – two lanes of steady 100 km/h traffic – no place for a cyclist.
Every year people bike across Canada at their own peril, mostly along the Number One Highway. In 2014, Torontonian Graeme Loader was killed two kilometres outside of Brandon, struck by an SUV on Highway 1A. His journey was raising money for the World Wildlife Fund and ended in an avoidable tragedy. Safety is a reason people choose to drive cars, but it's a catch 22. Cars make roads unsafe. There needs to be more car-free cross country routes.
Machinery roads are unused most of the time and could be converted into a shared farm machinery/bicycle trail network. This doesn't mean pavement. Any pavement would be quickly destroyed by tractors and other heavy implements. The routes just need some official recognition under a coherent network with signs that provide directions, like Minnedosa 12 kilometres this way, Rapid City 15 kilometres that way. The main trail could stretch from Turtle Mountain/William Lake Province Park to Riding Mountain National Park – a distance comparable to the Hunteweg – and branch out like a tree to the east and west. The network could be dotted with picnics areas and cafés equipped with medical supplies, bicycle mechanics, spare parts, water bottle fill stations, and snacks. It would make bicycling in these sparsely populated areas possible, safe, and enjoyable; and double as a wildlife corridor, create windbreaks for fields, reduce soil erosion, and improve water retention.
In addition to an extensive rural bicycle trail network, buses running along secondary highways, like Highway Ten, could have stops at every major intersecting road. That would at least give people the option to carpool, walk, or bike to their highway stop and take the bus the rest of the way. My in-laws could bike the four kilometres to the highway, lock up their bikes, and catch a bus to Brandon or Minnedosa, wherever they want to go.
More people living in rural areas would drive less if given the option. If anything, the network would be a tourist attraction or enable bicycle camping pilgrimages to Riding Mountain, Spruce Woods, and Turtle Mountain/William Lake. It should be possible to live without a car in rural areas. Just as it is in urban areas, the infrastructure has to support the behaviour.
We're Living In The Future Already
In the end of Power Metal Beiser sketches out his vision for the future, clearly inspired by a vacation in Amsterdam. A self-interested homo economicus reluctantly goes to work riding an ebike to catch a train. She works for a recycling company, a job she applied for because it paid more than her previous job. She has a meeting with Nigerian metal recycling entrepreneur, Tijjani Abubakar. I believe the chapter about Abubakar is the same as this Wired article. Beiser's vision shows the societal transformation that has taken place. The protagonist doesn't have a car. She lives in an apartment recently built on the site of a gas station. Spaces that were once parking lots are now parks and apartments. There is a clothing repair shop on the main floor. She rides an ebike.
I'm disappointed Beiser didn't place a bus or tram stop every 200 metres in his imagined city. An inner-city rail system should not be so remote that a person needs an ebike to get there. Ebikes still contain critical metals, albeit fewer than cars. Beiser compares the metallic metabolism of an ebike with electric hummers. One ehummer battery requires the same amount of critical metals as twenty ebikes, but an ebike transports only one passenger. An ehummer has five seats, though four of them are probably empty most of the time. Ebike owners might purchase multiple batteries, especially if they use their ebike often. Ehummers are certainly on the bigger side compared with other cars, which makes for a more dramatic comparison. A family of four with one electric car and four ebikes has a lower impact than a family of ehummer owners, but a family of four that walks or bike everywhere has an even lower impact. Why Beiser's character couldn't ride a regular bike or walk? In the end it reads like an ebike advertisement.
Beiser proposes taxes and additional costs for car owners as ways of nudging them out of car ownership. Well to do drivers will likely pay the difference, like his character's suburban brother. Politicians have yet to implement lasting effective measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “Axe the [carbon] tax” is a conservative rallying cry in Canada that appears to have unified people against Justin Trudeau's Liberal environmental measures. I won’t mention the USA. This anti-environment momentum might have been part of what led to Trudeau's resignation as prime minister. There was a dip in greenhouse gas emissions when the carbon tax was first introduced, but it's been undermined by conservative provincial reimbursement schemes that return money to taxpayers instead of funding projects that will reduce emissions. Something has to change in our collective consciousness before people will accept that our behaviours need to change. Only then will governments be able to successfully implement reduction schemes. So campaigns must focus on convincing people from the ground up.
