I’ve written all this before, but I have not recently provided a concise summary. This essay provides a brief overview of the dire nature of our predicaments with respect to fossil fuels. The primary consequences of our fossil-fuel addiction stem from two primary phenomena: peak oil and global climate change. The former spells the end of western civilization, which might come in time to prevent the extinction of our species at the hand of the latter.

Global climate change threatens our species with extinction by mid-century is we do not terminate the industrial economy soon. Increasingly dire forecasts from extremely conservative sources keep stacking up. Governments refuse to act because they know growth of the industrial economy depends (almost solely) on consumption of fossil fuels. Global climate change and energy decline are similar in this respect: neither is characterized by a politically viable solution.

There simply is no comprehensive substitute for crude oil. It is the overwhelming fuel of choice for transportation, and there is no way out of the crude trap at this late juncture in the industrial era. We passed the world oil peak in 2005, which led to near-collapse of the world’s industrial economy several times between September 2008 and May 2010. And we’re certainly not out of the economic woods yet.

Crude oil is the master material on which all other depend. Without abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil, we cannot produce uranium (which peaked in 1980), coal (which peaks within a decade or so), solar panels, wind turbines, wave power, ethanol, biodiesel, or hydroelectric power. Without abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil, we cannot maintain the electric grid. Without abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil, we cannot maintain the industrial economy for an extended period of time. Simply put, abundance supplies of inexpensive crude oil is fundamental to growth of the industrial economy and therefore to western civilization. Civilizations grow or die. Western civilization is done growing.

Not only is there no comprehensive substitute for crude oil, but partial substitutes simply do not scale. Solar panels on every roof? It’s too late for that. Electric cars in every garage? Its too late for that. We simply do not have the cheap energy requisite to propping up an empire in precipitous decline. Energy efficiency and conservation will not save us, either, as demonstrated by the updated version of Jevons’ paradox, the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.

Unchecked, western civilization drives us to one of two outcomes, and perhaps both: (1) Destruction of the living planet on which we depend for our survival, and/or (2) Runaway greenhouse and therefore the near-term extinction of our species. Why would we want to sustain such a system? It is immoral and omnicidal. The industrial economy enslaves us, drives us insane, and kills us in myriad ways. We need a living planet. Everything else is less important than the living planet on which we depend for our very lives. We act as if non-industrial cultures do not matter. We act as if non-human species do not matter. But they do matter, on many levels, including the level of human survival on Earth. And, of course, there’s the matter of ecological overshoot, which is where we’re spending all our time since at least 1980. Every day in overshoot brings us 205,000 people to deal with later. In this case, “deal with” means murder.

Shall we reduce Earth to a lifeless pile of rubble within a generation? Or shall we heat the planet beyond human habitability within two generations? Or shall we keep procreating as if there are no consequences for an already crowded planet? Pick your poison, but recognize it’s poison. We’re dead either way.

Don’t slit those wrists just yet. This essay bears good news.

Western civilization has been in decline at least since 1979, when world per-capita oil supply peaked coincident with the Carter Doctrine regarding oil in the Middle East. In my mind, and perhaps only there, these two events marked the apex of American Empire, which began about the time Thomas Jefferson — arguably the most enlightened of the Founding Fathers — said, with respect to native Americans: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” It wasn’t long after 1979 that the U.S. manufacturing base was shipped overseas and we began serious engagement with Wall Street-based casino culture as the basis for our industrial economy. By most economic measure, we’ve experienced a lost decade, so it’s too late for a fast crash of the industrial economy. We’re in the midst of the same slow train wreck we’ve been experiencing for more than a decade, but the train is teetering on the edge of a cliff. Meanwhile, all we want to discuss, at every level in this country, is the quality of service in the dining car.

When the price of crude oil exhibits a price spike, an economic recession soon follows. Every recession since 1972 has been preceded by a spike in the price of oil, and direr spikes translate to deeper recessions. Economic dominoes began to fall at a rapid and accelerating rate when the price of crude spiked to $147.27/bbl in July 2008. They haven’t stopped falling, notwithstanding economic cheerleaders from government and corporations (as if the two are different at this point in American fascism). The reliance of our economy on derivatives trading cannot last much longer, considering the value of the derivatives — like the U.S. debt — greatly exceeds the value of all the currency in the world combined with all the gold mined in the history of the world.

Although it’s all coming down, as it has been for quite a while, it’s relatively clear imperial decline is accelerating. We’re obviously headed for full-scale collapse of the industrial economy, as indicated by these 40 statistics. Even Fortune and CNN agree economic collapse will be complete soon, though they don’t express any understanding of how we arrived at this point or the hopelessness of extracting ourselves from the morass.

We know what economic collapse looks like, because we’re in the midst of it. What does completion of the collapse look? I strongly suspect the economic endgame is capitulation of the stock markets. Shortly after we hit Dow 4,000, within a few days or maybe a couple weeks, the industrial economy seizes up as the lubricant is overcome with sand in the crankcase. Why would anybody work when the company for which they work is, literally, worthless? Even if they show up for a few days to punch the time-clock, the bank will not issue a check, and the banks won’t be open to cash it. It won’t be long before publicly traded utility companies don’t have enough employees to keep the lights on. It won’t be long before gas (nee service) stations shutter the doors. It won’t be long before the grocery stores are empty. It won’t be long before the water stops flowing through the municipal taps.

There are those who question my credibility, particularly when I make predictions. We’re in the midst of a war to save our humanity and the living planet, and some readers are worried about my credibility, as determined by the power of the main stream. My responses are two-fold: (1) I’m hardly sticking my neck out, unlike when I made my “new Dark Age” prediction in 2007 (at which point the price of oil had yet to exceed $80/bbl, the industrial economy appeared headed for perennial nirvana, and everybody who read or heard me thought I was insane); of the fifty or so energy-literate scholars I read, about half indicate the new Dark Age starts within a year, and a large majority of the other half give us less than two years; (2) Get over it. This war has two sides, finally. This revolution needs to be powerful and fun, and we cannot afford to lose. We cannot even afford to worry about seeking credibility from those who would have us are having us murder every remaining aspect of the living planet on which we depend for our survival.

Credibility? Respectability? It’s time to stop playing by the rules of the destroyers. We need witnesses and warriors, and we need them now. It’s time to terminate western civilization before it terminates us.

Lesson over. The exam comes within a couple years. And pop quizzes come up every day in this unfair system.

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This essay is permalinked at Counter Currents, Revelations, Islam Times, New Age Op-Ed, Island Breath, creative informationalist, Before It’s News, Mammon or Messiah research, Hot Kashmir, remedios’s posterous, and Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly.

