The result of our experiment will be, that man may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Jefferson did not call himself an anarchist, but his words and ideals indicate he strongly supported the rights and role of individuals, as well as a small government that minimally oversaw the citizenry. The Greco-Latin roots suggest the absence of a ruler, which seems like a good idea to me.

Like Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau idealized an agricultural society that was close to nature. Thoreau was a staunch defender of agrarian anarchy, and he focused even more closely on the individual than did Jefferson: “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” To my knowledge, no state governments believe we’ve yet reached that point.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century, and we find several other philosophers defending agrarian anarchy. Perhaps the best known examples are radical thinkers Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher) and Howard Zinn (recently deceased historian). But the clearest voice for agrarian anarchy came from iconoclastic Tucson writer Edward Abbey in the years before he died in 1989:

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

In my dreams, industrialized nations are headed for agrarian anarchy. Many countries have been there for years and can show us the way, if only we allow them. If a region never acquired ready access to cheap fossil fuels, agrarian anarchy was an obvious approach. How else but a strong sense of self-reliance and dependence on neighbors to grow and distribute all food locally? How else but reliance on those same traits to secure the water supply, and protect it from insults? How else to develop a human community dominated by mutual respect and mutual trust? Contrary to our current set of living arrangements, no currency is needed: barter fills the bill.

For all these reasons, I’m less than thrilled with the United States as a place to mitigate in place and particularly impressed with many countries in central and South America. Belize remains my first choice, for reasons including English as the official language and a long history of multiculturalism (including neither a majority race nor a majority culture). Electricity is spotty at best, most people harvest rainwater and use hand-dug wells, and food is brought into every town every day. Big government is largely absent, and the notions of Big Ag, Big Ad, and Big Pharma are laughable.

Mind you, I’m not recommending Belize or any other central American country for anybody younger than my half-century of years. I suspect climate chaos will make equatorial regions particularly uncomfortable within a decade. Mitigating in place seems dicey at best but if you’re willing to pull up stakes and head for the poles, central American might well serve as an intermediate step on the way to a reasonably long life.

There are many disadvantages associated with a sedentary life. We don’t know how soon, nor how quickly, climate chaos makes any particular place uninhabitable for humans. Ditto for environmental collapse. But if you’ve considered these factors and concluded you’d prefer mitigating in place to hitting the road, I suggest thinking outside national boundaries.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.

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, abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil are 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? It’s 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 measures, 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.

As should be clear by now, we cannot grow the industrial economy while reducing use of energy. As a result, we cannot grow the economy while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Thus, we’re stuck in a politically untenable situation: To save the living planet, including habitat for our own species, we need to shrink the industrial economy. But the industrial economy requires growth. Recent research indicates we need to shrink the industrial economy to oblivion to save our species. In other words, what we really need is to kill the industrial economy before it kills us. And by us, I mean all of us: the entire collection of wise apes. As a society, clearly we have made our choice. But as an individual, you can choose to the contrary, with benefits for your psyche and quite possibly your survival.

Crude oil is the master material, the energy source that provides access to all others. Economic growth requires ever-increasing supplies of crude oil. As availability of oil declines the price goes up (with considerable variability, as we have observed during five years since we passed the world oil peak) and the industrial economy starts to sputter. When the price gets high enough, long enough, the economy simply, finally, expires. The world has been on an undulating plateau of oil availability for several years, but that plateau leads to a cliff. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. military’s Joint Forces Command, the cliff comes in 8 months or so.

I know no energy-literate person who thinks we’ll be able to avoid the post-industrial Stone Age by 2025. Assuming a conservative 4% annual decline rate of crude oil between now and then indicates we will have access to the same amount of oil in 2025 as we did in 1970, when the planet held half as many people as it now does and the world was considerably less industrialized than it now is. And that’s merely the gross rate of decline, whereas the net rate of decline will be much more rapid because it takes so much energy to extract and deliver energy. Oil priced a $147.27 per barrel nearly brought down the industrial economy five times I know about, and we’re hardly out of the woods yet. There is little hope for the industrial era to persist more than a few years, and the next spike in the price of oil could very well be the trigger that brings the industrial era to a sudden close in an unprepared nation.

I suspect we’ll pass through a new Dark Age en route to the post-industrial Stone Age. Indeed, many countries in the world are already there because they lack the world’s reserve currency and the world’s largest military. Bully for us: We have both, thus ensuring a steady supply of fossil-fuel-driven energy into every city and town in the United States. Well, so far.

