[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Not The End Of The World

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 30 2008)

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


You know that things are beginning to heat up when both sides of a
controversy declare victory at the same time. Over the last week or so,
that's happened in the peak oil scene. On the one hand, quite a number
of cornucopians - those enthusiastic souls who believe that we can get
ourselves out of the hole we're in by digging faster and paying less
attention to where the dirt lands - have trumpeted the discovery of a
few new oil fields as proof that peak oil is a myth.

The Bakken shale {1}, a geological formation down in the basement of the
northern Great Plains, has attracted the bulk of this cheerleading. Mind
you, the Bakken's a significant discovery; there's apparently a fair
amount of oil down there, though the technical challenges involved in
extracting more than a tiny fraction of it are immense, and nobody's yet
sure if the energy that can be extracted from it will be more or less
than the energy cost needed to extract it. Even if it turns out to be
the oil find of the decade, though, and North Dakota oil millionaires
start showing up as a recognized type in American popular culture, the
most the Bakken can do is make up some of the production losses from
older oil fields and slow, for a time, our descent from Hubbert's peak.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the number of voices
proclaiming the imminence of total collapse has skyrocketed. Typical is
a recent post {2} in Sharon Astyk's useful peak oil blog. Astyk claims
that recent events have decisively settled the debate between the
fast-crash and slow-grind models of post-peak oil reality, in favor of
the fast crash - and we're already in it. Her argument is basically that
the drastic spikes in food and energy costs over the last few months
have outrun the limits of the slow-grind scenario; ergo, the fast crash
is here.

I've commented several times in these essays about the way that linear
thinking distorts our view of the future, and Astyk's prediction makes a
good example. The drastic price spikes in many commodities over the last
few months offer a warning that shouldn't be ignored, but treating them
as evidence that industrial society is about to implode imposes a linear
model onto the complex realities of socioeconomic change. The fact that
change is happening quickly right now does not mean that it will
continue to happen at the same pace, or even in the same direction.

Human societies are complex homeostatic systems that respond to changes
in their environments by trying to maintain their equilibrium. Both the
cornucopians and the fast-collapse theorists too often lose track of
this basic rule of human ecology, but it's interesting to note that they
do so in different ways. In the face of faltering oil production,
industrial societies intensify the search for new oil fields and exploit
fields that would have been considered uneconomical in the halcyon days
of cheap oil; that's how they try to maintain equilibrium. These are
responses to crisis, however, not evidence that the crisis is over. When
an oil reservoir as geologically challenging as the Bakken looks like a
good place to drill, that in itself provides a good measure of how
serious the drawdown of existing reserves has become.

At the same time, soaring costs of energy and food are among the ways
that a market-based society attempts to maintain equilibrium when supply
fails to keep up with potential demand. Rationing by price is a
profoundly inequitable way to sort out who gets food and energy in a
time of shortages, and who does not, but unless the industrial world
goes through drastic political changes in the very near future, it's the
way we're stuck with, and it does have at least one pragmatic advantage:
the ration coupons (we call them "money") and the entire system of
rationing are already in place, ready to use, without massive social
engineering.

As prices go up, a great many of the poor and disenfranchised worldwide
are sliding closer to the edge where destitution turns into starvation.
That's a tragedy, and a moral crisis of no small magnitude. Still, those
who think that it announces the imminent collapse of industrial society
need to revisit the history of the nineteenth century, when famines
racked the Third World with appalling frequency and a good half of the
population in many industrial nations lived in desperate poverty. Most
people in the industrial world nowadays, I suspect, have forgotten just
how much routine deprivation was a part of ordinary life before the
brief twentieth-century heyday of cheap abundant energy.

At the same time, rising prices in a market society also help drive
responses to crisis. Here in Oregon, much of the farmland in the long
and fertile Willamette valley has been used for years to grow grass seed
for the lawn-improvement market. This year, though, a good many of the
grass-seed farmers are planting wheat instead - the grass seed market is
weak, while the price they can expect for wheat is higher than it's been
in generations. Similar responses are beginning to show up in other
agricultural and economic sectors; that's the sort of response that can
be expected, after all, from a complex homeostatic system.