Update: So far, the comments at Counter Currents are absurd to the point of being humorous. But they cannot compare to the ludicrous nonsense landing in my hate-filled email in-box. Fear of the future must be driving this insanity. Similar stupidity fills the right-wing blogosphere. Google “Guy R. McPherson” for a taste.

Update 2: This essay is mentioned in the Melbourne, Australia Herald Sun, which adds one of my interviews from 2008. As usual, the comments are particularly insightful with respect to denial of both sides of the fossil-fuel coin.

It is easy for me to write about philosophy, conservation biology, education, global climate change, ecological collapse, economic collapse, and how to deal with all of them on a personal basis. These phenomena are pieces of ongoing reality. Facing up to them is difficult at times (as demonstrated clearly by my angst here) but, as Thomas Hardy pointed out, “If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” Indeed, better days lie ahead when we stop destroying every aspect of the living planet and start living as if we are a part of nature (cf. apart from nature).

Unlike the ease of my usual essays, this essay has been quite challenging to write. It responds to my email in-box, and the half-measures people can take to mitigate their misery during the completion of the ongoing economic collapse (while ignoring the moral imperative of living close to our neighbors and close to the land that supports us). I don’t believe in half-measures. Yet, as I visited San Diego and Tucson and their wide array of cultural exhibits and restaurants — where a large amount of amazingly good food can be had in exchange for the equivalent of an hour or two at minimum wage — I was forced to face my greatest fear about the future: the industrial era will persist long enough to allow industrial humans to destroy the very elements of the living planet that allow our continued existence as a species. According to this view, fossil fuels will become less and less available, but the reduction will be so gradual we will barely notice our increasing poverty (cf. this essay).

So, for the good people of Tucson, and for Angela-from-my-inbox and others like her in San Diego, I ask you to join me as I stare into the abyss. I’ll tackle the issues we face in my usual order: water, food, body temperature, and community.

Water is fundamental to human survival, so the greatest challenge we face is retaining potable water supplies. In the absence of municipal water coming through the taps, you will need to find another source of water and you will need to make it potable. Harvesting rainwater is barrels is easy enough, but you’ll have to reduce your consumption considerably (of water and nearly everything else). Fortunately, the issue of potability is resolved with relative ease. Water can be pasteurized with the power of the sun and, with a little more energy, can be boiled. Search the web using the phrase “pasteurize water” for a few quick tricks. You’ll want to invest in simple, inexpensive infrastructure while you still can.

For those of us who eat, food is another important consideration. Even if you believe we’re headed for third-world status, instead of the inability to buy food with fiat currency at the grocery store, you have to recognize what this means: limited selection and massive shortages. You’ll want to stock up on essentials while food is still inexpensive. And I strongly suggest figuring out how to grow, trap, shoot, prepare, and preserve a significant portion of your own food. You’ll want a rifle, and perhaps some traps, and the ability to use them. If all else fails, perhaps you can start making human jerky.

WordPress really needs a sarcasm tag.

Maintaining body temperature will be far more challenging in Fairbanks than Belize, which is why I recommend the latter as a place to live. But if you’re profoundly committed to your current residence, please invest in various elements of durability while they’re financially inexpensive: a metal roof and abundant insulation will go a long way toward keeping the rain at bay and also keeping your body at 98.6 F. Buy some blankets for you and the unprepared people with whom you’ll be bartering. Ditto for large garbage bags, which passably serve as raingear. The opportunities in this category are essentially limitless, and I’ve described a few of them here. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below.

A decent human community is probably less important in a world characterized by “muddling through” than in the future I foresee. After all, cheap fossil fuels have allowed us to develop comprehensive online communities instead of real ones. Still, I value communities for reason beyond survival, as I try to make clear here: “At some point, we simply lost track of the importance of communities, human and otherwise. Along the way to becoming a nation of multitasking, Twittering, Facebook ‘friends’ we abandoned the ability to connect meaningfully, viscerally, individually. If we are to thrive during the post-carbon era, we’ll need to create groups of straight-talking, look-’em-in-the-eye, mean-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean, self-reliant, individuals who are not afraid to ask for help from the neighbors and who, when asked, readily offer assistance.”

If you’re committed to your human community, you’ll want to stock up on items certain to be less commonly available in the near future than today. In addition to water (and the ability to purify it), food (and the seeds to grow more), and the previously mentioned blankets, medicine comes to mind. Two recent essays focus on simple antibiotics, which likely will not seem so simple in the coming years: they are linked here and here.

It’s not just antibiotics, of course. The possibilities are endless. If you wear glasses, buy several pair. To prevent your prescription from changing, invest in gas-permeable (i.e., “hard”) contact lenses and adapt to wearing them. Visit the dentist and get your teeth fixed. Store toothpaste and floss. Take a relevant class or two. And so on, ad nauseum, until you feel comfortable entering a world in which availability of goods and services is limited. And, if that’s too challenging, get rid of your taboos about marriage and hook up with a medical doctor, a dentist, and a pharmacist. While you’re at it, you might want to add a marksman, a permaculturist, and a really good shaman.

Above all, you’ll need the comfort of knowing politicians are acting in the best interests of the people they represent. You’ll need to convince yourself that the ongoing attempts by Obama and Bernanke (and Bush and Greenspan before them) are working. You’ll need to convince yourself that plugging every leak in the dam actually takes pressure off the dam, that the dam will not break because of temporary patches. Ultimately, you’ll have to convince yourself that American empire will last forever, and is not an empire.

Good luck with that.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.
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As I move toward conventional essays in this space and away from link-filled commentary, I have been posting many links about global climate change, energy decline, and economic collapse on Facebook, and I often accompany these links with pithy commentary. If you’d like to follow along and comment, click here.

Immorality aside, there is a risk. The risk comes in two flavors. One flavor is the opportunity cost of abandoning the empire too soon. The other flavor is the bitterness that comes when you realize you waited too long to abandon the empire, and you are suffering and then dying as a result. And surrounded by a bunch of ugly boxes we call suburbia, no less.

If you abandon the empire too early — before the lights go out, before the shelves are bare in the grocery stores, before the water stops coming out the municipal taps — you’ll forgo some of those imperial fruits. On the other hand, you’ll be ahead of the curve with respect to self reliance, you might ingratiate yourself into your community, and you’ll learn how to live on little. We’re all headed that way, with the ongoing economic collapse likely to be reach your house within two years and perhaps much earlier.

