The Foxtrot Collapse

Salvador Dali's 1957 'Dance' 

There’s always a lot of discussion on peak oil forums about whether the decline of industrial civilzation will take the form of a vertiginous descent, or whether it will be something long and grinding that will be measured in decades and centuries rather than years or months. In the fast-collapse camp are the likes of Dmitry Orlov (who bases his assessment on his experience of seeing the USSR implode) and Ugo Bardi, who expects a ‘Seneca’s Cliff’ dropoff. James Kunstler, Michael Ruppert and any number of others can probably also be added to the fast-collapse camp.

By comparison, the likes of John Michael Greer reckon we are in for a drawn-out era of terminal decline punctuated by serious crises which, at the time, will seem rather severe to all involved but which will give way to plateaux of relative stability, albeit at a lower level of energy throughput. At the end of this process we will be back to something resembling the Middle Ages, with smoking nuclear power plant dead-zones. His basis for this is a study of history, and in particular the work of writers such as Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler and Joseph Tainter, whose books emphasised the cyclical nature of all civilizations  These, they assert, can  be seen to go progress serially through stages of ebullient expansion, cultural dynamism, acquisition  entropy, overshoot, decay and eventual collapse. Our current industrial civilization, he argues, is but the latest in a long line of civilizations shuffling slowly towards the global compost bin.

But is it? Many would argue that scale matters and that today’s too-big-to-fail hyper-complex, bisophere changing civilization is such a different kettle of fish to its predecessors that when it enters the overshoot and collapse phase, as can be observed to be happening right now, the resulting calamity will be on a scale never before seen or experienced. All buildings fall down eventually, but would you rather be standing next to a fisherman’s cottage or a skyscraper when that happens?

In addition to these criticisms, some would point out that today’s global economy, aided and abetted by instant communications, is far more prone to cascading collapses, in which one strand in the web breaking leads to the whole web being destroyed. A bank collapse in China, for example, could lead to other banks seizing up and cause commerce to freeze as notes of credit go unwritten. By comparison, a mercantile trader in 15th century Venice would not have known that the bond guaranteeing his cargo was worthless for up to several months following the bankruptcy of a creditor, and trade would have carried on as normal in the interim. Inefficient communications, in this case, meant resilience.

Anyway, all the talk about fast collapse/slow collapse can seem a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. The simple facts of the matter are that we have exhausted all of the cheap energy options available to us, which is causing the global financial system - an entirely fabricated construct that can only run on blind optimism, greed and political largesse - to exist in a state of total crisis. Virtually every large economy in the world is facing up to its own pet crisis, although the scope and nature of each one is quite different. Europe is mired in unpayable debt, the US is addicted to pumping illusory ‘money’ via the Print button on the Fed’s keyboard and is just starting to realise there is no way back down the ladder, China’s gargantuan credit bubble is deflating, Japan is playing Russian roulette, and commodity producing countries such as Brazil and Australia are reeling from lowering demand from formerly insatiable importers. This is not just part of the business cycle as most talking heads assert.

It does seem quite likely that we are facing an uber Minsky Moment - that moment where investors realise their assets are vastly over-valued and stampede for the door. But where will they stampede to? The US dollar and world stock markets look like safeish havens for the time being to many, which would explain the Dow Jones’ and FTSE’s phenomenal head-scratching rises in recent weeks. Precious metals and land are being snapped up, especially by China which wants to simultaneously dump risky American assets and build a global network of agricultural land to feed its too-late-to-the-game middle class consumers (leaving ravaged ecosystems and raging mobs of dispossessed people in their wake). It’s a game where the stakes keep getting higher and higher with every passing week.

But the planet, of which our human economy is simply one small subset of, is a complex system to say the least, and complex systems are difficult to break all in one go. That’s why in my opinion collapse will not come about in a neatly linear fashion, but will be of a stop-start nature, like a badly-maintained fairground ride with a sadistic teenage operator. Of course, when I say the word ‘collapse’ I am mostly talking about the impacts it will have on the lives of we who live in the ‘West’ - most countries and people in the world have been living with collapse for centuries. Try telling a Malawian subsistence farmer that we may be in for a bumpy ride and see how he responds.

As has been noted before, global financial collapse is likely to be the first step, and that could happen overnight. Hot on its heels will be commercial collapse and a very sustained period of, shall we say, discomfort. Political collapse, as well as the rule of law, are next up on the Magical Mystery Collapse Tour, and we can only pray that we don’t get to social collapse too soon.

But all of these will take time. There will be grey areas and stages that overlap one another. Some locations will be worse off than others that might be just down the road, and some regions and countries might get lucky and find they are suddenly in a far better position than they were previously. Indeed, the whole thing will bloom like a fractal - or should I say is blooming like a fractal because we are already several years into this adventure. Individuals, communities, families, governments, militaries, religious groups and organised crime syndicates will all have their roles to play as the game changes, and only those most able to adapt to the ever-changing circumstances, or just the downright lucky, will be in a position to see the next stage of collapse.

Some stages are likely to be faster than others. The collapse of credit availability, insurance and investor confidence will be more or less instanteous once the first big domino falls, but national currencies, cooperative arrangements and various forms of trade will no doubt linger on for some time. Commerce is complex, with some supply chains being more fragile than others, so we’re likely to see the availability of most high tech items severely curtailed, while more basic items that don’t have to be shipped halfway across the globe and rely on several hundred individual suppliers, will be available for longer. Rationing will prolong the agony and the black market will step in as people get used to the idea that things are not as they used to be. 

So, for most of us I expect to see collapse happening at different rates. Sometimes they will be fast and brutal, and other times they will be slow and unnoticeable to those concerned until viewed in the rear view mirror of history. It’ll be a case of slow-slow-quick-quick-slow - which we might as well call a foxtrot collapse, after the ballroom dance with the same moves. 