As an aside, how long do you think we can maintain a military and a functioning industrial economy if we keep spending 58% of our budget on the former? We could stop our involvement in wars, but that would be quite un-American, wouldn’t it?

The costs of maintaining the non-negotiable American way of life are huge, even beyond simple economics. The American suburbs are the antithesis of durable living, as they require us to live far from work, far from play, and far from the places we shop for disposable items in our throw-away culture. They require obedience at home and oppression abroad. American Empire is city living (i.e., civilized), writ large.

The relatively few people paying attention to the undercurrents of the industrial economy know the ship is taking on water faster than the governments can run the printing presses. As the industrial economy continues to lurch and stumble, the vaunted American consumer loses the ability to consume (in part because inflation is rampant on items that actually matter, notably including food). Because ours is a consumer culture, with personal consumption accounting for 70% of the industrial economy, the ship is listing. The next financial crisis is already unfolding — notwithstanding absurd reports from politicians, media, and the irrational exuberance, again, in the stock markets — and governments have nearly exhausted their supply of tools to deal with economic issues. We hit the iceberg of peak oil and, as government administrators busily rearrange the deck chairs, it’s time to launch the lifeboats, even if you believe consumption is a good thing. Personally, I think it’s not, in part based on the definition:

Consume:

1. To do away with completely; destroy

2a. To spend wastefully; squander
2b. Use up

3. To waste or burn away; perish

Consuming gives most people a temporary emotional “high.” We’re addicted to shopping. But I trust it’s clear why rational people want no part of the consumer economy. If we cannot terminate the industrial economy, and soon, we’ll exhaust all habitat for humans on Earth by the end of this century (and, if the models are to be believed, much sooner). Along the way, if we have our way, we’ll destroy every non-industrial culture and every non-human species.

In the face of a contracting industrial economy and the knowledge we’re headed for a situation with extremely limited access to fossil fuels, a quote from Peter Drucker comes to mind: “You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.”

What’s an individual to do, in light of the imminent collapse of western civilization? In addition to hastening the collapse, some tools for which I’ve listed before, I describe four points along a continuum for your own, individual, post-carbon future: (1) transition towns, (2) agricultural anarchy, (3) hunting and gathering, and (4) traveling. I will describe each approach, briefly, as a means of generating thought, action, and perhaps even discussion.

Transition towns allow us the fantasy of keeping the current omnicidal culture going, albeit in slightly different form. This model assumes a long descent that allows time for cities to develop alternative energy sources. Think solar on every rooftop, for starters, and gardens in every suburban lot. For this approach to work, though, the food shed must be sufficiently nearby and sufficiently productive to support all the people in the transition town. This seems hugely problematic in sprawling western cities, especially those with more than a few thousand people. And for areas with limited supplies of water, or water that is several hundred feet below the surface of the ground, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario that doesn’t include massive suffering along the way to a huge die-off. The inability to store energy in the absence of fossil fuels beyond a few years in expensive, transient, and toxic batteries is a microscopic problem relative to the absence of ready access to water and food. And there’s an additional problem with the transition-town notion: I seriously doubt we have access to the fossil fuels needed to create the needed infrastructure for the 250 million city-living Americans, much less the 3.5 billion people who occupy the world’s cities. Solar panels and batteries simply won’t make the grade — there’s not enough oil left to pull this one off.

When the lights go out in the city, chaos often erupts. Is your city different? If so, will that difference persist when the lights don’t come back on, ever? I’ve often said and written that I would give my life to terminate the industrial economy, if only to alleviate the burden of oppression on the living world. I’ve no doubt, in fact, that I will make this sacrifice. And that’s okay: My insignificant life pales in contrast to the living planet and the persistence of our species. On the other hand, although I loved city life, my city was not worth dying for. So I left to prepare, recognizing that fortune favors the prepared. In contrast, Michael Ruppert moved to his home city of Los Angeles with full knowledge L.A. would be among the first cities to go up in flames. Ruppert is willing to die for the privilege of comforting the afflicted there.

Agricultural anarchy was offered as a model by Thomas Jefferson, and Monticello was the prime example before it became a museum. Contemporary examples are found in nearly every “third-world” country. A large proportion of the towns and cities in Central America and South America never have had ready access to abundant fossil fuels. As a result, communities have communal water sources and people dig shallow wells and harvest rain from rooftops. On a daily basis, local markets are filled with fresh food brought from nearby gardens and farms. The power goes out frequently, and nobody seems to mind because the towns and cities are actually located in livable areas in the absence of fossil fuels to heat or cool every building (cf. Tucson, Arizona). In short, agriculture has always been, and still is, at the center of everyday life.

