Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  With less energy available each year, and with unstable currencies plaguing transactions, manufacturing and transportation shrank in scale. It didn’t matter how little Nike paid its workers in Indonesia: once shipping became prohibitively expensive, profits from the globalization of its operations vanished. But Nike couldn’t just start up factories back in the States again; all of those factories had been closed decades earlier. The same with all the other clothing manufacturers, electronics manufacturers, and so on. All of that local manufacturing infrastructure had been destroyed to make way for globalization, for cheaper goods, for bigger corporate profits. And now, to recreate that infrastructure would require a huge financial and energy investment — just when money and energy were in ever-shorter supply.

  Stores were empty. People were out of work. How were they to survive? The only way was by endlessly recycling all the used stuff that had been manufactured before the energy crisis. At first, after the initial economic shock waves, people were selling their stuff on Internet auctions — while there was still electricity. When it became clear that lack of reliable transportation made delivery of the goods problematic, people started selling stuff on street corners so they could pay their rents and mortgages and buy food. But after the currency collapse, that didn’t make sense either, so people began just trading stuff, refurbishing it, using it however they could in order to get by. The cruel irony was that most of their stuff consisted of cars and electronic gadgets that nobody could afford to operate anymore. Worthless! Anybody who had human-powered hand tools and knew how to use them was wealthy indeed — and still is.

  Industrial civilization sure produced a hell of a lot of junk during its brief existence. Over the past 50 or 60 years, folks have dug up just about every landfill there ever was, looking for anything that could be useful. What a god-awful mess! With all due respect, I have always had a hard time understanding why — and even how — you people could take billions of tons of invaluable, ancient, basic resources and turn them into mountains of stinking garbage, with almost no measurable period of practical use in between! Couldn’t you at least have made durable, well-designed stuff? I must say that the quality of the tools, furniture, houses, and so on that we have inherited from you — and are forced to use, given that few of us are capable of replacing them — is pretty dismal.

  Well, I apologize for those last remarks. I don’t mean to be nasty or rude. Actually some of the hand tools left behind are quite good. But you have to understand: the industrial way of life to which you have become accustomed will have horrific consequences for your children and grandchildren.

  I can vaguely remember seeing — when I was very young, maybe five or six — some old television shows from the 1950s: Ozzie and Harriet...Father Knows Best...Lassie. They portrayed an innocent world, one in which children grew up in small communities surrounded by friends and family. All problems were easily dealt with by adults who were mostly kind and wise. It all seemed so stable and benign.

  When I was born, that world, if it had ever really existed, was long gone. By the time I was old enough to know much about what was happening on the bigger scene, society was beginning to come apart at the seams. It started with electricity blackouts — just a few hours at a time at first. At the same time the natural gas shortages clicked in. Not only were we cold most of the winter, but the blackouts got dramatically worse because so much electricity was being produced using natural gas. Meanwhile the oil and gasoline shortages were worsening. At this point — I guess I was a young teenager then — the economy was in tatters and there was political chaos.

  By the time I was an older teenager, a certain identifiable attitude was developing among the young people. It was a feeling of utter contempt for anyone over a certain age — maybe 30 or 40. The adults had consumed so many resources, and now there were none left for their own children. Of course, when those adults were younger they had just been doing what everybody else was doing. They figured it was normal to cut down ancient forests for wood pulp for their phone books, pump every last gallon of oil to power their SUVs, or flick on the air conditioner if they were a little too warm. For the kids of my generation, all of that was just a dim memory. What we knew was very different. We were living in darkness, with shortages of food and water, with riots in the streets, with people begging on street corners, with unpredictable weather, with pollution and garbage that could no longer be carted away and hidden from sight. For us, the adults were the enemy.

  In some places, the age wars remained just a matter of simmering resentment. In others, there were random attacks on older people. In still others, there were systematic purges. I’m ashamed to say that, while I didn’t actually physically attack any older people, I did participate in the shaming and name-calling. Those poor old folks — some of them still quite young, from my present perspective! — were just as confused and betrayed as we kids were. I can imagine myself in their shoes. Try to do the same: try to remember the last time you went to a store to buy something and the store didn’t have it. (This little thought exercise is a real stretch for me, since I haven’t been in a “store” that actually had much of anything for several decades, but I’m trying to put this in terms that you will understand.) Did you feel frustrated? Did you get angry, thinking, “I drove all the way here for this thing, and now I’m going to have to drive all the way across town to another store to get it”? Well, multiply that frustration and anger by a thousand, ten thousand. This is what people were going through every day, with regard to just about every consumer item, service, or bureaucratic necessity they had grown accustomed to. Moreover, those adults had lost most of what they had in the economic crash. And now gangs of kids were stealing whatever was left and heaping scorn on them as they did so. That must have been devastating for them. Unbearable.

