Figure 15. How self-reported levels of happiness vary according to per-capita annual energy consumption in various nations.
Figure 16. US Gross Domestic Product and Genuine Progress Indicators compared, 1950 to 2002.
Addressing the economic, social, and political problems ensuing from the various looming peaks is no mere palliative and will require enormous collective effort. If it is to be successful, that effort must be coordinated, presumably by government, and enlist people by educating and motivating them in numbers and at a speed that has not been seen since World War II. Part of that motivation must come from a positive vision of a future worth striving toward. People will need to believe in an eventual reward for what will amount to many years of hard sacrifice. The reality is that we are approaching a time of economic contraction. Consumptive appetites that have been stoked for decades by ubiquitous advertising messages promising “more, faster, and bigger” will now have to be reined in. People will not willingly accept the new message of “less, slower, and smaller,” unless they have new goals toward which to aspire. They must feel that their efforts will lead to a better world, with tangible improvements in life for themselves and their families. The massive public education campaigns that will be required must be credible, and will therefore be vastly more successful if they give people a sense of investment and involvement in formulating those goals. There is a much-abused word that describes the necessary process — democracy.
As another way of mitigating our paralyzing horror at seeing our society’s future as one of decline in so many respects, we should ask: decline to what? Are we facing a complete disintegration of everything we hold dear, or merely a return to lower levels of population, complexity, and consumption? The answer, of course, is unknowable at this stage. We could indeed be at the brink of a collapse worse than any in history. Just one reference in that regard will suffice: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year analysis of the world’s ecosystems released in 2006, in which 1,300 scientists participated, concluded that of 24 ecosystems identified as essential to human life, 15 are “being pushed beyond their sustainable limits,” toward a state of collapse that may be “abrupt and potentially irreversible.” 13 The signs are not good.
Nevertheless, a decline in population, complexity, and consumption could, at least in theory, result in a stable society with characteristics that many people would find quite desirable. A reversion to the normal pattern of human existence, based on village life, extended families, and local production for local consumption — especially if it were augmented by a few of the frills of the late industrial period, such as global communications — could provide future generations with the kind of existence that many modern urbanites dream of wistfully.
So the overall message of this book is not necessarily one of doom — but it is one of inevitable change and the need for deliberate engagement with the process of change on a scale and speed beyond anything in previous human history. Crucially: we must focus on and use the intangibles that are not peaking (such as ingenuity and cooperation) to address the problems arising from our overuse of substances that are.
Our One Great Task: The Energy Transition
As we have seen, just a few core trends have driven many others in producing the global problems we see today, and those core trends (including population growth and increasing consumption rates) themselves constellate around our ever-burgeoning use of fossil fuels. Thus, a conclusion of startling plainness presents itself: our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels — and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible.
At first thought, this must seem like an absurd over-simplification of the human situation. After all, the world is full of crises demanding our attention — from wars to pollution, malnutrition, land mines, human rights abuses, and soaring cancer rates. Doesn’t a monomaniacal focus just on fossil fuels miss many important things?
In defense of the statement I would offer two points.
First, some problems are more critical than others. A patient may suffer simultaneously from a broken blood vessel in the brain and a broken leg. A doctor will not ignore the second problem, but since the first is immediately life-threatening, its treatment will take precedence. Globally, there are two problems whose potential consequences far outweigh all others: Climate Change and energy resource depletion. If we do nothing to dramatically curtail emissions of greenhouse gases soon, we will almost certainly set in motion the two self-reinforcing feedback loops mentioned previously — the melting of the north polar icecap, and the melting of tundra and permafrost releasing stored methane. These would lead to an averaged global warming not just of a couple of degrees, but perhaps six or more degrees over the remainder of the century. And this in turn could make much of the world uninhabitable, make agriculture impracticable in many if not most places, and result not only in the extinction of thousands or millions of other species but the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of human beings.
If our dependence on oil, natural gas, and coal continues unabated the post-peak decline in their availability could trigger economic collapse, famine, and a general war over remaining resources. While it is certainly possible to imagine strategies to develop alternative energy sources and mandate energy conservation on a massive scale, the world is currently as reliant on hydrocarbons as it is on water, sunlight, and soil. Without oil for transportation and agriculture, without gas for heating, chemicals, and fertilizers, and without coal for power generation, the global economy would sputter to a halt. While no one envisions these fuels disappearing instantly, we can avert the worst-case scenario of global economic meltdown — with all the human tragedy that implies — only by proactively reducing our reliance on oil, gas, and coal ahead of depletion and scarcity. In other words, all that is required for the worst-case scenario to materialize is for world leaders to continue with existing policies.
