The Long Descent (5 page)

The second half of Nature's energy subsidy took the form of extreme temperatures and pressures deep within the Earth. Over millions of years more, these transformed the remains of prehistoric living things into coal, oil, and natural gas and, in the process, concentrated the energy they originally contained into a tiny fraction of their original size. A layer of anthracite coal bed an inch thick, for example, was originally a layer of dead plants several yards thick when it sank below the surface of a swamp 300 million years ago; despite the change in size, it still contains nearly all the flammable carbon of the original biomass. The result is fossil fuel that packs a huge amount of energy into a very small space.

Thus it's important to recognize the crucial distinction between a concentrated energy source and a diffuse one. If you had a handful of burning coal in one cupped palm, and a handful of sunshine in the other, you would certainly notice the difference. In the one hand is a resource that can conceivably support the intensive energy demands of an industrial society, and in the other is a resource that cannot.

All these factors play a part in setting the stage for the energy crisis emerging around us today, making it clear that the predictions of
The Limits to Growth
have stood up to the test of time rather better than the claims circulated by its detractors. Just as the study's authors predicted, industrial civilization finds itself squeezed by resource depletion. Peak oil is the poster child for this unwelcome change, but it's not the only resource likely to be in short supply in the near future. The waves of climate change and freak weather driven by CO2 emissions from the industrial world's tailpipes and smokestacks provide a sharp reminder that the other side of the Club of Rome's prediction — the menace of rising costs from pollution — is also present and accounted for. Unfortunately the three decades it took to prove the study's thesis were also the three decades in which the first crucial steps in the transition toward sustainability might have been made.

Problems and Predicaments

Plenty of pundits and ordinary people alike insist there still must be some constructive way out of the current situation. First in line are those who insist that replacing the rascals in power with some other set of rascals more to their liking would solve the problems facing industrial civilization. Next come those who argue that if only the right technological fix gets put in place, business as usual can continue. Further down the line are radicals of various stripes who insist that the best solution to the present crisis is to let industrial civilization crash and burn, in the firm belief that it would be replaced by some way of life they consider more appealing. Still others envisage the construction of lifeboat communities that have their own localized sustainable economies, created in an effort to get the basics of an alternative, sustainable economy in place before the existing one falls apart completely. All of these proposals approach the situation as a problem in need of a solution. This may seem like common sense, but it's not. A historical parallel may help point up what's going on here.

Imagine that some ancestor of mine shows up in a prosperous farming village in the English Midlands on a bright autumn day around 1700. It's a peaceful scene perched on the edge of catastrophic change, courtesy of the imminent arrival of the Industrial Revolution. Within a century, every building in the village will be torn down, its fields turned into pasture for sheep, and the farmers and cottagers driven off their land by enclosure acts passed by a distant Parliament to provide wool for England's cloth industry and profits for a new class of industrial magnates. For the young men of the village, England's transformation into a worldwide empire constantly warring with European rivals and indigenous peoples overseas prophesies a future of press gangs, military service, and death on battlefields around the globe. For a majority of the other residents, the future offers a forced choice between a life of factory labor at starvation wages in bleak urban slums and emigration to an uncertain fate in the American colonies. A lucky few will prosper spectacularly by betting on ways of making a living that nobody present on that autumn day has even imagined yet.

Imagine that, improbably enough, my ancestor figured all this out in advance, and has come to warn the villagers of what is in store for them. There, on the village green in the shade of an old oak, with everyone from the squire and the parson to the swineherds and day laborers gathered around him, he tells them that their way of life will be utterly destroyed, and tries to sketch out for them how the coming of industrial society will impact them, their children, and the land and life they love. Imagine that, even more improbably, they take the warning seriously. As the afternoon passes, the villagers agree that this is a serious problem indeed. What, they ask my imaginary ancestor, does he think they should do about it? What solutions does he have to offer?

What could he say in response? From today's perspective, it's clear that nothing the villagers could have done would have deflected the course of the Industrial Revolution even slightly. Events far beyond their control — geological events millions of years in the past that laid down huge coal deposits in the shallow seas that would someday become England, economic patterns going back most of the way to the fall of Rome, political shifts that had been shaking all of Europe for two centuries — drove England toward its industrial transformation. If by asking for a solution, his listeners hoped to find a way to change the whole situation for the better, my imaginary ancestor would have had to say that there was none. At most, he might have been able to give the villagers some general advice on how to cope with the torrent of changes about to break over their heads.

The consequences of the Industrial Revolution were just as complex as its causes. The destruction of England's traditional rural economy and the society that depended on it drove waves of change that moved out in all directions. Successful responses to it followed the same divergent paths. Some people prospered by abandoning their old lives and making the crossing to a new continent or a new economy, some by digging in their heels and maintaining their old way of life as long as possible, and others by staying flexible and keeping their options open. Still, none of these options offered a guarantee; many who attempted them found that they led only to impoverishment and an early death.

The question itself is the difficulty. What those English villagers faced in the years after 1700 was a predicament, not a problem. The difference is that a
problem
calls for a solution; the only question is whether a solution can be found and made to work and, once this is done, the problem is solved. A
predicament,
by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them “solves” the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.

For human beings, at least, the archetypal predicament is the imminence of death. Facing it, we come up with responses that range from evasion and denial to some of the greatest creations of the human mind. Since it's a predicament, not a problem, the responses don't make it go away; they don't “solve” it, they simply deal with the reality of it. No one response works for everybody, though some do tend to work better than others. The predicament remains, and it conditions every aspect of life in one way or another.