Hunting and gathering will doubtless make a comeback for a very few hardy, quick-witted folks. This model resembles the prior Stone Age, and clearly is the most durable approach. It worked for the first 2 million years of the human experience, and we fled from it as recently as a few thousand years ago. But if you can’t find a tribe to go along, you’ll be as lonely as a Saguaro cactus on an ice floe.

Finally, individuals can largely avoid the ravages of collapse by traveling from spot to spot. History has been kind to travelers because people rooted in a particular place hunger for knowledge. If you’re to pursue this route, you’ll need to be quick-witted, good-humored, and willing to lend a hand when needed. Also, you’ll need to recognize and avoid danger. Traveling will be terrifying, but no worse than staying in one location. And you’ll get to see the world and live an adventure-filled life, just as promised by U.S. military recruiters.

None of these options offer a life similar to the one you’ve known. But a different life doesn’t mean a worse life, especially if you give a rat’s backside about anybody besides yourself. There will be plenty of opportunities to serve your community, as there has always been, in the months and years ahead. We’ll be living closer to our neighbors and closer to the living planet that sustains us all. For those courageous, compassionate, and creative souls willing to live in the world rather than in a cubicle, life’s about to get even more interesting. For the vast majority of industrial Americans, though, life is about to become miserable and surprisingly short.

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This essay was inspired by a comment from Danielle Charbonneau. It is permalinked at Counter Currents, Island Breath, and A Climate for Change.

But if the government would get out of the way or, better yet, serve as an inspiration and provide resources, we could shape our society to deal effectively with economic contraction. We could focus on the delivery of water, the production of food, and maintenance of public health with a substantially re-localized, and significantly more durable, set of living arrangements. The alternative we are currently pursuing — a last-ditch attempt to maintain the impossible dream of endless suburbia followed by a rapid trip to the post-industrial Stone Age — is an unmitigated apocalypse in slow motion. I feel as if I’m watching a cheesy 1970s disaster film, waiting for the director to yell, “Cut!” so we can all go back to our pre-HFCS cheese doodles and soda pop.

Assuming we all jump on board the contraction train, we have several options at our disposable. I’m a fan of one of them, and I’ll present an alternative likely to be more appealing to most readers. These two routes are simply points along a continuum from (1) the omnicidal, destined-for-disaster business as usual and (2) its attendant massive die-off of humans as we enter the Stone Age without advance planning.

Route number one is such a durable outcome we did it for two million years. That’s essentially the entire human experience. We had easy lives, characterized by a few hours of work each week to supply our hunted-and-gathered food. We spent a lot of time communing with the natural world, and creating art that reflected our time with nature. We were a bit too spiritual for my own personal tastes, but that spirituality was rooted in ignorance. Now that we know better than to believe in spirits, the next trip to the Stone Age can be characterized by rational thought, free inquiry, intelligent discussions, and strong communities rooted in place.

Our lives will be short, relatively speaking, but they will be far from the Hobbesian wage-slavery in which we’re currently mired. All aboard the peace train, everybody.

The next stop is agricultural anarchy, in the spirit of Monticello. I know Thomas Jefferson’s model was built on the backs of slaves, and I know about the horrors of patriarchy. But again, we know better this time. The local, organic production of food will once again form the center of commerce, and also our lives. The animals we respect and nurture will provide power. We will honor soil as the life-giving entity it is.

If we pursue the latter route, we’ll need to abandon the cities en masse. We’ll need to develop a crash course in country living. If you think it can’t be done, you haven’t been reading this blog. Believe me: If I can develop the attitude and skills I’ve developed within a year, after spending an entire life as an imperialist educator, just about anybody else can, too. Surely people with fewer than my 49 years can do this, and without the physical pain that results from heaping large doses of physical abuse onto a long-neglected body. Had I known how long I was going to be using these old bones, I’d have taken better care of them, back when I was younger.

There you go, then: Two possibilities for a future with infinite possibilities. Neither involves long-distance travel, but the recent luxury of overseas, overnight is a big part of the problem. Ditto for the summer driving vacation and the long-distance commute to “live” in soulless suburbia.

Yes, we’ll need to work out myriad details. The transition will not be easy. But it will not be lethal to a majority of people in industrialized countries, either. Many other advantages come to mind, in addition to the ones I pointed out a few months ago. For example, we might not have to prepare for civil war, and we won’t be all atwitter about which bubbles are about to burst.

That’s my two cents, undoubtedly overpriced. And you?

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This post was inspired by a comment from vera.

