The Ecotechnic Future by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2010-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

the specialization trap

The reinvention of the household economy will also be a stark necessity as the age of abundance capitalism gives way to later seres in the successional process of the future. The centralized production and distribution of goods that defines the industrial economy is vulnerable to breakdown, and not only because it uses extravagant amounts of fossil fuel energy. An example from the past shows where the dangers lie.10

In the Roman Empire, ceramics were a central technology and the Roman pottery industry was huge, capable and highly centralized, churning out tableware, storage vessels, roof tiles and other goods in such quantities that archeologists across Roman Europe struggle to cope with the fragments today. The pottery works at La Graufesenque in southern Gaul, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout the western empire and beyond it. Ceramics bearing the La Graufesenque stamp have been found in Denmark and eastern Germany, hundreds of miles past the Roman frontiers. Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots and watertight roof tiles.

All this ended when Rome fell. When archeologists opened the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, the pottery they found told a stark tale of technological collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What’s more, most of it had to be imported because the potter’s wheel dropped entirely out of use in Britain–one of many technologies lost in a cascading collapse that took the island down to levels of impoverishment more extreme than anything since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before. Cooking vessels, food containers and roofing that keeps out the rain are basic to any form of settled life. An agrarian society that cannot produce them is impoverished by any definition; an agrarian society that had the ability to produce them, and then loses that ability, has undergone an appalling decline.

What makes this example relevant to the present is that the post-Roman collapse had its roots in the sophistication and specialization that made the Roman economy so efficient. Huge pottery factories like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out quality goods in volume, could make a profit only by marketing their wares across much of a continent, using far-flung networks of transport and exchange to get products to consumers who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend. The Roman world was rich and stable enough to support such networks — but the post-Roman world was not.

The political implosion of the Roman Empire thus turned an economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As transport and exchange networks came apart, the Roman economy went down with it, and that economy had relied on centralized production and specialized labor for so long that no one knew how to replace it with local resources.

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