Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  Explaining Our Incomprehension

  Why are Peak Oil and Climate Change so hard for many people to understand? There are probably many reasons. One often cited (and discussed brilliantly and at length by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich in their 1989 book New World New Mind) is that humans are hard-wired via the reptilian brain for fight-or-flight responses to adversity or danger, but have an innate inability to respond effectively to slowly developing problems that are hard to personalize. Ornstein and Ehrlich suggest that our species, if it is to survive, must quickly improve its capacity to understand and deal with systemic crises.

  Another possible reason why so many people can’t “get” Peak Oil and Climate Change has to do with psychological maturity — which often does not correlate particularly well with chronological age. Psychological maturity might be defined as the ability or tendency to think of not just one’s own welfare but that of larger groups — family, community, the world as a whole, and that of other species; and to think in terms of long time horizons in addition to short ones. This includes thinking about consequences of present behavior that will be felt only by future generations. People who are psychologically mature know — not just theoretically, but by experience — that youth and old age are on a continuum; that life consists also of death; and that personal sacrifice is sometimes required for the sake of family or community.

  Acceptance and Beyond: Peak Oil Grief

  The late Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the pathbreaking book On Death and Dying, is famous for distinguishing five psychological stages of grief typically traversed by people who have recently been informed that they have a fatal illness — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Knowledge of these stages has enabled counselors more effectively to help individuals deal psychologically with their impending demise. Several Peak Oil authors have suggested that Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model could also help in describing and treating our collective distress over the impending loss of our comfortable, energy-guzzling way of life. (Could this be a form of pre-traumatic stress disorder?) Many people, upon first “getting” Peak Oil or Climate Change respond by exhibiting one or another of these predictable stages, and denial is most often the first.

  If the model holds up, we might find that differing messages are effective for helping people reach the point of accepting our situation, depending on their current stage of adjustment. For example, we should expect people who have just heard about the problems for the first time to try out all of the time-worn denial ploys: “Oh, but technology will come to the rescue. Surely they will think of something. What if there’s lots more oil out there that just hasn’t been discovered? Maybe measured warming patterns are just due to natural climate variability. Perhaps a few degrees of warming will actually be good for us!” If people respond with anger, this may simply be symptomatic of an inner psychological process of adjustment that may require days, weeks, or months to work itself out. We may wish to gently persist in offering information, but in ways appropriate to the stage of adjustment being exhibited.

  Even those who have reached the acceptance stage of the process seem to cycle back through previous reactions (I still find myself experiencing denial, anger, bargaining, and depression after years of studying the problem of oil depletion).

  For over 30 years eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy has led “despair and empowerment” workshops (they are now also called “the work that reconnects”) with thousands of veteran environmental and peace activists, as well as Israelis and Palestinians and other groups suffering from long-standing enmity. Her workshops are designed to help participants process more thoroughly, quickly, and effectively the grief they feel over the destruction of people and planet, and to overcome the psychology of denial and helplessness that keeps them mired in the status quo. Workshop tools include ritualistic exercises and guided creative processes. In the past few years Joanna has been supportive of Peak Oil education and I’ve been delighted to offer public presentations with her on a couple of occasions. Some Peak Oil groups in North America and Australia have offered workshops based on her work, including one called “The Heart of Peak Oil” held in Melbourne in 2006.

  More than once I’ve heard the comment that at least some Peak Oil and Climate Change activists seem strangely happy despite the dire nature of their message. Perhaps the Kübler-Ross formula, though useful, is insufficient for the purpose of describing the full cycle of psychological reactions among environmental activists. Beyond acceptance must come a further stage — action. Those who simply spend their time learning about oil depletion and the melting of glaciers are often glum plums, the death of a party. However, those who spend hours a week organizing local food systems, car co-ops, and economic localization forums seem to flip over into an infectious cheeriness. This observation, if widely confirmed, could have wider significance: we may have hit upon one of the main potential motivators for broad social change. Knowing the world is unraveling while assuming there’s nothing you can do about it is a recipe for desolation. Being involved in heroic work to save the world is empowering and exciting. Once one acknowledges the dilemma we’re in, these seem to be the only two options.

