Well, the Fates were apparently listening last week. As I
write this, stock markets around the world are lurching through what might just
be the opening moves of the Crash of 2015, whipsawed by further plunges in the
price of oil and a range of other bad economic news; amid a flurry of layoffs
and dropping rig counts, the first bankruptcy
in the fracking industry has been announced, with more on their way;
gunfire in Paris serves up a brutal reminder that the rising spiral of
political violence I traced in last week’s post is by no means limited to North
American soil. The cheerleaders of
business as usual in the media are still insisting at the top of their lungs
that America’s new era of energy independence is still on its way; those of my
readers who recall the final days of the housing bubble that burst in 2008, or
the tech-stock bubble that popped in 2000, will recognize a familiar tone in
the bluster.
It’s entirely possible, to be sure, that central banks and
governments will be able to jerry-rig another round of temporary supports for
the fraying architecture of the global economy, and postpone a crash—or at
least drag out the agony a bit longer. It’s equally possible that other
dimensions of the crisis of our age can be forestalled or postponed by drastic
actions here and now. That said, whether
the process is fast or slow, whether the crunch hits now or a bit further down
the road, the form of technic society I’ve termed abundance industrialism is on its way out through history’s exit turnstile, and
an entire world of institutions and activities familiar to all of us is going
with it.
It doesn’t require any particular genius or prescience to
grasp this, merely the willingness to recognize that if something is
unsustainable, sooner or later it won’t be sustained. Of course that’s the
sticking point, because what can’t be sustained at this point is the collection
of wildly extravagant energy- and resource-intensive habits that used to pass
for a normal lifestyle in the world’s industrial nations, and has recently
become just a little less normal than it used to be. Those lifestyles, and most
of what goes with them, only existed in the first place because a handful of
the world’s nations burned through half a billion years of fossil sunlight in a
few short centuries, and stripped the planet of most of its other concentrated
resource stocks into the bargain.
That’s the unpalatable reality of the industrial era.
Despite the rhetoric of universal betterment that was brandished about so
enthusiastically by the propagandists of the industrial order, there were never
enough of any of the necessary resources to make that possible for more than a
small fraction of the world’s population, or for more than a handful of
generations. Nearly all the members of our species who lived outside the industrial
nations, and a tolerably large number who resided within them, were expected to
carry most of the costs of reckless resource extraction and ecosystem
disruption while receiving few if any of the benefits. They’ll have plenty of
company shortly: abundance industrialism is winding down, but its consequences
are not, and people around the world for centuries and millennia to come will
have to deal with the depleted and damaged planet our actions have left them.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow, and the likely aftermath of
the industrial age won’t do anything to improve the taste. Over the last six
months or so, I’ve drawn on the downside trajectories of other failed
civilizations to sketch out how that aftermath will probably play out here in
North America: the disintegration of familiar political and economic
structures, the rise of warband culture, the collapse of public order, and the
failure of cultural continuity, all against a backdrop of rapid and
unpredictable climate change, rising seas, and the appearance of chemical and
radiological dead zones created by some of industrial civilization’s more
clueless habits. It’s an ugly picture, and the only excuse I have for that
unwelcome fact is that falling civilizations look like that.
The question that remains, though, is what we’re going to do
about it all.
I should say up front that by “we” I don’t mean some
suitably photogenic collection of Hollywood heroes and heroines who just happen
to have limitless resources and a bag of improbable inventions at their
disposal. I don’t mean a US government that has somehow shaken off the senility
that affects all great powers in their last days and is prepared to fling
everything it has into the quest for a sustainable future. Nor do I mean a
coterie of gray-skinned aliens from Zeta Reticuli, square-jawed rapists out of
Ayn Rand novels, or some other source of allegedly superior beings who can be
counted upon to come swaggering onto the scene to bail us out of the
consequences of our own stupidity. They aren’t part of this conversation; the
only people who are, just now, are the writer and the readers of this blog.
Within those limits, the question I’ve posed may seem
preposterous. I grant that for a phenomenon that practically defines the far
edges of the internet—a venue for lengthy and ornately written essays about
wildly unpopular subjects by a clergyman from a small and distinctly eccentric
fringe religion—The Archdruid Report has a preposterously large
readership, and one that somehow manages to find room for a remarkably diverse
and talented range of people, bridging some of the ideological and social
barriers that divide industrial society
into so many armed and uncommunicative camps. Even so, the regular readership
of this blog could probably all sit down at once in a football stadium and
still leave room for the hot dog vendors. Am I seriously suggesting that this
modest and disorganized a group can somehow rise up and take meaningful action
in the face of so vast a process as the fall of a civilization?