The second risk is the larger one, and also the more tempting one. It is based on your proclivity for dining on the fruits of empire a bit too long. I hate to get biblical, considering my beliefs, but if you hang on to the easy life in the city too long, the wages of sin is (sic) death. To take a more secular approach drawn from popular culture, try this line from No Country for Old Men: “This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

So far, this country’s been very easy on people (especially Caucasians), one of the consequences of ready access to inexpensive oil. But that’s changing, and it’s about to change much faster. You can either get in front of the changes or you can let them roll over you. Think steamroller, and you’re a duck in a leg-hold trap.

photo courtesy of iStockphoto.com

Would you trade your human community for an online community? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up their 16 daily hours on Facebook they’ll gladly sacrifice human interaction for the joy of electrons. They will be hammering away at the keyboard long after their “friends” stop answering, long after the batteries run dry in the laptop, long after the grid has failed. Waiting, waiting, waiting until there’s nothing left to wait for.

Would you trade virtual reality for reality? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up their television shows they’ll willingly sacrifice human interaction for the feel-good dumbassery of television characters. They will be wondering what happened to their “friends” on television long after the television blinks out for the final time. Then they’ll wait for a studly hero to save them. He’ll be otherwise occupied.

Would you give up living because you fear the future? Some people with whom I speak are so unwilling to give up the notion of marauding hordes they’ll turn away from personal preparations for a decent future because they fear their preparations will be insufficient. Such a decision thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: The collective unwillingness to prepare . We make our own futures, albeit constrained by reality. But some people with whom I speak are unwilling to make changes in light of a changing world, thereby ensuring change will happen to them instead of with them.

Would you trade your life for health medical care? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up their employment “benefits” they will work until the industrial age ends. And then work a while longer, hoping insurance will cover their trip to the clinic for a flu shop. All the clinics will be closed.

Would you trade your life for a night on the town? For me, it would have to me a helluva night. Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up eclectic and inexpensive (sic) restaurants and nightclubs they’ll keep their date with Destiny’s Child, thus sealing their own destiny.

Would you trade your life for a few bucks? How about for a lot of bucks? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up their puts and contracts in the markets — after all, there’s serious bling to be made off their expansive knowledge of peak oil and the financial markets — they will be trying to make money off their next trade long after the lights go out, thus precluding electronic trading in the belly of Wall Street’s beast.

Would you trade your life for the industrial economy? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up inexpensive (sic) groceries they are waiting until the industrial economy finishes its collapse. Then they’ll move. Or, more likely, they won’t.

Would you risk your life on the Technomessiah? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up their easy lives in the city they’ll bank on the ability of technology to bail us out of our dire economic mess. They fail to recognize that inexpensive oil is the Technomessiah. She died a few years ago, but she’s walking around, zombie-like, to save on funeral expenses. Burying a messiah isn’t cheap, you know.

Would you risk your life on the government? Any government? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up a high standard of living at low (sic) cost they’ll count on the ability of the government to keep the current game going toys and jobs coming, courtesy of American Empire and its militaristic reach.

image courtesy of fas.org

Would you trade your sense of humanity — your ability to become a human animal in the real world — for meaningless chit-chat at the water cooler? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up interpersonal interactions in the workplace they’ll gladly forgo the wonder of the human experience in a human community. They willingly, gladly, purposely hang onto a murderous way of living in exchange for the good life.

Would you risk the lives of your progeny, and all future humans, for the comfort of inexpensive (sic) fossil fuels? Some people with whom I speak are so reluctant to give up happy motoring and central air conditioning they’ll gladly ignore the cultures and species we destroy on our imperial path. By their actions, if not by their words, they demand a personal IV of cheap oil, just as this country mainlines crude.

What will it take before you notice the warning shots? If you think the empire cannot fall within a couple years, you’re reading a different set of tea leaves than the dozens of petroleum geologists, social critics, thought leaders, writers, historians, and economists to whom I’ve been paying attention.

What will it take before you notice the moral imperative? I’m not thinking about the morality of attending church services or donating to the community food bank; rather, I’m thinking about the real costs of everyday choices based on cheap living within the mainstream culture of the industrial economy.

What will it take before you begin preparations for a world of your own making? The real world awaits, beyond the edge of empire. And if you don’t think the United States represents an empire, then I don’t think you understand the meaning of the word.

Rome is burning. Why are you fiddling?

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This essay is dedicated to the many people who will die in ignorance, apathy, or continued pursuit of the American nightmare. It is permalinked at Counter Currents, Island Breath, CFB483, and Insurance Today.

Don’t you know, yeah, yeah

The hour is late as the game enters the top of the ninth inning. The home team has held the Industrialists scoreless, and leads by a single run. If the Industrialists score, the home team will bring out the bats.

Don’t you know that you are a shooting star

The lead-off batter for the Industrialists reaches base on a bunt down the third-base line. A sacrifice fly to deep right follows a sacrifice bunt, advancing the runner to third with two outs.

And all the world will love you just as long
As long as you are

Nature’s pitcher checks the runner at third before smoking a fastball low and away. The Industrialist’s best hitter swings and misses.

“Strike one,” cries the umpire behind home plate. “You’re out.”

Johnny’s life passed him by like a warm summer day

Incredulous, the batter turns and stares at the umpire. The Industrialist’s manager storms from the dugout to argue the call. But it’s game over for the Industrialists. Nature wins again. All the appeals will be for naught.

If you listen to the wind, you can still hear him play

Stunned by the outcome, the few fans of the visiting Industrialists file out the exits as the fans of Nature collectively exhale a sigh of relief. A few angry Industrialists lash out, injuring Nature’s players for a final time. But everybody knows it’s over. Nature didn’t even need to use its last turn at bat to win this one.

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Perhaps Osama bin Laden was correct when he said, twelve years ago, oil should be priced at $144 per barrel. Perhaps this price will suffice to bring down the empire. Perhaps the first post-peak spike in the price of oil will yet do the trick.

President Obama and his lead lackey Ben Bernanke have managed to paper over the gaping holes in the industrial economy for 18 months, largely because the clueless fans of empire have been watching reality television instead of paying attention to reality. As managers of the industrial age, Obama and crew have effectively argued against economic collapse. Among the many costs to industrial humans, which admittedly pale relative to the costs to non-industrial humans and non-human species: criminal banks and ongoing erosion of the freedoms we once took for granted.

All that arguing could have been spent preparing an unprepared citizenry instead of creating a diversion from the central issue of our time. But that’s water under the proverbial bridge. Instead of a recovery, we’re witnessing an economic death spiral. Although it seemed absurdly unlikely as little as a few months ago, it is becoming evident that the economic impacts of passing the world oil peak are still running full-out. We might not need a second spike to bring the shooting star of industry down to Earth.