I’m sure that, when all is said and done, nearly all of those in the reality-based community who regularly write about peak oil, civilizational decline and environmental crisis (with the exception of the Near Term Human Extincion folks) would agree that collapse occurrs by stages and it is merely our own standpoints which determine how direcly we are affected and when. After all, a credit meltdown could seem like Armageddon to a Hong Kong banker, but would barely even register as news to someone living a sustainable life on an island in Greece. Conversely freaky weather caused by climate change could destroy the Greek islander’s livelihood, but the banker, unaware of the natural elements outside his air-conditioned trading floor, would not even notice.

Becoming aware of the proximity of the stages of collapse should be a priority for individuals and governments alike, but for a multitude of human reasons this is not the case. Nevertheless, if you’re reading this then you’re probably also one of ‘the choir’ and are acutely aware of all the mounting problems that we face. It’s a catch 22 situation, aided and abetted by most media, which are desperately blinkered when it comes to nebulous predicamants, and keen to focus on blaming individual people for their follies. Oh, and it doesn't help shift advertising space.

So for the time being we have blogs to use as communication tools, although when they are gone one day we might be back to the days of printed mailing lists and subscriber magazines and journals. In fact, I think I’ve already come up with one ...The Entropy Times - your daily dose of doom. 

You heard about it here first.

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By the way - this is my 100th post. I can't believe I have actually got this far with this blog, and further can't believe that there are some 10,000 page views a month (although probably at least half are robots/government spies/friends checking that I am still batty). I'm thinking about actually trying to earn a few pennies from my endeavours and writing a book, making it available to buy from this site. It already has a working title - Mind the Vortex - How to Survive the 21st Century - but I'd be interested to hear if anyone thinks this is a good idea or a bad one. With all the work I am doing over at Fox Wood (this week I dug a humungous hole by hand and cleared half an acre of brambles with a sickle) I could do with a project that doesn't involve getting covered in mud and coming home with bleeding forearms and blistered hands. 

Thanks for reading 22 Billion Energy Slaves!

Of black ducks and mystery teachings

A small dolmen in a park in Copenhagen. 

In this week we have seen two events that might in the future be seen as small way markers along the path in the direction we are heading. The first one, close to home, was the sudden bankruptcy and cessation of Denmark's de facto national airline Cimber Sterling. The news, when it appeared on Thursday morning, came like a small black swan (let's call it a black duck) and shocked passengers at the airport were duly interviewed, with most of them standing forlornly beside their luggage with 'what am I supposed to do now?' attitudes.

The second event was on the other side of the world in Japan where it has been reported that the last of the country's 50 nuclear reactors has now been taken offline, with no realistic prospect of being reconnected in a country still dealing with the legacy of the meltdown at Fukushima. Plan B, as far as the Japanese are concerned, involves importing huge amounts of oil and gas to make up for the electricity shortfall. This can hardly be seen as a long term strategy for any number of reasons and is a timely reminder that our menu of energy options boils down to no more than a few dishes of the day.

If, like me, you regard events such as these as ever-mounting evidence of a growing crisis in the industrial world for which we are wholly unprepared, then the next logical step would seemingly be to prepare ourselves for the inevitable. Using the analogy of a large ship that is sailing towards an iceberg, we can either don our life jackets and stand ready by the lifeboats (having failed to convince the captain of the danger), or else pretend not to see the clearly visible icebergs looming in our path and instead carry on knocking back tequilas at the bar six decks below. Such measures, in the real world, might involve building as many useful skills as possible in order that we are not totally caught short when delicate supply chains shatter, or building greater community bonds so that you can take advantage of the division of labour when the energy slaves suddenly perish. There are certain practical things that you can do as well to ensure a relative degree of comfort for yourself and your family, such as planting a garden and insulating your house.

All of the above could be considered wise moves for those who, as Dmitry Orlov puts is, are not interested in sitting in the dark wearing dirty clothes wondering what went wrong. But taking the whole thing a stage further than the merely practical we could do ourselves a favour and build some resilience into our attitudes and the way we think about things and relate to the world. This makes sense from several perspectives. A problem, unless it is life threatening, is accorded a severity based on our perception of how serious it is. And in an age when problems are rushing towards us like an army of orcs in a Lord of the Rings movie, it would seem only prudent to adopt as many forms of defence against them as it is possible to muster.

It was with this in mind that I recently read a copy of John Michael Greer's latest book Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Now, I'm not going to say that this is a book review because a) I'm not at all qualified to review such a book and b) It could never be because to review a book you must at least maintain a façade of detached objectivity and anyone who has read this blog would simply not believe me if claimed that to be so. Furthermore, the book is primarily concerned with the mystery teachings, which have been studied and practised by mankind down the ages, and as such they can't be 'analysed' as such in a purely intellectual manner. So, instead, 'll just say what the book is about and what I got from it.

My background is about as non-spiritual as the next average Joe. I wasn't raised as a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim. I wasn't even raised as an atheist, and can probably count on the fingers of both feet the number of times I have ever been in a church that wasn't a school trip, a funeral or a wedding. In fact, like the overwhelming majority of people in the UK, I was raised as a kind religion-less materialist and the only kind of salvation or goal worthy of pursuing that was ever suggested to me was to 'make it' in the City or somewhere.

