 The Institute is embedded in the village of Cooxville. This little community has been here over 175 years, both before, during, and after industrialization. We think it will be here well into a future as we transition to a post-industrial age, and whatever that brings. So let's get into our 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 and head back to the present and future of Cooxville. Hello and welcome to the second episode of our new season. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 71 on December 1st, 2023, coming to you from the Low Tech Recording booth. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to be introducing our new season of the podcast, where we'll be spending a lot of time in the year 2100 and talking about what could be. You can still follow us on Twitter, X, or whatever it's called right now. Our handle is at low underscore techno, like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. 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If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, which is of course lowtechinstitute.org. This season, we're going to be spending most of our time in the year 2100, looking at how Cooksville has adapted to the new, new, new, new normal. As temperatures and precipitation change over time and our fuel sources have radically altered, life is going to be very different, but in order to get there, we have to know where we were. So today, we're going to be jumping into our time machine and heading back 10,000 years and walking our way through the historical record to see what makes Cooksville tick, both before European colonization in the 1850s and today. And after that, we're going to jump forward to the year 2100, tracing the alternative future history that will be the background for the rest of this season. If you haven't listened to the last episode, pause here, go back and listen to episode 71 for an introduction to this new series. And you might wonder, we're all looking at Cooksville instead of a big city. And that question will be answered over the course of this season. But in short, most people have lived in villages for the past 10,000 years, because they are more locally sustainable. Cooksville specifically has been referred to as the town that time forgot. From being founded by European settlers in the mid 1800s to today, the village has stayed largely the same size because the train never came here. The neighboring towns grew, but we stayed the same. And we hope that this small but steady population can continue into the future and serve as an example for the boom and bust cities around us. So without any further ado, let's hop into the, why don't you hop into the passenger seat of our DeLorean and let's set our time circuits for 8,000 years ago. So we have just arrived in what will be Southern Wisconsin in a few thousand years. Humans have been in North America for a few thousand years at this point, but archaeologists really don't know when exactly humans first came to this continent. And we likely never will, because the sparse populations did not leave big impacts on the environment, nor did they leave behind lots of buildings or other infrastructure. So we have to rely on human and other organic remains, as well as projectile points and other things that are really difficult to find. So as we look through the tiny window that is archaeology, we know that people cross the land bridge from Siberia and spread southward from there. When the first people came to Wisconsin, it was under glaciers. And as the glaciers receded, a tundra-like step followed. And as time went on, a spruce forest covered much of what is today Wisconsin. Megafauna, which is just a fancy word for animals like mastodons, giant ground sloths and larger versions of today's camels, roamed the new grasslands and forests and were followed by hunters. As the late Paleo period began transitioning to the archaic period around 8,000 BC, Oak, Hickory, and Maple Forest covered much of where we are today. At this time, the environment was changing and hunting pressures led to the disappearance of these megafauna, leaving us with just a few tiny animals like moose, caribou, and elk. A few thousand years later, a warm dry spell turned the southern part of the state into prairies and deer predominated in the hunting scene. Obviously, this whole time, people were making use of nuts, small game, fish, but these provide less evidence in the archaeological record, so we don't know as much about those. People living at this time were semi-nomadic, moving between camps for seasonal resources for thousands of years. So as the archaic came to a close around 500 BCE and transitioned into the Woodland period, the environment was basically what we see in Wisconsin today. That is a combination of prairie and mixed forests in the south, grading to more coniferous ones as you move north. The people were largely hunter-gatherers with a smattering of gardening, and by the end of this period, around 1000 BCE, or excuse me, of the common era, corn, beans, and squash had arrived. This last period before European contact was called the Oneoda tradition, and was one of increased sedentism, and that just means people were staying in one place, building villages, burial mounds, and depending more on large-scale agriculture, supplemented by hunting and gathering trips. So when Europeans started arriving in this area, first as explorers and traders, they met many native groups, from the more hunting and gathering-dependent Ojibwe in the north, to the Sioux language groups in the south, where Cooksville is located today. It was home to the Ho-Chunk group, otherwise known as the Winnebago, who lived in settled villages. But one problem the Europeans had was that they only saw land as managed if it was clear and demarcated by fence line. The existing inhabitants, though, exerted a lot of control over their environment, from tended multi-crop gardens and fields to careful underbrush burns, which encouraged seedlings and sprouts to attract game animals. The settlers encountered what they thought was an oak savanna, not realizing that it was a carefully managed landscape. The Ho-Chunk had a hierarchical government with hereditary leaders, a council, and even a police force, and now many times people will say that native populations had lived in harmony with nature. And while their local subsistence patterns were more responsive