Johnny died one night, died in his bed
Bottle of whiskey, sleepin’ tablets by his head

Woah …
Don’t you know that you are a shooting star

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The industrialized world was supposed to have time to prepare alternatives to oil. Or so goes the mainstream story.

The ongoing story runs contrary to conventional wisdom. This version of the traditional narrative includes a twist, completely unexpected by most readers (and especially by economists). Just when it appears Nature is down for the count, even as Nature is gasping for life through the many assaults of industry, even as the living planet is turning belly-up and taking our species with her, a light flickers.

At first distant and dim, the light grows until it obscures the darkness of industry. Plants grow through the asphalt and then cloak the highways and bridges. Cities give way to small towns. Machines give way to nature’s bounty. The global horde of humankind gives way to a compassionate host of humanity.

This version of the story includes a Hollywood ending and a feel-good, bumper-sticker mantra: Nature Bats Last.

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This essay is permalinked at Energy Bulletin and Island B.reath

I’d like to visit with you on your property, to discuss your ability to thrive in light of the ongoing collapses in the industrial economy and the environment. I will focus on a durable set of living arrangements. Fees vary, depending primarily on three factors:

1. Location. No offense to my Phoenician readers, but I’ve been to Phoenix, and I’m not excited about the prospect of returning, at least for no pay. I’ve not been to Ecuador so I’ll visit there if you’ll simply pay my expenses.

2. Civility. After a career in academia, I’ve spent far too much time working with jerks. I prefer people who appreciate what I have to offer, and who are kind. Here’s a model, but you need not be a saint to qualify. And you might need to put up with me not being a saint.

3. Seriousness. During the last year, about a hundred people have visited the mud hut to see what we’ve done as they prepare to develop a durable set of living arrangements. Considerably more people have sent email messages seeking advice. I have responded to each visitor and to each message with free, detailed advice because these people clearly are serious. On the other hand, I have little tolerance for people who are in denial about the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy or ongoing global climate change. If you’re serious about changing your life, I’m serious about helping you.

In any case, I’ll charge considerably less than Matt Savinar, Chris Martenson, Matt Simmons, or the handful of other people offering consulting services. Far be it for me to disparage these energy-literate folks, and perhaps you get what you pay for. Maybe my commitment to a life of service will provide little service to you. But unlike most of the consultants I know and know about, along with my partners at the property I’ve actually developed a durable set of living arrangements, paying particular attention to water, food, body temperature, and community. I know what it takes — down to the details — as well as how to prioritize and avoid costly mistakes.

The notion of economic collapse has gone mainstream. Renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente claims this is “much bigger” than economic collapse as he predicts“food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter dig-ins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror” in 2012. In light of the accelerating decline in American Empire as well as the world’s industrial economy, please let me know if you’d like practical advice as you navigate the stormy seas ahead.

Feel free to spread the word, and contact me if you’re interested. You can reach me via email at grm@ag.arizona.edu, leave me a message at 520.621.5389 (for the short time I still have an office on campus), and Skype me at guy_mcpherson (though the connection is cumbersome). Alternatively, additional contact information for me is displayed here. I’m always willing to talk on the telephone if you’ll pay for the call, but we’ll have to arrange a date and time to talk because I’m rarely in the vicinity of the telephone at the mud hut.

If you’ve visited the mud hut or communicated with me via other means, feel free to leave a testimonial in the form of a comment. Not that I’m fishing for compliments, you understand. That would be unseemly.

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This post, and the underlying idea, were inspired by my friend Cindy Winkelman, an idea-generating phenomenon.

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Next-day update: Please have patience as I deal with an overflowing email in-box. I’m headed out of town for a couple days, but I will respond to each message within a week. Thanks.

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Based on recent comments in this space, and also in my email in-box, I am compelled to provide an updated overview of my proposed agenda in light of the ongoing collapse of the world’s industrial economy. There’s nothing new here, but plenty of people don’t have the time to read what I’ve written in the past so, in spasms of foolish ignorance, they keep asking me to stop driving my car (trust me, I’d love to … and I go for weeks at a time without doing so) or cease speaking and writing about economic collapse because it is not happening (and, in a related issue, there’s an invisible man in the sky who loves us and wants us to be happy).

The other primary topic of conversation, real and virtual, begins with “Okay, but what can I do?” As if I’ve ignored that particular question. “No, but I mean me. Here in Phoenix. With no money and no spare time.”

Sigh. If you’re unwilling to change, you’ll simply have to let change happen to you. And Bill Clinton was correct about this issue: People like change in general, but not in particular. Nobody who is unwilling to change is liable to appreciate the change headed their way.

If you’re willing to change, perhaps you’ll seek ideas and inspiration from sources other than me. Perhaps you’ll test your courage, creativity, and compassion. You’re going to need those attributes soon enough anyway, so you might as well drag them out now.

I think the ongoing economic collapse is driven by declining energy supply at the world level: We passed the world peak of conventional crude oil in 2005. Considering the primacy of oil to the industrial economy and therefore to our way of living, it’s no surprise the industrial economy is unraveling. Fortunately, it’s taking disaster capitalism with it, albeit far too slowly to suit me.

My hope, of course, is completion of the economic collapse in time to save the remaining fragments of the world’s biological diversity and perhaps even habitat for our own species. Call me a dreamer. Recognizing that it’s generally a waste of time to try to convince people we’re headed for economic disaster and therefore environmental nirvana, that, regardless, is my mission.

I have no interest in trying to save civilization, which is irredeemable and omnicidal. But I am interested in extending the lives of the relatively few people in the industrialized world willing to make substantive changes in their lives. Sadly, that leaves out nearly everybody with whom I converse or correspond.

Conservation is irrelevant at this point and, with respect to materials that are too cheap to meter, conservation probably has always been irrelevant. That’s the crux of Jevons’ paradox. Although Jevons’ paradox assumes free markets, and all markets are manipulated, it is not at all clear to me that relaxing the free-market assumption would have a significant influence on the global outcome of energy markets. Furthermore, if you’re really a believer in free markets and lack of governmental interference in those markets, then oil is the premier example of a global free market.

Many people are concerned we’ll respond to Jevons’ paradox with hedonism. As if we’re not already there.

