Peak Everything (9 page)

Of course, from a biological point of view, food is energy. And so what we are saying (once again, but in a slightly different way) is that understanding energy sources is essential to understanding human societies.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris identified three basic elements that are present in every human society:

Change at any of these levels can affect the others: the emergence of a new religion or a political revolution, for example, can change people's lives in real, significant ways. However, the fact that so many cultural forms seem consistently to cluster around ways of obtaining food suggests that
fundamental
cultural change occurs at the infrastructural level: if people switch, for example, from hunting to planting, or from planting to herding, their politics and spirituality are bound to shift as well, and probably in profound ways.

The industrial revolution represented one of history's pivotal infrastructural shifts; everything about human society changed as a result. This revolution did
not
come about primarily because of religious or political developments, but because a few prior inventions (steel, gears, and a primitive steam engine — i.e., Class B and C and simple Class D tools) came together in the presence of an abundant new energy source: fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and natural gas. Ideas (such as Cartesian dualism, capitalism, Calvinism, and Marxism), rather than driving the transformation, achieved prominence because they served useful functions within a flow of events emanating from infrastructural necessity.

What have been the structural and superstructural impacts of industrialism?

Because only a reduced portion of the population is required to work the land in order to produce food-energy (now with tractors and harvesters rather than oxen), a large majority of the populace has lost direct connection with the land and with the cycles of nature. If hunters get their food-energy from hunting, we get ours from shopping at the supermarket.

The ensuing proliferation, first of factory work and later of specialized occupations, has led to the development of universal compulsory public education and the idea of the “job” — a notion that most people today take for granted, but that seems strange, demeaning, and confining to people in non-industrial cultures.

With the expansion of the educated middle class, simple monarchical forms of government soon ceased to be defensible. By the latter part of the 18
^th
century, a trend was well established, within incipient industrial nations, of revolution and the widespread and growing expectation of democratic participation in governance — though of course that expectation was quickly hijacked by the
nouveau
mercantile elites. Somewhat later, the economic exploitation of labor that typified both previous agricultural civilizations and the new industrial states also became the target of revolution; once again, the primary effect of revolution was primarily merely to
rearrange the deck chairs: people's actual daily work and psychic life were still being shaped by machines, and, at a deeper level, the energy sources that propelled them.

We must remember that industrialism followed on the heels of the European takeover of the resources and labor of most of the rest of the world during centuries of conquest and colonialism. Thus the experience and expectation of economic growth had already insinuated itself into the minds of members of the European merchant class before industrialism took hold. Once the fuel revolution began, with vastly more energy available per capita, economic activity achieved seemingly perpetual exponential growth, and economic theories emerged not only to explain this growth in terms of “markets,” but to affirm that now, because of markets, growth was necessary, inevitable, and unending. World without end, amen. Fractional-reserve banking, based on the wonder of compound interest, served as the fiscal embodiment of these new expectations. In effect, within the minds of society's managers and policy makers, faith in technology and markets supplanted previous religious faith in the hallucinatory agricultural and herding deities that had presided over Western civilization for the previous couple of millennia.

In the early 20
^th
century, as mechanized production mushroomed to swamp existing demand for manufactured products (among people who mostly still lived rurally and fairly self-sufficiently), elites began experimenting with mass propaganda in the form of advertising and public relations. Later, television would dramatically increase the effectiveness of these efforts, which amounted to nothing less than the regimentation of the human imagination according to the demands of the industrial system.

George Stephenson's “Rocket,” built in 1829, was the world's first steam locomotive, which opened the way to fossil-fueled travel and transport.

Since women were now needed both as consumers and workers
in order to continue the perpetual expansion of that system, feminism (via the destruction of old domestic roles and the promotion of new ambitions and consumer tastes) became an inevitable byproduct.

In short, just as we would predict on the basis of the theory of infrastructural determinism, when fossil fuels deeply altered humanity's means of obtaining sustenance from the Earth, everything about human society changed — from child rearing to politics; from cultural myths to personal dreams.