One of the things that gives that question an ironic flavor
is that quite a few people are making what amounts to the same claim in even
more grandiose terms than mine. I’m thinking here of the various proposals for
a Great Transition of one kind or another being hawked at various points along
the social and political spectrum these days. I suspect we’re going to be
hearing a lot more from those in the months and years immediately ahead, as the
collapse of the fracking bubble forces people to find some other excuse for
insisting that they can have their planet and eat it too.
Part of the motivation behind the grand plans just mentioned
is straightforwardly financial. One part of what drove the fracking bubble
along the classic trajectory—up with the rocket, down with the stick—was a
panicked conviction on the part of a great many people that some way had to be
found to keep industrial society’s fuel tanks somewhere on the near side of
that unwelcome letter E. Another part of it, though, was the recognition on the
part of a somewhat smaller but more pragmatic group of people tht the panicked
conviction in question could be turned into a sales pitch. Fracking wasn’t the
only thing that got put to work in the time-honored process of proving Ben
Franklin’s proverb about a fool and his money; fuel ethanol, biodiesel, and
large-scale wind power also had their promoters, and sucked up their share of
government subsidies and private investment.
Now that fracking is falling by the wayside, there’ll likely
be a wild scramble to replace it in the public eye as the wave of the energy
future. The nuclear industry will doubtless be in there—nuclear power is one of
the most durable subsidy dumpsters in modern economic life, and the nuclear industry has had
to become highly skilled at slurping from the government teat, since nuclear
power isn’t economically viable otherwise—it’s worth recalling that no nation
on earth has been able to create or maintain a nuclear power program without
massive ongoing government subsidies. No doubt we’ll get plenty of cheerleading
for fusion, satellite-based solar power, and other bits of high-end vaporware,
too.
Still, I suspect the next big energy bubble is probably
going to come from the green end of things. Over the last few years, there’s
been no shortage of claims that renewable resources can pick right up where
fossil fuels leave off and keep the lifestyles of today’s privileged middle classes
intact. Those claims tend to be long on enthusiasm and cooked numbers and short
on meaningful assessment, but then that same habit didn’t slow the fracking
boom any; we can expect to see a renewed flurry of claims that solar power must
be sustainable because the sticker price has gone down, and similar logical non
sequiturs. (By the same logic, the internet must be sustainable if you can pay
your monthly ISP bill by selling cute kitten photos on eBay. In both cases, the sprawling and almost
entirely fossil-fueled infrastructure of mines, factories, supply chains, power
grids, and the like, has been left out of the equation, as though those don’t
have to be accounted for: typical of the blindness to whole systems that
pervades so much of contemporary culture.)
It’s not enough for an energy technology to be green, in
other words; it also has to work. It’s
probably safe to assume that that point is going to be finessed over and over
again, in a galaxy of inventive ways, as
the fracking bubble goes whereved popped financial bubbles go when they die.
The point that next to nobody wants to confront is the one made toward the
beginning of this week’s post: if something is unsustainable, sooner or later
it won’t be sustained—and what’s unsustainable in this case isn’t simply fossil
fuel production and consumption, it’s the lifestyles that were made possible by
the immensely abundant and highly concentrated energy supply we got from fossil
fuels.
You can’t be part of the solution if your lifestyle is part
of the problem. I know that those words are guaranteed to make the
environmental equivalent of limousine liberals gasp and clutch their pearls or
their Gucci ties, take your pick, but there it is; it really is as simple as
that. There are at least two reasons why that maxim needs to be taken
seriously. On the one hand, if you’re clinging to an unsustainable lifestyle in
the teeth of increasingly strong economic and environmental headwinds, you’re
not likely to be able to spare the money, the free time, or any of the other
resources you would need to contribute to a solution; on the other, if you’re
emotionally and financially invested in keeping an unsustainable lifestyle,
you’re likely to put preserving that lifestyle ahead of things that arguably
matter more, like leaving a livable planet for future generations.
Is the act of letting go of unsustainable lifestyles the
only thing that needs to be done? Of course not, and in the posts immediately
ahead I plan on talking at length about some of the other options. I’d like to
suggest, though, that it’s the touchstone or, if you will, the boundary that
divides those choices that might actually do some good from those that are
pretty much guaranteed to do no good at all. That’s useful when considering the
choices before us as individuals; it’s at least as useful, if not more so, when
considering the collective options we’ll be facing in the months and years
ahead, among them the flurry of campaigns, movements, and organizations that
are already gearing up to exploit the crisis of our time in one way or
another—and with one agenda or another.