If you think individual conservation efforts scale up to society, consider an incomplete but still stunning overview of the statistics on energy use. For example, the energy in a million barrels of crude oil — the amount gushing in the Gulf of Mexico every ten days or so — will supply your house with power for the next 81,000 years or so but will keep cars on U.S. highways for about four hours. So, at some level we’re all BP (those of you cheering for the industrial economy have company from J.P. Morgan Chase on the BP issue — the spill and cleanup apparently will enhance GDP, at least in the short run). More pragmatically, though, we each bear about as much responsibility for BP’s incompetence and recklessness as we bear for causing planetary ice to melt, the financial success of Wal-Mart, and the microfauna in belly of the nearest polar bear. As much as the media and politicians would like you to feel responsible and guilty, you should feel neither.

I regularly promote the idea of hastening economic collapse. If you’re not on board with that idea, but you still see the huge neon signs pointing us in that direction, perhaps you can be convinced to pursue a modicum of self reliance.

Photo credit: Getty images

The notion of self reliance, long discarded in a nation where we enslave others to do our drudgery, is about to make a profound comeback. When the new Dark Age gets under way, people who are willing to do useful things with their hands and minds will be welcome additions in any community. The contemporary idea of American-style independence is, in Orwellian fashion, the exact opposite of independence. To secure our food, water, and body temperature, we have become wholly dependent on a large-scale system (the industrial economy). This is the diametric opposite of self reliance, and it’s long past time to focus on self reliance within the context of the interdependence of people in communities. We need each other, but we do not need the industrial economy.

How do you provide service to your community? What preparations should you make to thrive during the post-carbon era, and to help your community thrive, too?

I have written at length about the preparations I’ve made, with a focus on water, food, body temperature, human community, and living a life of service (in this case, four out of five gets you the equivalent of a cake with no flour). Securing these elements has been done by humans for about two million years in the absence of the industrial economy. Only recently have we become dependent on a system that is making us crazy and killing us. I suggest we get out of this system. If that cannot be done in your specific location — and I’m thinking about places such as Tucson, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Los Angeles, California — I strongly suggest changing locations. The other obvious alternative is to re-arrange the deck chairs as the cruise ship of empire takes on even more water. There are many approaches to be pursued on this front, including recycling, joining a CSA, riding the bus, and volunteering in the local literacy movement. These are noble causes, but they won’t save you or your community. And if you don’t save yourself, you won’t be able to help anybody else.

People often ask me how they can make the kinds of changes I’ve made, without actually making those changes themselves. That is, how can they turn their lives upside-down without actually changing a thing? They blame lack of finances (which, as I’ve pointed out with my own example, can be overcome by joining others in a community-based effort). They blame an unwillingness to leave the apex of empire, the large city they occupy (i.e., they do not agree with my view that industrial economy is inherently immoral). They blame the marauding hordes certain to find them if they get out of the city (i.e., they use any and every excuse to avoid taking action). Comfortable with the immorality of their lives, unwilling to forgo empire in exchange for the difficulty of self reliance, brainwashed by culture to keep pursuing this particular version of culture, they are hopelessly trapped in a hapless situation. Although I recognize the power of culture and the lack of free will for human animals, I’m beginning to lose sympathy.

Empires don’t break up, they break down. And American Empire is obviously breaking down, with abundant evidence to be found in the striking absence of any appeal to the common good from governments at any level. There has been no semblance of morality emanating from the fascists running the corporations, and therefore the country, since at least 1980. I don’t expect a vast outpouring of empathy and compassion any time soon. Faux compassion, of course. But the real deal? I hardly think so.

Digital art courtesy of Hock on the Behance Network

Although some insist a slow descent is likely, I have yet to understand how that can possibly work. Feel free to fill me in. Do we dim the lights one percent annually so that, in one hundred years, the electricity goes out without our noticing? Do we reduce our extraction of finite materials a few percent each year, even as the human population grows by more than 200,000 people daily, until we simply, peacefully, stop using everything needed to maintain the industrial economy? Do we slowly, painlessly, with no suffering at all, reduce the human population to a viable number? What is that number? A billion? Fewer?

All these outcomes seem quite unlikely to me. I think we’re so committed to unlimited, exponential growth on a finite planet that we’ll do whatever it takes to delude ourselves into believing that impossibility. If that means we have to destroy everybody and everything so we can have ice cream and cookies every night, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’re an industrialized world of overfed clowns and we think others are laughing with us instead of at us. In short, I need somebody to show me another way. I’m eager to learn how we can prevent unimaginable suffering and catastrophic die-off on a finite planet. Sans miracles, of course.

Looking back, and relying on a plethora of economic metrics, it’s evident we’ve experienced a lost decade. So we can trace the economic decay to 2000 or so. It’s easy enough to can go back further, tracing the imperial decline to 1979 with the Carter doctrine. Or 1956 with the Interstate Highway System. Or the late 1940s with the federal government’s promotion of suburbia. Or 1789 with the unrelenting thirst for empire at all costs exhibited by the founding fathers. With respect to any of these temporal benchmarks, the decay clearly has accelerated in recent years and months.

From the day I predicted the new Dark Age would begin by the end of 2012, the criticism has been continuous. Most critics, citing no evidence and no understanding of peak oil and its economic consequences, claim we’ll surely adjust and adapt and generally demonstrate our big-brained brilliance with a long descent into peace, prosperity, and infinite good times. Adding balance in a mainstream media kind of way, the occasional critic optimistically — without recognizing the optimism — claims the Dark Age will begin well before 2012. We should be so lucky.

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This essay is permalinked at The Gable Grey, Counter Currents, Rebel News, and Island Breath, and it gets a shout out at Unconventional Ideas and it is discussed at the LATOC Forum.

Of course, had stock traders known the dire nature of AIG, for an easy example, the economy would have completed its ongoing collapse long ago. Fortunately, Americans prefer presidents and presidential candidates who lie about the likes of AIG (and, as nearly as I can distinguish, everything else).

But back to the smoke-and-mirrors recovery. It’s fizzling out and there is worse to come. The Wall Street Journal predicts collapse will come in 2011. Over on CNBC, the recommendation is to buy barbed wire as the endpoint of devaluation appears. Others prefer a different phrase: the next step down, also known as a dead end. If you’re a part of Saudi Arabia’s royal family — welcome to the blog, by the way, and feel free to post a comment — it’s time to get out before the apocalypse comes to the kingdom.

For the imperialist-in-charge, what to do, what to do? Now that the Keynesian approach has about run its course, Obama is set to re-open offshore drilling program in a feeble attempt to keep the current game going. And there’s undoubtedly more stimulus headed our way, even though we already passed the point of debt saturation: each new dollar of federal debt now subtracts 45 cents from GDP.

