/publication/79

Publisher: Founders House (2015)

That movement [towards sustainability] was backed by a loose coalition with diverse and often conflicting goals, and it faced strident opposition from a large sector of the public, but it had the support of government officials who were worried about the price of dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and who also felt the need of politicians to appear to be doing something about the crisis du jour, which at that point was the high cost of energy. Some members of both parties opposed the movement, though others on both sides of the aisle backed it; some corporate interests opposed it, while others recognized that alternative energy just might turn out to be the next big thing. The entire movement, however, was based all along on the gamble that the American public would be willing to tighten its belt and plunge into the transition to an ecotechnic society even when the bills started coming due in earnest. \n On the other side of the game was a coterie of Republican politicians and strategists who guessed that when push came to shove, the American public would crumple. When a chapter of accidents put their candidate into the White House, they bet the future of their party on that guess, and won. The election that mattered here wasn't Reagan's relatively narrow victory in 1980, but his landslide in 1984, when most of the nation registered its approval of a policy shift that spared them the costs of the transition to sustainability. It was after the latter election that the axe came down on funding for appropriate tech, and Woodsy Owl's iconic 'Give a hoot - don't pollute!' ads vanished from the airwaves.

226-227

When people insist, as so many of them do, that of course we'll overcome the limits to growth and every other obstacle to our allegedly preordained destiny out there among the stars, all that means is that they have a single story wedged into their imagination so tightly that mere reality can't shake it loose. The same things' true of all the other credos I've discussed in recent posts, from 'they'll think of something' through 'it's all somebody else's fault' right on up to 'we're all going to be extinct soon anyway so it doesn't matter any more.' Choose any thoughtstopper you like, and behind it lies a single story, repeating itself monotonously over and over in the heads of those who can't imagine the world unfolding in any other way. \nThe insistence that it's not too late, that there must still be time to keep industrial civilization from crashing into ruin if only we all come together to make one great effort, and that there's any reason to think that we can and will all come together, is another example. The narrative behind that claim has a profound appeal to people nowadays, which is why stories that feature it - again, Tolkien's trilogy comes to mind - are as popular as they are. IT's deeply consoling to be told that there's still one last chance to escape the harsh future that's already taking shape around us. It seems almost cruel to point out that whether a belief appeals to our emotions has no bearing on whether or not it's true.

225-226

Grandiose visions of vast renewable-energy buildouts and geoengineering projects on a global scale, of the kind being hawked so ebulliently these days by the prophets of eternal business as usual, fit awkwardly with the reality that a great many industrial nations can no longer afford to maintain basic infrastructures or to keep large and growing fractions of their populations from sliding into desperate poverty. The choice that I discussed in last week's post, reduced to its hard economic bones, was whether we were going to put what remained of our stock of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources into maintaining our current standard of living for a while longer, or whether we were going to put it into building a livable world for our grandchildren. \nThe great majority of us chose the first option, and insisting at the top of our lungs that of course we could have both did nothing to keep the second from slipping away into the realm of might-have-beens. The political will to make the changes and accept the sacrifices that would be required to do anything else went missing in action in the 1980s and hasn't been seen since. That's the trap that was hidden in the crisis of our age: while the costs of transition were still small enough that we could have met them without major sacrifice, the consequences of inaction were still far enough in the future that most people could pretend they weren't there; by the time the consequences were hard to ignore, the costs of transition had become too great for most people to accept - and not too longer after that, they had become too great to be met at all.

204-205

It's worth being precise here: for the rest of the time our species endures, we will have to deal with much more sharply constrained energy supplies than we've had handy over the last few centuries. That doesn't mean that our descendants will be condemned to huddle in caves until the jaws of extinction close around them; I've argued at quite some length in one of my books that the endpoint of the mess we're currently in, centuries from now, will mostly likely be the emergence of ecotechnic societies - societies that maintain relatively high technology on the modest energy and resource inputs that can be provided by renewable sources. I've suggested, there and elsewhere, that there's quite a bit that can be done here and now to lay the foundations for the ecotechnic societies of the far future. I've also tried to point out that there's quite a bit that can be done here and now to make the unraveling of the age of abundance less traumatic than it will otherwise be.