  Now that I’m so ancient myself, I have a little more tolerance for people. We’re all just trying to get by, doing the best we can.

  I suppose you’re curious to know more about what has happened during this past century — the politics, wars, revolutions. Well, I’ll tell you what I know, but there’s a lot that I don’t. For the last 60 years or so we haven’t had anything like the global communications networks that used to exist. There are large parts of the world about which I know almost nothing.

  As you can imagine, when the energy resource shortages hit the United States and the economy started to go into a tailspin (it’s interesting that I still use that word: only the oldest among us, such as myself, have ever seen an airplane tailspin, nose-dive, or even fly), people became angry and started looking around for someone to blame. Of course, the government didn’t want to be the culprit, so those bastards in power (sorry, I still don’t have much sympathy for them) did what political leaders have always done — they created a foreign enemy. They sent warships, bombers, missiles, and tanks off across the oceans for heaven-knows-what grisly purpose. People were told that this was being done to protect their “American Way of Life.” Well, there was nothing on Earth that could have accomplished that. It was the American Way of Life that was the problem!

  The generals managed to kill a few million people. Actually, it could have been tens or hundreds of millions, even billions for all I know; the news media were never very clear on that, since they were censored by the military. There were antiwar protests in the streets, and some of the protestors were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The government became utterly fascistic in its methods toward the end. There were local uprisings and brutal crackdowns. But it was all for nothing. The wars only depleted what few resources were still available, and after a few horrible years the central government just collapsed. Ran out of gas.

  Speaking of political events, it’s worth noting that in the early years of the shortages, the existing political philosophies had very little to offer that was helpful. The right-wingers were completely devoted to shielding the wealthy from blame and shifting all of the pain onto poor people and overseas scapegoats. Meanwhile
, the Left was so habituated to fighting corporate meanies that it couldn’t grasp the fact that the problems now facing society couldn’t be solved by economic redistribution. Personally, as a historian, I tend to be much more sympathetic to the Left because I think that the amount of wealth a few people accumulated was just obscene. I suspect that a hell of a lot of suffering could have been averted if all of that wealth had been spread around early on, when the money was worth something. But to hear some of the leftist leaders talk, you’d think that once all the corporations had been reined in, once the billionaire plutocrats had been relieved of their riches, everything would be fine. Well, everything wasn’t going to be fine, no way.

  So here were these two political factions fighting to the death, blaming each other, while everybody around them was starving or going crazy. What the people really needed was just some basic commonsense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth — their way of life was coming to an end — and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.

  Much of what has happened during the past century was what you have every reason to expect on the basis of your scientists’ forecasts: we have seen dramatic climate shifts, species extinctions, and horrible epidemics, just as the ecologists at the turn of the 21st century warned there would be. I don’t think that’s a matter of much satisfaction to those ecologists’ descendants. Getting to say “I told you so” is paltry comfort in this situation. Tigers and whales are gone, and probably tens of thousands of other species; but our lack of reliable global communications makes it difficult for anyone to know just which species and where. The last I heard, the oceans have been mostly empty of life for decades. For me, songbirds are a fond but distant memory. I suppose my counterparts in China or Africa have their own long lists.

  Climate Change has been a real problem for growing food. You never know from one year to the next what swarms of unfamiliar insects will show up. For a year or two or three, all we get is rain. Then there’s drought for the next five or six. It’s much worse than a nuisance; it’s life-threatening. That’s just one of the factors that has led to the dramatic reduction in human population during the last century.

  Many people call it “The Die-off.” Others call it “The Pruning,” “The Purification,” or “The Cleansing.” Some terms are more pal - atable than others, but there really are no nice ways to describe the actual events — wars, epidemics, famines.

  Food and water have been big factors in all of this. Fresh, clean water has been scarce for decades now. One way to make young people mad at me is to tell them stories about how folks in the old days used to pour millions upon millions of gallons of water on their lawns. When I describe to them how flush toilets worked, they just can’t bear it. Some of them think I’m making this stuff up! These days water is serious business. If you waste it, somebody’s likely to die.

  Starting many decades ago, people began — by necessity — to learn how to grow their own food. Not everyone was successful, and there was a lot of hunger. One of the frustrating things was the lack of good seeds. Very few people knew anything about saving seeds from one season to the next, so existing seed stocks were depleted very quickly. There was also a big problem with all the modern hybrid varieties: few of the garden vegetables that were planted would produce good seeds for the next year. The genetically engineered plants were even worse, causing all sorts of ecological problems that we’re still dealing with, particularly the killing off of bees and other beneficial insects. The “suicide seeds” developed by the designer-gene seed companies to protect patent rights were absolutely the worst: while those strains disappeared very quickly once the distribution system started to come apart, the millions of people dependent on them for food had nothing else to plant — or eat. That story is part of our collective mythology now, and is just one of the reasons that the seeds of good open-pollinated food plants are like gold to us.