The difference between a problem and a predicament has particular relevance here and now, because the last three hundred years or so have witnessed a curious shift in the way some of the basic factors of human life have been conceptualized. Since the dawn of industrial civilization, the predicaments that define what used to be called “the human condition” have been reframed as a set of problems to be solved. Death itself falls into this category. On the one hand, we've got transhumanists such as Alan Harrington in
The Immortalist
proclaiming that death is “an unacceptable imposition on the human race;”
¹⁶
on the other hand we've got a medical industry willing to inflict almost any amount of indignity and pain in order to preserve bare biological life a little longer at all costs. Our culture's mythology of progress envisions the goal of civilization as a utopian state in which poverty, illness, death, and every other aspect of the human predicament has been converted into problems and solved by technology.

The difficulty with all this is that predicaments don't stop being predicaments just because we decide to treat them as problems. There are still plenty of challenges we can't solve and be done with; we have to respond to them and live with them. Death, for example, is not an “imposition;” it's an inescapable part of the human condition. A good case could be made, and indeed has been made, that it's also one of the prime driving forces behind human art, culture, spirituality, and wisdom, and that the confrontation with the inevitability of one's own death is an unavoidable step on the path to human maturity.

The irony of the current crisis is that a civilization that tried to turn all its predicaments into problems has ended up confronted with problems that, after being ignored too long, turned into predicaments. A controlled, creative transition to sustainability might have been possible if the promising beginnings of the 1970s had been followed up in the 1980s and 1990s. That didn't happen, and now we have to live with the consequences. One of the best ways to gauge the shape of those consequences is to look at older civilizations that have encountered the limits to growth, and draw tentative conclusions based on their experiences.

The Lessons of History

It's unpopular these days to suggest that we have anything to learn from the past. Possibly this is because history holds up an unflattering mirror to our follies. Those who recall the 1929 stock market bubble, for example, can find every detail repeated in the tech market frenzy of the late 1990s. The same claims that a “new economy” and new technology made the business cycle obsolete, the same proliferation of investment vehicles (investment trusts then, mutual funds today), the same airy confidence that stock values would go up forever and fundamentals didn't matter: fast forward seventy years and you saw the follies of 1929 replayed in 1999, cheered on by economists who, of all people, should have known better.

The rise and fall of civilizations offer the same embarrassment on a grander scale. We know what happens to societies that outrun their resource base: they go under. Dozens of past cultures ended up in history's wrecking yard for exactly this reason. Civilizations collapse; as Joseph Tainter pointed out in his useful book
The Collapse
of Complex Societies,
it's one of the most predictable things about them. From this perspective, our industrial civilization may not be all that different from the scores of earlier civilizations that overshot their natural resource base and crashed to ruin as a result. The collapse of civilizations is a natural process. It doesn't follow exactly the same course in every situation, but like most natural processes, some things about it can be predicted by comparison with past examples.

One highly relevant example is the ancient Maya, who flourished on the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America while Europe struggled through the Dark Ages. Using only a Neolithic stone technology, the Maya built an extraordinary, literate civilization with fine art, architecture, astronomy, and mathematics, and a calendar more accurate than the one we use today. None of that saved it from the common fate of civilizations. In a “rolling collapse” spanning the years from 750–900 ce, Mayan civilization disintegrated, cities were abandoned to the jungle, and the population of the lowland Maya heartland dropped by 90%.

The causes of the Maya collapse have been debated for well over a century, but the latest archeological research supports the long-held consensus among scholars that agricultural failure was the central cause.
¹⁷
Like modern industrial society, the Maya built their civilization on a nonrenewable resource base. In their case it was the fertility of fragile tropical soils, which couldn't support the Mayan version of intensive corn farming indefinitely. All the achievements of Mayan civilization rested on the shaky foundation of swidden agriculture — a system in which fields are allowed to return to jungle after a few years of cultivation, while new fields are cleared and enriched with ashes from burnt vegetation. It's a widely used system in tropical areas around the world, but, like dependence on fossil fuels, it has a hidden vulnerability. Swidden works extremely well at relatively modest population levels, but it breaks down disastrously when population growth takes over and farms can no longer return to jungle long enough to restore soil fertility.

Tropical soils lose most of their fertility after only a few years of farming, and clearing too much jungle too quickly causes topsoil erosion. Dust samples taken from cores of lake sediment from the Yucatan show that both these processes spun out of control during the Maya zenith and collapse. Soil depletion and erosion combined with normal cycles of drought in the Yucatan to cause catastrophic crop failures that sent classic Mayan civilization into a tailspin of political and military chaos from which it never recovered.

Like modern industrial society, the Maya had plenty of options available as they approached what we might as well call “peak corn.” They knew about crops that give higher yields than corn but draw less heavily on soil nutrients, such as manioc, sweet potato, or ramon nuts,
¹⁸
and they could have switched enough of their farmland to these crops to make a difference. Other ancient peoples managed shifts of this sort easily enough; many of the ancient Greek city-states did exactly that in the eighth century bce. As a way of dealing with the stark ecological limitations of their rocky peninsula, the Greeks gave up an economy based on grain and cattle in favor of olive and grape farming for export.
¹⁹
Among the Maya, though, a switch of this sort was apparently never considered. Archeologists have been able to analyze the ancient Mayan diet by testing skeletons, and they found that corn provided more than 50% of the calories in the Maya diet before, during, and after the collapse.
²⁰