Of course, many of these changes were destructive both of people and nature. And so, while many of the political struggles of the 20
^th
century centered on questions of the distribution of power and wealth (as had been the case since the first agricultural surpluses were laid aside over 7,000 years ago), many of those struggles also grew from efforts to control technology's caustic impacts, which were linked by social critics both to tools themselves and to people's attitudes toward them.

This cover of
Modern Mechanix and Inventions
from June, 1936, typifies the techno-optimism of the mid-20
^th
century.

Technological politics focused on a range of issues: nuclear weapons and nuclear power, polluting chemicals, ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases, and the genetic engineering of food, to name only a few familiar examples. The most radical of the techno-critics were inspired by the writings of anthropologists such as Stanley Diamond, who evinced profound admiration for the world's remaining hunter-gatherers. For the anarchoprimitivist philosopher John Zerzan,
all
technology is damaging, debauched, destructive, and demeaning, and only a return to our
primordial, pre-linguistic, pre-technic condition will enable us to recover fully our innate freedom and spontaneity.
⁷

On the other hand, techno-optimists proclaimed that humanity was in the process of overthrowing age-old limits of every kind — to population growth, levels of consumption, ease of movement, quickness of communication, access to information, and so on.

But the techno-critics and the techno-boosters, from the mildest to the most extreme, have all tended to assume that, for decades hence, barring intervention, humanity will pursue a continued trajectory of technological change: the only thing that could thwart this ongoing “progress” would be the awakening of a new moral sensibility (misplaced, in the view of the techno-boosters) leading humans to reject technology, entirely or in part.

With the discourse on Peak Oil that has commenced since the beginning of the new millennium has come a focus on energy as the determining factor in social evolution — rather than technology
per se,
or ideas, or political struggles. And with that shift has also come the sense that resource limits will eventually drive basic cultural change — rather than moral persuasion, mass enlightenment, or some new invention.

As oil and gas prices rise, signaling the start of the peaking period, we continue to see the rollout of new inventions in the form of the latest iPhone, the next generation of nuclear bombs, improved surveillance tools, and so on. However, there is also evidence that the stream of new inventions, like the global stream of oil, is starting to dry up.

Physicist Jonathan Huebner of the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, has for several years been studying the pace of technological change and invention, using innovations catalogued in
The History of Science and Technology.
After applying some elaborate mathematics, he has concluded that the rate of invention of significantly new and different tools peaked in 1873 and has been dwindling gradually since then. Huebner calculates our current rate of innovation at seven important technological
developments per billion people per year — about the same rate as prevailed in Europe in 1600. If the trend continues, by 2024 the innovation rate will have declined to that of the Dark Ages.
⁸

Figure 18.

Assuming Huebner is right, it would seem that the 19
^th
-century adoption of fossil fuels led to an early-peaking wave of invention, and we are living on its trailing edge. As fossil fuels peak and decline, we are unlikely to see another such burst of similar kinds or degrees of innovation; instead, we will see
adaptation
to a lower-energy cultural environment. And that adaptation may occur by way of versions of older cultural patterns that resulted from previous generations' responses to similar levels of available energy.

Peak Oil will be a fundamental cultural watershed, at least as important as the industrial revolution or the development of agriculture. Yet few mainstream commentators see it that way. They discuss the likelihood of energy price spikes and try to calculate how much economic havoc will result from them. Always the solution is technology: solar or wind and maybe a bit of hydrogen for green-tinged idealists; nuclear, tar sands, methane hydrates, and coal-to-liquids for hard-headed, pro-growth economists and engineers; Tesla's free-energy magnetic generators for the gullible fringe dwellers.

But technology cannot solve the underlying dilemma we face as a result of our application of fossil fuels to every human problem or desire. We are growing our population, destroying habitat, undermining global climatic stability, and depleting resources in ways and at rates that cannot be mitigated by
any
new tool or energy source. The only way forward that does not end with the extinction of humanity and thousands or millions of other species is a scaling back of the entire human project — in terms both of human numbers and per-capita rates of consumption.