An acronym I introduced a while back in these posts might
well be worth revisiting here: LESS, which stands for “Less Energy, Stuff, and
Stimulation.” That’s a convenient summary of the changes that have to be made
to move from today’s unsustainable lifestyles to ways of living that will be
viable when today’s habits of absurd extravagance are fading memories. It’s
worth taking a moment to unpack the acronym a little further, and see what it
implies.
“Less energy” might seem self-evident, but there’s more
involved here than just turning off unneeded lights and weatherstripping your
windows and doors—though those are admittedly good places to start. A huge
fraction of the energy consumed by a modern industrial society gets used
indirectly to produce, supply, and transport goods and services; an allegedly
“green” technological device that’s made from petroleum-based plastics and
exotic metals taken from an open-pit mine in a Third World country, then
shipped halfway around the planet to the air-conditioned shopping mall where
you bought it, can easily have a carbon footprint substantially bigger than
some simpler item that does the same thing in a less immediately efficient way.
The blindness to whole systems mentioned earlier has to be overcome in order to
make any kind of meaningful sense of energy issues: a point I’ll be discussing
further in an upcoming post here.
“Less stuff” is equally straightforward on the surface,
equally subtle in its ramifications. Now of course it’s hardly irrelevant that
ours is the first civilization in the history of the planet to have to create
an entire industry of storage facilities to store the personal possessions that
won’t fit into history’s biggest homes. That said, “stuff” includes a great
deal more than the contents of your closets and storage lockers. It also
includes infrastructure—the almost unimaginably vast assortment of
technological systems on which the privileged classes of the industrial world
rely for most of the activities of their daily lives. That infrastructure was
only made possible by the deluge of cheap abundant energy our species briefly
accessed from fossil fuels; as what&##8217;s left of the world’s fossil fuel supply
moves deeper into depletion, the infrastructure that it created has been caught
in an accelerating spiral of deferred maintenance and malign neglect; the less
dependent you are on what remains, the less vulnerable you are to further
systems degradation, and the more of what’s left can go to those who actually
need it.
“Less stimulation” may seem like the least important part of
the acronym, but in many ways it’s the most crucial point of all. These days
most people in the industrial world flood their nervous systems with a torrent
of electronic noise. Much of this is
quite openly intended to manipulate their thoughts and feelings by economic and
political interests; a great deal more has that effect, if only by drowning out
any channel of communication that doesn’t conform to the increasingly narrow
intellectual tunnel vision of late industrial society. If you’ve ever noticed
how much of what passes for thinking these days amounts to the mindless
regurgitation of sound bites from the media, dear reader, that’s why. What
comes through the media—any media—is inevitably prechewed and predigested
according to someone else’s agenda; those who are interested in thinking their
own thoughts and making their own decisions, rather than bleating in perfect
unison with the rest of the herd, might want to keep this in mind.
It probably needs to be said that very few of us are in a
position to go whole hog with LESS—though it’s also relevant that some of us,
and quite possibly a great many of us, will end up doing so willy-nilly if the
economic contraction at the end of the fracking bubble turns out to be as
serious as some current figures suggest. Outside of that grim possibility,
“less” doesn’t have to mean “none at all”—certainly not at first; for those who
aren’t caught in the crash, at least, there may yet be time to make a gradual
transition toward a future of scarce energy and scarce resources. Still, I’d
like to suggest that any proposed response to the crisis of our time that
doesn’t start with LESS simply isn’t serious.
As already noted, I expect to see a great many nonserious
proposals in the months and years ahead. Those who put maintaining their
comfortable lifestyles ahead of other goals will doubtless have no trouble
coming up with enthusiastic rhetoric and canned numbers to support their case;
certainly the promoters and cheerleaders of the soon-to-be-late fracking bubble
had no difficulty at all on that score. Not too far in the future, something or
other will have been anointed as the shiny new technological wonder that will
save us all, or more precisely, that will give the privileged classes of the
industrial world a new set of excuses for clinging to some semblance of their
current lifestyles for a little while longer. Mention the growing list of
things that have previously occupied that hallowed but inevitably temporary
status, and you can count on either busy silence or a flustered explanation why
it really is different this time.
There may not be that many of us who get past the nonserious
proposals, ask the necessary but unwelcome questions about the technosavior du
jour, and embrace LESS while there’s still time to do so a step at a time. I’m
convinced, though, that those who manage these things are going to be the ones
who make a difference in the shape the future will have on the far side of the
crisis years ahead. Let go of the futile struggle to sustain the unsustainable,
take the time and money and other resources that might be wasted in that cause
and do something less foredoomed with them, and there’s a lot that can still be
done, even in the confused and calamitous time that’s breaking over us right
now. In the posts immediately ahead, as already mentioned, I’ll discuss some of
the options; no doubt many of my readers will be able to think of options of their
own, for that matter.
