joshua wilson's List: Viable Communities

• The vast majority of people who become aware of the peak oil issue soon begin to consider the question of what type and size of community they want to be part of beyond peak oil, which communities will be the most sustainable, self-sufficient, self-reliant and survivable in the future.
• For most people pondering community survivability their thoughts turn to how to make the community in which they live, whether village or city, workable as energy resources decline.
• The large cities of more than a million population with which we have become so familiar in our lifetime simply did not exist before the fossil-fuel era for the simple reason that they were not sustainable without the availability of a tremendous amount of energy
• the life of all communities, especially villages, and the majority of people who lived in them largely revolved around agriculture with villagers working the fields that surrounded the village.
• The serfs paid for their right of land possession and occupancy with labour for the lord of the estate (generally three days a week) and with taxes paid to the lord, often in the form of a specified proportion of what they produced on the land.
• The factors and forces that originally led to the development of communities and stood in the way of them growing beyond a limited size are the same forces that will affect ongoing survivability of communities throughout the world during the global decline of fossil fuel reserves and thereafter.
• The reality that caused these earlier communities and societies to be largely focused on agriculture and the land on which it was practiced is the same reality that will beset us as the world's fossil-fuel supplies disappear.
• The only source of input to this planet is the steady flow of energy that we receive from our sun. Prior to the invention of the windmill and the solar cell, the primary effective means of converting that incoming solar energy into useable form was through plant photosynthesis, the basis of support for all life on this planet.
• nuclear energy, tidal energy, hydro-electricity, geo-thermal energy
• The long-term potential for continued use of these energy sources, however, depends on the long-term survival of an organized society and viable community structures through which to maintain these energy infrastructures.
  
• Though electricity is a key part of the ability for our modern world to function, the most important aspect of energy in our world is that of various transportation fuels and other products such as fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels.
• If food production all occurs outside our cities, as it does for most cities around the world today, then the ability to deliver those foods into a city to feed millions of people and the ability to return waste nutrients to the land on which the food is grown in order to maintain the fertility of that land, will be severely hampered if not impossible.
• The necessary substitute of human and animal power for the energy derived from fossil fuels in the production of that food will severely impact the ability and the desire of those working the land to put in the vastly greater quantity of effort needed to produce sufficient surplus food to feed the huge populations of large cities.
• Essentially that will predicated on the ability of each community to produce most, if not all, of its own food through the labour and effort of its own people.
• It suggests that the primary orientation of any community is going to have to production of the food needed by that community.
• I believe networks of smaller communities, possibly with each community also specializing in tradeable goods such as tools and household articles, with these communities centered on a common bio-region, will probably become the predominant societal structure over time.
• I adamantly believe that we must have fully self-reliant communities capable of producing small tradeable surpluses for trading within the local bio-region

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• They've squeezed into a 154-square-foot home that looks more like a kid's playhouse than their previous 1,800-square-foot home.
• says it's exhilarating to no longer feel compelled to keep up with the Joneses. "There's a tremendous burden that's off your shoulders," she says. "Small is OK, and it might even be better."
• (a three-bedroom place) has 774 square feet.

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