These two problems are potentially lethal, first-priority ailments. If we solve them, we will then be able to devote our attention to other human dilemmas, many of which have been with us for millennia — war, disease, inequality, and so on. If we do not solve these two problems, then in a few decades our species may be in no position to make any progress whatever on other fronts; indeed, it will likely be engaged in a struggle for its very survival. We’ll be literally and metaphorically burning the furniture for fuel and fighting over scraps.
My second reason for insisting that the transition from fossil fuels must take precedence over other concerns can likewise be framed in a medical metaphor: often a constellation of seemingly disparate symptoms issues from a single cause. A patient may present with symptoms of hearing loss, stomach pain, headaches, and irritability. An incompetent doctor might treat each of these symptoms separately without trying to correlate them. But if their cause is lead poisoning (which can produce all of these signs and more), then mere symptomatic treatment would be useless.
Let us unpack the metaphor. Not only are the two great crises mentioned above closely related (both Peak Oil and Climate Change issue from our dependence on fossil fuels), but, as I have already noted, many if not most of our other modern crises also constellate around fossil fuels. Even long-standing and perennial problems like economic inequality have been exacerbated by high energy-flow rates.
Pollution is no different. We humans have polluted our environments in various ways for a very long time; activities like the mining of lead and tin have produced localized devastation for centuries. However, the problem of widespread chemical pollution is a relatively new one and has grown much worse over the past decades. Many of the most dangerous pollutants happen to be fossil fuel derivatives (pesticides, plastics, and other hormone-mimicking chemicals) or by-products from the burning of coal or petroleum (nitrogen oxides and other contributors to acid rain).
War might at first seem to be a problem completely independen
t of our modern thirst for fossil energy sources. However, as security analyst Michael Klare has underscored in his book Blood and Oil,14 many recent wars have turned on competition for control of petroleum. As oil grows scarcer in the post-peak environment, further wars and civil conflicts over the black gold are almost assured. Moreover, the use of fossil fuels in the prosecution of war has made state-authorized mayhem far more deadly. Most modern explosives are made from fossil fuels, and even the atomic bomb — which relies on nuclear fission or fusion rather than hydrocarbons for its horrific power — depends on fossil fuels for its delivery systems.
One could go on. In summary: we have used the plentiful, cheap energy from fossil fuels, quite predictably, to expand our power over nature and one another. In doing so we have produced a laundry list of environmental and social problems. We have tried to address these one by one, but our efforts will be much more effective if directed at their common root — that is, if we end our dependence on fossil fuels.
Again, my thesis: many problems rightly deserve attention, but the problem of our dependence on fossil fuels is central to human survival, and so as long as that dependence continues to any significant extent we must make its reduction the centerpiece of all our collective efforts — whether they are efforts to feed ourselves, resolve conflicts, or maintain a functioning economy.
But this can be formulated in another, more encouraging, way. If we do focus all of our collective efforts on the central task of energy transition, we may find ourselves contributing to the solution of a wide range of problems that would be much harder to solve if we confronted each one in isolation. With a coordinated and voluntary reduction in fossil fuel consumption, we could see substantial progress in reducing many forms of environmental pollution. The decentralization of economic activity that we must pursue as transport fuels become more scarce could lead to more local jobs, more fulfilling occupations, and more robust local economies. A controlled contraction in the global oil trade could lead to a reduction of international political tensions. A planned conversion of farming to non-fossil fuel methods could mean a decline in the environmental devastation caused by agriculture and economic opportunities for millions of new farmers. Meanwhile, all of these efforts together could increase equity, community involvement, intergenerational solidarity, and the other intangible goods listed earlier.
Surely this is a future worth working toward.
The (Rude) Awakening
The subtitle of this book, “Waking Up to the Century of Declines,” reflects my impression that even those of us who have been thinking about resource depletion for many years are still just beginning to awaken to its full implications. And if we are all in various stages of waking up to the problem, we are also waking up from the cultural trance of denial in which we are all embedded.15
This awakening is multi-dimensional. It is not just a matter of becoming intellectually and dispassionately convinced of the reality and seriousness of Climate Change, Peak Oil, or any other specific problem. Rather, it entails an emotional, cultural, and political catharsis. The biblical metaphor of scales falling from one’s eyes is as apt as the pop culture meme of taking the red pill and seeing the world beyond the Matrix: in either case, waking up implies realizing that the very fabric of modern life is woven from illusion — thousands of illusions, in fact.
