The following article originally appeared on The Archdruid Report.
It has been
nearly four decades now since the limits to industrial civilization's
trajectory of limitless material growth on a limited planet have been clearly
visible on the horizon of our future. Over that time, a remarkable paradox has
unfolded. The closer we get to the limits to growth, the more those limits
impact our daily lives, and the more clearly our current trajectory points
toward the brick wall of a difficult future, the less most people in the
industrial world seem to be able to imagine any alternative to driving the
existing order of things ever onward until the wheels fall off.
This is as true in many corners of the activist community as it is in the most
unregenerate of corporate boardrooms. For most of today's environmentalists,
for example, renewable energy isn't something that people ought to produce for
themselves, unless they happen to be wealthy enough to afford the rooftop PV
systems that have become the latest status symbol in suburban neighborhoods on
either coast. It's something that utilities and the government are supposed to
produce as fast as possible, so that Americans can keep on using three times as
much energy per capita as the average European and twenty times as much as the
average Chinese.
Of course there are alternatives. In the energy crisis of the Seventies,
relatively simple conservation and efficiency measures, combined with lifestyle
changes, sent world petroleum consumption down by 15% in a single decade and caused
comparable drops in other energy sources across the industrial world. Most of
these measures went out the window in the final binge of the age of cheap oil
that followed, so there's plenty of low hanging fruit to pluck. That same era
saw a great many thoughtful people envision ways that people could lead
relatively comfortable and humane lives while consuming a great deal less
energy and the products of energy than people in the industrial world do today.
It can be a troubling experience to turn the pages of Rainbook or The Book of the
New Alchemists, to name only two of the better products of that mostly
forgotten era, and compare the sweeping view of future possibilities that
undergirded their approach to a future of energy and material shortages with
the cramped imaginations of the present. It's even more troubling to notice
that you can pick up yellowing copies of most of these books for a couple of
dollars each in the used book trade, at a time when their practical advice is
more relevant than ever, and their prophecies of what would happen if the road
to sustainability was not taken are looking more prescient by the day.
The irony, and it's a rich one, is that our collective refusal to follow the
lead of those who urged us to learn how to get by with less has not spared us
the necessity of doing exactly that. That's the problem, ultimately, with
driving headlong at a brick wall; you can stop by standing on the brake pedal,
or you can stop by hitting the wall, but either way, you're going to stop.
One way to make sense of the collision between the brittle front end of
industrial civilization and the hard surface of nature's brick wall is to
compare the spring of 2010 with the autumn of 2007. Those two seasons had an
interesting detail in common. In both cases, the price of oil passed $80 a
barrel after a prolonged period of price increases, and in both cases, this was
followed by a massive debt crisis. In 2007, largely driven by speculation in
the futures market, the price of oil kept on zooming upwards, peaking just
south of $150 a barrel before crashing back to earth; so far, at least, there's
no sign of a spike of that sort happening this time, although this is mostly
because speculators are focused on other assets these days.
In 2007, though, the debt crisis also resulted in a dramatic economic downturn,
and just now our chances of dodging the same thing this time around do not look
good. Here in the US, most measures of general economic activity are faltering
where they aren't plunging – the sole exceptions are those temporarily propped
up by an unparalleled explosion of government debt – and unemployment has
become so deeply entrenched that what to do about the very large number of Americans
who have exhausted the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits current law allows
them is becoming a significant political issue. Even the illegal economy is
taking a massive hit; a recent NPR story noted that the price of marijuana has
dropped so sharply that northern California, where it's a huge cash crop, is
seeing panic selling and sharp economic contraction.
What's going on here is precisely what The
Limits to Growth warned about in 1973: the costs of continued growth have
risen faster than growth itself, and are reaching a level that is forcing the
economy to its knees. By "costs," of course, the authors of The Limits to Growth weren't talking
about money, and neither am I. The costs that matter are energy, resources, and
labor; it takes a great deal more of all of these to extract oil from deepwater
wells in the Gulf of Mexico or oil sands in Alberta, say, than it used to take
to get it from Pennsylvania or Texas, and since offshore drilling and oil sands
make up an increasingly large share of what we've got left – those wells in
Pennsylvania and Texas have been pumped dry, or nearly so – these real,
nonmonetary costs have climbed steadily.
