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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Coming of Deindustrial Society: A Practical Response
  • Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 06:37:38 -0600


The Coming of Deindustrial Society: A Practical Response
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/whatToDo/DeindustrialAge.htm
John Michael Greer

With the coming of Peak Oil and the beginning of long-term, irreversible
declines in the availability of fossil fuels (along with many other
resources), modern industrial civilization faces a wrenching series of
unwelcome transitions. This comes as a surprise only for those who haven't
been paying attention. More than thirty years ago, the Club of Rome's epochal
study The Limits to Growth pointed out that unless something was done, a
global economy based on fantasies of perpetual growth would collide
disastrously with the hard limits of a finite planet sometime in the early
twenty-first century.

The early twenty-first century is here, nothing was done, and the
consequences are arriving on schedule. The road that would have brought
industrial society through a transformation to sustainability turned out to
be the road not taken. The question that remains is what we can do with the
limited time we have left.

The Failure of Politics

There are specific practical things that can be done, right now, to deal with
the hard realities of our situation. The problem is that most of them are
counterintuitive, and fly in the face of very deeply rooted attitudes on all
sides of the political spectrum.

The first point that has to be grasped is that proposals for system-wide,
top-down change - getting the Federal government to do something constructive
about the situation, for instance - are a waste of time. That sort of change
isn't going to happen. It's not simply a matter of who's currently in power,
although admittedly that doesn't help. The core of the problem is that even
proposing changes on a scale that would do any good would be political
suicide.

Broadly speaking, our situation is this: our society demands energy inputs on
a scale, absolute and per capita, that can't possibly be maintained for more
than a little while longer. Sustainable energy sources can only provide a
small fraction of the energy we're used to getting from fossil fuels. As
fossil fuel supplies dwindle, in other words, everybody will have to get used
to living on a small fraction of the energy we've been using as a matter of
course.

Of course this is an unpopular thing to say. Quite a few people nowadays are
insisting that it's not true, that we can continue our present lavish,
energy-wasting lifestyle indefinitely by switching from oil to some other
energy source: hydrogen, biodiesel, abiotic oil, fusion power, "free energy"
technology, and so on down the list of technological snake oil. Crippling
issues of scale, and the massive technical problems involved in switching an
oil-based civilization to some other fuel in time to make a difference, stand
in the path of such projects, but those get little air time; if we want
endless supplies of energy badly enough, the logic seems to be, the universe
will give it to us. The problem is that the universe did give it to us - in
the form of immense deposits of fossil fuels stored up over hundreds of
millions of years of photosynthesis - and we wasted it. Now we're in the
position of a lottery winner who's spent millions of dollars in a few short
years and is running out of money. The odds of hitting another million-dollar
jackpot are minute, and no amount of wishful thinking will enable us to keep
up our current lifestyle by getting a job at the local hamburger joint.

We - and by this I mean people throughout the industrial world - have to make
the transition to a Third World lifestyle. There's no way to sugar-coat that
very unpalatable reality. Fossil fuels made it possible for most people in
the industrial world to have a lifestyle that doesn't depend on hard physical
labor, and to wallow in a flood of mostly unnecessary consumer goods and
services. As fossil fuels deplete, all that will inevitably go away. How many
people would be willing to listen to such a suggestion? More to the point,
how many people would vote for a politician or a party who proposed to bring
on these changes deliberately, now, in order to prevent total disaster later
on?

John Kenneth Galbraith has written a brilliant, mordant book, The Culture of
Contentment, about the reasons why America is incapable of constructive
change. He compares today's American political class (those people who vote
and involve themselves in politics) to the French aristocracy before the
Revolution. Everybody knew that the situation was insupportable, and that
eventually there would be an explosion, but the immediate costs of doing
something about it were so unpalatable that everyone decided to do nothing
and hope that things would somehow work out. We're in exactly the same
situation here and now.

So while it may be appealing to fantasize about vast government programs
bailing us out of the present predicament, such fantasies are not a practical
way of responding to the situation. We have to start with the recognition
that the most likely outcome of the current situation is collapse: to borrow
the Club of Rome's formulation, sustained, simultaneous, uncontrolled and
irreversible declines in population, industrial production, and capital stock.