to the local environment than the imported European ones, that idea of harmony is an oversimplification. Much of this belief comes from the fact that 70 to 90 percent of the original inhabitants of North America died due to disease and other stressors and conflict that came along with European settlement. And therefore, these reduced populations lived in relative abundance. That means they had fewer mouths to feed with the same amount of resources. So it looked like they were living in harmony with nature when in fact they were just a small population using the resources that originally supported a much larger one. So the same thing happened in Europe after the bubonic plague, as previously occupied land was suddenly available to the smaller number of survivors. So just as Wisconsin was becoming a state in the 1840s and 50s, Cooksville was founded. This was a period of explosive growth of European population, going from about 30,000 to over 300,000 in a decade. Hundreds of villages like Cooksville sprung up, especially in the south, where the rolling oak savanna gave way to old growth forest in the north. Our village got its name from John Cook, who platted the western side of town and built the first house. That house still stands today and is lived in by friends of ours. John Cook moved west shortly thereafter, but the town continued to grow. The land to the east was a speculative land purchased by US Senator David Webster at just $1.25 an acre. He sold it to Dr. John Porter, who platted it for residents around essential commons and gave it the name Wakoma, which is supposed to be a Ho-Chunk name, meaning clear water, for the river next to town now known as the Bad Fish Creek. Our DeLorean has arrived in the year 1850. The village census lists 175 people as residents. Most of them stem from New England states like Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Others come from old England, also Scotland and Ireland. The village has an inn, a tavern, a grist mill, sawmill, shutter and door factory, cheese factory, and general store. Residents included doctors, merchants, a potter, tailor, miller, brick makers, blacksmiths, carpenters, a wagon maker, and many farmers, homemakers, and of course children. Even at that time, Cooksville was known for its social life. It even had one of the earliest pianos in the area and hosted lectures and debates, choirs, parties, plays, pranks, and much more than was typical for these Spartan frontier villages. But as our DeLorean coasts forward in time, we can see the fortune of this village changing thanks to the coming of the train to nearby communities like Stoughton and Evansville, which are each about six miles north and south of Cooksville. They had train stations by the mid-1860s, and eventually the local mills fell out of use, and these larger communities grew by drawing people away from Cooksville. From this time on, the village had only 60 to 80 residents, and in the early 1900s, the tavern and inn burned down. By 1911, Ralph Warner began restoring what was called the house next door, just on the west side of the commons. This was the first of many Cooks villains to attempt to preserve the original homes of the village instead of tearing them down to build contemporary buildings. The 1886 schoolhouse was preserved and updated and used through the 1960s as a one-room schoolhouse and afterwards as a community center. Dozens of the Gothic revival houses and structures of both brick and wood survived in good enough condition to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Around that time, a group of locals, led by architect Michael Ceturnus, began restoring and tactfully adding on to the historic structures. Cooksville has been called the village that time forgot for good reason. The state even considered buying it and bringing in other historic residences to create an open-air museum. Luckily for us, this did not come to pass, but the idea did persist and later became Old World Wisconsin in a location about an hour east of here. I highly recommend you check it out. Cooksvillians of the 1800s lived typical frontier and settlement lives. Most were farmers and a few were professionals. They grew much of their own food in kitchen gardens and the surrounding fields such as wheat, barley, oats, and other grains dominating really until the 1870s. So Southern Wisconsin was so fertile it provided a sixth of the nation's wheat during the mid-1800s. As train lines reached deeper into the state and rust attacked the wheat crop, fresh produce like peas, corn, cucumbers, and other vegetables became important cash crops for the Chicago market. Today we think of Wisconsin as a dairy state and that really took off around the turn of the 20th century. Houses in Cooksville were built of local materials and updated through the years. Most structures were built of masonry or wood. Bricks were even dug and formed and fired on the southwest corner of town. Boards and timbers were cut at the nearby sawmill. The local hoxie, shutter, and door factory used literal horsepower to create many interior and exterior trimmings. They had a horse out behind the factory walking in a circle, pushing around an axle to provide power for the early tools in the factory. Heat came from wood stoves and fireplaces. People cooked with wood heat and did laundry by hand. They made and repaired clothes in home. The general store served as a post office for letters and parcels, and at that time waste was mostly organic and could be composted or repurposed. And while the initial settlers had to be more locally self-sufficient, over time they were able to depend on imported goods. This started with specialty items that they could not make themselves, but later even staples were shipped into rail depots to be picked up by wagon and brought to Cooksville. So let's get back into our DeLorean and jump forward to 2020 and look at Cooksville today. After the revitalization efforts of the 1970s and 80s, Cooksville continued to be a small neighborhood of commuters and characters. The overall layout and infrastructure of the village largely remained the same as it had centuries ago. About a third of the current houses were built in the 1850s and 60s before it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and these ranch or split-level houses seemed kind of at odds with the adjacent historic homes that still dominate the town. Part of the reason