The price of oil in dollars functions here as a workable proxy measure for the
real cost of oil production in energy, resources, and materials. The evidence
of the last few years suggests that when the price of oil passes $80 a barrel,
that's a sign that the real costs have reached a level high enough that the
rest of the economy begins to crack under the strain. Since astronomical levels
of debt have become standard practice all through today's global economy, the
ability of marginal borrowers to service their debt is where the cracks showed
up first. In the fall of 2007, many of those marginal borrowers were homeowners
in the US and UK; this spring, they include entire nations.
What all this implies, in a single phrase, is that the age of abundance is
over. The period from 1945 to 2005 when almost unimaginable amounts of cheap
petroleum sloshed through the economies of the world's industrial nations, and
transformed life in those nations almost beyond recognition, still shapes most
of our thinking and nearly all of our expectations. Not one significant policy
maker or mass media pundit in the industrial world has begun to talk about the
impact of the end of the age of abundance; it's an open question if any of them
have grasped how fundamental the changes will be as the new age of
post-abundance economics begins to clamp down.
Most ordinary people in the industrial world, for their part, are sleepwalking
through one of history's major transitions. The issues that concern them are
still defined entirely by the calculus of abundance. Most Americans these days,
for example, worry about managing a comfortable retirement, paying for
increasingly expensive medical care, providing their children with a college
education and whatever amenities they consider important. It has not yet
entered their darkest dreams that they need to worry about access to such basic
necessities as food, clothing and shelter, the fate of local economies and
communities shredded by decades of malign neglect, and the rise of serious
threats to the survival of constitutional government and the rule of law.
Even among those who warn that today's Great Recession could bottom out at a
level equal to that reached in the Great Depression, very few have grappled
with the consequences of a near-term future in which millions of Americans are
living in shantytowns and struggling to find enough to eat every single day. To
paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, that did
happen here, and it did so at a time when the United States was a net exporter
of everything you can think of, and the world's largest producer and exporter
of petroleum to boot. The same scale of economic collapse in a nation that
exports very little besides unpayable IOUs, and is the world's largest consumer
and importer of petroleum, could all too easily have results much closer to
those of the early 20th century in Central Europe, for example: that is,
near-universal impoverishment, food shortages, epidemics, civil wars, and
outbreaks of vicious ethnic cleansing, bracketed by two massive wars that both
had body counts in the tens of millions.
Now you'll notice that this latter does not equate to the total collapse into a
Cormac McCarthy future that so many people like to fantasize about these days.
I've spent years wondering why it is that so many people seem unable to
conceive of any future other than business as usual, on the one hand, and
extreme doomer porn on the other. Whatever the motives that drive this curious
fixation, though, I've become convinced that it results in a nearly complete
blindness to the very real risks the future is more likely to hold for us. It
makes a useful exercise to take current notions about preparing for the future
in the survivalist scene, and ask yourself how many of them would have turned
out to be useful over the decade or two ahead if someone had pursued exactly
those strategies in Poland or Slovakia, let's say, in the years right before
1914.
Measure the gap between the real and terrible events of that period, on the one
hand, and the fantasies of infinite progress or apocalyptic collapse that so
often pass for realistic images of our future, on the other, and you have some
sense of the gap that has to be crossed in order to make sense of the world
after abundance. One way or another, we will cross that gap; the question is
whether any significant number of us will do so in advance, and have time to
take constructive actions in response, or whether we'll all do so purely in
retrospect, thinking ruefully of the dollars and hours that went into preparing
for an imaginary future while the real one was breathing down our necks.
I've talked at quite some length in essays about the kinds of
preparations that will likely help individuals, families, and communities deal
with the future of resource shortages, economic implosion, political breakdown,
and potential civil war that the missed opportunities and purblind decisions of
the last thirty years have made agonizingly likely here in the United States
and, with an infinity of local variations, elsewhere in the industrial world.
Those points remain crucial; it still makes a great deal of sense to start
growing some of your own food, to radically downscale your dependence on
complex technological systems, to reduce your energy consumption as far as
possible, to free up at least one family member from the money economy for
full-time work in the domestic economy, and so on.
