At some point in the collapse, it will become necessary to nationalise all unproductive land and distribute it to those willing to produce food for local consumption (this is already happening in Venezuela and Brazil – and some other countries). Buying land is not itself a form of security – it is necessary to produce food on that land for it to be socially useful.

As an interim measure, trasnitionsists should push governments for a general legal permission to occupy derelict land and produce food on it in a sustainable way. Notices could be posted advising landlords that unless the land is brought into production within, say, 6 months then it will be legally occupied and planted with food crops. Repossession of occupied land would then be granted only after harvest of those crops. Voluntary release of occupied lands after 3-5 years of crop rotation could be written into the generalised legal permission to prevent the establishment of squatter rights under civil law and encourage proper soil stewardship.

We in Ireland have huge land resources around our cities which are now under public ownership as part of the NAMA process. These lands will not be developed and will form very useful green belt areas ideally located for local food production.

Government will need to be forced to grant generalised licences initially by high-profile illegal occupations, as happened in Brazil and Venezuela.

I think you’re talking about a convertible community http://www.appropedia.org/Convertible_community

I heard about this from the US recently. The farmer takes a month subscription off some city folks, say £10 a month off 100 people. He uses this 1000 quid to pay off mortgage, buy more land, build resources, grow vegetables. Then in the event of any sort of collapse, these people can go and live on the farm!!

I am wondering if we might be better off persuading a local farmer or land rich people to take our money (as if I had any!! ) to pay off any mortgage and therefore enable them to grow food without stress and therefore continue to feed us in the longer term? Co-ops sort of thing?

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Hey James, thank you for providing that download… well Nicole Foss has quite a lot to say in that 70 mins.

Lots of fast paced hard hitting info… I don’t know how to explain it, her talk didn’t ring fully true to me… It was like she was brushing over things that I’ve been thinking about a lot, both financial and in the energy sector, and she didn’t introduce any of the sense of uncertainty of how it will play out, when in fact much is in debate, even by the out-of-the-box thinkers who do this stuff day and night.

I just finished up a bit of reading this morn… and it reminded me of one analysis a year ago in the midst of the credit crisis. It was that the credit crisis would lead to a currency crisis as governments absorb debt as the lender of last resort (as has happened all this year). As governments continue to print money, and absorb debt, confidence will drop out of their respective currencies, so we can expect currency collapse. People will turn away from government printed money and go for hard forms of money (real things).

Under the currency collapse scenarios, her recommendations (on deflation) are quite wrong (selling your house, sit on cash).

BTW… The energy thing has been percolating in my mind since your last email so did some more research.

As it turns out only around 6TW of worldwide energy consumption is from oil (1 cubic mile = 55TW), so she’s overstated the energy problem by an order of magnitude. And roughly 75% of our energy is industrial/commercial/transport related so it goes to reason that these will be greatly tempered over the coming economic times. Will it extend our runway for renewables? Will we spend it wisely?

I ran some more numbers, just on the solar PV alone (because it’s my pet interest)… A bit like Moore’s law, PV production doubles every 2 years. If we have 10 years of an “oil runway” by 2020 we get 0.7TW of solar capacity… BUT what if we have 20 years?. I works out we’ll have 23TW (then divide by 3.5 because the sun doesn’t always shine).

(We currently use around 16-17TW, the sun supplies us with 89,000TW if we could harvest it all.)

I thought I’d leave on a sunny note

More clearly presented info on this here: http://is.gd/cUJdN (although they aren’t as worried about the future of the financial system as many of us are)