159-161

No matter how you twist and turn the matter, Greece is never going to be able to pay its national debt. Neither are Spain, Italy, or half a dozen other nations that ran up big debts when it was cheap and convenient to do so, and are now being strangled by a panicking bond market and a collapsing economy. This isn't new; most of the countries on Earth have either defaulted outright on their debts or forced renegotiations on their creditors that left the latter with some equivalent of pennies on the dollar. The US last did that in a big way in 1934, when the Roosevelt administration unilaterally changed the terms on billions of dollars in Liberty Bonds from 'payable in gold' to 'payable in devalued dollars,' and proceeded to print the latter as needed. That or considerably worse will be happening in Europe in the near future, too. \nA good deal of the discussion of these upcoming defaults in the blogosphere, though, has insisted that these defaults will lead to a complete collapse of the world's financial economy, and from there to an equally complete collapse of the world's productive economy, leaving all seven billion of us to starve in the gutter. It's an odd belief, since sovereign debt defaults have happened many times in the recent past, currency collapses are far from rare in economic history, and nation-states can do - and have done - plenty of drastic things to keep goods and services flowing in an economic emergency. Partly, I suspect, it's our old friend the apocalypse meme - the notion, pervasive in modern culture, that the only alternative to the indefinite continuation of business as usual is some unparalleled cataclysm or other. \nStill, there's another dimension to these fantasies, which is simply that the financial industry has done a superb job of convincing people that what they do is important to the rest of us. It's true, to be sure, that having currency in circulation makes economic exchanges easier, and the kind of banking services that people and ordinary businesses use are also very helpful, but governments used to produce and circulate currency without benefit of banks until fairly recently, and banking services of the kind I've just mentioned can be provided quickly and easily by a government that means business; in 1933 it took the US government just over a week, at a time when information technology was incomparably slower than it is today, to nationalize every bank in the country and open their doors under Federal management. The other services the financial industry provides to the real economy can equally well be replaced by hastily kluged substitutes, or simply put on hold for the duration of the crisis. \nSo the downside of any financial crisis, however grandiose, can be stopped promptly by proven methods. Then there's the upside. Yes, there's an upside. That's the ultimate secret of the financial crisis, the thing that nobody anywhere wants to talk about: if a country gets into a credit crisis, defaulting on its debts is the one option that consistently leads to recovery. \nThat statement ought to be old hat by now. Russia defaulted on its debts in 1998, and that default marked the end of its post-Soviet economic crisis and the beginning of its current period of relative prosperity. Argentina defaulted on its debts in 2002, and the default put an end to its deep recession and set it on the road to recovery. Even more to the point, Iceland was the one European country that refused the EU demand that the debts of failed banks must be passed on to governments; instead, in 2008, the Icelandic government allowed the country's three biggest banks to fold, paid off Icelandic depositors by way of the existing deposit insurance scheme, and left foreign investors twisting in the wind. Since that time, Iceland has been the only European country to see a sustained recovery. \nWhen Greece defaults on its debts and leaves the Euro, in turn, there will be a bit of scrambling, and then the Greek recovery will begin. That's the reason the EU has been trying so frantically to keep Greece from defaulting, no matter how many Euros have to be shoveled down how many ratholes to prevent it. Once the Greek default happens, and it will - the number of ratholes is multiplying much faster than Euros can be shoveled into them - the other southern European nations that are crushed by excessive debt will line up to do the same. There will be a massive stock market crash, a great many banks will go broke, a lot of rich people and an even larger number of middle class people will lose a great deal of money, politicians will make an assortment of stern and defiant speeches, and then the great European financial crisis will be over and people can get on with their lives.