Still, there's another dimension to all this, and it has to be mentioned,
though it's certain to raise hackles. For the last three centuries, and
especially for the last half century or so, it's become increasingly common to
define a good life as one provided with the largest possible selection of
material goods and services. That definition has become so completely hardwired
into our modern ways of thinking that it can be very hard to see past it. Of
course there are certain very basic material needs without which a good life is
impossible, but those are a good deal fewer and simpler than contemporary
attitudes assume, and once those are provided, material abundance becomes a
much more ambivalent blessing than we like to think.
In a very real sense, this way of thinking mirrors the old joke about the small
boy with a hammer who thinks everything is a nail. In an age of unparalleled
material abundance, the easy solution for any problem or predicament was to
throw material wealth at it. That did solve some problems, but it arguably
worsened others, and left the basic predicaments of human existence untouched.
Did it really benefit anyone to spend trillions of dollars and the talents of
some of our civilization's brightest minds creating high-end medical treatments
to keep the very sick alive and miserable for a few extra months of life, for
example, so that we could pretend to ourselves that we had evaded the basic
human predicament of the inevitability of death?
Whatever the answer, the end of the age of abundance draws a line under that
experiment. Within not too many years, it's safe to predict, only the
relatively rich will have the dubious privilege of spending the last months of
their lives hooked up to complicated life support equipment. The rest of us
will end our lives the way our great-grandparents did: at home, more often than
not, with family members or maybe a nurse to provide palliative care while our
bodies do what they were born to do and shut down. Within not too many years,
more broadly, only a very few people anywhere in the world will have the option
of trying to escape the core uncertainties and challenges of human existence by
chasing round after round of consumer goodies; the rest of us will count
ourselves lucky to have our basic material needs securely provided for, and
will have to deal with fundamental questions of meaning and value in some less
blatantly meretricious way.
Some of us, in the process, may catch on to the subtle lesson woven into this
hard necessity. It's worth noting that while there's been plenty of talk about
the monasteries of the Dark Ages among people who are aware of the impending
decline and fall of our civilization, next to none of it has discussed, much
less dealt with, the secret behind the success of monasticism: the deliberate
acceptance of extreme material poverty. Quite the contrary; all the plans for
lifeboat ecovillages I've encountered so far, at least, aim at preserving some
semblance of a middle class lifestyle into the indefinite future. That choice puts
these projects in the same category as the lavish villas in which the wealthy
inhabitants of Roman Britain hoped to ride out their own trajectory of decline
and fall: a category mostly notable for its long history of total failure.
The European Christian monasteries that preserved Roman culture through the
Dark Ages did not offer anyone a middle class lifestyle by the standards of
their own time, much less those of ours. Neither did the Buddhist monasteries
that preserved Heian culture through the Sengoku Jidai, Japan's bitter age of
wars, or the Buddhist and Taoist monasteries that preserved classical Chinese
culture through a good half dozen cycles of collapse. Monasteries in all these
cases were places people went to be very, very poor. That was the secret of
their achievements, because when you reduce your material needs to the absolute
minimum, the energy you don't need to spend maintaining your standard of living
can be put to work doing something more useful.
Now it's probably too much to hope for that some similar movement might spring
into being here and now; we're a couple of centuries too soon for that. The
great age of Christian monasticism in the West didn't begin until the sixth
century CE, by which time the Roman economy of abundance had been gone for so
long that nobody even pretended that material wealth was an answer to the human
condition. Still, the monastic revolution kickstarted by Benedict of Nursia
drew on a long history of Christian monastic ventures; those unfolded in turn
from the first tentative communal hermitages of early Christian Egypt; and all
these projects, though this is not often mentioned, took part of their
inspiration and a good deal of their ethos from the Stoics of Pagan Greece and
Rome.
Movements of the Stoic type are in fact very common in civilizations that have
passed the Hubbert peak of their own core resource base. There's good reason
for that. In a contracting economy, it becomes easier to notice that the less
you need, the less vulnerable you are to the ups and downs of fortune, and the
more you can get done of whatever it is that you happen to want to do. That's
an uncongenial lesson at the best of times, and during times of material
abundance you won't find many people learning it. Still, in the world after
abundance, it's hard to think of a lesson that deserves more careful attention.
Image by webhamster, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
