Transition to Sustainability, Long Descent, or Sudden Drop?

Various thinkers, including me, have posited that a collapse is coming. I would very much like to believe I am wrong, but the only arguments against seem to consist of character attacks along the lines of “You’re crazy,” or simply “It will never happen”-type wishful thinking.

Maybe, but until someone has reality-based reasons for why there will not be a collapse, I’ll stick with the evidence. The primary reason for the impending demise of our civilisation is that we, as a society, have chosen to believe what suits us over accepting reality. (See The Wisdom Deficit: How Very Intelligent People and Our Own Wishful Thinking are Leading Us to Disaster for a fuller explanation.) The questions that remain are: When will the collapse begin, how quickly will it unfold, will anything useful be done to prevent or mitigate the damage, and what should you be doing now?

To answer these questions, it is useful to get perspective from other thinkers, and I have chosen James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and Guy Dauncey as proponents of three different models of collapse. Let’s go in reverse order, as they go from merely change through serious collapse.

Transition to Sustainability

I recently interviewed Guy Dauncey on our radio show and questioned him about a collapse – and he believes absolutely not. He does see major changes coming – changes that some people will regard as a collapse of sorts, but that Dauncey believes will produce a better world. For example, while Dauncey acknowledges the end of oil and climate change will cause serious problems, he also believes that the decline will be slow and that leadership will arise and lead us to a future powered by renewable energy – and that uses much less energy.

For example, while Dauncey sees electric cars as a realistic possibility, not everyone will have one; the age of commuting from suburbs is over. Communities will be restructured as walkable, trains and public transit will be resurrected, and food will be grown locally and organically.

To many people, the loss of their car and the end of our car-based society will be seen as a collapse. Certainly countless people will have to change jobs, not by choice, but because their former career is now irrelevant. Transport truck drivers will be useless without transport trucks; highway police will not be needed if there are no highways. More people will be picking fruit and vegetables – we won’t be able to fly in people from developed countries to do this any longer. Someone who goes from the post-collapse (and arguably currently) useless position of Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions to fruit-picker might well decide that a collapse has occurred.

In his own words:

I don’t dispute all the obstacles, and nor the power of the vested interests (the coal and oil companies) to sabotage and delay all they can – it’s always been this way, throughout history. And humans have always organized to work together to overcome them.

Negativity kills creativity. If we sucker down to the believe that collapse is inevitable, we switch off the critical parts of our collective immune system that is determined not to allow this to happen.

I admire Guy’s optimism and determination to believe we can and will get out of this mess by reinventing what civilisation means, but I think he has overestimated two factors: the determination of those at the top to hold on as long as they can, and the refusal of almost everyone else to take any action until a crisis has actually occurred. And that is where the idea of a long descent comes in.

The Long Descent

John Michael Greer sees a collapse occurring over centuries, with successive crises punctuated by periods of partial recovery. He sees civilisation, technology, and population being lost in irregular steps downward. Where Dauncey sees much hope in renewable energy to prevent this, Greer believes that the loss of oil will be fatal to our current civilisation.

In theory, Dauncey is correct, as there is more than enough energy available from wind, solar, tidal, and especially conservation to meet our current needs many times over. Greer sees the very high EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) of oil and compares that to the much lower return from renewables, and he sees no way to continue powering our current, massively energy-hungry society. Dauncey would not disagree; where they part ways is what will be done about this.

Where Dauncey sees leadership arising/people coming together to radically restructure society and solve this problem, Greer sees it as a predicament that will not be confronted until we are in mid-crisis – by which time it will be too late. Greer expects oil price spikes that will wreak havoc on the economy, followed by an increased interest in renewables and conservation, causing a reduction in demand that allows the price of oil to drop and a partial recovery to occur. Dauncey would say that this crisis will drive us to find solutions; Greer says this will begin to happen and be derailed as oil prices decline and we go back to our wasteful ways, setting ourselves up for the next oil price spike and economic crash.

Greer points to the oil crisis of the 1970s as a scenario that is likely to be repeated. Oil prices spiked and availability dropped, leading to a serious program to move to renewable energy and conservation, but the leadership of the time – the Great White Hope and Republican Saviour Ronald Reagan – elected instead to go all-in on oil. This may someday be seen as a betrayal of the United States; where Reagan and successive leaders could have got the U.S. free from imported oil, they made a decision to make the nation dependent upon foreign oil. Greer points out that the United States is still a very major oil producer, and that if Americans used oil at the same rate as Europeans, the U.S. would be exporting oil.

In this, I think Greer is more likely correct than Dauncey, because Greer takes into account American culture and the corruption of politics. At the Earth Summit in 1992, George H.W. Bush stated that “The American way of life is not negotiable.” This was repeated by former Vice President Dick Cheney shortly after the attacks of 9/11. Every U.S. president from Reagan onward has preached this gospel either overtly or simply through his actions; as a result, the American people have been hearing for decades that conservation is unnecessary, that they can continue to drive and shop like there is no tomorrow, and that no adjustments to living arrangements will be required.

(To be fair to Dauncey, he – and I – point to the pre-World War II mobilisation of industry that occurred exceptionally rapidly. Government was also quite corrupt at that time, and vested interests equally determined to protect their profits and prestige at any cost to the nation and people. However, the crisis was obvious and there was plenty of energy to deal with it. Now the U.S. government is largely corporate-controlled, which Dauncey fully acknowledges, and oil – our most vital form of energy – will be in short supply and very expensive.)