That's also why the collapse of previous civilizations follows a
stairstep process that combines periods of severe crisis with periods of
partial recovery. Knocked out of one state of equilibrium by the
pressures driving it toward collapse, a society in decline finds a new
balance lower down the scale of socioeconomic complexity; when that
balance becomes unsustainable, another transition follows, and then
another point of equilibrium lower still; that's the underlying logic of
the theory of catabolic collapse, the basis for most of what appears on
this blog. It's hard to argue against the suggestion that we're entering
such a period of crisis just now, and if this is the case, we can expect
hard choices and troubled times in the years immediately ahead.

In the case of today's soaring food prices, likely results include
increased starvation in the world's poorest countries, and a sharp
increase in the world's roster of failed states. Meanwhile, drastic
economic, political, and cultural readjustments will hit the industrial
world as income redistributes itself from urban centers to farm country.
Further down the road, expect prices of many agricultural commodities to
come crashing back to earth as steep increases in production intersect
with the boom-and-bust cycle of commodities speculation. They'll head
back up thereafter - many centuries will likely pass before food is ever
again as cheap compared to incomes as it was in the second half of the
twentieth century - but the wild swings in commodity prices will place
added pressure on economic systems already creaking under existing strains.

Perhaps the most likely result of the current wave of crises, however,
is the twilight of the much-ballyhooed global market of the twentieth
century's last decades. That was never the wave of the future its
cheerleaders labeled it; it was a temporary artifact of a world in which
energy costs had been forced so low, and economic disparities between
nations raised so high, that distance apparently didn't matter and
arbitraging labor costs across continents seemed to make economic sense.
As energy costs have risen in recent years, nations with energy
resources have done the sensible thing and recognized the political
dimensions of economic exchange. Free-market fundamentalists who
denounce this "resource nationalism" seem to have forgotten that the
government of Russia, for example, was not elected by the citizens of
America, and gains no conceivable benefit by embracing policies that
benefit American consumers or politicians while disadvantaging their
Russian equivalents.

The food crisis has pushed this same transformation into overdrive.
Governments around the world that once made their nations' ability to
feed their own people a sacrosanct element of national policy, and were
talked out of this sensible strategy during the heyday of cheap energy,
have suddenly realized that the lukewarm gratitude of foreign
politicians and the plaudits of economists snugly sheltered in their
ivory towers don't count for much when a hungry mob heads for the
presidential palace. Most of the Asian countries that produce rice, the
grain that has soared most in price, have accordingly limited rice
exports to ensure that their own people get enough to eat. Where fossil
fuels and food crops go, other resources will follow; my guess is that
potash for fertilizer, an essential resource for industrial agriculture,
will be next in line.

The "free market", for that matter, was never that free in the first
place; a slanted playing board designed to maximize the flow of wealth
to the world's industrial nations and minimize flows in the other
direction, it replaced more straightforward forms of colonialism while
maintaining unequal patterns of exchange that allow the five percent of
the world's population who live in the United States to dispose of about
thirty percent of the world's natural resources. It's not surprising
that countries assigned the short end of the stick by these arrangements
would throw them off as soon as they could get away with it, and the
resource crunch now underway offers them a perfect opportunity to do so.

The end of the global economy may make life a good deal harder for those
of us in the United States and those other industrial nations, such as
Canada and Australia, that have become used to the absurdly lavish
energy and resource expenditures of the recent past. It bears
remembering, though, that people in Europe maintain a standard of living
in many ways higher ours on roughly one-third the energy per capita
Americans seem to think is necessary for civilized life. We can get by,
and get by tolerably well, on much less energy and many fewer resources
than we think.

This is likely to be a crucial point to keep in mind as the present
crisis unfolds. It's not the end of the world, or even the end of
industrial civilization, but if history is anything to go by, we could
be in for a couple of very rough decades. A crisis phase in the downward
arc of catabolic collapse is not a pleasant thing to live through, and
we can expect it to have social, economic, political, and (unless we're
extraordinarily lucky) military dimensions that will transform most
people's lives for the worse, temporarily or forever. That need not stop
us from facing the emerging crisis with as much grace and humanity as we
can muster, while doing our part to lay the foundations for the
ecotechnic societies of the future - unless, that is, we allow premature
proclamations of triumph or catastrophe to distract us from the work
that must be done.

Links:

{1}  http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3868

{2} http://sharonastyk.com/2008/04/22/we-regret-to-inform-you/

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/not-end-of-world.html#links


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