If you’re having a tough time swallowing the notion that the economy can go from apparent recovery to the toilet in a few years, remember what most people believed in 1930: they thought the bad economic news was behind them, too. It’s looking a lot like 1930.

Even usually clueless Americans are getting nervous about the economy — apparently they’re no longer watching television. But even the ever-soothing voices on the tube are pointing out that the gusher in the Gulf is getting worse by the day, with economic implications bound to bury the coast for decades. The BP spill is probably gushing on the order of 100,000 barrels per day, not the 70,000 bpd reported by BP, a number that keeps going up as they keep repairing the problem. The spill certainly exceeds estimates by ultraconservative marine scientists.

But even the latter scientists agree about the existence of the undersea plume (or cloud). I am definitely not applying the “scientist” label to anybody working for the Obama administration: those former scientists gave up their integrity card when they started lying in the name of political fortune. Their new jobs are to hide the facts, not reveal them.

Despite the ongoing game of obfuscation, striking similarities have emerged between the financial collapse of 2008-2009 and the Gulf disaster. Among other characteristics, BP is paralleling the actions of the big banks, aided by the Obama administration, in covering up the truth. It comes as no surprise that BP CEO Tony Hayward has racked up a “greatest hits” list of quotes only a politician’s mother could love.

Energy analyst Matt Simmons predicts BP will declare bankruptcy within a month. That would be one way to escape paying for damages. The more likely approach, in my opinion, is a full-scale bailout by you and me. That route is already wending its way through Congress, although GOP House leader John Boehner is shying away from the idea he proposed earlier.

In a stunning bit of good news — in the category of throwing us a bone — BP finally released the list of toxins in the dispersants. Now that I’ve seen the list, though, I’m not particularly happy about it.

Finally, a single article from the mainstream points out that maybe we should re-think our oil-drenched lifestyles. Oil drilling threatens our future, as even the BBC has determined. Will that be enough to get us off the devil’s excrement? Certainly not if Barack Obama or the politicians in Louisiana have their way.

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This essay is permalinked at Energy Bulletin and Island Breath.

The financial sector has been largely nationalized, with the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for trillions of dollars of bad loans made by big banks. Back in February 2009 our national debt was a mere $10.5 trillion, but it already exceeded the value of all the currency in the world and all the gold ever mined. Those were the good old days. Now our national debt exceeds $13 trillion (with more than $8 trillion still hidden from view), and the empire will go down like a tub full of gold bricks if we stop fanning the flames by slowing the printing press.

By running the printing presses at full speed, we are inflating the most massive bubble yet. We’ve seen how those bubbles pan out for the industrial economy. If we build them, the pin-pricks will come. Can we create another financial crisis? Of course. After all, a smoke-and-mirrors economic recovery is no protection against a crash in the equities markets. The peak in industrial economic growth is already here, with about ten thousand swords out there vying for attention to burst the bubbles of Treasuries, the U.S. big banks, China’s economic growth, the re-inflated housing market, and a renewed credit crisis. Oh, and of course the interaction between these myriad factors. In summary, the countdown is well under way for completion of the ongoing U.S. economic collapse, and there’s simply no way to soften the blow when we plunge to the bottom of the economic heap. The U.S. has the world’s biggest industrial economy, and the bigger they are, … well, you know.

The one-size-fits-all solution of printing money is leading inevitably to hyperinflation, even as the U.S. money supply dwindles. Think Zimbabwe, but with U.S. dollars. And the U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. All signs still point to a major crash in stock markets (see here and here, too, among a kajillion other sites). At this point in the post-peak oil era, it’s clear to anybody paying the slightest attention we’re headed for full spectrum collapse.

How will it end, and when? It seems completion of the U.S. economic collapse will follow on the heels of Europe, which is cheering for its own demise even as all the PIIGS drown in a sea of debt. This is supremely good news, of course, for the dozen or so people who care about non-industrial cultures and the living planet: Our little reign of terror is just about over. We’re an empty garbage can, playing power games enabled by the hologram-like appearance of power.

I’ve no doubt the empire will fail to go silently into the night. Instead, we’ll take out individuals and countries with every lethal weapon in our power, including weapons most of us don’t even know about and people we don’t care about. Iran apocalypse? Could be — talk about mutually assured destruction — and soon. How soon?

Your guess is as good as mine. But is it as good as the 25 leading trends forecasters, who agree that 2010 could be the year? Hedge funder Hugh Hendry provides a concise summary: “I would recommend you panic.”

As much as I appreciation the concision of Hendry’s recommendation, I would recommend you prepare and celebrate. I’ve been recommending the former for several years, while pointing out the good news associated with economic collapse. I have more company now than I’ve had for a while: Economic collapse has gone mainstream, and the occasional worthwhile ecologist is joining Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen in recognizing and spreading the good news.

Even as the gusher in the Gulf gets much worse by the day (thus diverting our attention from BP’s other large spill), even as Barack Obama tries to use the disaster to push his ill-founded political agenda, even as the cozy relationship between BP and the Obama administration becomes clear, so too do U.S. political policies keep steering straight at the iceberg of economic and environmental collapse. As the industrial economy stumbles along, the world’s biological diversity continues to suffer even as we peer into the abyss of extinction for many of the world’s species (including, ultimately, our own).

Where should you be when economic collapse comes to your house? Michael Ruppert and his protégé Rice Farmer suggest staying where you’re most comfortable. Much as I appreciate their efforts to inform and engage economic collapse, this advice seems immoral and short-sighted to me. First, it’s the comfort of city living that got us into this civilized mess to begin with, and it’s exactly this comfort that requires obedience at home and oppression abroad. Second, today’s comfortable urban existence might not be so damned comfortable when the lights go out and the water stops coming out the taps. Rice Farmer points out that people in rural areas will “have to cope with hordes of desperate, starving city people who try to steal our food. Unless you are in a really remote location, expect hungry visitors.”

Good point. But why do you think those “hordes of desperate, starving city people” are bound to be desperate and starving? Why do you think they’ll be leaving the cities in hordes? I’d guess it’ll be because they’ll become suddenly and profoundly uncomfortable when the grocery stores run out of food and the water stops coming out the taps. If you think you’ll be comfortable surrounded by a few thousand desperate, starving city people when TSHTF in your backyard, by all means stay in your comfort zone. On the other hand, if you don’t think that’s going to work out well for you, I’d recommend skedaddling out of the city before the real rush gets under way. When will that be?