Work and other daily activities can be within walking distance – and this is more desirable than the long daily commute involving multiple modes of transportation. Work itself should be reconsidered. Kathi Weeks calls for a basic income and shorter working hours in The Problem with Work: Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek advocate for the collectivization of housework as a means of sharing reproductive labour in equitable ways in After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. These authors also criticize time saving technologies as work reduction only for the well-heeled. Lower wage earners pick up the slack. The rise of Uber Eats and other delivery services, save the orderer from making a meal and leaving the house, but this is only made possible by shifting the weight of the work onto gig delivery workers.
Bicycles wear out over time. Chains needs to be cleaned and lubricated to prevent rust. Tires occasionally need air and sometimes get holes. With the right tools, you can do all of this yourself. Ebikes have electronic components that require additional steps in the supply chain and more technical expertise to repair. Batteries need to be cared for, brought inside to charge, electricity needs to be produced, and eventually they will need to be replaced and recycled. All of this implies more work and additional supply chains that are probably not experienced by the average ebiker, beyond bringing the battery indoors to charge and disposing of it when it’s finished. Emancipatory efforts must aim to reduce labour all along every supply chain, not only for those who have money.
Commuter trains, like the one in Beiser's vision, already exists. I lived in the town of Veendam (Netherlands) while attending Groningen University. I biked about two kilometres to the Veendam station and rode the train for about 40 minutes. I caught a bus in Groningen and rode it for another 20 minutes before reaching Zernike campus in the north of the city. It was a long commute for an hour and a half lecture, with wait times at every exchange. I’m happy to ride the train and bus over a car, but I would have preferred it if I only had to ride my bike two or three kilometres to university. I'm curious how others experience their commutes when they include bike, train, and bus or just two of these. Why couldn't Beiser have made his character work a few blocks down from where she lived? Why didn't he present a kind of post-work future? Working less would certainly reduce the demand for metals.
Before Veendam, I lived in Oldenburg and commuted to Bremen. I got up at 5:45 AM, ate what I could of breakfast, biked about four kilometres to the station, rode the train for 40 minutes. I had another bike locked up outside Bremen Central Station. I rode it another four kilometres on the final leg to work. It was sometimes miserable racing against the wind and clock in Bremen. The train was often a few minutes late and I had to make up time at work for being late. I was tired from lack of sleep and my bike wasn't in great shape either. The gear wires were ripped out and the fenders were smashed up from being left at the train station. My job was physical. I was active and on my feet for eight hours, minus a 30 minute lunch break, but I was happy to get on my bike when the shift was done. I was no longer pressured to work fast or monitored by managers. I was like Sisyphus coming down the mountain. I flew past jammed up car traffic like a breeze, unfortunately breathing in plumes of their exhaust. If I was quick enough I could catch the fast train and be home earlier. That happened only a few times, when it was late. I'd often fall asleep on the train and wake up with some old man smiling at me.
There wasn't a day that I looked forward to going to that job. I didn't feel that the work had any purpose beyond helping my employer get richer so he could live by his own schedule and buy more bitcoin or whatever business bros do with their money. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory David Graeber talks about the spiritual violence of pointless work. Not that this was a bullshit job. It was a pointless shit job, which is maybe even worse. It ate away at my limited time on Earth and isolated me from my wife and the world. Some days I didn't see the sun at all.
Jobs and the economy need to be reconsidered, so that we are able to choose what we do with our time without the penalties imposed by inhumane bureaucracies and the threat of being forced to beg for small change while living on the streets. Transportation emissions could be reduced significantly if we adopted slower and more human paces of living without the pressures of ever faster production demands and mindless economic growth. Public and active transportation would be convivial and in the service of people rather than acting as conveyer belts feeding the growth machine.