I’m reminded of this quote from Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” And lest you think cynicism is a bad thing, here’s a reminder from George Carlin that closely corresponds to my own view: “Scratch any cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

Knowing how badly we’re destroying the living planet on which we depend is bad enough to make me a little cranky. But I’ve been there for years. Consider, for example, this line from a book I wrote in the autumn of 2003: “Americans often initiate military conflict in foreign lands with no apparent role except to secure natural resources or further political careers, and the United States government continues to sell these acts of aggression to a willing public that desperately wants to deny its own role in mass murder.” What’s really elevated my crankiness during the last couple years is the degree to which we are willing to stoke the planet’s fossil-fuel furnace, even to the point of destroying habitat for our own species. Add to that the astonishing number of people who just don’t give a damn what we’re doing to the planet, and ourselves, and who present no alternatives to bringing the industrial machine of death grinding to a halt, and I’m a little surprised I haven’t (1) gone postal or (2) been placed in confinement by the government. I don’t doubt, though, that every dissident will soon be considered a terrorist.

I thought we were too self-centered to destroy habitat for human beings on this most wondrous of rocks. But apparently the nature of our self-absorption is entirely too personal. We are perfectly willing to destroy our species, and every other one on Earth, if the few of us in the industrialized world can have the latest piece of technology.

I passed cranky a year ago. At this point I’m outraged, along with anybody who’s actually paying attention. If I could only believe in political solutions, I’d be back at cranky. If I could foolishly believe we have 300 years of long descent into a technologically poorer but biologically richer world, I’d be a happy man. But instead, I see what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. I see no chance of a decent uprising from the masses, hence no chance to prune the tree of liberty in my time (much less every generation, as Thomas Jefferson suggested). I see us stuck in our proverbial, planet-raping ruts, too content with the bread and circuses of the Technomessiah to bring about change through action.

The failure of leadership in light of peak oil and global climate change is comprehensive. At this late juncture, there is no politically viable solution for either phenomenon. Once, perhaps, there was. But we let the solutions slip away.

Actually, we didn’t so much let them slip away as we drove them away with the biggest whip we could muster. We banished Jimmy Carter from office, and from the political conversation, the moment he uttered a series of solutions to our fossil-fuel addiction. We never stood a chance with respect to runaway greenhouse: As soon as we committed ourselves to infinite growth on a finite planet by selecting fossil fuels instead of rational behavior, we destroyed any reasonable chance of dealing with our fossil-fuel addiction and therefore destined ourselves and the living planet to a leap from the political frying pan to the fires of hell.

We’re left with two politically unviable choices: economic meltdown or extinction of our species (and many others). To the maximum possible extent, we are choosing both heinous outcomes. But at some point, the ongoing economic meltdown reaches its inevitable completion at the hand of peak oil. Regardless of the specific timing, the Renaissance will need leaders, and those leaders are with us today. Among the relevant questions: Who are they, and how will they lead?

It’s too late for leadership from my generation, which failed miserably. We created the twin disasters now unfolding. We brought you Ronald Reagan and all the selfish bastards who followed in his shoes, right up to the current Warmonger-in-Chief. We brought you abysmal leadership beyond the Oval Office as well, including Congress, state and local governments, entrepreneurs, heads of corporations and non-profit organizations, and pathetic, growth-addicted “educational” institutions. I’ve no doubt I missed many of the parties responsible for the crises we face, but there’s plenty of blame to go around, and the failure of leadership is overwhelmingly comprehensive and comprehensively pathetic.

As I’ve indicated previously, evolution clearly dealt us a bad hand. It pushes us to the “flight-or-fight” response of survival. The survivors are driven to procreate. Those who survive and procreate then are driven to accumulate material possessions. Is it any wonder the financial elite run the industrialized world? Or that they are leading us to disaster?

Where has this evolutionary play led us? And, equally importantly, where do we turn from here? Who will lead, and how?

During the last few years, I have interacted closely with about a hundred individuals between the ages of 18 and 34, including many students and a passel of nieces and nephews. These young people represent the pool from which post-carbon leaders must come. It is their future, and they are now reaching the age of leadership. Somehow, people must emerge from this pool to lead us to a brighter tomorrow, sans electricity.

Although I’m typically unremitting in my optimism about economic collapse and therefore dodging the bullet of human extinction, my optimism wanes when I think about leadership in the post-carbon era. Of those hundred or so individuals I’ve come to know reasonably well, fewer than a handful give me cause for hope. Fewer than a handful possess the necessary traits to survive economic collapse, much less assume a leadership role on the other side.

