The Lunar Society, Revisited

In the 18th Century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution--and hence at the dawn of modernity--a group of brilliant, accomplished, and forward-thinking men started meeting monthly, on the full moon, to discuss ideas and innovations that would dramatically transform society, including many of these in which they themselves were at the forefront. They called themselves the Lunar Society,These included (1) Matthew Boulton, a prominent industrialist who first introduced workers' insurance schemes and sick pay; (2) his business partner James Watt, the visionary industrialist who transformed the steam engine (originally invented by Thomas Newcomen to pump water from coal mines) into a serviceable mechanism for all other manufacturing; (3) Erasmus Darwin, poet, inventor, and botanist (and grandfather of Charles Darwin); (4) Josiah Wedgwood, the father of English pottery, whose company mass produced ceramic ware, making it affordable, for the first time, to the masses; (5) Joseph Priestley, the chemist and Unitarian preacher who isolated oxygen and discovered Carbon Dioxide. Overseas correspondents to this elite group included Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. For further info, here is a link:

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Lunar-Society/

A pretty amazing group, to say the least! 

These guys were living at the dawn of the industrial era, and sharing their thoughts about the implications of these profound socioeconomic and technological changes in which they were all eminent participants. 

And now, whether we like it or not, we are drawing toward the end of that same industrial era, due to the fundamental contradiction between (1) an economy based on the infinite growth of fossil fuel-driven production, consumption, and population, and (2) a finite biological support system (the Earth). 

Here in the suburbs, most of us, for obvious reasons, are in total denial about the imminent collapse of our comfortably affluent way of life, since it is all we have ever known. And for those of us who are more keenly aware of what's coming, our tendency is to oscillate between denial (business as usual) and sheer panic and despair about the future.

There is a third option, however, far more adaptive than either denial or panic. And that is intelligent planning--which is just what the Lunar Society was doing-- as a new, vastly different way of life was rapidly upending the stable, predictable society they had always known. 

The difference, of course, was obvious: while they were looking forward to a future of hitherto unimaginable economic growth, technological innovation and general affluence, we today face the far more daunting challenge of downsizing and relocalizing, if we are to avoid a hellish descent into chaos as our global market economy collapses all around us.

This is, of course, the theme of David Holmgren's new book, Retrofitting Suburbia, which I am proposing as the first reading of my monthly book club for my Garden Guild Network.  But whereas the original Lunar Society met at the Full Moon, we will meet at the New Moon, when all is in darkness. Because at present, none of us can possibly know what a post-industrial future on a superheated, ecologically degraded planet will look like--or whether there will be a future at all. In the darkness, all we can do is hope for the best, but plan for the worst--by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.