A Car-Free Post-Work Anarchist Degrowth Scenario: Toward a Utopian Enthnography of the Imagination
Scenarios help illustrate possible alternative futures, like the one Beiser authored at the end of Power Metal. Beiser's vision is a green capitalist future. Below I illustrate a possible car-free post-work anarchist degrowth future, inspired in part by Kropotkin's vision for society sketched out in The Conquest Of Bread.
Kathy1 wakes up with the morning sun shining through her bedroom window. Her partner is already gone and took their nine year to school. He teaches a few morning classes at a school down the street and spends the rest of the day helping out around the neighbourhood. Kathy is trained as a nurse, but admissions to the hospital have been in sharp decline. She'll be there if she's needed, but she hasn't been needed for a while and she's happy about that for a few reasons.
She sits up in bed and stretches a little. Her apartment is two bedrooms with a small kitchen and bathroom. Since they never use the kitchen, they've converted it into a kind of multi-purpose work space. The sink is nice to have for drinking water. The bedrooms are big enough for a desk and some chairs, but Kathy prefers to go to the library down the street when she wants to be some place completely quiet. The library has private rooms, plenty of books, and some comfortable chairs. If she wants to be loud and socialize, practically every other space is made for that.
She gets herself ready for the day and heads down the stairs to the communal dining hall and kitchen on the main floor. “Well-well, look who decided to finally get out of bed,” a neighbour teases Kathy. Four people aged twenty-something to sixty-something are seated at one of the tables in the hall and greet Kathy with a round of good mornings. These four plus Kathy manage a two acre section of the neighbourhood organic vegetable garden (NOVG) that feed the community. There are usually eight, but three are busy with something else for the time being.
Kathy is always the last to join, but the others are in no rush either. They've already eaten breakfast and cleaned up. They like to talk with one another and joke around. There is a bowl of porridge with apples, bilberries, and a hazelnut butter drizzled on top for Kathy. All of these ingredients were grown locally. The apples are from the courtyard garden, grown last year and stored in the cold root cellar (also in the courtyard). The courtyard garden has herbs and greens for everyday eating. Not every courtyard in the neighbourhood has a vegetable garden, but the members of this housing cooperative decided they could never grow enough food. There are plenty of parks, streets, and other places for the kids to play in. Kids can play in the gardens too.
Not everyone in this garden management group lives in the same building as Kathy. They came together because of shared ideals and complementary personalities. They all have an interest in growing food and manage a larger forest restoration project on an abandoned agro-industrial field outside the city. That's where the bilberries came from, frozen from last year.
Kathy eats her porridge and listens to the discussion. She knows most of today's plans made here won't matter. We'll see what needs to be done when we get to the garden, she thinks. They did so much these past few weeks that there isn't much to do today. A little weeding perhaps. It hasn't rained in weeks, but the rainwater collection storage system is holding. They covered bare soil with straw to help retain moisture, but they still might have to water.
Everyone agrees to work in the garden first and then go to the forest, likely in the afternoon. Kathy finishes her porridge and washes her bowl.
It's about 8:30 AM. The streets have an air of conviviality. People of all ages are gathered on street, seated on benches and stoops. They talk, laugh, and eat. Groups of school children work on projects. A few tend flower gardens lining the streets. The flowers buzz with bees.
The NOVG is only 300 metres from Kathy's apartment. The garden is lush despite the dry spell. Almost every known edible plant that grows in this climate can be found here. Vegetables for everyday use are most abundant. A chicken coup and yard with fruit trees is situated at the edge of the garden boundary. A couple dozen hens root for grub. The gardens are encircled by irrigation canals kept oxygenated by a combination of solar power, gravity pumps, and oxygenating plants like hornwort.
The group gets to work adjusting plant supports to accommodate new growth. There are a few early raspberries, strawberries, ripe cucumbers, snap peas, and other greens that need to be harvested. They gather these and place them into collective storage. They set the ones that need to be eaten aside for lunch. This takes all morning.