Nevertheless, I wasn't entirely without the feeling that there must be more to life than two flat dimensions and I do remember at an early age having a strong feeling that purpose of life must be to gaze in awe at the wonders of the universe. If that sound pretentious, I'm sorry, but it's the only way I can describe it. I'm not sure where that feeling came from, but it could have had something to do with my mother, who was a quiet spiritualist with a firm conviction of there being 'something more' based on an out-of-body experience she had had a small girl when she had 'died' from middle ear disease and was able to watch her sobbing parents and the frantic doctor from somewhere up near the ceiling. This must have struck a chord with me and a latent spirituality manifested itself in me around the age of 30 when, having read practically everything Alan Watts had ever written, I found myself drifting towards Buddhism. But any progress on my path to Nirvana was halted when I met a visiting lama in Copenhagen and was revolted by the sycophancy of his acolytes and their 'holier than thou' attitude. Buddhism, it suddenly seemed, was all about amassing karma by giving silk scarves to important people and elbowing others out of your way to do so.

Nevertheless, there were many good and useful things in Buddhism that have stayed with me and one of them is the idea that true transformation comes from within – and that this requires a lot of work. This, it turns out, is one of the core messages of the mystery teachings, and John Michael Greer explains their Seven Laws using the language of the science of ecology. By doing so he is repeating a tradition of presenting their teachings in a language that people in the modern age can understand. In ancient Greece, Plato taught them using the language of geometry, which was the hip science of the age back then, so Greer is translating them to language that we can readily understand.

Greer is also interested in correcting what he sees as a gaudy over-commercialised and watered down version of the mystery teachings and spiritualism in general that has mushroomed in recent decades, taking particular issue with the idea that positive thinking can make you financially rich and/or have any other effect in the material world of our everyday lives. Similarly, he is not impressed by any New Age 'airy fairy' insistence that we are all heading into a new Age of Aquarius via some form of apocalypse or rapture or mass rebirth of consciousness. The kind of transformation he has in mind requires a lot of practice and is hard work but ultimately much more rewarding.

The book is split into two sections with the first being an explanation of the Seven Laws of the mystery teachings explained through the language of ecology and the second being about how to use these teachings in your everyday life as a kind of psychic defence against the kinds of predicaments I mentioned above and a way of making sense of the universe on a level deeper than a purely intellectually rationalising basis. At the end of each section is a meditation exercise, an affirmation and a theme for reflection.

The Seven Laws are explained at some length, each with the analogy of a meadow with its various populations of field mice, snakes, birds of prey and plant species. They are set out as follows – with the explanation of each being taken directly from the book:

1 – The Law of Wholeness. Everything that exists is part of a whole system and depends on the health of the whole system for its own existence. It thrives only if the whole system thrives and it cannot harm the whole system without harming itself.

2 – The Law of Flow. Everything that exists is created and sustained by flows of matter, energy and information that come from the whole system to which it belongs and that return to the whole system. Participating in these flows, without interfering with them, brings health and wholeness; blocking them, in an attempt to turn flows into accumulations, causes suffering and disruption to the whole system and all its parts.

3 – The Law of Balance. Everything that exists can continue to exist only by being in balance with itself, with other things, and with the whole system of which it is a part. That balance is not found by going to one extreme or the other way by remaining fixed at a static point; it is created by self-correcting movements to either side of a midpoint.

4 – The Law of Limits. Everything that exists is subject to limits arising from its own nature, the nature of the whole system of which it is a part, and the nature of existence itself. Those limits are as necessary as they are inescapable, and they provide the foundation for all the beauty and power each existing thing is capable of manifesting.

5 – The Law of Cause and Effect. Everything that exists is the effect of causes at work in the whole system of which each thing is a part, and everything becomes, in turn, the cause of effects elsewhere in the whole system. In these workings of cause and effect, there must always be a similarity of kind between an effect and at least one of its causes, just as there must be a similarity of scale between an effect and the sum total of its causes.

6 – The Law of the Planes. Everything in existence exists and functions on one of several planes of being or is composed of things from more than one plane acting together as a whole system. These planes are discrete, not continuous, and the passage of influences from one plane to another can take place only under conditions defined by the relationship of the planes involved.

7 – The Law of Evolution. Everything that exists comes into being by a process of evolution. That process starts with adaption to changing conditions and ends with the establishment of a steady state of balance with its surroundings, following a threefold rhythm of challenge, response and reintegration. Evolution is gradual rather than sudden, and it works by increasing diversity and accumulating possibilities, rather than following a predetermined line of development.

Most of the above laws are easy enough to understand on a purely rational level for someone versed with popular science, with only the Law of Planes requiring some deep reflection to get grasp of. But the one perhaps of most interest unlocking the key of how to thrive (and I use that word cautiously …) in an age of industrial crises is the Law of Limits. This asserts that beauty and creativity can only flow when some concrete limit is placed on something. Given that everything has a concrete limit placed on it – but that modern though insists that this is otherwise – recognition of this fact allows for a blossoming of possibilities. Music is better when performed within the conventional limits of keys and scales placed on it, as is art. The implication is that life lived with the recognition of hard limits is in fact the opposite of restricting, and an acknowledgement of that fact opens up numerous possibilities.

The latter sections of the book deal with how to use the teachings in your own life and Greer admits that the book is not a definitive look at the mystery schools, but is more like a tempting morsel of bait that might attract those who are predisposed to study the teachings in greater depth to seek out their own mystery school teacher. As such it provided me with a great deal of insight into the nature of the disastrous ways in which industrial civilization has backed us into our current predicament and, more importantly, ways in which we can align ourselves better for a future more harmoniously in line with the natural systems that birthed us and of which we are a part of. I'd highly recommend the book to anyone with an even half-open mind to the idea that there might be something more to the universe than a great cosmic atomic game of billiards. What's more it is also an important addition to arsenal of anyone who considers that ecology matters in the ongoing fight to convince others that what we do to the environment we do to ourselves.

