[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Rethinking the Rust Belt

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (May 06 2009)

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



One of the least useful habits of thought fostered by the modern
mythology of progress, it seems to me, is the notion that historical
change can only move in one direction - the direction in which it seems
to be going at the present. Those of us who suggest that today's
industrial societies are headed for a process of decline and fall, not
that different from the ones that ended civilizations of the past, run
up against this insistence constantly. The truism that time only goes
one way gets distorted into the claim that since the last three hundred
years have seen a great deal of expansion and technical development, the
future must follow the same trajectory.

A hundred years ago, exactly that same logic was applied by people who
insisted that war between civilized nations was a thing of the past.
Wars between the nations of Europe had, in fact, become steadily less
frequent over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, and a great
many Europeans managed to convince themselves that this process could
only continue in the 20th, leading to universal peace. As you may have
noticed, they were quite mistaken - a detail that has not prevented the
same logic from being deployed with equal enthusiasm more recently.

Consider the chorus of derision that rose up a couple of years ago when
James Kunstler, in his book The Long Emergency (2005), warned that
piracy would likely revive around the Pacific rim as the industrial age
comes to its end. I don't recall a single reviewer of the book who took
that prediction seriously, and a great many of Kunstler's critics leapt
on it with gleeful cries - though one should note that these cries
became curiously muted once the recent spate of pirate raids off the
coast of Somalia hit the news. Of course Kunstler is quite correct;
piracy was already a serious problem in several parts of the world when
he wrote, it has become worse since then, and once fuel shortages begin
to limit the reach of modern navies and economic crises add to the
roster of failed states, it may become a serious factor affecting the
future of maritime trade. Only the delusion that piracy belongs to the
past, and therefore can't be part of the future, keeps this ugly reality
from being recognized.

It's impossible to make sense of the present, much less the future, from
within the tunnel vision of a view of history that sees the world moving
through some fixed sequence of development. When pundits say that
contemporary hunter-gatherers are “still in the Stone Age", or that
members of some nonindustrial societies are "living in the Middle Ages",
while only the world's industrial cultures have "entered the 21st
century", they are talking nonsense. It's a very popular kind of
nonsense; people in the industrial world love to think of themselves as
the top rung of history's ladder, with every other culture as a
now-outmoded stage in the ascent to ranch houses and SUVs; but it's
still nonsense.

Biologists studying the evolution of life forms have gradually been
forced to discard the notion that evolution has a fixed agenda, and have
realized instead that the interplay of genetic diversity and natural
selection can move in any direction - simplifying here, adding
complexity there, leading one species into a highly specialized niche
while another becomes a generalist capable of moving between many
ecological roles. Notions that the biosphere as a whole has moved toward
greater complexity over Earth's long history - very nearly the last
holdout of the old fantasy of linear evolution - have had to be
discarded, because the evidence simply won't support them; the last
fifteen million years, for example, have seen a steady loss of
complexity across the Earth's biosphere as the planetary climate cooled
in the run-up to the most recent round of ice ages, and the rich
ecosystems of the Mesozoic, the age of dinosaurs, were far more complex
than most of those that have succeeded them.

It's long past time to apply the same thinking to history, and recognize
that forcing human societies onto a linear model of progress serves the
purposes of ideology rather than clear thinking. Human societies, like
biological species, adapt to make the most of their environments with
the inherited resources they have to hand. Sometimes those adaptations
move in the direction of greater complexity and some form of
technological development, while in other cases they move toward greater
simplicity and shed technologies that are no longer useful. Those
societies with a long cultural memory can even cycle back and forth
between simpler and more complex levels of organization and technology -
the long history of imperial China offers an excellent example of just
this process at work.

The rise and approaching fall of the industrial age, it may be worth
suggesting, may turn into the same process on steroids. In ecological
terms, the torrent of fossil fuel energy that created the modern world
can be seen as a massive disruption to established patterns of human
social ecology. Those patterns stretched like silly putty, or broke
apart entirely and were replaced, as a new economy of abundance evolved
and expanded. That economy, however, was ultimately a product of
ever-expanding supplies of fossil fuels, and once production bumped
against the hard ceiling of geological limits, it began to break apart.
The economic convulsions of the last few decades mark the crest of the
wave, and the beginning of its long retreat.