They brought some bread, homemade mayonnaise, hummus, and Dijon mustard, and boiled eggs to the garden. They make sandwiches and eat the vegetables from the garden. They talk lightly or admire the garden and watch the clouds in the sky. Some are fluffy and white. Dark clouds rise on the horizon.
After lunch they ride shared bikes out to the forest. They take the old four lane highway. The aging asphalt cracking to pieces from lack of upkeep. It's going to be a massive project to convert this into a human-scale trail, Kathy thinks. Trees could block the hot sun and wind, and it would be a cosier if it were narrower and maybe add some curves. All along the decaying highway are ecosystem restoration projects, ecological agriculture, or grazing animals in the early stages of development.
Kathy's group's forest isn't much of a forest yet – a few acres of saplings and juvenile trees. The fast growing boxelders are nearly two metres (6.5 feet) high. Deer have been eating the oak saplings. “We need to plant more and protect them until they're bigger,” one of them says. They've planted cottonwood, white birch, wild plum, and hackberries; a section of spruces and bilberries; red and black currants, saskatoon, and gooseberries; and ferns and other low lying forest plants. “What other berries could we plant in here?” someone asks pointing to an open grassy area. “I think we should leave as it is,” another says.
Here it's dry too. “Hopefully those dark clouds coming over the horizon will bring some rain,” Kathy says and thinks but only after they get back. The forest has a reedy, willowy marsh and a boardwalk leading out to the middle. The group built a shack to store watering cans, shovels, and other tools. Kathy takes a few watering cans and dunks them into the water at the end of the boardwalk – even if it rains, it won't hurt the smallest saplings to get a little extra in this dry weather. Mallards, northern shovelers, and buffleheads beat their wings on the water and take flight. Everyone turns to look at the sound.
After sprinkling the saplings with water, there isn't much more to do here today. Kathy imagines what this place will look like five years from now, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now. I hope it won't be destroyed, she thinks.
When everyone all are satisfied, they mount their bikes and head back to their neighbourhood along the crumbling highway. It starts to rain and they begin pedalling faster, laughing – thankful that they won't have to water later.
It's only the middle of the afternoon when they get back. Everyone disperses to dry off, then return to the common spaces to socialize or head off to some work space. Some are in music groups, some are visual artists, craftworkers, some make clothing, some fix or make electronics or had some cleaning to do. They make pottery or do metallurgy. They build furniture, salvage and repair. Some give lectures, some attend lectures. Some stay in their apartments and relax with a cup of tea. Some head back to the gardens. All activities are done either because they are needed or wanted. No one does anything that benefits a small group of people at the expense of the others.
Supper is a community affair organized by meal groups that rotate responsibilities. Kathy belongs to one of these groups, but it's not their turn tonight. Every night is a feast and party with live music, theatrical performances, readings, and discussions. When it comes time to eat, Kathy sits at a table with her partner, daughter, and a few neighbours. They are planning to take the train to a different city tomorrow just to see what they are doing over there. It's a good time of year to do something like this. A few neighbours want to join. They want to catch the early train so they will be there before 9 AM. “Alright,” Kathy chides. “I'll go to bed early.” They finish eating and a band starts to play.
This scenario provides a glimpse into the day in a life in a possible car-free post-work degrowth anarchist future. Exploring imagined lives for multiple characters in an ethnography of the imagination would augment a fuller picture of this utopian society. How does Kathy's partner spend his day? How about their daughter? An elderly individual? Someone who doesn't garden? A multi-author collaboration developing additional characters would bring more diverse perspectives into the fold – something for later perhaps. I left out details like what kind of toilets are used (compost toilets), how buildings are heated and powered (definitely not fossil fuels or nuclear), and global relations. Peace and stability needs friendly worldwide cooperation, the dismantling of hierarchies, and a deep valuation of ecosystems. These are topics for another time.
Named after Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem With Work, though this isn't supposed to resemble the real person in any way.