Survival alone requires the proper psychological outlook, physical stamina, and a decent dose of intelligence. The first criterion alone eliminates at least eight of ten potential candidates. Almost nobody under the age of thirty is willing to deal with a low-energy, poverty-infused personal reality if it means forgoing his cell phone. Despite plenty of opportunities to observe non-industrial cultures in the world — arguably, more opportunities than any people in the history of the planet — a vast majority of today’s youngsters cannot envision economic collapse even when it surrounds them. A life without electricity, cheap food at the grocery store, and water coming out the taps is as foreign as a day without i-Pods and online porn. The hyper-indulgence of the generations has ratcheted up nearly beyond belief, and certainly beyond the point of comfortably returning to a life where a walk in the woods is viewed as a privilege instead of a burden.

While the ability to deal with the real world was plummeting to its current near-zero nadir, the notion that physical stamina is meritorious has largely disappeared from American life. Somewhere along the way, bicycling came to require a spandex uniform, and walking was relegated to losers who could not afford a new car. Meanwhile, living close to the land became a quaint notion mutually exclusive from a culturally important position in life (cf. texting and playing video games). For the vanishingly small proportion of individuals who are physically fit and willing to deal with an unfamiliar set of circumstances in the years ahead, the ability to exert intelligent leadership represents a daunting challenge. The challenge appears far too great for most of the people I know, nearly all of whom are wondering how they can scam the current system instead of wondering how they can help build a new one. The idea that the new one should be based on service to Earth and impoverished humans hasn’t yet entered the collective consciousness of the new “me” generation.

Obviously, I don’t know who will fill the leadership gap, or how they will do it. But I’m pretty sure the answers won’t come from over-indulgent children who are unwilling to grow up. I’m pretty sure the answers won’t come from youngsters who think the placement of their tattoos is more important than the placement of their gardens. I’m pretty sure the answers won’t come from ill-mannered children who dress for dinner in clownish clothes, untied shoes, and sideways baseball caps. I’m pretty sure the answers won’t come from people who think cars of the future will save us, instead of further destroying the living planet and our chances of survival. I’m pretty sure the answers won’t come from thoughtless automatons who irrationally believe technology will solve all our problems, instead of recognizing that technology is self-defeating. I’m pretty sure the answers won’t come from people who believe cities to be the apex of life on Earth, and who believe rural living is for bumpkins.

It’s not that I blame these overgrown children for whom maturity is a mirage. They are products of culture, and culture has led them into the misguided belief that the fossil-fuel fiesta is just getting started.

Instead, the best party on Earth is about to begin. Personally, I couldn’t be happier about it. But I’m guessing the children won’t be pleased.

But back to me — my favorite subject, after all — and the accusations of inappropriate behavior I attract, like snakes to the eggs of ground-nesting birds. People will die, they cry, purposely and studiously ignoring the millions of people and other animals killed every day by the industrial economy. They act as if the industrial economy is propped up by a solid foundation of love and world peace. It’s all rainbows and butterflies, that good old industrial economy. A friend and neighbor, channeling Buddhism, claims she is taking right action by signing petitions to halt a dam on the nearby river and campaigning for Barack Obama. As if petitions or protests ever stopped anything the kings of industry wanted to construct. And don’t even get me started on Wall Street’s front man, the Trojan horse for big banks and the Pentagon, the prince of (Nobel) peace, the Liar-in-Chief whose war crimes surely match Henry Kissinger’s by now.

People accuse me of inappropriate behavior because, in this increasingly postmodern world, we don’t talk about right and wrong. Cultural sensitivities, you know. Not to mention cultural relativism. Call me insensitive — I’ve been called worse, and my skin is thick — but I claim there is right and wrong.

I’m way too postmodern to believe there’s absolute right and wrong. I gave up that brand of religion years ago. But on specific issues, in particular circumstances, there is damned little gray. Even in the relatively broad example of industrial culture, there is plenty of black and white.

The definition I’ll use is straight from my buddies Merriam and Webster. Moral: 1 a: of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior: ethical (moral judgments) b: expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior (a moral poem) c: conforming to a standard of right behavior d: sanctioned by or operative on one’s conscience or ethical judgment (a moral obligation) e: capable of right and wrong action (a moral agent)

There can be little doubt that a system that enslaves, tortures, and kills people is wrong. Industrial culture does all that with stunning efficiency. Big Energy poisons our water. Big Ag controls our seeds, hence our food. Big Pharm controls, through pharmaceuticals, the behavior of our children. Wall Street controls the flow of money. Big Ad controls the messages you receive every day. The criminally rich get richer through crime: that’s how America works. Through it all, we think we’re free.

