Island in the Sea of Time

Book: Island in the Sea of Time. S.M. Stirling.

Volume 1 of the Nantucket trilogy.

Description

Kevin Carson:

" It's the first volume of his Nantucket trilogy, which begins with an unexplained “Event”: the transportation of the entire island of Nantucket, with all its present-day buildings and inhabitants, to the world of 1250 BC. The series recounts Nantucket's attempts to survive in the late Bronze Age—among other things, rebuilding a local industrial economy given only the on-island resources that made the transition, and the resources that can be obtained by trade in a Bronze Age world.

The core of Nantucket's reconstituted industrial economy is a basement machine shop owned by Patrick Leaton, a sort of shop-geek hobbyist, under the glorified name of Seahaven Engineering.

There are also, thanks to Nantucket's craft economy, some authentic blacksmiths with small-scale iron smelting facilities, as well as pottery-makers and a glassblower. The economic conversion is aided by some marginal wind and photovoltaic generating capacity, along with some emergency backup generators and assorted fuel reserve tanks around the island. Given the replicability of his machinery, and given the feasibility of creating alternative means of generating the power to run it, Leaton has the initial traction he needs to begin building a sustainable industrial economy.

To repeat, something similar (with resources pooled along the lines Karl Hess and Colin Ward suggested with their neighborhood shops and Kirk Sale with his local repair/recycling/remanufacture facilities) is likely to be the basis of a local manufacturing economy when the supply chains of replacement parts from Whirlpool and GE dry up. Given such a distributed local manufacturing economy built from a base of small machine shops and hobbyist workshops, coupled with microenterprises (bakeries, day care centers, cab services, market gardens, microbreweries, etc.) run out of people's homes using their ordinary household capital equipment, and with liquidity provided by LETS systems if and when the present currency system collapses, I believe thriving local economies will expand to fill the gap pretty quickly under pressure of necessity.

One thing that will help the transition will be if the U.S. government, state governments, and other "hollowed out states" lack the capability of enforcing bank ownership of paper on mortgages in default, and we can transition as the banks collapse to a default system of ownership based on current possession. That, and no last-ditch effort at large-scale police statism to enforce the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and suchlike at the national level, or zoning restrictions on home-based microenterprises, neighborhood bazaars and workshops, etc. at the local level.

Even when collapses have been catastrophic, as in Argentina early in the decade, people have been extremely resilient and creative in finding ways to make things work in the face of necessity. Stirling's fictional account of the emergency construction of Nantucket's manufacturing economy assumed a sudden and catastrophic disappearance of all non-local inputs. That's a worst-case scenario, extremely unlikely.

If there were such a catastrophic event, the lesson of Stirling's account seems to be that there are a lot of small machine shops, high school metal shops, etc., all over America and the rest of the industrialized world, along with enough alternative energy and emergency backup power to take up the slack of converting such shops to off-the-grid power. Even if national and global supply chains completely shut down, no particular community would be left in the radical isolation of Stirling's Nantucket. So given the existing, widely distributed facilities that could be expanded into local manufacturing bases, it's a safe bet that some sort of decentralized manufacturing economy would survive the transition even in the worst case.

For what it's worth, I expect the collapse to be a long one (a "long emergency") taking from one to two decades, so there will be no catastrophic collapse and sudden vacuum to fill. So Stirling's scenario can be taken as a sort of a fortiori argument for the feasibility of reconstituting some sort of localized manufacturing economy over the course of a longer and more controlled crash. In that event, we are likely at the very least to have time for a learning curve like that Cuba had building an economy of neighborhood market gardeners to fill the gap when Soviet-bloc petrochemicals were cut off (applied by way of analogy to the learning curve for expanding small machine shops and backyard hobby shops into a local manufacturing base)." (http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2009/02/long-emergency-sm-stirling-and.html)