Looking for a place to crash

No place like home. Is England a good place in which to plan a post industrial future?
Photo from  www.virtual-shropshire.co.uk

People keep asking me where they think the best place would be to hold out when the post industrial age gets into full swing. I've said before that I think Britain is as good a place as any, with some large provisos. There are a number of reasons I think this to be so, which I'll go through nearer the bottom Here's a sample from an email a reader in Japan sent me:

“I'm trying to cobble together reasons for cautious optimism, or, at least, avoiding outright despair, since, among other things, I have two small children. I'm wondering if there is still time for some sort of managed transition or if a managed transition will occur in some places, while outright and rapid collapse occurs in others. And, thus, like all of us in the peak-oil-aware community, I spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out places where a gradual descent is more likely than outright collapse.”

What people are really saying, of course, is that they're scared. And with good reason. Taking a look at human history through an ecological perspective one cannot help but conclude that we have so vastly overshot our resource base – and are in fact consuming energy that was harvested for us millions of years ago – that we are like those cartoon characters that go off a cliff and hang there momentarily in the air before realising their situation just before gravity kicks in.

What happens when gravity re-establishes itself and the finite ecosystem on which we have evolved to live within – i.e. Earth – refuses to yield more energy treasures, is not going to be pretty. The first signs of this are already upon us in the form of financial tremors, shaking the foundations of the mostly abstract world of finance. But far more traumatic than any financial storm (although those can wreak a fair bit of havoc) will be the sense of drowning we start to experience as our artificially built human world is dragged beneath the waves by the concrete wellies of EROEI.

It's at this point, when it no longer makes sense to extract or 'produce' new energy because it would cost more energy than you would get back to do so, that things are going to get serious. Demand might still be rocketing for certain things like oil, coal, steel, concrete etc, but the straitjacket of supply will ensure that the price rockets to such an extent that only the very richest individuals, companies and nations will be able to afford them. We'll all feel the pinch, to put it mildly.

But of course nowhere is 'best' to try and weather such a cataclysm – the whole point of recognising the knock on effects of severely curtailed access to cheap and abundant energy is that there will be no 'one size fits all'. Thus, for me, Britain – or more specifically England – would work best – that is where I am from, after all. For a Mongolian herdsman, Mongolia would probably work best. It's wherever you feel most comfortable and would be able to build a good network of reliable friends and acquaintances that is the best.

Saying that, even without the aid of a crystal ball, some areas are clearly going to do worse than others. Only the most ecologically myopic would choose to move to an area in which human existence is strictly dependent upon the ability to pump water or grow crops using cheap energy. Las Vegas springs to mind. As does much of Saharan Africa. But let's not forget that the vast majority of humankind has no choice over where they live and it is only a few privileged people from the currently wealthy nations that have such a luxury. The chance to figure out a good place to be and to move there and get on with the hard business of fitting in and making a safe living is a great privilege open to only a few. If you're one of them, appreciate it.

But the huge windfall of almost free energy over the last century or so has made us energy illiterate. Energy, many people assume, comes out of wall sockets. If there's a blackout then energy companies and politicians are to blame. Cheap energy is our universal right, we are led to believe, and most people have no idea how fragile the state of affairs is.

Furthermore, as our societies industrialised and we left the land our ecological literacy has similarly diminished. I got a sharp lesson in this when we moved to Spain and lived on a hillside farm for three years. If it didn't snow heavily at the top of the mountain during the winter, we had no water in the summer and the trees died. It's a simple enough concept, but it didn't concern many of the foreigners moving to the area. Neighbours with more cash than us paid for tankers of water to be driven up the hill to their properties once a week to fill up their swimming pools at great expense. In the future this kind of extravagance will not just be frowned upon, it will be impossible.

But there is another fear factor at play. Aside from knowing where to live, people, myself included, want to know how long they've got before the music stops. I like using the analogy of stopping music because that's how I envisage our long descent. As I see it it will be like one of those children's birthday parties where all the kids are playing a game of stop-dance. The music is playing and all the kids are dancing merrily, flinging their arms out in joy and throwing shapes; a parent (her finger hovering over the 'pause' button on the CD player like some mischievous Greek goddess) decides when the music stops, whereupon all the kids have to stand as still as possible. The first one to move will be out, and then the music starts up again, albeit with less participants.

I'm not saying the jagged descent from Hubbert's peak will be anything like as much fun as playing stop dance (and there will be no jelly and ice cream at the end), but I am definitely of the 'long slow collapse' camp rather than the sudden abrupt end. There's a lot of space between a Promethean future living on spaceships among the stars on one hand and a sudden violent apocalypse on the other. Let's call that middle ground 'reality,' for want of a better word.

What we'll likely see then is periods of crisis, that could last anything from a couple of years to a generation, followed by extended periods of calm – but, crucially, at a lower tempo and with fewer players. This is the way in which civilizations decomplexify themselves and our industrial civilization won't be markedly different. In the end, after probably 200 years or so, 99% of fossil fuels will be a distant memory and our descendants, when they are not cursing us for destabilizing the climate and wiping out many of the planet's life support systems, will at least be thankful that we managed to extract so much metal and leave it lying around for remodelling into simpler forms of technology.

In the meantime, for most of us we will feel like Winnie the Pooh in the opening lines of A.A.Milne's classic story:

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”

Each of the bumps will be a nasty shock but it won't finish us off. They'll likely take the form of bouts of hyperinflation, regional resource conflicts, a local nuclear meltdown or small nuclear war, a total national collapse of fish or pollinating insects, a famine or two.

Bump, bump, bump.

Each time it will be painful and protracted but eventually we will sort ourselves out again and either adapt to a different area or change our ways until we find ourselves at the bottom of the stairs, on level ground, which we may as well call a steady state economy in balance with nature.