This brings us to our final scenario of rapid and total collapse.

Sudden Drop, Fast Stop

Where Greer sees humanity stair-stepping down into a de-industrial world, Kunstler expects the collapse to occur fairly rapidly and leave few untouched. He describes this in his post-collapse novel, World Made by Hand, in which government has become useless and essentially ceases to exist, industry of all sorts collapses, and we revert very quickly to a pre-industrial state.

Kunstler sees corruption and delusion at the top as a serious problem, in that leaders will not tell the truth to the American people, and thus no constructive action will be taken until the first oil shock hits. Further, he sees the high number of American “morons” as a major impediment. These are people who refuse to face reality and will be extremely angry when they can no longer afford to drive or heat their homes or buy cheap crap at Wal-Mart, and they will be looking for someone to blame.

Looking at the current insanity in the U.S., it is hard to disagree. Take the Tea Party wingnuts on the right, add the deluded souls who thought Obama – the Great Black Hope and Democratic Saviour – would be any different than any previous President, consider that every one of them thinks “the American Way of Life is non-negotiable,” stir in a corrupt media populated with people prone to encouraging violence, add an oil shock, and the recipe for disaster is ready to bake.

Kunstler calls the result The Long Emergency because we will face an emergency situation that will last for a long, long time. Greer likewise does not see anything like our current civilisation and technology rebounding any time soon, if ever. The idea of putting a man on the moon will seem like a fairy tale to our great-grandchildren.

Where Lies Reality?

Who is most “right” will be revealed with time. All agree that what we currently consider civilisation will end. Dauncey expects we will rally together to replace it with a more sustainable economy. Greer and Kunstler also see sustainability happening – because there will be no other choice. Anything unsustainable will simply cease to exist: Go green or die, baby.

Where they differ is what standard of living that will exist. Dauncey sees a massive push to renewable energy enabling the continuation of something close to our current standard of living, albeit largely without cars. Greer and Kunstler see the end of most technology and a reversion to a conditions similar to those that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution; most of us will be peasants or tradespeople. There may be some ‘nobility’; Kunstler describes a scenario in World Made by Hand where a wealthy landowner ‘employs’ numerous people – as peasants and tradespeople – on his large farm/village. These people willingly trade their independence for security.

Greer and Kunstler also see a significant reduction in population as likely. What they mean by this is that a lot of people will die younger than they would have. Diabetes, for example, will once again be a death sentence as insulin becomes unavailable. So will many infections, as antibiotics disappear and drug-resistant germs spread. Depression will cause many more to commit slow suicide through alcoholism and foolish decisions, and without a social ’safety net’ or strong community, these people will simply die. There is plenty of evidence for this from the former Soviet Union, where birth rates plummeted by 40% and death rates rose by 40%.

Personally, I prefer Dauncey’s scenario, where we transition to a green economy and nobody has to die off.  I believe it could happen, although many peak oil theorists would disagree, because they think that we needed to start the transition years ago. However, like Guy Dauncey, I think a WWII-scale mobilisation could take us where we need to go quickly enough, provided there was sufficient support from the population-at-large – and we neutralise vested interests. We would have to write off a lot of sunk costs, like suburbs and Phoenix, redirect all available energy to making new sources of energy, conserve like mad, and many people would have to give up certain luxuries they currently feel very entitled to.

The likelihood of this happening, though, is slim. Greer persuasively argues that it has not happened in previous civilisational collapses; at first, the problem is small and distant, and thus easily ignored. This is a shame, because small changes early would save civilisation. Eventually the danger becomes unignorable, but by then major changes are required and nobody, especially the elites, want that, so wishful thinking is substituted for realistic action and, sooner or later, a crash happens.

What To Do?

A collapse is, by definition, somewhat chaotic. All three thinkers mentioned here suggest that managing the transition to the new order is by far the best plan. It currently seems unlikely that we will do that, so the ‘transition’ is going to be bumpy. How to protect yourself and those you love as best you can is a difficult topic, so I will cover it in another article.

In the meantime, we should all be doing what we can to push our glorious leaders to speak the truth. Greer makes the very valid point that we are in this position in part because we have taken our democracies for granted. We think casting a vote every few years is sufficient to sustain democracy, but clearly it has not been. The time is now to get politically involved, and I do not mean to waste your time attempting to get the latest flavour of saviour elected. We need every single elected politician speaking the truth and representing the people, regardless of political party.

As this will take time and be opposed with billions of dollars by vested interests, you must start speaking the truth, and you must start preparing for collapse as best you can.

Resources in this article

Here are the books mentioned in this article. I have two of them on my bookshelf, but to be honest, they were purchased some years ago before I had thoroughly investigated the likelihood of a collapse. While all the books are excellent and will greatly help you understand the possibility and danger of a collapse, I now borrow such books from the library and reserve my purchases to books that will be useful post-collapse.

Guy Dauncey’s The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming (The Solutions Series) – Jammed full of what we need to do. If you want to know what can be done, this is the book for you; Dauncey is an expert in energy.

John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. A persuasive argument that decline is inevitable and will happen very soon.

And two books by James Howard Kunstler, both currently ‘bargain priced’ at Amazon. First, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. And second, World Made by Hand his novel depicting a post-collapse United States, or, in reality, the tiny, very local piece that is able to be experienced in the absence of aircraft, cars, and trains.