The Long Descent (2 page)

Readers who hope to see those same reassuring sentiments repeated here will be disappointed. The energy crises of the 1970s, as this book will show, were anything but an aberration. Rather, they marked industrial civilization's first brush with an unwelcome reality that will dominate the decades and centuries ahead of us. We have lived so long in a dream of perpetual economic and technological expansion that most people nowadays take progress for granted as the inevitable shape of the future. Our collective awakening from that fantasy may prove bitter — after sweet dreams, the cold light of morning is rarely a welcome sight — but at this turn of history's wheel, few things are more necessary.

No heresy raises hackles in the contemporary world quite so effectively as the suggestion that the soaring towers and equally lofty pretensions of the industrial world could become the crumbling ruins and dim memories of some future age. At the core of the modern world's identity is the conviction that our civilization is exempt from the slow trajectories of rise and fall that defined all of human history before the industrial revolution. It's an article of contemporary faith, as deeply and sincerely held as any religious creed, that we have been singled out for some larger destiny — perhaps a science fiction future among the stars, perhaps a grand catastrophe bigger and brighter than any other civilization has managed for itself, but certainly not the slow ebb of a tide of expansion that has been flowing since our ancestors figured out how to tap into the Earth's reserves of fossil fuels. This conviction colors nearly all modern attempts to make sense of the future.

The word “decline” has been absent from our historical sense for so long that most people nowadays find the possibility of economic, cultural, and technological decline impossible to grasp. Still, that unacknowledged possibility defines the most probable future for the modern industrial world. We have to face the fact that our civilization may not be exempt from the common fate, and could very well follow the great civilizations of the past down the long slope into history's dumpster.

In the view from that Caernarfon hilltop, the similarities that united the empires of past and present stood out clearly enough to bring that awareness within reach. In the pages that follow, I hope to provide a similar view from a more abstract height. The topography in question was originally surveyed by an American petroleum geologist in the middle years of the 20th century. Its name is Hubbert's peak, and the road that leads down from it traces out the most likely future we face today — a future I've named the Long Descent.

Making sense of that future will require a reassessment of many aspects of the recent past and careful attention to the cultural narratives we use to impose structure on the inkblot patterns of human history. Those tasks will be taken up in the first two chapters of this book, “The End of the Industrial Age” and “The Stories We Tell Ourselves.” The chapter that follows, “Briefing for the Descent,” outlines the likely shape of our approaching decline into a deindustrial future. The next two chapters, “Facing the Deindustrial Age” and “Tools for the Transition,” map out the strategies and technologies that will be needed in an age of decline. A final chapter, “The Spiritual Dimension,” is an attempt to make sense of the Long Descent in the context of that realm of ultimate meanings we awkwardly call “spiritual” or, perhaps, “religious.” An appendix, more technical in nature, outlines the theory of societal collapse that underlies the argument of this book.

No book is the product of a single mind, and this one in particular has benefited from the help I have received from many other people. Dr. Richard Duncan and the members of the Third Place Society introduced me to the world of peak oil and encouraged the first rough outlines of the ideas presented here. Richard –Hein–berg offered valuable feedback at several stages of the process; he and Wijnandt de Vries also arranged for online publication of my initial essay “How Societies Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse” when other options fell through. Many people provided valuable feedback on that essay and on subsequent posts on my blog, “The Archdruid Report,” where many of the ideas discussed in this book were first aired. All the staff of New Society Publishers, especially publisher Chris Plant and editor Linda Glass, were unfailingly enthusiastic and helpful.

Another series of intellectual debts begins with Corby –Ingold, who introduced me to the modern Druid tradition. Philip Carr-Gomm, Chosen Chief of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), helped me make sense of Druidry and posed cogent questions about the interface between Druid spirituality and the fate of the industrial world. The visit to Caernarfon described at the beginning of this introduction was made possible by OBOD's Mount Haemus award for Druid scholarship, for which I also must thank the Order's Patroness Dwina Murphy-Gibb. Dr. John Gilbert welcomed me into the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), the Druid order I now head. He and many other members of AODA have played crucial roles in shaping my ideas on this and many other subjects. My wife Sara, finally, has had a central part in helping to shape this book, and in the rest of my life. My thanks go to all.

ONE
The End
of the
Industrial Age

F
or those of us who grew up during the energy crises of the 1970s, recent headlines have taken on an eerie degree of familiarity. Now as then, soaring energy costs make the news almost daily, part of a wider economic shift that's sending the prices of many raw materials through the roof. The countries that export the oil we in North America waste so casually (OPEC then; Iran, Venezuela, and Russia now) are showing an uncomfortable eagerness to cash in their economic chips for the headier coin of international power. Meanwhile the US balance of trade sinks further into a sea of red ink as imported consumer goods from our largest Asian trading partner ( Japan then, China now) overwhelm what's left of American exports, sending the dollar skidding against most foreign currencies. In Yogi Berra's famous words, it's déjà vu all over again.