This final stage (well, nothing is final …) is what John Michael Greer calls the Ecotechnic future – a future of far less technological complexity where we have in all likelihood returned to the kind of spiritual practices that resemble more closely those of the Kalahari Bushmen than the Vatican.

Which is a long winded way of getting to say why I think Britain would, for me and my family at least, be the right place to strap ourselves in for the roller coaster ride of a lifetime. First of all, as I see it, there are two major down sides when discussing Britain as a 'safe' place to be. The first elephant in the room is population. With around 60 million people it means that the challenge of feeding everyone is twice as great as it was the last time we were challenged to do so, during the Second World War. It was tough then, it'll be impossible then next time around.

The second big downside is that there is an awful lot of nuclear material lying around the place. When financial collapse is followed by serious resource constraint we will still need to devote huge resources to safeguarding the waste produced to generate today's cheap electricity. Only a blind optimist could imagine that nuclear waste dumps would not one day be abandoned to the elements and allowed to leak out into the air, seas and groundwater. Most nuclear power stations are currently built in areas that will be prone to raised sea levels. They are also mostly built in areas of low population density where, historically, the locals have not had much clout in Westminster.

Given these two facts you won't find me moving anywhere near a large city or a nuclear power station. Luckily the peninsula of south west England has neither of these and is far enough from London to make it not worth the effort. At least that's what I'm counting on – I'm sure people will insist otherwise.

There is also the problem of land ownership in Britain (specifically England) – but that's a problem I see resolving itself soon enough when the property bubble deflates and resources devoted to ensuring people are not allowed to live off the land are over stretched, forcing a change of policy in line with resilience and sustainability (as has been the case in Wales).

And now the good news. For all the complaining that people do about Britain it still has a lot going for it. One of the side effects of having, and losing, the world's most powerful empire is a culture of breast beating and teeth gnashing by those with less economic power. During the era of empire, to keep the elite at the centre of power they had to offer everyone else something. We natives were only restless when not being thrown a bone by the masters. And in those days, as Britain's imperial core extracted wealth from half the globe, there were plenty of bones to go around. But since the empire has shrunk in size to, as Adrian Mole memorably put it, some islands on the map that he couldn't locate because a cake crumb had fallen on them, the sense of entitlement hasn't shrunk correspondingly. I have been in enough bars in Spain to know that entire legions of people have left the UK, disgusted that it has 'gone to the dogs', and choosing to display their patriotism by moving to another, less economically fortunate, country.

Well fine. But what I see in the UK is a much greater sense of cooperation and willingness to face up to facts by quite a large slice of the population. Losing an empire can either make you bitter or it can turn you into a stoic. 'Mustn't grumble' people say, or 'worse things happen at sea'. Getting by is what is important and in most places community spirit is alive and well.

One only has to look at the Transition movement, and all of the people who practice sustainability as a matter of course. Up and down the country countless thousands are engaged, each to their own extent, in growing food organically, reviving old crafts and generally living in a post-consumer way. What's more, this isn't even a new thing, it's been part of the national character for decades. Perhaps thousands of years of having to deal with despotic kings and nobles has taught us that the best way to live is modestly – whatever it is there is a great reservoir of resilience built into the culture and it does not manifest itself in remotely the same way as, say, the people who choose to buy several guns and a shack in rural Montana and live off bear meat.

I don't mean everyone, of course. But perhaps enough.

Furthermore Britain, being the first industrial nation, still has plenty of the infrastructure that allowed it to prosper in those heady newly-industrialised days. One of the main elements of this is the canal network, which reaches into most corners of the country and has survived largely intact thanks to the money and efforts of enthusiasts and the tourism industry over the years. Canal boats are still in manufacture and shifting freight from roads to horse-pulled canal barges will be one of the low energy possibilities of the future that will keep regional centres connected and ensure trade links.

Aside from the canals there is also an excellent (by most standards) train network. Margaret Thatcher did her bit to destroy the inefficient extremities of the network but as the economic calculus shifts there is no great reason why old branch lines cannot be brought back into service again. Furthermore, the UK is criss crossed (some would say covered) with good quality (for now) roads that, even if they are used less and less frequently by motor vehicles, will still be very usable by low-tech transport such as horses and bicycles. The smallish size of the country also makes it navigable by bicycle and it's entirely possible to cycle fully-laden from one extremity to the other on a bike in around 10 days (I know, I've done it).

Of course, there are monumental challenges facing Britain in getting it on track to becoming a sustainable set of islands – but show me a place where this isn't so. The only place I can think of that might even get close is Greenland – and even that might find itself at the centre of an oil war.

Lastly, but definitely not least, it's worth remembering that many of the ancient spiritual traditions that were so prevalent in Britain until the all-conquering Christianity arrived, are still very much practised, albeit often out of sight. Philip Carr-Gomm in his Book of English Magic reckons that in England you're never too far from a practising witch – even if she does look like just a regular person in a regular job. Druidism is booming and Pagan societies are enjoying a similar resurgence. What's more, being an 'eccentric' when it comes to displaying your fondness for Earth spirits is more-or-less acceptable in England, and I for one am looking forward to seeing the forthcoming film the Spirit of Albion.

What all these have in common is a worship of Earth magic i.e. a religion of being connected to the planet that supports you. In the decades and centuries ahead, with organised 'revealed' religions on the wane, these alternatives could be ready to step into the limelight. This has always been acknowledged: step into any old English church, lie down on one of the pews (assuming a service isn't going on) and focus on the celling. Up there, among all the angels and frescoes and what have you, more often than not, you'll likely see a cheeky leaf-fringed face looking back down at you. This is the Green Man – a little architectural anomaly in most churches but nevertheless an undeniable reminder that, behind all the pompous edifices of our constructed temples lies the inescapable fact that we are all, whether we like it or not, a part of the ecosystem.

