Peak Everything (28 page)

Rainbow gatherings, such as the one in Russia in 2005 where this photo was taken, keep the hippie ethos alive.

However, the two events of that era that had the potential to most profoundly shape the Boomers' lives, and those of their children, are less often dwelt on. Both occurred in 1970: the peak in US oil production and the first Earth Day.

At the time it happened, the US oil production peak went unnoticed; it was observed in hindsight a few years later, though even today it is scarcely mentioned in the press. One of the few who really understood its significance was the scientist who had anticipated it — geologist M. King Hubbert. Its consequences for the US economy and for global geopolitics would only gradually reveal themselves, with the first strong hint appearing in 1973's Arab oil embargo. Those consequences would eventually include the undermining of the entire American consumerist-imperialist project.

Of course oil was and is central to the automobile and airline industries, which have been major drivers of the US economy. Less obvious is oil's role in modern industrial agriculture. However, if one looks more deeply, the very fabric of 20
^th
century America is petroleum-soaked. In 1900 the world's wealthiest and oiliest man was John D. Rockefeller, whose company, Standard Oil, had cornered the national market. Rockefeller himself was an abstemious churchgoer who believed that wealth was a sign of God's favor; what does such a person do with so much money? All sorts of things. Why not go into banking in order to make even more money? The Rockefeller family did so with a vengeance and was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve System — the banking system that quietly controls the US currency and economy. If one is exceptionally
wealthy it is also handy to have some influence over public opinion — and so Rockefeller wealth found its way into controlling positions in media organizations. Even scientific research can have its uses: when I was tracing the history of genetic engineering for my 1999 book
Cloning the Buddha,
I discovered that the inception of molecular biology (the basis for all subsequent developments in genetic science) came in the 1920s as a result of strategic grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in its quest for a means of eugenic “social control.” Politics, geopolitics, war, weapons manufacturing, education — all were deeply impacted by the Rockefeller oil fortune. Oil wasn't just a subsidy to American wealth; it formed the very substance and character of American wealth.

Therefore the fact that by 1971 US oil production had peaked and was in terminal decline was momentous (if unheralded) news. America could no longer be a
source
of wealth in the same way it had been; if it were to maintain its privileged position globally it would have to become the world's moneychanger, banker, landlord, stockbroker... and enforcer. American military force would have to be used increasingly to safeguard and protect US access to the resource wealth of
other
countries, while international trade agreements would have to be written and enforced to the advantage of American corporations. And those corporations would be ever less involved directly in manufacturing, but more in trading, branding, and licensing.

The other signal event of 1970 — the first Earth Day — was well noted at the time. The brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day was reported prominently in the
New York Times, Time,
and most other significant media outlets. Legislation followed: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments, the Resource Recovery Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

The crowd at Woodstock filled a natural amphitheater, with the stage at the bottom.

Perhaps even more important than this legislation was the symbolic value of the occasion in giving voice and identity to a growing minority who viewed the fossil-fueled industrial project as having dire consequences for humanity and nature, and who advocated a dramatic change of direction for society as a whole, away from consumerism and toward conservation, away from militarism and toward nurturance of life. The Earth Day message — which would be given renewed force two years later with the publication of the Club of Rome report,
The Limits to Growth,
and then again with the Arab oil embargo of 1973 — appealed to many young people's intuitive longing for a return to a simpler, more localized and agrarian version of America, an America that didn't meddle in other nations' affairs.

The Earth Day message might have been still more compelling had its framers been aware of the fact and significance of their nation's oil peak. However, though the message evoked legislative and cultural responses, it sank in only so deep. It was, after all, difficult for many Americans to accept the notion that they should voluntarily give up their material privileges, their control of global resource streams, their entitlement to a glittering technotopian future of effortless abundance, and accept instead a self-disciplined and self-limiting future of hard work and parsimonious material aspirations. The difficulty was compounded by the existence of an international rival, the USSR, that would presumably fill the void if America were to shrink from its imperial duties. The Soviet Union was also a competitor in the oil business and had actually out-produced the US in recent years. Wouldn't stepping off the consumerist treadmill mean giving in to the Commies?

It was a contest of visions and values, and that contest was to be decided in the election of 1980.

Jimmy Carter was a less than perfect president; nevertheless, he somewhat understood the Earth Day message. I was living in Canada during the mid-1970s and almost never watched television, but I somehow found myself viewing the live broadcast of a Carter speech in which he told Americans that they would have to change their material way of life in order to keep their freedoms. I was so amazed to hear an American president saying such things that I moved back to the US. But the Carter years were destined to be few.

For over three decades the American Right had been searching for ways to overturn the New Deal. Corporate leaders backing the Republicans had managed to make common cause with the burgeoning Christian fundamentalist movement and the anti-Communist fringe; Nixon had perfected the strategy of bringing social conservatives from the old Confederacy into the Republican Party; and the party had found its perfect pitchman — a former movie actor and ex-spokesman for General Electric. Ronald Reagan and the Republican PR machine pushed all of the right buttons, even resorting to an “October surprise” to manipulate the Iranian hostage crisis to their benefit.