Then as now, too, the rising cost of oil isn't simply the result of market vagaries or the wickedness of oil companies. It comes out of a disastrous mismatch between our economic system and the hard facts of petroleum geology. In 1970, petroleum production in the United States reached its all-time peak and began the steady decline that continues to this day. This decline forced American society, raised on fantasies of endless supplies of cheap home-grown energy, to retool its foreign policy, its economy, and its culture to deal with the unwelcome new reality of dependence on overseas reserves. Much of the economic and cultural turmoil of the decade after 1970 came out of the wrenching changes demanded by that new reality.

Figure 1.1. The Hubbert Curve

One of the basic tools of petroleum geology, the Hubbert curve predicts the total production of petroleum from an oil well. Peak production comes when about half of total production has already taken place.

The peak of US oil production came as a surprise only to those who weren't paying attention. Decades before, a petroleum geologist named M. King Hubbert worked out equations that predict in advance how much oil you can get from a well.
¹
Oil is viscous stuff, and it takes time to move through pores and crevices in the rock that contains it. When an oil well pierces the rock and starts drawing out oil, the flow starts off slowly, gradually rises to peak production, and dwindles away just as gradually to nothing. Normally this works out to a bell-shaped curve, the Hubbert curve, that ranks today as one of the basic tools of petroleum geology.

Hubbert's discovery, however, had wider implications. The same curve, he found, was just as effective a way of tracking production from oil fields, oil provinces (regions with similar geological features), and the oil reserves of entire nations. It's worth taking the time to understand how this works, because both the crisis of the 1970s and the larger crisis taking shape around us today both unfold from it. Production from a field, an oil province, or a country starts off slowly, just as with an oil well, because it takes time and investment to find the right places to drill. As the first few wells start producing, more wells are drilled, and total production rises. Eventually, though, the rising curve of production runs into the awkward fact that any given field, oil province, or country only contains so much oil.

This impacts production in two ways. First, as the number of wells rises, it gets harder to find more places where oil can be drilled. Second, old wells start to run dry as each one follows its own –Hubbert curve, and so rising production from new wells starts to be offset by dwindling production from older ones. Sooner or later, these two factors overtake the rate of new oil production, and the field, province, or nation tips into decline. On average, this happens when about half the recoverable oil has been pumped out. There's still plenty of oil in the ground when this happens, and much of it may not even be discovered by then, but each new well drilled after the peak simply helps take up some of the slack from older wells that are running dry.

All through the early 1950s, Hubbert tried out his curve on oil field data from around the world and refined his equations. In 1956 he took the next step by predicting publicly that oil production in the United States would peak about 1970, and then enter a permanent decline. Almost everyone in the oil industry dismissed his claim as nonsense. The conventional wisdom insisted that better technology and increased investment would keep US domestic oil production rising into the far future.

As the numbers came in during the early 1970s, though, it became clear that Hubbert was right. Despite immense investment, dramatic new technological advances, and federal tax policies that amounted to a trillion-dollar giveaway to the American oil industry, production peaked and then began to shrink right on schedule. That peak and decline gave the newly founded Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) the leverage they needed to force the price of oil upward. Then, when the United States sided with Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, OPEC was able to impose an oil embargo that came close to bringing the US economy to its knees.

Hubbert was not finished, though. In 1970, armed with the best current estimates of world oil reserves, he took his curve one step further and applied it to the entire world. His calculations predicted that oil production for the entire planet would crest around 2000, and decline thereafter. This was bad news for a global economy that depended on oil for close to half its energy and nearly all its transportation. How bad the news might be, though, did not become clear until a few years later, when a study sponsored by the Club of Rome put the concepts of limits to growth on the Western world's cognitive map.

The Limits To Growth

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, a former CEO of Italian auto manufacturer Fiat. Its mission was to find constructive responses to what Peccei called “the global prob-lematique” — the spiral of converging crises that he, along with many leading figures in economic and scientific fields, saw closing in on industrial society in the second half of the 20th century. Shortly after its founding, the Club hired a team of MIT scientists and computer engineers for a daring project — an attempt to predict the future course of industrial society. The results of the project saw print in 1972 as the controversial bestseller
The Limits
to Growth,
one of the defining books of the decade and the storm center of bitter debates that continue to this day.

What the
Limits to Growth
team found was that, in simplest terms, unlimited growth on a finite planet is a recipe for disaster. As population increases and economic growth unfolds, the world has to provide ever greater supplies of food, water, energy, and raw materials for industry. The Earth, though, only has so much oil, so much coal, so much topsoil, and so on through the sprawling list of resources used by industrial society, and it can only absorb so much pollution before the natural systems that support the global economy begin to break down. Since these systems include the weather patterns, water and nutrient cycles, and ecological interactions that produce food for people to eat, wood and other raw materials for them to use, and even the oxygen they breathe, this is not a small matter.

None of this is a problem as long as a society stays within what ecologists call the
carrying capacity
of its environment (the level of resource use and pollution the environment can support indefinitely). Once growth outstrips carrying capacity, though, resources become scarcer while demand rises, and so the costs of supplying the economy with what it needs climb steadily. Meanwhile, rising population and economic growth churn out ever greater amounts of pollution and put increasing strains on economically important natural systems. As these natural systems begin coming apart, the global economy either has to pay to do things nature once did for free or it has to fund pollution control measures to keep natural systems operating. Either way, costs go up.