In this case, “better late than never” is the wrong answer. The time to dig a well is not when you’re thirsty. The time to plant a garden is not when you’re hungry. The time for securing your water and food is now, before the industrial economy burns itself out. You and I didn’t start the fire of empire. But we’re about to see it extinguished.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.

Mission accomplished. I’m there, as we all are. As we always have been, during two million years of the human experience.

May you attract the attention of the government.

I’m there, as I have been for years. To remove all doubt, about five years ago I placed a call to then-Governor Napolitano’s lead advisers on two topics, Energy and Agriculture & Natural Resources. I begged and pleaded with them, but they kept coming back with their singular response: “There is nothing we can do about global peak oil.”

It took a couple years for me to figure out what they meant because, of course, there are many things the government can and should do to mitigate for declining energy supplies. Government officials could start by letting citizens in on the truth about energy.

So, what did members of the governor’s staff really mean? There are no politically viable solutions. In this case, telling the truth is political suicide. The impending death of millions of people — and perhaps billions — pales in comparison to political careerism.

May you find what you’re looking for.

I’m talking to a naturalist I barely know. His one-year-old son is resting on his shoulders and treating a cattail as his personal magic wand. The seeds of the cattail are falling into the hair and beard of the 40-year-old naturalist as the boy succumbs to his own personal energy crisis and, fighting all the way down, succumbs to slumber.

I’m writing a book about the dire nature of our predicaments and I mention the high likelihood of a global economic collapse within a decade or so. The naturalist doesn’t bat an eye before responding: “I hope I’m around to see it. I don’t want my son to have all the fun.”

Fast forward six years, and I’m sharing a property with the naturalist and his young son. Collapse of the industrial economy is well underway, and has entered the acceleration phase of its death spiral. Obviously, we will live to see the final stages of the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy. As a result, we might see the living planet take the first tentative steps to a comeback.

Or perhaps not. Maybe in the coming few years we will die, collateral damage of the demise of the industrial economy. Just like entire ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico and the millions of species organisms within them, consumed by the fire as Rome goes up in flames.

Maybe lifting the curse of industry will reveal a worse fate, at least at the level of individuals. But it’s difficult to imagine a situation in which termination of the industrial age will not improve the lots of every non-industrial culture and every non-human species on this planet.

May we find what we’re looking for, regardless of the personal cost.

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This essay is permalinked at Energy Bulletin, Counter Currents, and remedios’s posterous.

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1.
In my sophomore year of college I enrolled in a course that had given generations of students a painless way to satisfy the liberal-arts science requirement. It was known as Rocks for Jocks, and the final exam was the easy identification of every rock in a box. If you wanted an A in science, you took geology.

But the first day of geology class, a new professor announced Rocks for Jocks was over. The faculty of Arts and Sciences was determined to bring rigor into the geology program. We were now in a science class, and he was going to teach us science, no matter what had been taught in the past.

The final exam had nothing to do with a box of rocks. It asked for a coherent explanation of the chemistry and resulting crystal structures of basaltic minerals under varying conditions of temperature and pressure. I had studied my ass off, and was still grateful for the B-minus I received.

Along the way I had been drilled on high-temperature physics and the dynamics of dissolved gasses, and how aluminosilicate, with its strong chemical bonds, makes country rock hang together. I can still tell you about the relationship between plagioclase and orthoclase, information I haven’t used in forty-odd years.

Other aspects of the course have become more important over the years. The professor was the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who delighted us with lectures on why Godzilla and King Kong would die of heat stroke before they wrecked a single city, and why Mothra wouldn’t be able to fly unless the atmosphere had the density of water. Later, when I read Gould’s books, his sentences echoed the clear thinking that had brought the realities of classical physics into his paleontology lectures.

In one of those books, Gould went beyond classical physics and applied chaos theory to paleontology, and developed a refinement of evolutionary theory known as punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium, put much too simply, suggests that species stabilize for millions of years until something happens and most of them die. Each flowering of evolution is simply natural selection, operating in a world full of empty ecological niches. Ten million years after a mass extinction, the earth has a whole new zoo.

The agent of extinction is climate, if climate includes asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, the sudden transformation of methane clathrates into atmospheric methane, and the appearance of capitalist hominids.

Punctuated equilibrium has been accepted by most evolutionary scientists, but if Gould were alive today, he’d be subjecting it to his own scientific skepticism. He consistently used science to undermine pseudoscientific certainty, magical thinking about technology, and the appropriation of scientific metaphors by non-scientists. He was particularly hard on people who tried to use science to enforce racist policies or determine standards for intelligence. But he questioned his own work just as much as he questioned the work of the more reckless and less intelligent people who also called themselves scientists.

The scientific method is just a powerful way to process data, Gould told us. Anyone who makes a religion of science doesn’t understand it. Certainty isn’t the point. Asking the right questions is the point. Any hypothesis can be overturned by new data, and there’s always new data.

So in college I learned to believe in a method, rather than in the data it processed. My geology course made it hard for me to believe anyone’s didactic scientific pronouncements, especially when they posed as prophecy.

If all this sounds deeply conservative, it is. To bring science into any controversy is to introduce shades of gray forbearance where once all was foam-at-the-mouth black and white. But while the scientific method is slow, if you’d like to see through the cloud of bullshit generated by bought-and-paid-for scientific experts, it provides some useful optics.

2.
So, forty years later. Stephen Jay Gould is dead of mesothelioma, possibly contracted from one of the large blocks of asbestos fibers that were used as teaching aids in college geology labs back in the day. I remember watching a geology lab assistant peel a long feathery fiber from one of those blocks and wave it at us while lecturing on crystal structure. “You can make clothes from these crystals,” he said.

As a civilization, we just didn’t know. Or if we did know, we lacked the ability to name the idiocy and blind malice that underlay consumer culture. When the dying miners in Libby, Montana, were presented with evidence of what working in asbestos mines had done to them, some of them refused to believe it, much like some Jews walking down the steps to Auschwitz’s showers refused to believe they were walking into gas chambers. The deliberate stupidity required to construct an Auschwitz or an asbestos industry—stupidity elevated to the status of evil—is beyond the capacity of human intelligence to believe in it.

In his later writings, Gould demolished the cover that so-called scientific experts provided for lethal technologies, but that has not kept whole industries from continuing to employ science PhDs who will testify that dangerous and useless products and procedures are safe and effective.

3.
After college I started working as a medical writer and had almost finished a book on heart disease before the company I was working for went broke. For six months I had read medical textbooks and peer-reviewed cardiology studies and talked to cardiologists, and I knew a bunch about the human heart and its maladies.

