No subject

so, outlining The Decline and Fall of the American Empire as he strolls
past sheep grazing on the mossy ruins of ancient Washington DC, all this
will doubtless seem traumatic enough. For those who experience that
transformation first hand, though, it will likely have a much different
appearance. The young Parisienne whose image I invoked at the beginning
of this essay, after all, did not go to sleep one night in the agrarian,
half-feudal France of the Ancien Régime and wake up the next morning as
a grandmother in the nascent industrial nation that France became in
Napoleon's wake. Even those changes in the interval that brought her
grief - any sons she had, for example, would have faced high odds of
dying a soldier's death - would have been spread out over the years,
part of a fabric of many other experiences.

Similarly, the unraveling of today's industrial society can be expected
to follow a similar tempo of change. If the scenario I've outlined above
is anything close to the shape the future holds for us, we can expect to
witness economic, social, and political turmoil beyond anything the
industrial world has experienced in living memory. We will all be
attending more funerals than we do nowadays, and our appearance as the
guest of honor at one of them will likely come noticeably sooner than it
otherwise would. Most of us will learn what it means to go hungry, to
work at many different jobs, to have paper wealth become meaningless,
and to watch established institutions go to pieces around us. A quarter
century or so from now, the world may be a very different place, but on
the way there each of us will have had to deal with the same unoriginal
challenges of everyday life we face today.

The continuity of history as a lived experience imposes requirements on
planning for the post-peak future that haven't always been noticed. Like
the imaginary lifeboat ecovillages that would make perfect economic
sense in an imagined world, but can't even scrape together the funding
to get built in this one, a good many of the plans and projects that
have been discussed as a response to peak oil make no provision for the
fact that people will still have to live their lives and make a living
while they wait for those projects to justify themselves. Those projects
that make good practical sense here and now, or at least place no great
burden on the people who choose to pursue them, will be a good deal more
viable than those that can only support themselves in a radically
different world than the one we inhabit. In the weeks to come I plan on
sketching out some outlines of how such an approach to the future might
be crafted.
_____

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/2008/08/tempo-of-change.html


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