In contrast to western civilization, I think a system is right — and even just — if it treats people alike and liberates them, thus giving them freedom to live unchained from the bonds of culture, politics, and a monetary system developed and implemented by others. I will not go down the road of oppression at the point of a gun or the blade of a bulldozer, but it’s easy to extend the notion of enslavement-torture-death to entire peoples and the landbase. It’s pretty clear I don’t need to go down that road: We’re so thoroughly disconnected from the land and from our neighbors that we no longer have a clue what happiness looks like, much less how we might bring some home.

What, about industrial culture, is wrong? Let’s start with the morality of war criminals such as Barack Obama at, for example, this week’s circus in Copenhagen. Obama is merely following in the footsteps of civilized people such as Thomas Jefferson and George W. Bush in fucking the living planet, and every non-industrial culture. In North America, we’ve been quashing terrorism in since 1492, and we just keep at it, pulverizing the planet while imprisoning and torturing anybody who gets in the way of civilization. We have a long a sordid history, and we keep doing it again, and again, and again. And, in exchange for a comfortably miserable life marked by an equal mix of unhappiness and i-Pods, we tolerate anything to which our hand-picked leaders subject us. This entire, life-draining, life-sucking enterprise requires us to tell increasingly absurd lies and convince ourselves they are the truth. Fortunately, this requires little effort on our part because we are awash in cognitive dissonance as we swim in an ocean of cultural denial.

It is relatively easy to make a moral case in favor of pulverizing the lands and waters myriad other species need to survive. We merely need to convince ourselves we’re not really part of nature. And, because of the aforementioned ocean, that’s not a problem. But then there’s the more difficult issue: the future of humanity. How do we justify the ongoing, ever-increasing destruction of the hanging-on-by-a-thread living planet, when we and future generations need the literal ocean to survive? How do we justify the murderous blob of economic growth in the name of baubles but at the cost of human life? Does that seem right? In destroying the living planet and all hope for future humans to occupy the planet, it hardly seems to me we are “expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior,” while “conforming to a standard of right behavior.”

Like the rest of us, scientists are eager to please the public, so they’re trying to make the dire medicine increasingly sweet by ratcheting up the dumbing down of the bad news. They’ve come up with a Dow Jones Index for climate change, because everybody knows and cares about the Dow, whereas nobody gives a damn about the living planet and our likely near-term extinction.

Graphs that please the eye notwithstanding, it’s probably too late to stop the frying of the planet unless we bring the industrial economy crashing to a very abrupt halt. Even conservative mainstream scientists admit that only complete collapse of the global industrial economy will save us from runaway greenhouse. Naturally, their paper was rejected by several journals — even the scientific community can’t handle this particular truth — before it was published last month in Climatic Change. We do not know how quickly we’ll need to terminate the industrial economy to save our species. If we did, we could spend that entire span arguing about the morality of bringing down the industrial machine of death. Since we don’t, we need to act as if the matter is urgent, which, as it turns out, nicely matches the data on the topic.

I am increasingly convinced that the only moral choice at all is to bring down the industrial as quickly as possible, and by any means necessary. If that means destroying property, think about the destruction of lives caused by industrial culture. If the means of halting industrial activity are violent, think about the violence and death caused by every civilized action. Using a cellular telephone is legal — and even encouraged by industrial culture — yet it kills women and children in the Congo. On the other hand, tearing down a cell-phone tower that kills thousands of birds every year and facilitates the death and torture of Congolese people is a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment. Because tearing down a cell-phone tower almost certainly represents an act of terrorism, it is punishable by suspension of habeas corpus, torture, and life in prison.

Short of violent and illegal acts, we have few options at our disposal. In fact, using all means at our disposal still leaves us a few thousand bricks shy of a full pallet. It appears even our most “outrageous” actions pale in comparison to the scale of the problem we face. The bankers are in charge, regardless of the immoral actions they take. The limited power we have is slipping away faster than justice in our courtrooms.

What does all this mean for us, the people with no voice? Does it leave us moral choices? Does it indicate how we ought to live, in a world gone horribly awry while we were ensconced in the freak show?

I have little to offer here, other than boring pragmatic advice about self reliance and introspection. We should be investing in our neighbors, as has always been true. And those neighbors aren’t just humans. They’re animals and plants, soil and water. We need to protect and honor them as we do our own children. We need to harbor them from the ravages of war, and also from an economy built on war. We need to live outside the industrial economy and within the real world of honest work, honest play, simple pleasures, and paying the consequences of our daily actions. We need to abandon a political system that takes without giving, long after it abandoned us. At the most fundamental level, we need to re-structure society so that children understand and value the origins of food, and life.

