The Long Descent Read online

  Advance praise for

  The Long Descent

  Candidates for public office, and the voters who elect them, should be required to read John Michael Greer’s accurate diagnosis of the terminal illness our fossil-energy subsidized industrial civilization has too long denied. He shows how stubborn belief in perpetual progress blinded us to the abyss toward which we were speeding and thus impeded wise preparation for our unavoidable descent into a deindustrial age. We must hope that the array of mitigating tools he prescribes may yet render that descent down the back side of Hub-bert’s peak less devastating than it will be if we insistently claim a right to be prodigal in using this finite Earth.

  — William R. Catton, Jr.

  author of Overshoot: The Ecological

  Basis of Revolutionary Change

  This is a very wise and timely message for a nation facing enormous practical challenges. Greer’s generosity of spirit and essential kindness are habits of mind and heart very much worth emulating.

  — James Howard Kunstler

  author of World Made by Hand

  and The Long Emergency

  When we find ourselves falling off the lofty peak of infinite progress, our civilization’s mythology predisposes our imaginations to bypass reality altogether, and to roll straight for the equally profound abyss of the Apocalypse. Greer breaks this spell, and instead offers us a view on our deindustrial future that is both carefully reasoned and grounded in spirituality.

  — Dmitry Orlov

  author of Reinventing Collapse:

  The Soviet Experience and American Prospects

  If, as Greer suggests, our “prolonged brush with ecological reality” is not a slide or a free-fall, but a stair-step, then we have time to see this book made required reading in every U.S. high school. This is both a past and future history book, written from a perspective that is rare now, but will soon be widely shared.

  — Albert Bates,

  author of The Post-Petroleum

  Survival Guide and Cookbook

  “Sweeping historical vision” is not generally a term applied to books about peak oil, which tend to imagine the coming crisis in terms as a culmination and a single event. John Michael Greer offers a useful corrective to this narrow vision in a book that is both pragmatic and visionary. In this deeply engaging book, Greer places us not at the end of our historical narrative, but at the beginning of a sometimes harrowing, but potentially fascinating transition.

  — Sharon Astyk

  author of Depletion & Abundance: Life on the

  New Home Front and blogger, SharonAstyk.com

  At once erudite and entertaining, Greer’s exploration of the dynamics of societal collapse couldn’t be more timely. Resource depletion and climate change guarantee that industrial societies will contract in the decades ahead. Do we face a universally destructive calamity, or a long transition to a sustainable future? That’s one of the most important questions facing us, and this book is one of the very few to address it on the basis of clear reasoning and historical precedents.

  — Richard Heinberg

  Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute,

  and author of The Party’s Over and Peak Everything

  The fall of civilization, according to Greer, does not look like falling off a cliff but rather “a slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history’s dumpster.” Presenting the concept of “catabolic collapse”, Greer brilliantly assists the reader in deciphering an illusory intellectual polarity consisting on one side of the infinite progress of civilization and on the other, apocalypse. Not unlike the journey through the mythical Scylla and Charybdis, Greer appropriately names this odyssey the Long Descent, and for it, he offers us not only an excellent read, but tangible tools for navigating the transition.

  — Carolyn Baker

  author of Speaking Truth to Power

  www.carolynbaker.net

  THE

  LONG

  DESCENT

  NEW SOCIETY PUBLISHERS

  CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA:

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  the National Library of Canada.

  Copyright © 2008 by John Michael Greer.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Diane McIntosh.

  Images: iStock/Dan Tero

  Printed in Canada.

  First printing July 2008.

  Paperback isbn: 978-0-86571-609-4

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  Contents

  Preface

  1 The End of the Industrial Age

  2 The Stories We Tell Ourselves

  3 Briefing for the Descent

  4 Facing the Deindustrial Age

  5 Tools for the Transition

  6 The Spiritual Dimension

  Afterword

  Appendix: How Civilizations Fall:

  A Theory of Catabolic Collapse

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  Preface

  The difference between Europeans and Americans, some wag has suggested, is that Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance, and Americans think a hundred years is a long time. I had a cogent reminder of that witticism in the summer of 2003 when my wife and I climbed a rocky hill in the Welsh town of Caernarfon. Spread out below us in an unexpected glory of sunlight was the whole recorded history of that little corner of the world.

  The ground beneath us still rippled with earthworks from the Celtic hill fort that guarded the Menai Strait more than two and a half millennia ago. The Roman fort that replaced it was now the dim brown mark of an old archeological site on low hills off to the left. Edward I’s great gray castle rose up in the middle foreground, and the high contrails of RAF jets on a training exercise out over the Irish Sea showed that the town’s current overlords still maintained the old watch. Houses and shops from more than half a dozen centuries spread eastward as they rose through the waters of time, from the cramped medieval buildings of the old castle town straight ahead to the gaudy sign and sprawling parking lot of the supermarket back behind us.

  It’s been popular in recent centuries to take such sights as snapshots of some panorama of human progress, but as Caernarfon unfolded its past to me that afternoon, the view I saw was a different one. The green traces of the hill fort showed the highwater mark
of a wave of Celtic expansion that flooded most of Europe in its day. The Roman fort marked the crest of another wave whose long ebbing — we call it the Dark Ages today — still offers up a potent reminder that history doesn’t always lead to better things. The castle rose as medieval England’s Plantagenet empire neared its own peak, only to break on the battlefields of Scotland and France and fall back into the long ordeal of the Wars of the Roses. The comfortable brick houses of the Victorian era marked the zenith of another vanished empire, and it didn’t take too much effort just then to see, in the brash American architecture of the supermarket, the imprint of a fifth empire headed for the same fate as the others.

  Views like this are hard to find in North America. The suburban houses and schools where I spent my childhood were all built after the Second World War, on land that had been unbroken old growth forest three quarters of a century before that. In that setting, it was easy to believe the narrative of linear progress served up by the schools, the media, and the popular culture of the time. Even in the handful of Atlantic coast cities old enough to have a history worth mentioning in Old World terms, the marks of the past are buried deep enough beneath the detritus of the present that the same narrative seems to make sense. The energy crises of the 1970s shook this easy faith in progress, but the following decade saw that moment of uncertainty dismissed as an aberration, or rather a nightmare of sorts from which we had all thankfully awakened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ONE

  The End

  of the

  Industrial Age

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

  Then as now, too, the rising cost of oil isn’t simply the result of market vagaries or the wickedness of oil companies. It comes out of a disastrous mismatch between our economic system and the hard facts of petroleum geology. In 1970, petroleum production in the United States reached its all-time peak and began the steady decline that continues to this day. This decline forced American society, raised on fantasies of endless supplies of cheap home-grown energy, to retool its foreign policy, its economy, and its culture to deal with the unwelcome new reality of dependence on overseas reserves. Much of the economic and cultural turmoil of the decade after 1970 came out of the wrenching changes demanded by that new reality. r />
  Figure 1.1. The Hubbert Curve

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

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

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

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