As my regular readers know, I’ve been talking for quite a
while now here about the speculative bubble that’s built up around the fracking
phenomenon, and the catastrophic bust that’s guaranteed to follow so vast and
delusional a boom. Over the six months or so, I’ve noted the arrival of one
warning sign after another of the impending crash. As the saying has it,
though, it’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings, so I’ve been listening for the
first notes of the metaphorical aria that, in the best Wagnerian style, will
rise above the orchestral score as the fracking industry’s surrogate Valhalla
finally bursts into flames and goes crashing down into the Rhine.
I think I just heard those first high notes, though, in an
improbable place: the email inbox of the Ancient Order of Druids in America
(AODA), the Druid order I head.
I have no idea how many of my readers know the first thing
about my unpaid day job as chief executive—the official title is Grand
Archdruid—of one of the two dozen or so Druid orders in the western world. Most
of what goes into that job, and the admittedly eccentric minority religious
tradition behind it, has no relevance to the present subject. Still, I think
most people know that Druids revere the natural world, and take ecology
seriously even when that requires scrapping some of the absurd extravagances
that pass for a normal lifestyle these days. Thus a Druid order is arguably the
last place that would come to mind if you wanted to sell stock in a fracking
company.
Nonetheless, that’s what happened. The bemused AODA office
staff the other day fielded a solicitation from a stock firm trying to get
Druids to invest their assets in the fracking industry.
Does that sound like a desperation move to you, dear reader?
It certainly does to me—and there’s good reason to think that it probably
sounds that way to the people who are trying to sell shares in fracking firms
to one final round of clueless chumps, too. A recent piece in the Wall Street
Journal (available outside the paywall here)
noted that American banks have suddenly found themselves stuck with tens of millions
of dollars’ worth of loans to fracking firms which they hoped to package up and
sell to investors—but suddenly nobody’s buying. Bankruptcies
and mass layoffs are becoming an everyday occurrence in the fracking
industry, and the price of oil continues to lurch down as producers maximize
production for the sake of immediate cash flow.
Why, though, isn’t the drop in the price of oil being met by
an upsurge in consumption that drives the price back up, as the accepted rules
of economics would predict? That’s the cream of the jest. Here in America, and
to a lesser extent elsewhere in the industrial world, four decades of
enthusiastically bipartisan policies that benefited the rich at everyone else’s
expense managed to prove Henry Ford’s famous argument: if you don’t pay your
own employees enough that they can afford to buy your products, sooner or
later, you’re going to go broke.
By driving down wages and forcing an ever larger fraction of
the US population into permanent unemployment and poverty, the movers and
shakers of America’s political class have managed to trigger a
classic crisis of overproduction, in which goods go begging for
buyers because too few people can afford to buy them at any price that will pay
for their production. It’s not just oil that’s affected, either: scores of
other commodities are plunging in price as the global economy tips over into
depression. There’s a specter haunting the industrial world; it’s the ghost of
Karl Marx, laughing with mordant glee as the soi-disant masters of the
universe, having crushed his misbegotten Soviet stepchildren, go all out to make
his prophecy of capitalism’s self-immolation look remarkably prescient.
The soaring price of crude oil in the wake of the 2005
global peak of conventional oil production should have served notice to the
industrial world that, to adapt the title of Richard Heinberg’s excellent 2003
summary of the situation, the party was over:
the long era in which energy supplies had increased year over year was
giving way to an unwelcome new reality in which decreasing energy supplies and
increasing environmental blowback were the defining themes. As my readers
doubtless noticed, though, the only people who willing to grasp that were out
here on the fringes where archdruids lurk. Closer to the mainstream of our
collective thinking, most people scrunched shut their eyes, plugged their ears
with their fingers, and shouted “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” at the top of
their lungs, in a desperate attempt to keep reality from getting a word in
edgewise.
For the last five years or so, any attempt to talk about the
impending twilight of the age of oil thus ran headfirst into a flurry of
pro-fracking propaganda. Fatuous twaddle about America’s inevitable future as
the world’s new energy superpower took the place of serious discussions of the
predicament into which we’ve backed ourselves—and not for the first time,
either. That’s what makes the attempt to get Druids to invest their life
savings in fracking so funny, in a bleak sort of way: it’s an attempt to do for
the fracking boom what the fracking boom attempted to do for industrial
civilization as a whole—to pretend, in the teeth of the facts, that the
unsustainable can be sustained for just a little while longer.
