The Long Descent (20 page)

A metaphor might be useful here. Imagine that you found out today that tomorrow morning you'll be taken up to 10,000 feet in an airplane and tossed out the cabin door. That's a real crisis, and it demands serious thought and action. If you believe that the only two options are either staying in midair at 10,000 feet or falling to your death, though, you may just overlook the action that would be most likely to save your life: wearing a parachute.

The metaphor can be extended a little further. The problem with being thrown out of an airplane at 10,000 feet isn't that you fall; it's that you fall too fast and land too hard. The same is true of the end of the industrial age. If the transition from industrial society to the deindustrial cultures of the future could be made gradually, with plenty of time to scale back our expectations and replace energy-intensive technologies with simpler ones, our predicament would be so mild it would barely merit the name. At this point, however, so many opportunities have been wasted and so many resources depleted that the transition out of the industrial age will likely be a good deal more disruptive, with close parallels to the breakdowns and dark ages that followed other civilizations in the past. This still leaves plenty of room for strategies that, like the parachute in the metaphor, will slow the descent and minimize the shock of landing.

Thus it's one thing to try to find some way to power today's industrial system with renewable sources while leaving intact the structures of everyday life that give our civilization its extravagant appetite for energy. It's quite another thing, and much closer to the realm of the possible, to use renewable energy to meet the far more modest energy requirements of an agrarian society. Especially in North America, restating the question in this way opens up immense possibilities. Very few people who live on this continent, for instance, have noticed that it's only our energy-wasting lifestyles that keep us dependent on imported oil — with all the unwelcome economic and political consequences that brings. Even 35 years after its own Hubbert peak, the United States is still one of the largest producers of oil on Earth.
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If the average American used only as much energy per year as the average European, America would be exporting oil, not importing it. Only our insistence on clinging to the dysfunctional lifestyles of an age that is passing away keeps such an obviously constructive goal off the table in discussions of national energy policy.

The same logic can be extended much more broadly. Today's industrial agriculture, for example, will become utterly unsustainable once the huge fossil fuel inputs that go into farm machinery, agricultural chemicals, worldwide transport networks, and the like stop being economically viable. That doesn't mean, as some of the more extreme peak oil theorists argue, that once fossil fuels become too scarce and costly to use for agriculture, we'll all starve. It simply means that the agriculture of the future will have to rely on human and animal muscle, and other locally produced sources, for energy, and turn compost and manure into fertilizer, the way farmers did for millennia before the invention of the tractor. It also means that the sooner we launch the transition back to this more viable way of farming, the better.

There are still people alive today who grew up working horse-drawn combines in the 1920s, when American agriculture was already productive enough to make the Great Plains the world's breadbasket. Converting back to horse-powered agriculture would be a challenge, but one well within the realm of the possible; relatively simple changes in agricultural, taxation, and land use policy could do much to foster that conversion.
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With severe depopulation setting in across much of America's old agricultural heartland, more dramatic steps such as a renewal of the old Homestead Act,
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coupled with price guarantees for organically grown grain crops, would make a good deal of sense as well.

If the mythology of progress didn't blind today's policymakers to such options, any number of steps could be taken to ease the transition from industrial to deindustrial society. Those steps are likely to remain outside the realm of the politically thinkable for a long time yet, at least on a large scale, but the same logic can be applied on a local and individual scale. Individuals, groups, and communities, just as much as nations and industrial civilization as a whole, face the challenge of managing the descent from –Hubbert's peak. The longer we try to cling to the peak, the harder and faster the fall is going to be, and fewer are the people and cultural resources that are likely to survive it. If we accept that the Long Descent is inevitable and try to make it in a controlled manner, on the other hand, the way is open not only for bare survival, but for surviving in a humane and creative fashion while preserving as much of value as possible for the future.

Nor are all possible deindustrial societies of the future equal. The future need not be condemned to medieval squalor unless we throw away the opportunity to deal with the realities of our predicament while there is still time. It's entirely possible to have a cultured, literate, humane society with thriving cities and a vigorous exchange economy on a very limited resource basis. During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), for example, Japan closed its borders to the outside world in a successful bid to stay out of the clutches of the European colonial empires of the day. With a large population and few natural resources, Tokugawa Japan ran almost entirely on human muscle. Yet this was one of the great periods of Japanese art, literature, and philosophy; literacy was so widespread that the three largest cities in Japan had 1,500 bookstores among them, and most people had access to basic education, health care, and the necessities of life.
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If we get past the distractions of emotionally appealing mythologies, face the future squarely, and start getting ready for it now, future deindustrial societies could achieve as much. That goal is within reach, and it's hard to think of a better gift we can offer the future.

Some people in debates about the future of industrial society have argued that attempting to cushion the decline instead of preventing it is morally wrong because this way of approaching our predicament accepts the unacceptable. This sort of thinking is understandable, but it misses the central point at issue. We don't necessarily have a choice about what we have to accept. All of us, for example, will have to accept the reality and inevitability of death — not only our own deaths, but those of the people we love as well. In the presence of death, we can rail against the inevitable, or we can deal with its reality and do what we can to minimize its negative dimensions.