Holding that fabric together is one master illusion, the notion that somehow what we see around us today is normal. In a sense, of course, it is normal: the daily life experience of millions of people is normal by definition. The reality of cars, television, and fast food is calmly taken for granted; if life has been like this for decades, why shouldn’t it continue, with incremental developmental changes, indefinitely? But how profoundly this “normal” life in a typical modern city differs from the lives of previous generations of humans! And the fact that it is built on the foundation of cheap fossil fuels means that future generations must and will live differently.
Again, the awakening I am describing is an ongoing visceral as well as intellectual reassessment of every facet of life — food, work, entertainment, travel, politics, economics, and more. The experience is so all-encompassing that it defies linear description. And yet we must make the attempt to describe and express it; we must turn our multi-dimensional experience into narrative, because that is how we humans process and share our experiences of the world.
The great transition of the 21st century will entail enormous adjustments on the part of every individual, family and community, and if we are to make those adjustments successfully, we will need to plan rationally. Implications and strategies will have to be explored in nearly every area of human interest — agriculture, transportation, global war and peace, public health, resource management, and on and on. Books, research studies, television documentaries, and every other imaginable form of information transferal will be required to convey needed knowledge in each of these areas. Moreover, there is the need for more than explanatory materials; we will need citizen organizations that can turn policy into action, and artists to create cultural expressions that can help fire the collective imagination. Within this whirlwind of analysis, adjustment, creativity, and transformation, perhaps there is need and space for a book that simply tries to capture the overall spirit of the time into which we are headed, that ties the multifarious upwellings of cultural change to the science of global warming and Peak Oil in some hopefully surprising and entertaining ways, and that begins to address the psychological dimension of our global transition from industrial growth to contraction and sustainability.
This book was conceived during a brief stay in a tiny village in west Cornwall in late 2006. Perhaps the bleakness of the countryside at that season is reflected in the title. However, I hope also that Cornwall’s rugged beauty and its people’s remaining connections with down-to-earth, pre-industrial ways of thinking and of doing things are also somehow represented, if only indirectly, in these pages.
The chapters herein are self-contained essays and while I have made every effort to put them into a helpful and logical order, readers who like to savor a book’s last chapter first or to read chapters out of sequence will find that this approach works reasonably well here.
Each chapter has a story attached to it, which I will relate briefly.
“Tools with a Life of Their Own” was written in response to a penciled letter from the representative of a radical anti-technology magazine asking for an article. I wrote the requested article and sent it to the e-mail address noted in the letter. Then, when no reply was forthcoming, I sent a printout of the essay via “snail mail” to the return address on the envelope. Still no reply. To this day I do not know whether my article was rejected, whether my messages were intercepted by Federal agents, or whether the magazine’s editors’ ambivalence about technology rendered them unable to manage their communications responsibly. The essay was later published in the anthology Living a Life of Value, edited by Jason A. Merchey.16
“Fifty Million Farmers” is the edited text of a speech delivered in November, 2006 to the E. F. Schumacher Society (which has published the full version).17 Over the past few months I have offered essentially the same message to the Ecological Farming Association in Asilomar, California, the National Farmers Union of Canada in Saskatoon, and the Soil Association in Cardiff, Wales. Each time I discussed the likely impacts of Peak Oil and gas for modern agriculture, and emphasized the need for dramatic, rapid reform in our global food system.
“Five Axioms of Sustainability” came from many years of frustration over the widespread, careless use of the terms sustainable and sustainability. The words would not have gained so much currency if many people were not worried that our society is in some sense unsustainable — i.e., that it cannot survive in its current form. Yet the terms are frequently tacked onto practices and programs (e.g., “sustainable yields” on investments) that can have no substantial impact whatever on society’s ability to survive into the future. This chapter represents my
effort to help refine our working definitions of these key terms. It is somewhat tougher reading than the rest of the book, and I had thought of making it an appendix; however, it is not an afterthought, but goes to the heart of every other significant discussion in the text.
Three chapters were inspired by creative works: “(post-) Hydrocarbon Aesthetics” came from a visit to an Arts and Crafts museum exhibit; “Parrots and Peoples” followed my viewing of the documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill; and “Population, Resources, and Human Idealism” was my response to the Broadway musical, Urinetown. In each case, the result was not a review in the usual sense, but rather an exploration of ideas relating to the theme of this book.
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