A few months back, I decided to celebrate this sort of
thinking by way of the grand old Druid custom of satire. The
Great Squirrel Case Challenge of 2015 solicited mock proposals for
solving the world’s energy problems that were even nuttier than the ones in the
mainstream media. That was no small challenge—a detail some of my readers
pointed up by forwarding any number of clueless stories from the mainstream
media loudly praising energy boondoggles of one kind or another.
I’m delighted to say, though, that the response was even better
than I’d hoped for. The contest fielded
more than thirty entries, ranging from the merely very good to the
sidesplittingly funny. There were two winners, one chosen by the members of the
Green Wizards
forum, one chosen by me; in both cases, it was no easy choice, and if I had
enough author’s copies of my new book After Progress, I’d probably just
up and given prizes to all the entries, they were that good. Still, it’s my
honor to announce the winners:
My choice for best squirrel case—drumroll, please—goes to
Steve Morgan, for his fine gosh-wow sales prospectus for, ahem, Shares
of Hydrocarbons Imported from Titan. The Green Wizards forum
choice—drumroll again—goes to Jason Heppenstall for his hilarious parody of a
sycophantic media story, King Solomon’s
Miners. Please join me in congratulating them. (Steve and Jason, drop
me a comment with your mailing addresses, marked not for posting, and I’ll get
your prizes on the way.)
Their hard-won triumph probably won’t last long. In the
months and years ahead, I expect to see claims even more ludicrous being taken
oh-so-seriously by the mainstream media, because the alternative is to face up
to just how badly we’ve bungled the opportunities of the last four decades or
so and just how rough a road we have ahead of us as a result. What gave the
fracking bubble whatever plausibility it ever had, after all, was the way it
fed on one of the faith-based credos at the heart of contemporary popular
culture: the insistence, as pervasive as it is irrational, that the universe is
somehow obligated to hand us abundant new energy sources to replace the ones
we’ve already used so profligately. Lacking that blind faith, it would have
been obvious to everyone—as it was to those of us in the peak oil
community—that the fracking industry was scraping the bottom of the barrel and
pretending that this proved the barrel was full.
Read the morning news with eyes freed from the deathgrip of
the conventional wisdom and it’s brutally obvious that that’s what happened,
and that the decline and fall of our civilization is well under way. Here in
the US, a quarter of the country is in the fourth year of record drought, with
snowpack on California’s Sierra Nevada mountains about
9% of normal; the Gulf Stream is
slowing to a crawl due to the rapid melting of the Greenland ice
sheets; permanent joblessness and grinding poverty have
become pervasive in this country; the national infrastructure is
coming apart after decades of malign neglect—well, I could go on; if
you want to know what life is like in a falling civilization, go look out the
window.
In the mainstream media, on the occasions when such things
are mentioned at all, they’re treated as disconnected factoids irrelevant to
the big picture. Most people haven’t yet grasped that these things are
the big picture—that while we’re daydreaming about an assortment of shiny
futures that look more or less like the present with more toys, climate change,
resource depletion, collapsing infrastructure, economic contraction, and the
implosion of political and cultural institutions are creating the future we’re
going to inhabit. Too many of us suffer from a weird inability to imagine a
future that isn’t simply a continuation of the present, even when such a future
stands knocking at our own front doors.
So vast a failure of imagination can’t be overcome by the
simple expedient of pointing out the ways that it’s already failed to explain
the world in which we live. That said, there are other ways to break the grip
of the conventional wisdom, and I’m pleased to say that one of those other ways
seems to be making modest but definite headway just now.
Longtime readers here will remember that in 2011, this blog
launched a contest for short stories about the
kind of future we can actually expect—a future in which no deus ex
machina saves industrial civilization from the exhaustion of its resource
base, the deterioration of the natural systems that support it, and the normal
process of decline and fall. That contest resulted in an anthology, After
Oil: SF Stories of a Post-Petroleum Future, which found a surprisingly
large audience. On the strength of its success, I
ran a second contest in 2014, which resulted in two more volumes—After
Oil 2: The Years of Crisis, which is now available, and After Oil 3: The
Years of Rebirth, which is in preparation. Demand for the original volume
has remained steady, and the second is selling well; after a conversation with
the publisher, I’m pleased to announce that we’re going to do it again, with a
slight twist.