Reagan and George H. W. Bush (who, during the mid-1980s, may have been the de facto president) were the last US leaders of the World War II generation, their cohort's final gift to the nation. It was morning in America, but let the Earth be damned: the Republicans had found an electoral strategy so successful that Democrats began trying to copy it, so that since 1980 the entire US political system has lurched toward ever-increasing economic inequality, globalization, imperialism, and militarism.

So what did the Boomers do after 1980?

Having already taken a detour into the bleary world of recreational drugs, many of the more spirited Boomers now turned to gurus, meditation, and cults: politics was a bummer; if we really wanted to change the world we should change our heads first.

Other Boomers steered toward the stock market and scrambled up the corporate ladder. They got jobs, made money, and discovered that “greed is good.” By the end of the decade it was apparent that the Boomers were divided, with some upholding the Earth Day vision, others honing their skills as right-wing radio talk show hosts, and the rest just trying to get by.

Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president (born in 1946), elicited high hopes among his generational peers feeling battered by a dozen years of Reagan/Bush. But as governor of Arkansas, Clinton had already learned the necessity of obeying entrenched power-holders in order to get along in politics. Moreover, by now the American governmental-corporate system was far too large and complex, and had far too much momentum behind it, to permit a fundamental change in direction.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, many of us had believed that when our generation eventually took over the reins of power we would change the world. Well, here we were with one of our cohort as president and the country was more deeply mired than ever in the banality of consumerism. The WWII generation was increasingly filling obituary pages and populating nursing homes; now we had no one to blame but ourselves. The generation of peace and love had become the generation of SUVs and fast food.

It was clear that we had deluded ourselves by thinking of our cohort as united in its values, or by imagining that those values were somehow immutable. Just as Brokaw's “greatest generation” had started out in the 1930s battling the evils of unrestrained capitalism and went on in the 1940s to fight the menace of fascism only to end by electing Nixon, Reagan, and Bush and supporting the Vietnam war, we were now doing something similar.

This is not to say that all of our number had sold out: we could count as generational heroes and heroines thousands of scientists, activists, artists, musicians, and writers who kept alive the Earth Day ideal of a society that lives in harmony with nature rather than parasitically destroying it. However, with each passing year that ideal seemed ever more elusive — especially so following the 2000 election.

We watched as that election was stolen, and our outrage only grew as we saw prominent Democrats quietly acquiescing to the evisceration of much of what was left of American democracy. The events of 9/11 jolted even the drowsiest awake, and some of us began paying attention as never before when we realized that mainstream news organizations were failing to ask the most obvious questions about the events — about the mysterious collapse of the towers, the failure of officials to dispatch jet fighters, the immediate confiscation and destruction of evidence, the suspicious airline stock trades, the thwarted warnings, and much more. With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the detentions in Guantanamo, and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, it became clear that the US had entered an entirely new historical period. The current president-by-decree was another Boomer, but his shortcomings didn't end with rampant corruption among his appointees and the simplemindedness he so obviously exhibited: he was, in the words of George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, “an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” and his cronies were evidently dedicated neo-fascists with every intention of turning America into a Disneyland Reich. That they were in some ways ridiculously inept made them all the more dangerous.

In response, some Boomers honed their political consciousness. Political documentaries and blogs proliferated like wildflowers in springtime.

Elections came and went, and widespread disgust with the disastrous ongoing occupation of Iraq eventually handed Congress to the Democrats. But there was never broad public discussion of the real issue that will impact our lives in the next few years — the generation that grew up expecting always
more
will soon be faced with
less.
The nation, now hallucinating uncontrollably from toxic exposure to Fox News, is in debt to the point that no conceivable decision made today will prevent a devastating implosion of the US economy, especially in view of the impending oil and gas peaks.

It may seem cynical to some if I say that it is too late to salvage America's political system, its economy, its suburban way of life; that it is even too late to contemplate an easy and peaceful transition to
a
different
socio-ecological reality. But as far as I can tell, these are the facts. That possibility probably died in 1980. As they say these days,
get over it.

This doesn't mean that life will end tomorrow. The American dream is going down, yet we still have some control over
how
it goes down. And it is in this remaining arena of choice that the post-World War II cohort might partially redeem itself.

During the next two decades we Boomers will be our society's elders. We will have amassed considerable financial capital, as well as human capital in the forms of competence, credibility, and connections. How will we use this capital?

If we use it for any purpose other than to help awaken all and sundry to our collective plight, and to lead a change of course toward a peaceful, local, slow, and self-limiting post-fossil-fuel way of life, even if that goal may not be immediately attainable, it will all have been wasted.