for no new houses in the 1870s and 80s and 90s was a local ordinance and zoning committee that disallowed contemporary constructions in the district. And although this, although new construction did happen, the exterior had to fit within the mid-1800s appearance of Cooksville and obviously this annoyed some residents, but many others appreciated what it preserved. This village has faced the threat of so-called progress every generation and so far it's stood the test of time. Cooksville remains populated by characters. About half the village keeps to themselves and commute to work in Madison or other places. Madison's only a half hour away by car. The other half, most of whom lived in the historic homes, are active in the local community. The community center is now located in the Old School House. They host Fourth of July picnics, Halloween parties, Arbor Day celebrations, as well as lectures, music performances, and meetings. Historic Trust has helped local residents maintain the older structures and about a third of the villagers are retired. Many are active in the local church or in other pursuits like gardening, art, music, old cars. Almost everyone living here moved in from somewhere else. The four current children under five, two of which are mine, represent a baby boom not seen since the 1970s. The working adults are largely professionals including a lawyer, mechanic, nurse, restaurant owner, and a few teachers, also metalsmiths. The metalsmiths moved here because of Dr. Evermore, a legendary Wisconsin artist who worked with metal and found objects to create sculptures and who had his shop in the village. This attracted former students and collaborators. The residents here live pretty typical lives. Their food and goods were bought at stores in neighboring communities and even though many did enjoy gardening and there was one market garden, everybody drives cars and trucks to get around to get their food and everything else. Even riding bikes or walking along the busy roads is very dangerous as the traffic through town barely slows down to the posted speed of 45 miles an hour. Most homes are heated with propane or natural gas and that natural gas line only came here in the last year or two. As the temperatures warm, people installed air conditioners and everybody still relies on water, on well water and septic systems. Until recently, the town's internet was provided by a single antenna distributed by microwave dishes on top of everyone's roof, but then lately a fiber-optic connection has been installed in Cooxville and leapfrog the town's communication systems well ahead of most rural areas. Another notable addition to Cooxville came in 2017, but the Low Technology Institute and the family associated with it, that's me, moved into the Longborn House on the Commons. Cooxville has a history of eclectic residents and we fit right into that tradition. We transformed our overgrown yard from three-quarters acres of overgrown vegetation to a garden, chicken coop, compost hutch and field crops growing in an abandoned market garden. We retrofitted the house with radiator heating, solar hot water and solar panels plus an efficient wood stove for supplementary heat. We hold classes for people interested in learning skills from venison butchery and pickling to timber frame and solar power. We do research on local sustainability like growing one's own food, building with local materials and DIY power heating and cooling solutions. This work was largely self-contained but because we've already used our time machine to peek into the future we know that in 2025 the Institute was awarded a large grant to implement what would become what would come to be known as localism. Localism is the systems we've built to house, feed and create what we need to survive locally but we'll spend a lot more time on this throughout the rest of this series and now we're going to get into our trusty DeLorean and jump 80 years into the future through the year 2100 where we'll be spending most of the rest of the season of the podcast. Once there we can look back on the years that we've just jumped over to see how we got to where we are today. Maybe it's just because the people we talked to in 2100 live through these changes that they seem so momentous but it's likely that the last 80 years have seen more change than any time in human history at least globally. Both ecologically and socially even since the industrial revolution which converted a majority agrarian or farming society to an urban one didn't see such rapid upheaval that took generations of change. For the first time in recent history people had to learn to live with less energy available than the previous generation. This revolution in living was brought about by a change in energy production in conjunction with climate change playing a supporting role. Since 2020 the biggest change is that people have stopped using oil. At that time we had estimated proven oil reserve that is how much crude oil is in the ground divided by annual consumption that is how much we use each year to give us until about 2065 before oil would give out but that turned out to be what we call an engineer's answer. Engineers view people as little automatons who behave in predictable ways. About 2035 the public began to rapidly shift away from using oil because it was too expensive even though the industry could physically pump another quarter centuries worth of oil out of the ground. It was increasingly expensive because we had already pumped all the easy that is cheap oil out first. By this time alternatives were less expensive but we still had a problem but we'll get to that in a minute. First we have to see why oil was such a big deal in the first place. Oil is really efficient as a fuel because it condenses a huge amount of energy into a tiny package. Really anything that explodes is energy dense. Right now I'm reading the biography of Robert Oppenheimer and was struck by the fact that it took huge amounts of energy to enrich the uranium and plutonium to a point where they could explode as an atom bomb. Concentrating huge amounts of energy into a small amount of matter tends to release that energy back when the matter is disintegrated. The same thing is true of fertilizer which uses huge amounts of energy that sometimes cause fertilizer factories to explode. At any rate a gallon of gasoline contains about 34 kilowatt hours of energy that's about