My personal view is that fuel supplies will soon evidently begin a permanent and inexorable decline accompanied by severe economic contraction. I don’t believe this to be a bad thing as we live in a finite world and ultimately will need to live within our means – the sooner this happens the easier it will be. In such an event, considering that very few people have voluntarily and preemptively adapted to a lower-energy future, there will likely be a time of disruptive transition – and the more people resist the transition and try to maintain their current high-energy lifestyle the harder and longer it will be. I think that food production will be come more organic (less available petro-chemical based fertilisers/pesticides), more local (less petrol driven long distance road freight and less personal mobility), more labour intensive (less use of tractors for sowing and reaping) – and I also think because of this by necessity people will need to move closer to food sources for work and for sustenance. If this line of thought is correct (and I’d love to hear alternate theories) and there is a general movement away from urban centres to rural areas then one of the things necessary to support this I imagine would be housing.

The reason I’m contemplating this is that I’m finally stepping back from high-energy living and will be trying to focus my time and efforts into areas of community benefit. One such thing could be inexpensive (both in resources and time to build) housing. Such housing would use local resources whether that be earth/sand/straw for adobe or local timber. I think it would be interesting to start a small grassroots organisation of volunteers that pioneer a model of collaborative building. And this doesn’t necessarily have to be the building of 3-bedroom, 200 square metre behemoths with their own large kitchens, dining, lounge, bathroom, toilet, laundry. I believe there’s room for more creative solutions to living environments where common resources are shared. For example maybe a small cluster of families could share a kitchen, laundry, bathroom block. This could be a major adjustment for a lot of people used to having an entire house of their own personal space with their own amenities that are not shared. However, such resource sharing would be a natural accompaniment to a situation where a group of families share both in daily work and in food that is harvested. Also a more labour intensive lifestyle would invite the possible time and labour saving approaches of both shared meal preparation and child/elder care.

In times of hardship I think that backyard and community gardening would increase significantly to try and meet people’s calorific requirements, but some people may opt to up-sticks and move closer to productive food growing regions.