As that retreat proceeds, the more complex and resource-intensive
technologies and social habits of recent years will likely be among the
early casualties, and some of the less complex and resource-intensive
technologies and social habits of the recent past may well get fished
out of the trash heap and pressed back into service, because they are
better suited to the new environment of resource constraints than their
more extravagant replacements. This will have sweeping impacts on the
new economies that take shape in the wake of the current Great
Recession, paralleling the impacts the original shifts had in their time
- but in the other direction. Any number of examples could be named, but
the ones I want to discuss now are geographical.

The economic and human geography of North America during the 20th
century went through sweeping changes with results that are still
echoing around us today. Technology played some role in driving those
changes, but another factor was at least as powerful: the transformation
of the United States from a manufacturing economy, producing goods and
services at home, to a tribute economy propped up by the labor and
resources of client states overseas. (This is what actually underlies
the recent rhetoric about "globalization"; there was similar talk during
the heyday of the British Empire, too.) Since most of the real wealth
circulating in the American economy of the late 20th century came from
overseas, the seaports of the east and west coasts came to dominate the
economy, while the old economic heartland of the Midwest turned into a
"Rust Belt" of half-empty cities and crumbling smokestacks.

The idea that these same cities might be on the brink of economic
revival may seem about as likely as, say, a revival of piracy did to
Kunstler's critics a few years ago. Those who believe in the
continuation of business as usual are unlikely to be able to imagine
Pittsburgh or Peoria at the crest of the future's wave; those who
believe in the equally improbable scenario of overnight collapse into a
dark age or worse can't imagine an economic revival at all. Still, all
history is ultimately local; it's easy to say, for example, that "Rome's
economy declined in the last two centuries of the Empire", and as a
generalization this is true, but it masks a huge amount of temporal and
regional variation, including periods and regions in which the economic
climate improved noticeably.

Thus the possibility of a Rust Belt renaissance in the coming decades
should not be dismissed out of hand. America's overseas empire is
already coming apart at the seams, as the costs of maintaining it
overtake its economic benefits - the common fate of empires throughout
history - and rival powers turn our imperial overreach to their
advantage. In the foreseeable future, the United States will again have
to produce most of the goods and services it uses at home - and as that
happens, the regions most likely to profit by it are those inland areas
whose central position gives them easier access to markets nationwide,
and whose access to the old arteries of waterborne transport will make
them much more viable as centers of production and distribution in
future where energy will be in short supply.

More generally, the best resource for thinking about the economic map of
2050, say, may just be an economic map of 1880. When railroads and
waterways once again become the primary means of transport, the places
that were major economic hubs will likely become major hubs again,
because they will make the same economic sense in the future that they
did when railroads and waterways were last in vogue. The economic map of
2100, in turn, may have more in common with that of 1830 or thereabouts,
since continuing depletion of remaining fossil fuel supplies will likely
have made railroads uneconomical for most uses, leaving waterborne
transport the only cost-effective alternative to local production. Add
in the impact of population contraction driven by economic decline and
failing public health - essentially the same mix that's driving a
similar contraction in the former Soviet Union - and the parallels may
be even more exact.

This way of looking at the future has any number of potential
implications, not least for those who hope to weather the current round
of economic contraction and social turmoil with some level of grace. My
guess is that both these factors will be concentrated in the coastal
regions, as the wealth flows generated by the declining import economy
give way to economic stagnation and contraction, and in regions such as
the Southwest where political borders are increasingly out of step with
demographic reality. Isolated regions throughout the West, already
marginal at best, are likely to slip into permanent poverty as the
tourist economy breaks down and climate shifts already under way make
crippling droughts more common. On the other hand, agricultural regions
outside the drought belt will likely thrive as the price of food rises,
and the old Rust Belt cities - many of which shed half or more of their
population over the last fifty years, relieving the population pressure
and many of the social problems that made headlines not too many decades
ago - may weather the current wave of crises tolerably well.

There will be other waves of crisis further down the road; history
reminds us that the downside of a civilization's history is a very
uneven process, and it's anyone's guess which areas will be favored by
the patterns of change that take shape later in the course of the
decline. Suggesting a renaissance in the Rust Belt and the agricultural
Midwest also flies in the face of a great many contemporary assumptions,
driven as they are by the intellectual fashions of a mostly coastal
intelligentsia used to dismissing the inland reaches of this continent
as "flyover states". Still, history seems to take a perverse delight in
overturning such assumptions, and those who can get outside the delusion
that historical change is a one-way street may find unexpected
possibilities opening up before them.

_____

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 (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/rethinking-rust-belt.html


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