The same principle applies to the current situation. At this point in history, after decades of wasted opportunities and profligate energy use, preventing the industrial age from ending would most likely be impossible even if our societies were prepared to muster the will and leadership to take the necessary steps — which they clearly are not. As suggested in Chapter 1, this conjunction of events defines the present crisis as a predicament, not a problem. At the same time, prevention isn't the only option that can save lives and salvage at least some of the cultural treasures of the last six thousand years. A parachute, again, won't keep you from being thrown out of that airplane at 10,000 feet, but it's still a very useful thing to have if your efforts at prevention fail. In the present situation, equivalent steps are arguably the only options we've got that make moral or practical sense.

Coping with Catabolic Collapse

Responding to the decline and fall of a civilization, of course, is a good deal more complex than strapping on a parachute. Fortunately, the process of decline is also a good deal slower than falling out of an airplane, and this makes room for options that apocalyptic mythologies hide from view. If, as I've suggested, the decline and fall of industrial civilization will resemble rolling down a bumpy slope more than falling off a cliff, it becomes possible to meet each wave of crises as it comes, using resources that are already on hand. For example, there's no need to flee to the wilderness to build communities to survive the transition to deindustrial society; we already have communities in place — the cities, towns, and rural neighborhoods where we live right now; these can be reshaped to handle the challenges and opportunities of the future.

None of the four horsemen described in Chapter 3 — declining energy availability, economic contraction, collapsing public health, and political turmoil — are new to human experience. Our great-grandparents knew them well, and today they are familiar to the vast majority of our fellow human beings. Only the inhabitants of the world's industrialized societies have had the opportunity to forget about them, and then only during the second half of the 20th century. Before then, most people knew how to deal with them, and most of the strategies that were developed and used in the past will still be viable far into the future. The one hitch is that we have to be ready to put them into practice. Since governments have by and large dropped the ball completely, it's up to individuals, families, groups, and local communities to get ready for the future ahead of us. Each of the four horsemen requires a different response, and so different preparations will be needed for each.

To cope with the first horseman,
reducing energy use
is the core strategy. The less energy you need to keep yourself alive and comfortable, the easier you can cope when energy costs spin out of control. Minor tinkerings aren't going to be enough, though; you need to pursue the sort of comprehensive changes in energy use pioneered so successfully in the 1970s. Plan on cutting your energy use by half, to start with, and be ready to cut it further as needed. That means significant changes in lifestyle for most people, of course. In particular, commuting by car has to become a bad memory, and if this requires you to move, get a new job, or change your lifestyle, that's what it requires. Get rid of your car if you can; if you can't, trade in your gas hog for a light, efficient compact, and keep it in the garage under a tarp except when you actually need it. While you're at it, practice coping with blackouts, brownouts, and other forms of energy shortage; they'll be frequent visitors in the future.

To cope with the second horseman,
choosing a viable profession
forms the essential step. Most of the jobs in America today don't produce necessary goods and services, and most goods and many services used in America today aren't produced here. This mismatch promises massive economic disruptions during the crisis period, as an economy and a work force geared to sales, retail, and information processing collides with a new economic reality that has little room for these but a desperate need for locally produced food, clothing, and tools. Anyone prepared to step into a viable economic role in this new reality has a much better chance of thriving as the old economy goes away. You'll need to choose a craft that requires very modest energy inputs, and produces something people need or want badly enough to buy even in hard times. Think of market gardening, garment sewing, home appliance repair, and beer brewing as examples. You'll need to get your training and tools in advance, of course, and the sooner you hang out your shingle the better, even if it's just a hobby-business patronized by your friends until the next wave of crises hits.

To cope with the third horseman,
taking charge of your own
health
is the central task. Modern medicine is one of the most energy- and resource-intensive sectors of the economy; it's already priced itself out of reach of many people in nations that don't have socialized health care, and in many of the nations that do, access to care is being whittled away by budget cuts and service restrictions. It is probably best to assume that by the time the next wave of crises arrives, your only health care will be what you can provide for yourself. Plan on learning about preventive medicine and sanitation, taking advanced first aid classes, and arranging for do-it-yourself health care in any other way you can. Don't neglect alternative health care methods, either; while there's some quackery in the alternative field, there's also much of value, and the denunciations of alternative health care that come from the medical establishment are mostly just attempts to protect market share. Finally, get used to the inevitability of death. You probably won't live as long as you used to expect, and if you need high-tech medical help to stay alive, you'll have to accept that it may stop being available without warning. Death is simply part of the human condition. The stark terror of death that haunts so many people in industrial societies is a luxury that a deindustrializing world can't afford.

To cope with the fourth horseman,
community networking
provides the necessary response. This doesn't mean the sort of utopian projects that were tried and failed so dismally during the 1960s; it means the proven and effective approaches that have been used for hundreds of years by people who learned that working together is an essential tool for survival. If you've participated in a block watch, shopped at a farmers market, or belonged to a community service organization, you've taken part in community networking activities. In the future, local citizens will need to maintain basic community services such as sanitation, dispute resolution, and public safety during times when centralized government isn't functioning. Getting to know your neighbors and participating in local community organizations helps build connections that will make the ad hoc arrangements needed in a crisis achievable.

Energy Possibilities

The shortsighted choices and missed opportunities of the last thirty years have given us a future in which energy will become drastically more expensive when it can be obtained at all. At this point in history, this unwelcome transformation can't be prevented. Today's national and regional governments are so blinkered by the myth of progress and so beholden to the existing economic order that the chance they'll pursue a constructive response to our predicament at this point is minimal at best. The one remaining option is preparation on the personal, family, and community level.