It’s no longer just the living planet we should be concerned about. It’s us. The moral question, then: What are you going to do about it?

Interesting blog site, Guy.

Sorry to learn about your separation from UofA, I think. I really don’t know the school very well. You are a bit of a radical in the Age of Denial, you know.

We should probably talk. There is a difference between what we are doing and an actual pursuit of sustainability. We’re trying half-assed things, like creating a green economy with green collar jobs. It’s sustainable development. If we’re successful, we may slow our cultural demise somewhat. There are those that think by taking our tact, we may create room for some technological fixes.

While I hope that might happen, I don’t really believe it will. However, I’m not sure what else to do – besides finding some arable land with good water and rounding up a bunch of talented, patient small farmers and moving there – assuming that the increasing storms, droughts, fires, etc. wouldn’t wreck everything. “Best laid plans…”

The objective of our colloquium is to “accentuate the positive” by forming collaborations between us economic meddlers. If we spend any time confronting the realities and the overwhelming data, we’ll not get anywhere. Our work assumes that we have the time needed to change course by increments within the current economic structure.

If you have some thoughts on other avenues of action to take, I’d be very interested. Keep in mind, we’re limited in power to our communities – and even there, our power is hampered by entrenched interests, ignorance and greed.

Let me know what you think – and maybe a good time for a phone call.

My response:

Yes, let’s talk. Here’s something to ponder between now and then:

For starters, we agree about one thing: It’s all about community. The age of cheap fossil fuels allowed us to forget that. But communities are making a comeback, and we’ll need strong ones if we’re to get through the years ahead with minimal human suffering. We’ll also need tremendous doses of compassion, creativity, and courage.

If we maintain the industrial age, as you’d like, we drive most of the species on the planet to extinction, including ours. Latest estimates, which are undoubtedly as conservative as their pre-cursors, indicate we’ll run out of habitat for humans by mid-century.

If we terminate the industrial age, as I’d like, we might return to agricultural anarchy, in the sense of Thomas Jefferson. We might not, of course — we might be too self-indulgent for that, and we’ll bring chaos instead of anarchy — but I’d say it’s worth a shot. Preparing for agricultural anarchy within the next few years will require a tremendous commitment of resources and especially action. Think shoulders to the wheel in a way we haven’t seen, in this country, since at least World War II and probably earlier.

The clear choices are extinction or anarchy (with a chance of chaos tossed in). This seems like a no-brainer to me. What am I missing?

I suppose one route would have me presenting my “radical” (i.e., reality-based) view as a touchstone and wake-up call. Any number of more moderate (i.e., denial-based) views could follow to make people feel good while they are taking action. Or, more likely, nominally supporting people who are taking action. Or — and I suspect this is the best for which we can hope — staying out of the way while people take actions necessary to save our species beyond mid-century while feeding our children in the months and years ahead.

I’m available for a phone call at my rural property just about any time. Please call me, but let me know when you’ll call so I can be waiting by the phone (otherwise I’ll be outside, working). Best times for me are after 9:30 a.m. and before 4:00 p.m. because I have animal-husbandry duties before 9:30 and after 4:00.

All the best,
Guy

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This post is permalinked at Energy Bulletin.