***

By the way, along with the RSS feed problem, which now seems to be fixed, some people were also finding it difficult to post comments. I have now removed all barriers, so you shouldn't have any more problems.

Not a Doomer, a Peakster

Yes, that's us. The Earth, photographed from a distance of 4 billion miles by Voyager, is the dot in the centre to the right. Do we look like masters of the universe?

Wikipedia will tell you that peak oil is the theoretical point at which half of the world's oil reserves have been extracted. This is literally true, but it's not the whole story. Many people in the peak oil blogosphere spend inordinate amounts of time and mental energy trying to figure out how much oil or gas is left in various fields around the world and how much time we have left to do something (i.e. how much time we have left to do nothing).

To me, this is not what peak oil is about. I know, for example, that one day (God forbid) I am going to die. I don't spend much time trying to predict the exact date of my death, instead I just get on with living in the time allotted to me. My demise is not so much a problem that can be dealt with, but a predicament that I must live with. In the same way it seems to me that to focus so much on how much recoverable fossil fuel there is in the ground seems to be missing the point.

But I haven't always thought like this.

For me, the penny dropped in around 2009 when I read Thomas Homer Dixon's The Upside of Down. Here, for the first time, was someone talking about the ecological crises we face from an entirely different angle. Instead of evil corporations and politicians Homer Dixon took a broader view, looking at the history of empires, using Rome as an example of how civilizations begin to feed off themselves and eventually collapse. It occurred to me for the first time that I might be part of a civilization in decline.

Amazon.com, the next time I logged on, kindly said that if I liked Thomas Homer Dixon, I'd probably like John Michael Greer too. I put The Long Descent in my electronic basket and, a few days later, the book that would change my life forever arrived in my postbox. I eagerly read the jacket – at the top it read 'A harrowing but ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of the age of oil'. I read it cover to cover in a day.

Whoa! The book was a banquet for the mind – a true epiphany The concept of catabolic collapse was probably the most radical idea I had ever heard of. Of course, I had heard the term peak oil bandied around for years but it had always remained at the abstract level. Reading The Long Descent I suddenly found myself staring into a chasm, and it was far more frightening than any environmental apocalypse scenario I had considered before. Just who was this John Michael Greer and what gave him the right to such genius? I Googled him, expecting to uncover a picture of a mild-mannered but crumpled-looking academic with a neat centre parting standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation. Instead I was presented with a man with a long beard and wearing white robes standing in a megalithic stone circle like some real-life Merlin.

I was stunned. I found out that he was an American archdruid and had written books on spirituality, magic and science fiction. He did not seem to be possessed of a normal mind, so sharp and penetrating were his insights. All of the other non-fiction authors I had read to date paled by comparison.

But I was hungry for more, and sent off for more books. Richard Heinberg was next with The Party's Over and Peak Everything. Then came others. Michael C. Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, James Howard Kunstler, Sharon Astyck – I devoured them all.

And every book I read seemed to spread out tentacles and demand that I read the works of other great minds. E.F. Schumacher, whose book Small is Beautiful was one of the core texts here (as is his Guide For The Perplexed), and eventually I got onto William R. Catton's Overshoot – the first book to seriously address human ecology back in the 1980s.

All of these writers addressed one simple fact – the peaking of world oil supplies, happening right about now. But what they went into in ever greater detail is the consequences of that peaking. Whole new worlds opened up before me. I found myself reading and thinking about this stuff practically every waking minute (and sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it too). The realisation that we would not face a nice orderly transition to some other kind of fuel that would allow us to keep everyday life looking more or less like it does at the moment had hit me in the gut like a three hundred pound gorilla charging at me. The implications!

Up until then, my general reaction to the term peak oil was: so what? As anyone raised on a diet of environmental liberalism I despised oil for polluting the seas and heating the climate. Wars were fought over oil, river deltas poisoned and real-life J.R.Ewings existed just because of this sticky black goo. The sooner it was all gone then the sooner we could all drive electric cars powered by wind turbines!

But I had been missing the point all along.

I realised that I had become a peak oil Cassandra. Up until then I had always assumed I was an environmentalist. I felt I had been an environmentalist from the age of about six when I gazed at a shiny new plastic bucket in our garden and worried to myself that it seemed so … unnatural. From that point onwards I followed the familiar arc of learning and, attending a meeting with Jonathan Porritt when I was 18 made up my mind that, whatever I did in life, it had to involve saving the world somehow.

I failed miserably on that last bit, and despite doing all the greenie things such as recycling, experimenting with vegetarianism, working as a rainforest volunteer etc, etc, the gap between what I believed in and what I should actually be doing continued to widen. The great consumer culture boom that began in the 1980s was like a tsunami that carried everyone along on it and it was only possible to profess environmental views in polite society if it were done in the context of middle class green consumerist tokenism. Cognitive dissonance led to gnawing guilt and in the year 2000 I quit my well paid job as an energy trader – a job which I just seemed to have floated into like a stick being swept along on a river - and set off around the world for almost two years with my wife, living out of a backpack. Along the way I spent quite some time in Laos, and saw first hand how a nation could be stripped of its natural resources in the name of development.

When we came back we started a family and moved to Spain where I set up an environmental newspaper and renovated an old farmhouse with a view to becoming an organic farmer. This was all well and good and I appeared to be finally walking my green talk, but what I still did not appreciate was the fact that my whole way of life and the system we lived under was still vastly subsidised by fossil fuels. I laboured under the idea (propagated in my newspaper) that at some point people would 'wake up' and become environmentally conscious. I guess you could call it naïvety.