  Collective PTSD

  The next few decades will be traumatic. The slow squeeze of economic contraction will probably be punctuated by dramatic weather-related catastrophes, resource wars, and regional instances of social collapse. As a result, we are likely to see widespread symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — a condition first widely recognized among combat soldiers returning from the Vietnam War but now regarded as a generic category of psychological responses to disturbing events ranging from incest to natural disasters. In individuals, the typical symptoms include:

  • vigilance and scanning

  • elevated startle response

  • blunted affect or psychic numbing (the loss of the ability to feel)

  • denial (mental reorganization of the event to reduce pain, leading sometimes even to amnesia)

  • aggressive, controlling behavior

  • interruption of memory and concentration

  • depression

  • generalized anxiety

  • episodes of rage

  • substance abuse

  • intrusive recall and dissociative “flashback” experiences

  • insomnia

  • suicidal ideation and

  • survivor guilt

  In recent years several sociologists and psychologists have investigated collective PTSD — the consequence of an entire society suffering trauma. One of the most extensive surveys of the psychological effects of mass trauma yet published is Lewis Aptekar’s Environmental Disasters in Global Perspective. Aptekar compared studies from traditional, “developing,” and “developed” cultures; he also explored the aftermaths of many kinds of disasters — including chronic disasters (droughts, famines), quick onset disasters (floods, fires, storms, earthquakes), and human-induced disasters (wars, toxic chemical spills, nuclear plant meltdowns). The findings he reviewed are complex and varied, and researchers whose work he cited came to differing conclusions. There is some controversy, for example, on whether the psychological effects of disasters persist for years, perhaps generations, or are only transitory. After a thorough study of researchers’ conflicting views, Aptekar concluded that discrepancies in observations probably arise from differences in the nature and severity of the disasters, the presence (or lack) of a social support system, the degree to which the environment returns to its pre-disaster state, as well as from differences in research methods (different studies of the same disaster sometimes produced different results).

  Aptekar first dispelled misconceptions about people’s immediate responses to disasters. Looting and panic are rare; instead, people more frequently display behavior that has a clear sense of purpose and is directed toward the common good. Tragically, officials who believe that social chaos inevitably follows disasters often
delay warning communities of impending crises because they wish to avoid a panic. Nor do people flee from disaster sites; rather, they tend to remain. In addition, outsiders usually enter the area in order to help survivors or to search for family members, producing what has come to be known as the “convergence phenomenon.”

  Aptekar described post-traumatic stress disorder in some detail and cited the work of researchers who studied its impacts in different kinds of natural and human-induced disasters. Symptoms seem to appear only after the severest disasters, and in cases where victims are directly and personally affected: “The victims who show the greatest psychopathology are those who lose close friends and relatives.” 1 Not all of the symptoms occur immediately, and reactions may appear years afterward, especially on anniversaries of the disaster. Gradually, people tend to distort their memory of the event, forgetting parts of what happened and minimizing its impact and their reactions to it. Children appear to be particularly vulnerable after a disaster. Meanwhile, adverse reactions in adults can be so severe that disaster victims “pass fear and insecurity onto their children — even those yet to be born — by replacing in their child-rearing a sense of a secure world with a fearful worldview.”

  One of the early pioneers in the study of disasters, Samuel Prince (whose work was published in the early 1920s), was convinced that disasters inevitably bring social change.2 Subsequent work has tended to confirm Prince’s conclusions; however, the examples cited by Prince and Aptekar are of non-industrial societies that responded to trauma by exhibiting more of the characteristics of industrial cultures. This is not likely to be so frequent a response if the mass trauma consists of a partial or complete collapse of industrialism. Sociologist Max Weber wrote that disasters tend to produce charismatic leaders, an observation that has been confirmed in various cultural settings.3 This is a social phenomenon that could indeed be extrapolated to the circumstances we can anticipate.

  Patterns of reaction in already industrialized societies are somewhat different from those in non-industrial ones. In many instances, impacts are minimized because of the almost immediate availability of elaborate aid and support systems. Yet disaster researcher Benjamin McLuckie hypothesized (in 1977) that “the higher the society’s level of technological development, the more vulnerable it would be.”4 That is because people in industrialized countries live in major population centers and rely on sophisticated technologies, increasing their vulnerability to a large-scale collapse of interlocking systems of transportation, communication, water supply, and food distribution.

  Responses to human-made disasters are again different: According to Aptekar, victims of these often show more stress than victims of natural disasters because of the perceived need to find parties to blame. Whatever the eventual circumstances resulting from Peak Oil and Climate Change, it seems probable that groups in differing geographical areas, and in differing economic conditions, will react in dissimilar ways. In the case of a breakdown of communication and control, those who are more dependent on high tech will likely suffer much more than those who are still somewhat accustomed to locally filling their own basic needs. Over the short term, we are likely to see acts of extraordinary heroism alongside extreme examples of opportunism and stupidity.

  But what if the trauma continues for years or decades? To what degree is a persistent, universal disaster (such as the collapse of a society) different from the examples Aptekar cited? In the former case, given enough time, might there indeed be panic and looting, and general flight from the sites of greatest hardship? Aptekar does not offer discussion or examples in this regard; for these we might better look to clues from books like Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, which discusses, for example, how population levels, especially in Rome itself, fell dramatically, job specialization declined, and famines became more common and severe.