Let’s start with Barack Obama, the current “Democrat” trying to get past the Republican smear machine. I can’t imagine he’ll be successful, in large part because, as Stalin pointed out, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.” The Republicans are infamous for stealing elections, and they’re working hard to steal this one. But they’re starting out by labeling Obama a “liberal” (I’m old enough to remember when that was a good thing), even though his political hero is Ronald Reagan, who ran away from the liberal label during his presidential campaigns.
Before Obama we have to go back nearly eight years to that most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Actually, I steal a line from my older and wiser brother in referring to Bill Clinton as the best Republican president since Eisenhower. But Clinton called himself a Democrat, so I’ll run with that, for now, while pointing out that his success depended greatly on his ability to outflank Congressional Republicans on the political right. Before Clinton, we have to go back to 1977-1980 to find Democrat Jimmy Carter, who is widely regarded as the worst president in my lifetime (incorrectly, in my opinion).
Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush were sandwiched between Carter and Clinton, and the Reagan-Bush years are widely recognized as the years that led the way into neoconservatism in this country (actually, the notion was gaining traction by the time Reagan spoke at the Goldwater GOP convention, but that’s a quibble). Reagan was formerly a liberal Democrat with Trotsky-esque tendencies, as were the founders and early leaders of neoconservatism.
Thus, I trace the demise of political parties as disparate entities to Reagan’s election in 1980. With the 1980 election, the United States embraced a single ideology: economic growth. Political party no longer mattered because the ideology crossed party lines. And this dangerous ideology absolutely required imperialism. This country lacks the resources, particularly fossil fuels, to become self-sufficient while also growing our economy. By 1980, you might as well start calling nearly everybody in this country a Demoblican, or a Republicrat, or, more simply, a Democratic-Republican.
For that reason, I think this election matters little and perhaps not at all. Previous elections mattered a lot. This one, not so much. And I doubt your vote in 2012, should you be allowed to cast one, will even be counted. Obama, McCain, or — most likely, in my view — Palin (in the wake of McCain’s death) get to preside over the smoldering remains of the U.S. economy before 2012.
Of course, America as Empire is hardly new. FDR wriggled us into World War II explicitly to maintain supply lines, hence access, to fossil fuels. And before FDR, we can trace imperialism, or colonialism, or economic growth at the point of a gun, or whatever label you want to place on Empire, to the tenure of Woodrow Wilson. The famous “Wilson Doctrine” indicates that the United States should not attempt to create an empire, but rather a global democracy of equal and independent nations. But Wilson’s brand of democracy was restricted to the “right” people. His soaring rhetoric rings hollows when contrasted with his deeds, which included brutal U.S. invasions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, inspired by racism. As an aside, Wilson is associated, and sometimes credited, with the conspicuous rise of neoliberalism in the United States. Neoliberalism is the economic equivalent of neoconservatism.
While we’re thinking about racist imperialists, we can go back further. Thomas Jefferson was, and is, widely recognized as one of the most enlightened of the founding fathers. As I mentioned and documented in an earlier post, imperialist Jefferson commented about native Americans: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” Jefferson, along with James Madison, founded the Democratic-Republican political party.
I couldn’t make up this stuff.

The world’s best-known collection of dead white guys had much to say about religion, most of it bad. But the mostly ignorant, church-going members of the American populace have gobbled up so many bullshit sandwiches that the fairy tales they’ve adopted about the religious views of the founding fathers are nearly as grand as the ones they’ve accepted about spirits in our midst. The founding fathers were deists, and they were very clear about the separation of church and state. Had Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species a century sooner, there is little doubt the reasonable men who founded the United States would have leaned even further away from the cross.
If the First Amendment doesn’t provide a compelling enough example about the founding fathers and their disrespect for religion, perhaps these passages will elucidate the issue:
“During almost fifteen centuries, the legal establishment of Christianity has been on trial. What have been the fruits of this trial? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; and in both, clergy and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” (James Madison, speech to the General Assembly of Virginia, 1785)
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their [not our?] religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.” (George Washington, letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 22 June 1792)
“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” (Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli, signed by John Adams, 7 June 1797)
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” (Thomas Jefferson, letter to a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut, 1 January 1802)
“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?” (John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, 27 December 1816)
“Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.” (James Madison, letter to Jacob de la Motta, August 1820)
The contemporary view: Surely Madison didn’t mean to include Muslims. Or atheists. Or agnostics. Or anybody except Gawd-fearing Christians.
The views of the founding fathers on non-religious issues often show great wisdom and compassion:
“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” (Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759)
It’s as if Benny foresaw the PATRIOT Act.
“As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.” (Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776)
Or, to put a BushCo spin on this one: Today’s economy depends on tomorrow’s bankruptry. Day is night. Light is dark. And so on.
“Here sir, the people govern.” (Alexander Hamilton, speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 17 June 1788)
Dubya’s view is slightly different: “I’m the Decider.”
“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (James Madison, Federalist No. 58, 1788)
My, what a quaint idea.
“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” (George Washington, Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)
It’s as if George foresaw BushCo.
“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens…. There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books.” (Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Melish, 13 January 1813)
Power corrupts. Today’s Executive branch enjoys power that is virtually absolute. It’s not too tough to connect the dots on this one.
Perhaps the most exemplary quote comes from the most enlightened of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. He was referring to Native Americans, but they were merely the best “Them” of the day. The quote holds up very well today. Dubya should be justifying his lust for war by invoking this Jeffersonian line in every speech:
“In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” (Statement to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, 1807; The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Lipscomb and Bergh, volume 11, page 345)
These days, I rarely rely on the founding fathers for solace. They were very pragmatic, and therefore violent. They were, in a word, terrorists. They were correct about so many things. But we have not yet destroyed all of “them.” Here’s hoping the Empire falls before we have a chance.