the same amount of electricity a home uses in 2020. Think of that the power the electric power for an entire household packed into a milk jug but it was borrowed energy. This resource was built up so slowly that it was effectively non-renewable. It would take a thousand tons of dead rotted composted compressed concentrated biomass to create the gasoline to fill the modest 10 gallon tank of a Honda Fit or to put it another way every day in 2020 the world was burning through the fossil fuel equivalent of a year's worth of all the plant matter that grows on earth combined. That's every day we burned a year's worth of all the plant growth on earth. The problem that we faced in the first half of the 21st century was that we could not recreate such a potent energy source in a small volume of liquid or solid fuel. Starting around the 2020s the U.S. and other post industrial countries tried to electrify everything from promoting electric vehicles to heating systems politicians and industry led the public to believe that we could replace one non-renewable climate changing fuel for a cleaner renewable one but even with subsidized solar wind and nuclear power generations we fell well short of the amount of power we needed in the early 2000s when energy production in the U.S. peaked at just under 100 quadrillion BTUs although the initial effort to electrify our lives concentrated on lithium ion and other rare earth batteries by 2040 it was realized that hydrogen was a better alternative hydrogen can be created with solar wind hydro or other DC power sources and we've and we're going to spend a lot of time talking about hydrogen in probably two episodes but by mid-century it became clear that we committed the same mistake with electricity that we had made with fossil fuels and that is over dependence on a single type of energy just as fossil fuels were cleverly made to fulfill so many needs in the 2020s electricity was used for too many tasks in 2040 since 2050 the name of the game has been diverse local energy sources and system redundancy to create resilience now I alluded to a grant the low technology institute received shortly after our visit in 2020 and that capital proved to be transformative first for cooksville and then the region and then beyond starting in the 20 30s the institute parceled out grant money to neighbors paying for much of the infrastructure that we're going to cover in this season of the podcast or at least the initial versions of these systems that have been improved over the generations at first only a few neighbors took the institute up on their grants but the installation of earth tubes was really a turning point and illustrates the overall pattern of demonstrating a fully functioning system to skeptical neighbors before it is widespread before it's widespread adoption at first only three houses installed the subterranean ventilation tubes known or ventilation known as earth tubes this cools houses all summer for essentially free but after the first year when neighbors could see the results for themselves almost every homeowner in the village got them installed there were of course two holdouts who continued to pay for electric air conditioners until they passed away when the new owners bought the houses and immediately installed earth tubes that's just one example of the many systems we're going to cover but in most cases people adopted the wait and see approach before installing these new systems themselves because of these systems cooksville became a sort of a tourist destination for early adopters of alternative subsistence energy or technology starting in the 2035 the village in the institute hosted an annual localism event it started as a weekend of workshops and tours showing people the functioning systems as well as how to install and build them for themselves over time it came to grow including seminars research professional training and more social components like documentary screenings music and food spread over a week each summer the institute became well known for providing all of its plans and ideas and research to the public for free and while the initial solutions were not always perfect enough people tested and proved them and share them uh share their own solutions to create new and better versions over time and that brings us up to today cooks feel in the year 2100 we're now living in a completely different world and although the events and changes of the previous 80 years leading up to this point are purely speculation on my part i think they can be considered informed speculation and not all of them improbable some of them like the decline of fossil fuels seems almost inevitable and at this rate the over dependence on electricity for everything and now as we move into the rest of the season we're going to be touring the different systems that make cooksville a pioneer in localism and we'll be visiting the systems that have been improved over the intervening years but the technology to make every single one of the systems we're going to be talking about was already present in 2020 the only thing we lacked was the will and the funding to implement them and demonstrate their effectiveness next week we're going to dive right into a few episodes on energy the first we'll consider electricity where it's used how it's generated how it's stored and how it isn't used anymore stay tuned for that that's it for this week the low tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute the show is hosted and produced by me scott johnson this episode was recorded in the low tech recording room in cooksville wisconsin subscribe to the podcast on itunes spotify google play youtube and elsewhere we hope you enjoy this free podcast if you like if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute if you're a secret billionaire and you want to support this project and actually give us money to do this uh email me thank you to our forester and land steward level members maryland scarpon and the hamvases for their support the low technology institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org find us on social media and reach me directly i'm scott at lowtechinstitute.org our entry music today was dear mr super computer off the album power pop from hallisana that song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and share a like license meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit thanks and take care