But I also knew something about the impossibility of designing study parameters and interpreting results. Briefly put, you can never identify all the causes of a heart attack. You can never identify all the effects of a drug on a human heart or on the human life it maintains.

So you can have the famous Framingham Study, which tracked forty thousand people over fifty years, identifying as many risk factors for heart disease as possible, and when all the data is in you’ll find that you missed a major risk factor or came to the wrong conclusion about a drug or procedure. Every postulated result is subject to argument. The data that the Framingham Study has produced will be mined for years by teams of people using ever more sophisticated methods of analysis to promote their competing hypotheses.

If you want to see in how many different directions the same data can be stretched, take a look at Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If that book doesn’t shake your faith in the ability of science to know anything for certain, nothing will.

4.
“By the summer of 2010,” is the opening phrase of a chapter in a history that will be written in 2020. I’d give anything to read the rest of that sentence right now, but the nature of future histories involves a tedious waiting for verification. But here are some guesses:
“… world population was approaching 7 billion humans.”
“… atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had reached 394 ppm.”
“… pollinator activity was declining over broad areas in the central and southwestern U.S.”
“… it was clear that the U.S. Congress could not serve as an effecive regulator of international corporations.”
“… the rate of North Korean plutonium production was ten times what it had been two years before.”
“… Dr. Weltentod had been retired from bioweapons work for ten years. Alzheimer’s was making it hard for him to function, and he was becoming more and more paranoid and isolated. But the freezer in his basement was still humming away, and the samples he had smuggled out of the lab decades before were still intact.”

You can have fun doing this sort of thing, but you won’t be much wiser for it.

The lesson here is that the present can’t reveal the truth of our lives, but future historians can. I’d like to talk to one of them. Preferably a human one, which limits the time frame we can talk about.

There are plenty of exponential curves and feedback loops that humanity is sitting on. Common sense suggests a subset of them will prove broadly lethal. I’d like to know which ones they are. I won’t find out until it’s too late. It’s already too late.

5.
As military historians have shown, the generals who study the last war to fight the next one end up losing. History is a lousy prophet, especially when solipsistic prognosticators like Toynbee and Spengler get in the act.

A better prophet is common sense, which as the saying goes, isn’t common. It’s the complex dark brother of empiricism. It’s a blend of intuition, instinct, received knowledge, and perception melted together in the crucible of individual will. It can desert you when you most need it. Still, it’s helpful to apply it to some current situations, because you can know more through common sense than through science. Here are some spur of the moment, common-sense truths:
—If you take a planet with a history of climate phase-changes and introduce huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into its atmosphere you’re going to get a climate phase-change.
—Genetic engineering, antibiotics, and viral targeting of cancer cells are generating unintended consequences.
—The Iraq and Afghanistan wars will never have happy cost-benefit ratios unless you discount the value of human life to zero.
—Huge disparities in economic and political power will produce civil war and tyranny.
—Human population will crash rather than plateau because complexity has a momentum all its own.
—Deepwater oil wells are now politically and economically unviable due to their effects on ocean and shoreline environments.
—The scientific method is too slow to have an impact on any of these things.

6.
If Stephen Jay Gould was alive today, he’d be pissed. A lifetime of debunking, and what does he get for it?
—A parade of expert witnesses in front of Congressional committees, contradicting each other but somehow reinforcing Congress’s naïve faith in pseudoscience.
—In the public mind, a weird equation of science and technology, when in fact they have little in common and often act as antagonists.
—A medical establishment so eager to prolong life that it’s willing to redefine life to prolong something.
—A general unwillingness to use simple pocket calculators to extrapolate identifiable trends.
—Magical thinking in the face of real data.
—The exploitation of honest scientific uncertainty by unscrupulous corporations.
—The willingness of almost everyone to leave the Now and return to the Clinton era, when it was possible to project one’s self into to the future, in the form of optimistic ideas that grandchildren could understand or undamaged DNA those grandchildren would have.

7.
I’ve meditated myself into a dark place. But it’s not the fault of the scientific method. Rather, it’s a result of reading the headlines and using common sense to interpret them. And maybe a recent re-reading of Jaques Ellul’s The Technological Society tipped me a little more than usual toward techno-nihilism. Ellul is pretty convincing about his intuition that technology exists as a force in and of itself, one indistinguishable from death.

Ellul is no scientist, he’s a humorless Jesuit anarchist with literal-minded translators, but he’s worth reading if only because he knew enough in 1960 not to divide technology into Bad (the Bomb) and the Good (the new wonder drug Thalidomide). He declared a pox on all the houses of technology, calling technology a threat to human liberty and consciousness. If he were alive today, he’d be grimly satisfied at the fulfillment of his vision and delighted at getting a front-row seat at civilization’s upcoming auto-da-fe.

There’s a thought experiment that suggests things could be a good deal worse. If safe and easy-to-construct fusion plants could be built in every community, and if a quickly-rechargeable battery the size and shape of an automobile gas tank could be made to power a car for four hundred miles between charges, we could have the 20th Century, with its limitless technological horizons and murderous social arrangements, all over again.

8.
Jung said that it’s hard to see the lion that has eaten you. But if you’re open to your experience, you can probably at least tell that you’ve been eaten, and by a lion.

The trouble with metaphors like Jung’s is that they can apply to almost anything. These days, the lion can be the petroleum industry, big banks, dying oceans, climate change, radical fundamentalism, techno-survivalism, precious metal hoarding, or Facebook. No matter what the lion is, you’re going to end up as lion shit.

9.
Chaos theory has provided lots of metaphors for things that have nothing to do with chaos theory. “A sensitive dependence on initial conditions” may work to communicate the mechanics of ecosystems and natural selection, but it doesn’t add much to discussions of architecture and juvenile law and the economics of the automobile industry, places where I’ve seen it used lately. Political pundits or social critics or economists should stay away from the language of chaos theory, unless we want to end up with the punctuated-equilibrium equivalent of social Darwinism.

10.
Stephen Jay Gould had a joy in finding a new rock or fossil or previously unremarked feature of a petrified anatomy. Any of these things placed him on the edge of the unknown, where all certainty was in danger of being overthrown. He was comfortable and happy and clear-eyed in that place.

When he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, he saw himself again at the brink of the unknown. He lasted twenty years on the edge of death, noting in passing that you had no need to believe in statistics if you were an individual cancer patient. As individuals dealing with a malignant culture, we could learn from his example.

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John Rember has been teaching writing for thirty-five years. He’s the author of two collections of short stories and a memoir. His next book, to be published in 2011, is MFA in a Box, a Why-to-Write Book. You can read more about him and his writing at johnrember.com.