The basic rules are mostly the same as before:
Stories should be between 2500 and 7500 words in length;
They should be entirely the work of their author or authors,
and should not borrow characters or setting from someone else’s work;
They should be in English, with correct spelling, grammar
and punctuation;
They should be stories—narratives with a plot and
characters—and not simply a guided tour of some corner of the future as the
author imagines it;
They should be set in our future, not in an alternate
history or on some other planet;
They should be works of realistic fiction or science
fiction, not magical or supernatural fantasy—that is, the setting and story
should follow the laws of nature as those are presently understood;
They should take place in settings subject to thermodynamic,
ecological, and economic limits to growth; and as before,
They must not rely on “alien
space bats”—that is, dei ex machina inserted to allow humanity
to dodge the consequences of the limits to growth. (Aspiring authors might want
to read the whole “Alien Space Bats” post for a more detailed explanation of
what I mean here; reading the stories from one or both of the published After
Oil volumes might also be a good plan.)
This time, though, I’m adding an additional rule:
Stories submitted for this contest must be set at least one
thousand years in the future—that is, after March 25, 3015 in our calendar.
That’s partly a reflection of a common pattern in entries
for the two previous contests, and partly something deeper. The common pattern?
A great many authors submitted stories that were set during or immediately
after the collapse of industrial civilization; there’s certainly room for
those, enough so that the entire second volume is basically devoted to them,
but tales of surviving decline and fall are only a small fraction of the galaxy
of potential stories that would fit within the rules listed above. I’d like to encourage entrants to consider
telling something different, at least this time.
The deeper dimension? That’s a reflection of the blindness
of the imagination discussed earlier in this post, the inability of so many
people to think of a future that isn’t simply a prolongation of the present.
Stories set in the immediate aftermath of our civilization don’t necessarily
challenge that, and I think it’s high time to start talking about futures that
are genuinely other—neither utopia nor oblivion, but different,
radically different, from the linear extrapolations from the present that fill
so many people’s imaginations these days, and have an embarrassingly large role
even in science fiction.
You have to read SF from more than a few decades back to
grasp just how tight the grip of a single linear vision of the future has
become on what used to be a much more freewheeling literature of ideas. In book
after book, and even more in film after film, technologies that are obviously
derived from ours, ideologies that are indistinguishable from ours, political
and economic arrangements that could pass for ours, and attitudes and ideas
that belong to this or that side of today’s cultural struggles get projected
onto the future as though they’re the only imaginable options. This takes place
even when there’s very good reason to think that the linear continuation of
current trends isn’t an option at all—for example, the endlessly regurgitated,
done-to-death trope of interstellar travel.
Let us please be real:
we aren’t going to the stars—not in our lifetimes, not in the lifetime
of industrial civilization, not
in the lifetime of our species. There are equally good thermodynamic and economic reasons to
believe that many of the other standard tropes of contemporary science fiction
are just as unreachable—that, for example, limitless energy from gimmicks of
the dilithium-crystal variety, artificial intelligences capable of human or
superhuman thought, and the like belong to fantasy, not to the kind of science
fiction that has any likelihood of becoming science fact. Any of my readers who
want to insist that human beings can create anything they can imagine, by the
way, are welcome to claim that, just as soon as they provide me with a working
perpetual motion machine.
It’s surprisingly common to see people insist that the
absence of the particular set of doodads common to today’s science fiction
would condemn our descendants to a future of endless boredom. This attitude
shows a bizarre stunting of the imagination—not least because stories about
interstellar travel normally end up landing the protagonists in a world closely
modeled on some past or present corner of the Earth. If our genus lasts as long
as the average genus of vertebrate megafauna, we’ve got maybe ten million years
ahead of us, or roughly two thousand times as long as all of recorded human
history to date: more than enough time for human beings to come up with a
dazzling assortment of creative, unexpected, radically different
societies, technologies, and ways of facing the universe and themselves.
That’s what I’d like to see in submissions to this year’s
Space Bats challenge—yes, it’ll be an annual thing from here on out, as long as
the market for such stories remains lively. A thousand years from now,
industrial civilization will be as far in the past as the Roman Empire was at
the time of the Renaissance, and new human societies will have arisen to pass
their own judgment on the relics of our age. Ten thousand years from now, or
ten million? Those are also options. Fling yourself into the far future, far enough
that today’s crises are matters for the history books, or tales out of ancient
myth, or forgotten as completely as the crises and achievements of the
Neanderthal people are today, and tell a story about human beings (or,
potentially, post-human beings) confronting the challenges of their own time in
their own way. Do it with verve and a good readable style, and your story may
be be one of the ones chosen to appear in the pages of After Oil 4: The Future’s Distant Shores.
