[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Tempo of Change

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (August 20 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


One of the lessons of history is that change, no matter how drastic it
appears on the pages of history books, is rarely anything like so sudden
for those who live through it. Read an account of the French Revolution,
for example, and events seem to follow one another like explosions from
a string of firecrackers, from the final crisis of the Ancien Régime
straight through to the fall of Napoleon. For the man or woman in the
French street, though, these happenings were scattered threads in a
fabric of months and years woven from the plainer cordage of ordinary life.

Partly this is a function of the way historical narrative compresses
time. It bears remembering that a teenage Parisienne who sat daydreaming
of her upcoming wedding on the day that Louis XVI summoned the
États-General in 1788 would most likely have been a grandmother on the
day the Allied armies marched into Paris after the battle of Waterloo in
1815. Equally, though, it's rare for historical events to have the same
apparent importance at the time that they are assigned in the
historian's hindsight, not least because the everyday process of making
a living and moving through the stages of human existence plays a larger
role in most lives than the occasional tumults that make the history books.

This lesson needs to be kept in mind as we try to make sense of the
implications of the crisis of industrial society, not least because it
offers some protection against the common bad habit of projecting
daydreams onto the inkblot patterns of the future. That habit of
thinking is more than usually at issue in exploring the theme of this
week's post, the nature of daily life in the decades ahead of us.

The role of wishful thinking in driving the apocalyptic expectations so
common in contemporary culture rarely shows itself so clearly as here.
In the weeks leading up to the Y2K noncrisis, I knew quite a respectable
number of people whose conviction that industrial civilization was about
to undergo total collapse was all too clearly motivated by the belief
that this meant that come January 1 2000, they would no longer have to
continue living the lives they had made for themselves. You'd think that
the prospect of mass death would be a good deal more daunting than even
the most humdrum modern existence, but it's always part of the narrative
of imminent apocalypse that dieoff only happens to other people; no
matter how poorly suited the people in question were to the strenuous
task of surviving the overnight collapse of a civilization, each one of
them believed that they'd be among the lucky few.

The same sort of logic pervades certain corners of the peak oil scene.
I've met far too many people who don't know enough about plant care to
keep a potted petunia healthy, and have very likely never put in an
eight-hour day of hard physical labor in their lives - most middle class
Americans haven't, after all - and yet who nonetheless talk
enthusiastically about the life they expect to lead in a self-sufficient
rural lifeboat ecovillage as industrial civilization crashes into ruin a
comfortable distance away. It's all very reminiscent of the aftermath of
the Sixties, when a great many people headed back to the land with
equally high hopes; the vast majority of them straggled back to the
cities a few months or years later with their hopes in shreds, having
discovered that fantasies of the good life in nature's lap make poor
preparation for the hard work, unremitting discipline, and relative
poverty of life as a subsistence farmer.

The would-be communards of the Sixties had an advantage not shared by
their counterparts in the peak oil movement. Rural land was relatively
cheap, and money was fairly easy to come by, not least because the
counterculture scene always had a sprinkling of members with large trust
funds who functioned as the sugar daddies of the movement. As the Summer
of Love gave way to the summer of Altamont and the urban neighborhoods
that nurtured hippie culture went to seed, communes in the countryside
were a significant option, and a great many of them - I don't know that
a census was ever done, but there were certainly thousands - sprouted as
a result.

That has not happened in the wake of peak oil. Partly, of course, it's
one thing to leave the city behind for a rural commune when you're
nineteen years old and can put all your worldly goods into a knapsack,
with plenty of room left over for dreams; it's quite another thing to do
that when you're forty and comfortably middle-class, with a family to
support, a career to think of, and the prospect of retirement
sufficiently visible on the horizon of your future that the impact of
your choices on your pension is always somewhere in your thoughts.
Today's peak oil activists very often resemble the second of these
categories a good deal more than the first, which goes a long way to
explain the gaping difference between the number of lifeboat ecovillages
that have gotten onto the drawing boards and the number of them that
have actually been built.

Still, this is only one reflection of a much broader problem, which is
that lifeboat ecovillages do not make economic sense in today's world.
However self-sufficient they may turn out to be in the deindustrial
future their planners envision, they are anything but self-sufficient
here and now, when they have to be built and paid for. Nor is it at all
clear how soon they will become self-sufficient if the future turns out
to be a gradual descent into the deindustrial age, rather than the
sudden plunge so often imagined these days.

This is where the perspective I brought up at the beginning of this
essay - the difference between history as read in retrospect, and
history as lived at the time - becomes crucial. Seen in retrospect, the
changes that will follow the decline of world petroleum production are
likely to be sweeping and global. From the perspective of those who live
through them, however, those changes are much more likely to take
gradual and local forms. This will make them harder to notice, but
paradoxically easier to meet.

Imagine, for example, a scenario in which worldwide production of
conventional crude oil drops by an average of five percent a year, and
other fossil fuels follow gradual depletion curves of their own.
Especially at first, the gap can be offset with biofuels, tar sands, and
other unconventional sources; yearly production totals for liquid fueld
may even increase, though this won't include an accounting of the fuel
burnt to extract oil from tar sands or the petroleum products used to
grow biofuel crops, and thus will hide the fact that there's less energy
available for other uses. The need to funnel an ever-increasing fraction
of fuel into producing more fuel, coupled with expanding global
population and the ongoing transfer of economic and political power from
an aging American empire to its successors, will tend to drive fuel
prices up; economic contraction driven by the twilight of cheap energy
will tend to decrease demand, and drive them back down; factor in
speculation, and you get wild gyrations in energy costs, coupled to
cycles of economic boom and bust of an intensity not seen in the Western
world since the nineteenth century.

All of this spells trouble, without a doubt. To rising energy prices and
contracting economies, add the public health consequences of increasing
poverty and the likelihood that the end of the American empire will
result in wars as bloody and protracted as those that followed the
decline of every other major commercial empire in recent history, and
you get a recipe for massive change. I've argued in previous posts that
these changes mark the first stage of the decline and fall of Western
industrial civilization - the change from affluence industrialism to
scarcity industrialism - and that it will be followed by further stages
of contraction and social transformation, leading into a dark age
several centuries long from which our successor societies will
eventually emerge.