141-142

The skills, resources, and lifeways needed to get by in a disintegrating industrial society are radically different from those that made for a successful and comfortable life in the prosperous world of the recent past, and a great many of the requirements of an age of decline come with prolonged learning curves and a high price for failure. Starting right away to practice the skills, assemble the resources, and follow the lifeways that will be the key to survival in a deindustrializing world offers the best hope of getting through the difficult years ahead with some degree of dignity and grace. \n Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush. \n There's a fair amount of subtlety to the strategy defined by those words. As our society stumbles down the ragged curve of its decline, more and more people are going to lose the ability to maintain what counts as a normal lifestyle - or, rather, what counted as a normal lifestyle in the recent past, and is no longer quite so normal today as it once was. Each new round of crisis will push more people further down the slope; minor and localized crises will affect a relatively smaller number of people, while major crises affecting whole nations will affect a much larger number. As each crisis hits, though, there will be a rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way out, and as each crisis recedes, there will be another rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way back to what used to be normal. The vast majority of people who join either rush will fail. Remember the tens of thousands of people who applied for a handful of burger-flipping jobs during the recent housing crash, because that was the only job opening they could find? That's the sort of thing I mean. \n The way to avoid the rush is simple enough: figure out how you will be able to live after the next wave of crisis hits, and to the extent that you can, start living that way now. If you're worried about the long-term prospects for your job - and you probably should be, no matter what you do for a living - now is the time to figure out how you will get by if the job goes away and you have to make do on much less money. For most people, that means getting out of debt, making sure the place you live costs you much less than you can afford, and picking up some practical skills that will allow you to meet some of your won needs and have opportunities for barter and informal employment. It can mean quite a bit more, depending on your situation, needs, and existing skills. It should certainly involve spending less money - and that money, once it isn't needed to pay off any debts you have, can go to weatherizing your home and making other sensible preparations that will make life easier for you later on. \n For the vast majority of people, it probably needs to be said, collapsing now does not mean buying a survival homestead somewhere off in the country. That's a popular daydream, and in some well-off circles it's long been a popular way to go have a midlife crisis, but even if you have the funds - and most of us don't - if you don't already have the dizzyingly complex skill set needed to run a viable farm, or aren't willing to drop everything else to apprentice with an organic farmer right now, it's not a realistic option. In all likelihood you'll be experiencing the next round of crises where you are right now, so the logical place to have your own personal collapse now, ahead of the rush, is right there, in the place where you live, with the people you know and resources you have to hand.

136

To say that there's a curse on industrial society is simply to use an archaic metaphor for a point I've been discussing in these essays since The Archdruid Report began six years ago, which is that the consequences of industrial society's mismanagement of its relations with the planet will not go away just because we don't want to deal with them. That metaphor has a range of relevant features, and one of them is that any effective response to the curse - or, if you will, the predicament of our time - has to begin by taking stock of the ways that each of us, as individuals, contributes by our own attitudes and actions to the mess we're in, and then making appropriate changes. \nAfter six years, I shouldn't even have to say that daydreaming about running off to some conveniently unaffordable eco-homestead in the country doesn't count. Unless you're in a position to do that, and the vast majority of us aren't, that's simply another evasion. What's required instead is the less romantic but far more productive task of adapting in place: figuring out how, living where you live now, you can place much less of a burden on the biosphere, and help other people do the same thing. It probably has to be said that perfection isn't a reasonable expectation here - there's a long learning curve, and our culture and built environment place significant obstacles in the way - but a great deal can be done nonetheless. That can easily lead into activism of various kinds, for those who feel called to do that specific kind of work; it can also lead in plenty of other constructive directions.

98-99

Machines, as I think most of us have noticed by now, make very poor replacements for human beings, and the reverse is almost as true. Shifting from a machine society to a human society in the wake of peak oil, then, is not simply a matter of replacing one set of components with another that happen to be human. It's necessary to replace attitudes, values, and expectations that are suited to machines - and nearly the entire modern worldview can be summed up in these terms - with the very different attitudes, values, and expectations that produce good results when applied to human beings.

Politicians and ordinary people alike have taken to insisting that the solution to joblessness is to send people to college to get job training, on the assumption that this will somehow make jobs appear for them. To call this magical thinking is an insult to honest sorcerers...

