Reverse logistics involves recovering and redistributing material resources from consumer supply chains. That is usually a good thing to do, but considering how we power the recovery systems leads to much bigger questions.
Stranded, fossil-energy-dependent infrastructure assets (like all built-up suburban and CBD centers in so-called “australia”, and like most of the so-called “developed” world) have not only used up their borrowed time, but by continuing to function as a drain on global ecological resources, are rapidly using up other people’s time too. This is without the consent or even in many cases the knowledge of those who will come after us and try to clean up our mess.
Based on burning geological carbon and transferring those carbon stocks to the atmosphere, we are around 200+ years behind payments on accumulated carbon debt. For some reason though, we keep borrowing and spending, without even making the interest payments, let along paying down the principal. Collectively we continue to:
- Ship food vast distances away from where it is grown
- Promote large-scale centralised mass-consumption
- Commute daily in ridiculously inefficient personal vehicles
- Drive hundreds of kilometers every weekend for recreation
- Push to convert human and habitat spaces to car storage
- Boast about expanding 8-lane freeways to 12-lanes
- Commit public money to locking in fossil transport for generations
- Undertake discretionary air travel for exploitative tourism
- Make ongoing plans to expand airport and ocean freight capacity
- Push tons of barely used material resource into fresh waste pits
- Demand concrete and tarseal landscapes to support these failures
All these actions not only release insane, irrecoverable amounts of CO2 into an already massively polluted atmosphere, they also continue to built structural lock-in, driving us towards an accelerating global collapse of food and social systems, and leading to increased resource conflict, population displacement, refugee flows and ultimately, state terror campaigns against civilians. A world without genocide and ethnic cleansing isn’t possible if we keep feeding the death machines.
To prepare for the impending collapse, cities are planning vast weapons complexes, under the guise of “defence”, while continuing the drive the very problems they then seek to address with unimaginable violence. Murdering vulnerable people (or simply profiting off the vulnerable murdering each other) isn’t defence, it is indefensible.
How do we move past this nightmare scenario? We can shit towards understanding energy use and the role we play in creating demand for oil, gas, coal, concrete, and plastics within our global cultural and economic networks.
As one of the wealthiest societies ever to have existed, we can focus on what is possible, and not rely on flimsy excuses around why this ever expanding footprint of destruction is somehow inevitable. We can adjust our choices to drive systemic change. We can build places the wealthy (that’s us) don’t need to escape from, that we can enjoy just being in. That support living.
One key factor is acknowledging that distance matters. Moving materials long distances takes energy. When we use energy sources that minimise oil, coal and mining inputs, we soon grasp that using what we already have around us is critical. At their most simple, bioenergetic inputs (muscle power) are not unlimited, and can impose a very tangible personal cost. However, if we allow for suitable conditions we can unlock vastly more scalable ecological power sources, that hold the energy to solve many of the problems we need to address.
A flow on effect of that realisation is that we are surrounded by material wealth that used only for the briefest fraction of time before being discarded. Building social structures to preserve manufactured value not only reduces demand for new resources, but captures and keep the tools we already have available as long-term stores of human potential and promise.
That’s one of the reasons we say: “to compost, is to care”.
R.E.A.L. services are a direct intervention in our ways of maintaining basic living standards, that attempts to take all those factors and more into account when supporting the needs of the community. In as much as our existing built environment is not fit-for-purpose, when you do something:
- Do it with what we already have available
- Do it as close to the source as possible
- Do it in ways that preserves existing complexity
In a world of enforced suicidal delusion, just try to keep it R.E.A.L.