How do you explain to someone who considers themselves non-religious that the modern religion they have been indoctrinated with is scientific materialism wrapped up in the idea of progress? It is a bit like trying to explain the concept of wetness to a fish. I considered whether I was religious or not. Having been brought up to all intents and purposes an atheist, how could I possibly consider anything else?

But peak oil had taught me a lot about the way the world works. To plunge into the peak oil universe is to begin to grapple with everything from thermodynamics, macro economics and human ecology to mythology, sacred geometry and the true meaning of religion. I looked at the word religion again – it comes from the Latin and means 'a reattachment' to the universe that we are a part of. Anyone who seriously considers themselves as a separate entity from the universe should go on a long walk somewhere remote and have a good think.

I began to think in terms of energy and matter. We all live on a globe floating in space around a sun. All of our energy comes in the form of relatively weak and diffuse rays from that sun and the fact that we are gobbling our way through fossilised sunlight in the form of oil with no regard for the next generation or the life support systems of the planet that we have evolved to live on – the only planet we will ever live on - is a cause for some concern (to put it mildly). Since our grandfathers' grandfathers were babies we have used this windfall of energy recklessly to convert materials formed by nature into materials that only have value to mankind. Everything we have produced, from cars and factories to hand crafted violins and beautiful works of art is a form of pollution from the Earth's point of view. Every time they tell us on the news that the economy has grown a bit, that effectively means that the natural world has shrunk a bit.

But point this out to people and you will usually be met with a blank look, or worse. To suggest that the vast store of fossilised sunlight we have been gorging ourselves on for generations is coming to an end and that our societies, economies and psyches are utterly unprepared for it is to invite being called a doomer. Another thing one quickly learns via peak oil is that when confronted with perceived bad news we quickly revert to our base social primate 'see no evil …' selves.

If you want to find out for yourself try telling a few people the following points and check their reaction:

• In the future we won't have most of the medicines we rely on today
• In the future we won't build bases on the Moon or Mars
• In the future there will be no new energy sources that rival petroleum in their ability to power a vast industrial economy
• In the future there will be no point in having a pension
• In the future very few people will travel to foreign countries

In most instances the people who don't laugh and tell you to get a life will suggest instead that you should read up a bit on 'what's really going on'. A vast solar array covering the Sahara/Nevada Desert will power all of Europe/North America. New Thorium powered nuclear reactors will come online shortly and give us all the electricity we desire at virtually no cost. We'll grow algae in the sea and use it to make biodiesel. A big mirror in space will beam down energy straight to our smart grids. 

In any case, there's no need to worry because the Arabs have masses of oil but they are hoarding it for themselves. The planet is actually full of oil but the evil corporate controlled media is keeping it a secret from us. 

Those clever guys in the labs will think of something!

Quite often people won't be quite so polite when you suggest that humankind is subject to the same kind of limitations as other species and to say so is to invite foaming mouthed rhetoric spewed out angrily.

If you know people who say these things what they are doing is projecting their belief system onto you. They don't need any evidence that we are destiny's darlings (to borrow a phrase) or that the entire planet seems to have been formed just so that we could evolve into our present form and spend our time playing Angry Birds on our iPhones. They don't need any evidence because this is what most people choose to believe – and if enough people all believe something all together doesn't that make it come true?

Alas, no. We have but one planet and we are but one species amongst millions on its surface. Individually we are microscopic and insignificant. We have a great capacity for destruction, but also a great capacity for creativity. We have never really got over our monkey mindedness, which is a shame because that would have been quite useful in our current situation. “What's a smart species like us doing in a predicament like this?” asked the Italian peak oil writer Ugo Bardi a few weeks ago.

Quite.

Still, if all of the above sounds like bad news, then there is good news as well. Like all people in a state of denial (and I am including British environmentalists George Monbiot and Mark Lynas here), it can be tough to face up to reality. But once you have done so things become easier. To study and become viscerally aware of the implications of our looming energy descent naturally leads to questioning about what we can do about it. This is the good part, because it involves empowering yourself. Growing your own food, building stronger relationships, quitting the soul destroying cubicle job, insulating your home and stepping off the debt treadmill are just some of the overwhelmingly positive things we can all do. You can get involved with your local Transition movement and get a hold of Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook. You can brew your own beer, make your own soap, write your own songs and decide never to watch the X Factor again.

These are some of the things that I focus on on a daily basis. An awareness of peak oil  - lets call ourselves peaksters - provides us with insights into the nature of our predicament – it's going to be a rough ride down the far side of Hubbert's peak, but we can either rise to the challenge as individuals, families and groups, or we can keep our heads in the sand and allow ourselves to be buffeted around by the forces of chaos as the entire system we have built our lives into begins to come apart at the seams.

The choice, as they say, is ours.

22 Billion Energy Slaves

Hubbert's Peak. Poster courtesy of www.afterpeakoil.com

Welcome to my new blog. The title refers to the ex-oil geologist Colin Campbell's remark that the amount of work we get today from fossil fuels is the equivalent of having some 22 billion human slaves working for us round the clock 365 days a year. That's a lot of service we are getting but the shocking thing is that in the coming years and decades most, if not all, of these slaves are going to go away. What we are going to do as those slaves head off into retirement is the core theme of this blog.

Yes, Peak Oil. It's a term that is being bandied around increasingly these days and, basically, it refers to the fact that humanity has extracted around half of all known accessible reserves of oil and other liquid fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. Unfortunately, not many people take this fact too seriously - after all, if we've used up the first 150 years' worth doesn't that mean we don't have to worry about them running out for another 150 years?