  I did some traveling by foot and on horseback when I was younger, in my fifties and sixties, and we continue to get some sporadic reports from the outside world. From what I’ve seen and heard, it seems that people in different places have coped in different ways and with widely varying degrees of success. Ironically, perhaps, the indigenous people who were most persecuted by civilization are probably doing the best. They still retained a lot of knowledge of how to live simply on the land. In some places, people are dwelling together in makeshift rural communes; other folks are trying to survive in what’s left of the great urban centers, ripping up concrete and growing what they can as they recycle and trade all the old junk that was left behind when people fled the cities in the 2020s.

  Speaking as a historian, one of my biggest frustrations is the rapid disappearance of knowledge. You people had a mania for putting most of your important information on electronic storage media and acid-laden paper — which are disintegrating very quickly. For the most part, all we have are fading photographs, random books, and crumbling magazines.

  A few of our young people look at the old magazine ads and wonder what it must have been like to live in a world with jet airplanes, electricity, and sports cars. It must have been utopia, paradise! Others among us are not so sanguine about the past. I suppose that’s part of my job as a historian: to remind everyone that the advertising images were only one side of a story; it was the other side of that story — the rampant exploitation of nature and people, the blindness to consequences — that led to the horrors of the past century.

  You’re probably wondering if I have any good news, anything encouraging to say about the future of your world. Well, as with most things, it depends on your perspective. Many of the survivors learned valuable lessons. They learned what’s important in life and what isn’t. They learned to treasure good soil, viable seeds, clean water, unpolluted air, and friends you can count on. They learned how to take charge of their own lives, rather than expecting to be taken care of by some government or corporation. There are no “jobs” now, so people’s time is all their own. They think for themselves more. Partly as a result of that, the old religions have largely fallen by the wayside, and folks have rediscovered spirituality in nature and in their local communities. The kids today are eager to learn and to create their own culture. The traumas of industrial civilization’s collapse are mostly in the past; that’s history now. It’s a new day.

  Can you change my past, which is your future? I don’t know. There are all sorts of logical contradictions inherent in that question. I can barely understand the principles of physics that allow me to transmit this signal to you. Possibly, as a result of reading this letter, you might do something that would change my world. Maybe you could save a forest or a species, or preserve some heirloom seeds, or help prepare yourselves and the rest of the population for the coming energy shortages. Maybe you could talk a lot of people into leaving fossil fuels in the ground, where they belong. My life might be altered as a result. Then, I suppose this letter would change, as would your experience of reading it. And as a result of that, you’d take different actions. We would have set up some kind of cosmic feedback loop between past and future. It’s pretty interesting to think about.

  Speaking of physics, maybe I should mention that I’ve come to accept a view of history based on what I’ve read about chaos theory. According to the theory, in chaotic systems small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes in outcomes. Well, human society and history are chaotic systems. Even though most of what people do is determined by material circumstances, they still have some wiggle room, and what they do with that can make a significant difference down the line. In retrospect, it appears that human survival in the 21st century hinged on many small and seemingly insignificant efforts by marginalized individuals and groups in the 20th century. The anti-nuclear movement, the conservation movement, the anti-biotech movement, the organic food and gardening movements, indigenous peoples’ resistance movements, the tiny organizations devoted to seed saving — all had a profound and positive impact
on later events.

  I suppose that, logically speaking, if you were to alter the web of causation leading up to my present existence, it is possible that events might transpire that would preclude my being here. In that case, this letter would constitute history’s most bizarre suicide note! But that is a risk I am willing to take. Do what you can. Change history! And while you’re at it, be kind to one another. Don’t take anything or anyone for granted.

  11

  Talking Ourselves to Extinction

  LANGUAGE IS A POWERFUL meta-tool that dramatically amplifies cooperative human efforts to control the environment. Language also opens the possibility for religion and science — which otherwise would not exist. Language helped generate our current ecological dilemma. Can language help solve it?

  In systems theory and evolutionary biology, the word emergence describes the development of complex systems or organs; an emergent phenomenon is one based on the interaction of simpler elements but whose characteristics cannot be predicted based on a thorough knowledge of those elements. In the course of a species’ evolution a variation may appear that is retained because it confers an advantage in terms of existing functions; but once in place, the new characteristic may act in combination with other capacities of the organism to make truly novel and unexpected functions possible. Organs for sight and hearing probably originated as emergent phenomena. Life itself has been described as an emergent property of matter, and sensation and mind are emergent properties of higher organisms.