  In her essay “Ecological Collapse, Trauma Theory, and Permaculture,” Peak Oil activist Lisa Rayner surveys other relevant literature and draws conclusions directly relevant to the present discussion, quoting frequently from Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery. Other relevant books include Chellis Glendinning’s My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization and Benjamin Colodzin’s How to Survive Trauma: A Program for War Veterans and Survivors of Rape, Assault, Abuse or Environmental Disasters.

  Rayner notes that “classic” PTSD refers to responses to an acute life-threatening experience, such as a rape or a severe car accident. However, many people with symptoms of the disorder have not experienced an immediately life-threatening event, but instead have undergone an accumulation of milder stressors. Herman calls this condition “Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” while other researchers refer to it as “Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder (PDSD).”

  Rayner points out, “When whole communities suffer from trauma, people develop a kind of mass-PTSD at the social level that makes it very difficult to heal. Alcoholism, domestic violence and other problems become rampant. Conflicts between groups become intractable.” She also notes that “psychological research shows that it is nearly impossible to heal from past trauma if one is presently in a traumatic situation. For example, a battered wife cannot heal from the effects of child abuse until she gathers the strength to leave her marriage.”

  In cases where the original trauma is long past, the most important aspect of treatment seems to be the recollection and emotional processing of the event. A therapist or therapeutic community is often helpful in this regard. Rayner says, “Trauma survivors learn to make some sort of meaning out of their experiences, to take useful lessons about life away from what is otherwise a hopeless and degrading situation.” She quotes Herman’s important observation that “recovery can take place only within the context of relationships.”5

  All of this suggests that those with psychological training may play as important a role in our collective adaptation to Peak Oil and Climate Change as energy experts and permaculturists. The former should perhaps be gearing up to treat not only individuals but whole communities.

  A Model for Explanation and Treatment: Addiction and Dependency

  In his January 2006 State of the Union address, George Bush famously observed that “America is addicted to oil.” This was news to no one, but the phrase struck a nerve: it got more ink in the press the next day than anything else in his speech, and it is still frequently quoted.

  Following Bush’s statement, more than one commentator advocated the development of a twelve-step program to rid America of its addiction to petroleum. The original twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous was religion-based, so it might not be directly useful to an entire modern semi-secular society. But two of the steps could well apply:

  • admitting that we have a problem, and

  • making a searching and fearless inventory of our energy consumption.

  In what other ways can the addiction metaphor be helpful? In his article “Is Our Collective Oil Dependence an Addiction?”, Peak Oil activist Rob Hopkins concluded that dependency is a better metaphor than addiction in the current instance.6 Hopkins cites the WHO diagnostic definition of dependency, which says that “three or more of the following manifestations should have occurred together for at least one month or, if persisting for periods of less than one month, should have occurred together repeatedly within a 12-month period”:

  • a strong desire or sense of compulsion to take the substance

  • impaired capacity to control substance-taking behavior in terms of its onset, termination, or levels of use, as evidenced by: the substance being often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than intended or by a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to reduce or control substance use

  • a physiological withdrawal state when substance use is reduced or ceased, as evidenced by the characteristic withdrawal syndrome for the substance, or by use of the same (or closely related) substance with the intention of relieving or avoiding withdrawal symptoms

  • evidence o
f tolerance to the effects of the substance, such that there is a need for significantly increased amounts of the substance to achieve intoxication or the desired effect, or a markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of the substance

  • preoccupation with substance use, as manifested by important alternative pleasures or interests being given up or reduced because of substance use; or a great deal of time being spent in activities necessary to obtain, take, or recover from the effects of the substance

  • persistent substance use despite clear evidence of harmful consequences, as evidenced by continued use when the individual is actually aware, or may be expected to be aware, of the nature and extent of harm7

  Hopkins examines our societal dependence on oil in terms of each of these criteria and makes the case that each applies.

  If we accept that the metaphor does have value and that society is, in some sense, clinically dependent upon a damaging substance (oil), what implications does this have for public policy?

  Let us suppose that we genuinely wished to end our dependency on some other damaging substance, such as heroin. How would we go about doing this? One method might be to surround ourselves with methadone, cigarettes, beer, coffee, and chewing gum — that is, with other addictive or habit-forming substances — and then hope that our dependency on heroin somehow transferred itself to one or more of these. The strategy would probably not work well; the more likely outcome would be at least one added dependency.

  Let us translate this thought exercise to our oil dependency. Might we end it simply by developing new supplies of alternative fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, or liquids from coal and natural gas? If the analogy holds, the result is likely to be not an actual reduction in oil consumption but merely an added dependency on these alternatives. And indeed this is exactly what we see in most cases: it is difficult to find an instance in which any nation has substantially decreased its existing oil consumption as a result of the development of alternative fuels. In nearly every case alternatives serve merely to reduce the rate of growth in demand for oil. It doesn’t hurt, but neither does it address the core problem.