Apocalyptic Fantasies

Now as soon as this is said, most people who don't reject it out of hand slip
off at once into apocalyptic ideas of one sort or another. These should be
rejected; history is a better guide. Civilizations collapse. As Joseph
Tainter pointed out in his useful book The Collapse of Complex Societies,
it's one of the most predictable things about them. Ours is not that
different from hundreds of previous civilizations that overshot their natural
resource base and crashed to ruin. What we face is a natural process, and
like most natural processes, much of it can be predicted by comparison with
past situations.

But fantasy is often more palatable than reality, and most of the apocalyptic
notions in circulation these days are sheer fantasy. The idea, popular among
Christians who don't read their Bibles carefully enough, that all good
Christians will be raptured away to heaven just as the rest of the world goes
to hell is a case in point. It's a lightly disguised fantasy of mass suicide
- when you tell the kids that Grandma went to heaven to be with Jesus, most
people understand what that means - and it also serves as a way for people to
pretend to themselves that God will rescue them from the consequences of
their own actions. That's one of history's all time bad bets, but it's always
popular.

But the Hollywood notion of an overnight collapse is just as much of a
fantasy; it makes for great screenplays but has nothing to do with the
realities of how civilizations fall. The disintegration of a complex society
takes decades, not days. Since fossil fuel production will decline gradually,
not simply come to a screeching halt, the likely course of things is gradual
descent rather than freefall. Civilizations go under in a rolling collapse
punctuated by localized disasters, taking anything from one to four centuries
to complete the process. It's not a steady decline, either; between sudden
crises come intervals of relative stability, even moderate improvement;
different regions decline at different paces; existing social, economic and
political structures are replaced, not with complete chaos, but with
transitional structures that may develop pretty fair institutional strength
themselves.

Does this model apply to the current situation? Almost certainly. As oil and
natural gas run short, economies will come unglued and political systems
disintegrate under the strain. But there's still oil to be had - the Hubbert
Curve is a bell-shaped curve, after all. The world in 2020 may still be
producing about as much oil as it was producing in 1980. It's just that with
other fossil fuels gone or badly depleted, nearly twice as many people in the
world, and the global economy in shreds, the gap between production and
demand will be vast. The result will be poverty, spiralling shortages, rising
death rates, plummeting birth rates, and epidemic violence and warfare. Not a
pretty picture - but it's not an instant reversion to the Stone Age either.

Equally imaginary is the notion that the best strategy for would-be survivors
is to hole up in some isolated rural area with enough firepower to stock a
Panzer division, and wait things out. I can think of no better proof that
people nowadays pay no attention to history. One of the more common phenomena
of collapse is the breakdown of public order in rural areas, and the rise of
a brigand culture preying on rural communities and travelers. Isolated
survivalist enclaves with stockpiles of food and ammunition would be a
tempting prize and could count on being targeted.

Equally inaccurate is the notion that stockpiling precious metals will
somehow make the stockpilers exempt from the consequences of industrial
collapse. This strategy has been tried over and over again in recorded
history, and it doesn't work. Every few years, for example, archeologists in
Britain dig up another cache of gold and silver hidden away by some wealthy
landowner in Roman Britain as the empire fell apart. They're usually close to
the ruins of the owner's rural villa, which shows the signs of being looted
and burned to the ground by the Saxons. As a working rule, if your value
consists of what you've stockpiled, there will be an unlimited number of
other people interested in removing you from the stockpile and enjoying it
themselves. However many you kill, there will always be more - and eventually
the ammo will run out.

Communities of Survival

So what does work? The key to making sense of constructive action in a
situation of impending industrial collapse is to look at the community,
rather than the individual or society as a whole, as the basic unit. We know
from history that local communities can continue to flourish while empires
fall around them. There are, however, three things a community needs to do
that, and all three of them are in short supply these days.

First, a community needs some degree of local organization. Our present
culture here in America has discarded most of the local organizations it once
had, in favor of a mass society where individuals deal directly with huge
government and corporate institutions. This has to be reversed. The recent
move to reinvigorate civil society is a step in the right direction. Joining
or creating a local community group, and helping to revive local civil
society, will help provide your community with voluntary networks of
cooperation and mutual aid in difficult times.