If only. We are right now standing on the bumpy plateau of the oil production curve - or Hubbert's Peak as it's known - names after the late American geophysicist M. King Hubbert who sketched out a bell curve for US petroleum production, which posited that supply would peak in the late 60s or early 70s. His theory proved remarkably prescient, not just for the US but for all major oil fields, and the US did indeed experience a peak and has been in decline ever since. By the same reasoning Hubbert predicted that world oil supply would peak in 1995. He might have been off by a few years, and nobody can agree when or even if the peak was reached, but the International Energy Authority now states that conventional crude oil peaked in 2006.

A potted history of Peak Oil can be summarised as follows:

- In 1955 Hubbert predicted it but was ignored and even vilified.
- In the early 1970s oil shocks sent the industrial world into a panic and emergency measures were introduced to conserve energy
- In the 1980s people who were sick of energy rationing voted in politicians who promised a return of the good times - namely but not exclusively Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Raegan. These politicians pulled out all the stops and, combined with new (and very timely) discoveries in the North Sea and Alaska the industrial world was drowned in cheap oil ... for a time.
- Now, in 2011, with a peak having been reached we suddenly find ourselves in the position that emerging giant economies such as India and China, with a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, are demanding their share of the energy bonanza. That's why oil has gone up from around 10 dollars a barrel to the current price of over 100. Nobody knows how high the price will be in two, five or ten years, but 200 dollars a barrel does not seem unlikely.

Why should any of this matter?

Unfortunately it matters a great deal. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that what we must face up to in the coming years will be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced and there will not be a single one of us whose world will not be turned upside down. Those 22 billion energy slaves will be going away, and there aren't any other kinds waiting in the wings to take over. With a tiny handful of exceptions, every one of us alive in the rich world today was weaned on oil. Our food is grown with it, it powers the way we move around and everything from clothes and medicine is made with it. We might as well call ourselves Homo Petroleus.

It's normally at this point in a discussion that someone politely (or impolitely) points out to me that, don't I realise, the slack from oil will be taken up by renewable energy, nuclear power and other things, like coal.

One of the points of this blog is to detail why that won't be happening.

It's a difficult thing to acknowledge but what we face right now is nothing less than the end of the industrial age. Some people might say 'great' - but we shouldn't romanticise the pre industrial age. For the great majority of us the rest of our lives will consist of one crisis after another as political and financial institutions fall, energy crises rear their heads and ecological catastrophes loom. It won't be pretty and, given that several billion of the world's population rely on fossil fuels for their food production, we can count on there being a lot less of us around in the future.

While recognising these facts is likely the most important thing you can ever grasp, it is equally important not to equate it with some kind of apocalypse. Yes, things are going to get ugly, but it will be a long process. Civilisations generally take a couple of hundred years to die. Ours is unlikely to be exceptional - although we often think it is. But with the right preparation it will be perfectly possible to at least manage our energy descent in a way that keeps us alive and, if we're lucky, comfortable.

These are the kind of hard to stomach facts that I will be presenting in this blog. But one shouldn't despair. The kind of steps I am going to be suggesting generally involve taking charge of your affairs and thus empowering yourself. All of us have been bombarded with the psychological detritus of the industrial age since we were born and learning how to switch off its influence is like lifting a huge load off your shoulders.

A bit about me. I'm 40 years old, a father of two and although I am British I currently live in Denmark. I studied economics at university and went on to become an energy trader but then jacked in the corporate world to become a journalist in Spain, where I started my own environmental newspaper The Olive Press. Since then I have been the editor of a newspaper in Denmark and have been a freelance correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. I have also been an active participant in the Peak Oil blogosphere (so dispersed are its adherents at present that's the main forum for communication) and have studying the implications of what is in store for us for the past couple of years. There are a number of key figures in the Peak Oil scene and most of them are American. Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over and Peak Everything, is a favourite of mine, as is another hard hitter Dmitry Orlov, who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union firsthand.

There are other names of course but my principal influence, which I will fess up to right from the start, has been and continues to be the Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, John Michael Greer, whose book The Long Descent simply blew me away. His weekly Peak Oil blog The Archdruid Report has become an addictive cerebral dose of analysis and food for thought and is read by thousands. Incisive as his essays are, he has always maintained that his analysis springs purely from his own American perspective and acknowledges that other cultures may interpret his ideas in slightly different ways. It's in this spirit that I'm presenting this series of blog posts - or dispatches - from a British perspective. We have our own political system and ways of doing things that can, at times, be quite different to the US. It's going to be quite a journey because the one thing that becomes apparent as you start to explore Peak Oil is that immediately a host of other disciplines and subjects present themselves. Indeed, one might expect a contemplation of Peak Oil to be a never ending procession of production charts and geological analysis. It isn't.

To gain a thorough understanding of the challenges that are beginning to force themselves upon us it will be necessary to explore everything from economics and physics (especially the Laws of Thermodynamics), to religion, architecture, social theory, psychology and ancient history. There will also be large doses of philosophy, analysis of current affairs and DIY. It's going to be an interesting exploration and I hope that you, the reader, will share it with me. There is little time for preparation (that should have started 30 years ago) but I aim to produce one post per week, or more if time allows.

To round off this post I'll give you a little hint of the urgency of our situation. In 2009 the august and dry International Energy Agency failed to mention the term 'Peak Oil' anywhere in its 600 page annual report on the state of the world's energy supplies. In the 2010 report is casually mentioned Peak Oil for the first time and stated that it had already happened. In the 2011 report, which came out a few days ago, comes with a number of dire warnings suggesting that if we don't change our ways quickly then much of humankind will have been wiped out by the end of the century. If that sounds alarmist then that's because it is. If a report could have a flashing blue light on it and an air raid siren then you can guarantee that this one would.

But did you read that in the news? No, I thought not.