67-69

Nobody wants to be reminded that using less, so that our grandchildren would have enough, was the road we didn't take at the end of the Seventies. Still, the road we did take was always destined to be a dead end, and as we move deeper into the first half of the twenty-first century, the end of that road is starting to come into sight. At this point, we're faced with the prospect of using less energy, not because we choose to do so but because the energy that would be needed to do otherwise isn't there any more. That's the problem with living as though there's no tomorrow, of course: tomorrow inevitably shows up anyway. \n This late in the game, our remaining options are starkly limited, and most of the proposals you'll hear these days are simply variations on the theme of chasing business as usual right over the nearest cliff. Whether it's Stewart Brand's nukes, 'Drill Baby Drill,' ethanol or algal biodiesel or some other kind of energy vaporware, the subtext to every widely touted response to our predicament is that we don't need to use less. The same thing's just as true of most of the ideologies that claim to offer a more global response to that predicament; the one common thread that unites the neoprimitivists who claim to long for a return to the hunter-gatherer life, the conspiracy theorists who spend their days in an increasingly frantic orgy of fingerpointing, and the apocalypticists who craft ever more elaborate justifications for the claim that somebody or other will change the world for us, is that each of these ideologies, and plenty others like them, function covertly as justifications to allow believers to keep on living an ordinary American lifestyle right up to the moment that it drops away beneath their feet. \n The one option that doesn't do this is the one next to nobody is willing to talk about, and that's the option of using less. \n Mention that option in public, and inevitably you'll hear a dozen different reasons why it can't help and won't matter and isn't practical anyway. Can it help? Of course it can; in a time when world crude oil production has been bouncing against a hard ceiling for most of a decade and most other energy sources are under growing strain, any decrease in the amount of energy being wasted on nonessentials makes it a little easier to keep essential services up and running. Will it matter? Of course it will; as we move into a future of hard energy constraints, the fast at least a few people get through the learning curve of conservation, appropriate tech, and simply making do with less, the easier it will be for the rest of society to follow their lead and learn from their experience, if only when all the other choices have been foreclosed. Is it practical? Of course it is; the average European gets by comfortably on one third the annual energy budget as the average American, and it's been my experience that most middle class Americans can slash their energy use by a third or more in one year by a relatively simple program of home weatherizing and lifestyle changes. \n I'd like to suggest, in fact, that at this point in the trajectory of industrial civilization, any proposal that doesn't make using less energy a central strategy simply isn't serious. It's hard to think of any dimension of our predicament that can't be bettered, often dramatically, by using less energy, and even harder to think of any project that will yield significant gains as long as Americans cling to a lifestyle that history is about to relegate to the compost bin. I'd also like to suggest that any proposal that does start out with using less energy should not be taken seriously until and unless the people proposing it actually do use less energy themselves, preferably by adopting the measures they urge on others. \n That's how effective movements for social change happen, after all. Individuals start them by making changes in their own lives; as the number of people making those changes grows, networks emerge to share information, resources, and encouragement; the networks become the frame of a subculture, and as momentum builds, the subculture becomes a movement. It's indicative that the two movements that had the most impact on American culture in the second half of the twentieth century - feminism and Christian fundamentalism - both emerged this way, starting with individuals who changed their own lives, while any number of movements that tried to make change from the top down - again the climate change movement is a good example - failed to achieve their ends.

63-64

Consider, as one example out of many, the way that protecting children turned from a reasonable human concern to an obsessive-compulsive fixation. Raised under the frantic surveillance of helicopter moms, forbidden from playing outside or even visiting another child's home except on the basis of a prearranged and parentally approved play date, a generation of American children were held hostage by a galaxy of parental terrors that have only the most distorted relationship to reality, but serve to distract attention from the fact that the lifestyles chose by these same parents were condemning their children to a troubled and dangerous life in a depleted, polluted and impoverished world. \n The irony reached a dizzying intensity as tens of thousands of American parents rushed out to buy SUVs to transport their children to places every previous generation of American children proved perfectly capable of reaching by themselves on foot or on bike. It became the conventional wisdom, during the peak of the SUV craze, that the safety provided to young passengers by these massive rolling fortresses justified their purchase. No one wanted to deal with the fact that it was precisely the lifestyle exemplified by the SUV that was, and remains, the single most pressing threat to children's long-term safety and welfare. \n A great many of the flailings and posturings that have defined American culture from the Eighties to the present, in other words, unfolded from what Jean-Paul Sartre called 'bad faith' - the unspoken awareness, however frantically denied or repressed, that the things that actually mattered were not things anyone was willing to talk about, and that the solutions everyone wanted to discuss were not actually aimed at their putative targets. The lie at the heart of that bad faith was the desperate attempt to avoid facing the implications of the plain and utterly unwelcome fact that there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable. \n Let's repeat that, just for the sake of emphasis: there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable.

During the Seventies, a great many Americans came face to face with the hard fact that they could have the comfortable and privileged lifestyles they were used to having, or they could guarantee a livable world for their grandchildren, but they couldn't do both. The vast majority of them - or, more precisely, of us - chose the first option and closed their eyes to the consequences. That mistake was made for understandable and profoundly human reasons, but it was still a mistake, and it haunts the American imagination to this day.

...democracies always have severe problems with corruption, because democracy is one of the few systems of government in which the rich aren't automatically the ones who make collective decisions. In a hereditary aristocracy, say, the people who have the political authority also have most of the national wealth, and thus can afford the disdain for the merely rich that aristocrats so often affect. In a democracy, by contrast, there are always people who have wealth but want influence, and people who have power but want money, and the law of supply and demand takes it from there.