One often-neglected but useful resource is the old fraternal orders - the
Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Grange, and so on - which once included more
than 50% of adult Americans in their membership. Many of these organizations
still exist, and they're far less exclusive than people outside them tend to
think. Joining such an organization, or some other local community group, and
helping to revive local civil society is a crucial step that will provide
your community with essential networks of cooperation and mutual aid in
difficult times. The Stormwatch Project website is specifically aimed at
helping fraternal orders and similar organizations get ready to fill such a
role.

The second thing a community needs in the twilight of industrial society is a
core of people who know how to do without fossil fuel inputs. An astonishing
number of people, especially in the educated middle class, have no practical
skills whatsoever when it comes to growing and preparing food, making
clothing, and providing other basic necessities. An equally astonishing
number are unable to go any distance at all by any means that doesn't involve
burning fossil fuels - and almost no one in the developed world can light a
fire without matches or a lighter from some distant factory. Survival skills
such as organic gardening, low-tech medicine, basic hand crafts, and the like
need to be learned and practiced now, while there's time to do so. Similarly,
those people who cut their fossil fuel consumption drastically now - for
example, by getting rid of their cars and using public transit or bicycles
for commuting - will be better prepared for the inevitable shortages.

We live in a "prosthetic society" in which most people have totally neglected
their own innate abilities in favor of ersatz mechanical imitations. Even our
schoolchildren use pocket calculators instead of learning how to add and
subtract. All this has to be reversed as soon as possible. Those people who
can use their own hands and minds to make tools, grow food, brew beer, treat
illnesses, generate modest amounts of electricity from sun and wind, and the
like, will have a survival advantage over those who can't. In a violent age,
practical knowledge is a life insurance policy; if you're more useful alive
than dead, you're likely to stay that way. The pirate enclaves of the
seventeenth-century Carribbean were among the most lawless societies in
history, but physicians, navigators, shipwrights, and other skilled craftsmen
were safe from the pervasive violence, since it was in everyone's best
interests to keep them alive.

The third thing a community needs is access to basic human requirements, and
above all food. Very large cities are going to become difficult places to be
in the course of the approaching collapse, precisely because there isn't
enough farmland within easy transport range to feed the people now living
there. On the other hand, most American cities of half a million or less are
fairly close to agricultural land that could, in a pinch, be used to grow
food intensively and feed the somewhat reduced population that's likely to be
left after the first stages of the collapse. What's needed is the framework
of a production and distribution system around which this can take shape.

The good news is that this framework already exists; it's called the farmers
market movement. The last two decades have seen an astonishing growth in
farmers markets across the country - the latest figures I've seen, and
they're some years out of date, indicate that farmers markets are a $16
billion a year industry, with most of that money going to small local
farmers. I personally know organic farmers who are able to stay in business,
and support their families on quite small acreages, because they work the
farmers markets. Every dollar spent on locally grown produce from a farmers
market, instead of supermarket fare shipped halfway around the world, is thus
an investment in local sustainability and survival.

There are a good many other, similar steps that can be taken. Anything that
provides functional alternatives to energy-wasting lifestyles lays
foundations for the transitional societies of the late 21st century, and
ultimately for the sustainable successor cultures that will begin to emerge
in North America in the 22nd and 23rd centuries. The important point, it
seems to me, is to do something constructive now, rather than presenting
plans to the government in the perfect knowledge that they will be ignored
until it's far too late to do anything.

Perhaps a metaphor will make an appropriate finish for this little essay.
Imagine that you're on an ocean liner that's headed straight for a well
marked shoal of rocks. Half the crew is dead drunk, and the other half has
already responded to your attempts to alert them by telling you that you
obviously don't know the first thing about navigation, and everything will be
all right. At a certain point, you know, the ship will be so close to the
rocks that its momentum will carry it onto them no matter what evasive
actions the helmsman tries to make. You're not sure, but it looks as though
that point is already well past.

What do you do? You can keep on pounding on the door to the bridge, trying to
convince the crew of the approaching danger. You can join the prayer group
down in the galley; they're convinced that if they pray fervently enough, God
will save them from shipwreck. You can decide that everyone's doomed and go
get roaring drunk. Or you can go around quietly to the other passengers, and
encourage those people who have noticed the situation (or are willing to
notice it) to break out the life jackets, assemble near the lifeboats, take
care of people who need help, and otherwise deal with the approaching wreck
in a way that will salvage as much as possible.

Me, I suggest the latter. Life jackets, anyone?

2004 October 5





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