Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, April 3, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group

“Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.”

Think about the emergencies roiling worldwide and the words of the late economist E.F. Schumacher ring truer than ever.

We’ve been reminded that the huge technology, mass capital systems Schumacher inveighed against can come unglued. Witness, after years of assurances they’d never happen, Japan’s nuclear power plant emergency — following by a few months the disastrous discharge from an oil well deep under the Gulf of Mexico. And recall that the global fiscal crisis was triggered by a financial industry that claimed it was preserving our investments.

“Low-probability, high-impact events,” Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein notes, have plagued “human experience since Noah and the flood.”

But Schumacher saw how our overreach, constantly embracing mega-systems rather than smaller and more flexible ones, could well exacerbate global disaster risks. One of his prime targets, in fact, was nuclear fission and its perils.

Alive today (he died in 1977), Schumacher would doubtless be stressing climate change too. Although a gruesome competitor is now heaving into view: the possibility that food shortages could trigger economic turmoil, wars, even waves of death by starvation.

World food prices are spiking for the second time in three years, exacerbated this time by floods in Australia and last summer’s blistering drought in Russia. Food demand is certain to continue a rapid rise as world population soars from today’s 6.9 billion to an estimated 9.5 billion in 2050. Climate change, eroding topsoil and declining water tables — plus major diversion of croplands to biofuel production — pose real threats.

Plus, newly-affluent nations are shifting to meats and other protein-rich foods, requiring dramatically expanded grain crops to feed the livestock.

Energy to water, climate to food — no one has easy answers to this century’s pressing challenges. But one Schumacher prescription — decentralization, “smallness within bigness” — seems wiser than ever. And it fits best the pockets of population where most of the world lives: cities and their metropolitan regions.

Take food first. Today’s excessive reliance on commodity shipments, most often by fossil-fueled container ships, can be tempered by conscious metropolitan and city policies to encourage local and regional food production. The result is not just greener, fresher food, but an insurance policy against global emergencies that threaten supplies.

Closely related: water systems. The challenge, on the supply side, is to identify alternative fresh water supply sources in the event of a natural (or terrorist-sparked) disaster. Then, to avert dangerous flooding conditions, smart cities and regions need to move development away from flood plains, onto higher ground wherever they can. They can also start, as Philadelphia has pioneered, wide areas of swales, permeable pavement and other steps to absorb storm water before it reaches stormwater pipe systems that are very costly to build — and sometimes susceptible to overflow — as “100 year floods” become commonplace.

Energy systems come next. We depend mostly on coal, nuclear, and oil-fueled power plants that (1.) are protected federally against their disaster liabilities — meaning the taxpayer is the insurer of last resort — and (2.) lose a major part of their energy output along extended distribution lines. A promising alternative: neighborhood- or campus-based “cogeneration” plants. Producing electricity and steam simultaneously, their “bang for the BTU” is sensationally higher. Often natural-gas powered, they’re good targets too for solar and wind power. Plus, they’re a big buffer against regional power failures.

Thinking through these Schumacher-like themes, I decided to test them on my friend Scott Bernstein, founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago. He supported the decentralization advantage but underscored another: innovation.

“The principle,” Bernstein said, “is that a larger number of smaller interventions is a better solution than a smaller number of large ones. Smaller units mean less risk, less dependence on single solutions, less peril of technological lock-in like utilities buying the same nuclear plants. Plus, standard, legacy solutions crowd out good innovations.”

Cities and regions, in this view, work best if they’re seen as points of talent, creativity and production — and not simply as targets to be sold goods and services by some outside corporation.

Our cities and regions aren’t short on water, Bernstein suggests, if they use it with much higher efficiency. Innovation can also yield major dividends applied to advance localized (and “greener”) energy systems, to interlocking transportation systems (roadways, busways, subways, streetcars, even ferries), and to workplaces focused in downtowns and transit-accessible town nodes instead of suburban office parks.

Plus, we can be less dependent on distant, interruptable food chains if we start spotting locations in or near a city region appropriate for growing essential crops.

Rather than “bigger is better,” Schumacher advocated “lots of small, autonomous units,” committed to “the indivisibility of place and also of ecology.”

Critics will reply, fairly: we do need some big systems– for air traffic control, Internet and globally connected phone systems. Still, starting locally never sounded better.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.