by John Michael Greer

One of the lessons of history is that change, no matter how drastic it
appears on the pages of history books, is rarely anything like so
sudden for those who live through it. Read an account of the French
Revolution, for example, and events seem to follow one another like
explosions from a string of firecrackers, from the final crisis of the
Ancien Régime straight through to the fall of Napoleon. For the man or
woman in the French street, though, these happenings were scattered
threads in a fabric of months and years woven from the plainer cordage
of ordinary life.

Partly this is a function of the way historical narrative compresses
time. It bears remembering that a teenage Parisienne who sat
daydreaming of her upcoming wedding on the day that Louis XVI summoned
the États-General in 1788 would most likely have been a grandmother on
the day the Allied armies marched into Paris after the battle of
Waterloo in 1815. Equally, though, it's rare for historical events to
have the same apparent importance at the time that they are assigned
in the historian's hindsight, not least because the everyday process
of making a living and moving through the stages of human existence
plays a larger role in most lives than the occasional tumults that
make the history books.

This lesson needs to be kept in mind as we try to make sense of the
implications of the crisis of industrial society, not least because it
offers some protection against the common bad habit of projecting
daydreams onto the inkblot patterns of the future. That habit of
thinking is more than usually at issue in exploring the theme of this
week's post, the nature of daily life in the decades ahead of us.

The role of wishful thinking in driving the apocalyptic expectations
so common in contemporary culture rarely shows itself so clearly as
here. In the weeks leading up to the Y2K noncrisis, I knew quite a
respectable number of people whose conviction that industrial
civilization was about to undergo total collapse was all too clearly
motivated by the belief that this meant that come January 1, 2000,
they would no longer have to continue living the lives they had made
for themselves. You'd think that the prospect of mass death would be a
good deal more daunting than even the most humdrum modern existence,
but it's always part of the narrative of imminent apocalypse that
dieoff only happens to other people; no matter how poorly suited the
people in question were to the strenuous task of surviving the
overnight collapse of a civilization, each one of them believed that
they'd be among the lucky few.

The same sort of logic pervades certain corners of the peak oil scene.
I've met far too many people who don't know enough about plant care to
keep a potted petunia healthy, and have very likely never put in an
eight-hour day of hard physical labor in their lives – most middle
class Americans haven't, after all – and yet who nonetheless talk
enthusiastically about the life they expect to lead in a
self-sufficient rural lifeboat ecovillage as industrial civilization
crashes into ruin a comfortable distance away. It's all very
reminiscent of the aftermath of the Sixties, when a great many people
headed back to the land with equally high hopes; the vast majority of
them straggled back to the cities a few months or years later with
their hopes in shreds, having discovered that fantasies of the good
life in nature's lap make poor preparation for the hard work,
unremitting discipline, and relative poverty of life as a subsistence
farmer.

The would-be communards of the Sixties had an advantage not shared by
their counterparts in the peak oil movement. Rural land was relatively
cheap, and money was fairly easy to come by, not least because the
counterculture scene always had a sprinkling of members with large
trust funds who functioned as the sugar daddies of the movement. As
the Summer of Love gave way to the summer of Altamont and the urban
neighborhoods that nurtured hippie culture went to seed, communes in
the countryside were a significant option, and a great many of them –
I don't know that a census was ever done, but there were certainly
thousands – sprouted as a result.

That has not happened in the wake of peak oil. Partly, of course, it's
one thing to leave the city behind for a rural commune when you're
nineteen years old and can put all your worldly goods into a knapsack,
with plenty of room left over for dreams; it's quite another thing to
do that when you're forty and comfortably middle-class, with a family
to support, a career to think of, and the prospect of retirement
sufficiently visible on the horizon of your future that the impact of
your choices on your pension is always somewhere in your thoughts.
Today's peak oil activists very often resemble the second of these
categories a good deal more than the first, which goes a long way to
explain the gaping difference between the number of lifeboat
ecovillages that have gotten onto the drawing boards and the number of
them that have actually been built.

Still, this is only one reflection of a much broader problem, which is
that lifeboat ecovillages do not make economic sense in today's world.
However self-sufficient they may turn out to be in the deindustrial
future their planners envision, they are anything but self-sufficient
here and now, when they have to be built and paid for. Nor is it at
all clear how soon they will become self-sufficient if the future
turns out to be a gradual descent into the deindustrial age, rather
than the sudden plunge so often imagined these days.

This is where the perspective I brought up at the beginning of this
essay – the difference between history as read in retrospect, and
history as lived at the time – becomes crucial. Seen in retrospect,
the changes that will follow the decline of world petroleum production
are likely to be sweeping and global. From the perspective of those
who live through them, however, those changes are much more likely to
take gradual and local forms. This will make them harder to notice,
but paradoxically easier to meet.

Imagine, for example, a scenario in which worldwide production of
conventional crude oil drops by an average of 5% a year, and other
fossil fuels follow gradual depletion curves of their own. Especially
at first, the gap can be offset with biofuels, tar sands, and other
unconventional sources; yearly production totals for liquid fueld may
even increase, though this won't include an accounting of the fuel
burnt to extract oil from tar sands or the petroleum products used to
grow biofuel crops, and thus will hide the fact that there's less
energy available for other uses. The need to funnel an ever-increasing
fraction of fuel into producing more fuel, coupled with expanding
global population and the ongoing transfer of economic and political
power from an aging American empire to its successors, will tend to
drive fuel prices up; economic contraction driven by the twilight of
cheap energy will tend to decrease demand, and drive them back down;
factor in speculation, and you get wild gyrations in energy costs,
coupled to cycles of economic boom and bust of an intensity not seen
in the Western world since the nineteenth century.

All of this spells trouble, without a doubt. To rising energy prices
and contracting economies, add the public health consequences of
increasing poverty and the likelihood that the end of the American
empire will result in wars as bloody and protracted as those that
followed the decline of every other major commercial empire in recent
history, and you get a recipe for massive change. I've argued in
previous posts that these changes mark the first stage of the decline
and fall of Western industrial civilization – the change from
affluence industrialism to scarcity industrialism – and that it will
be followed by further stages of contraction and social
transformation, leading into a dark age several centuries long from
which our successor societies will eventually emerge.

From the perspective of some future Edward Gibbon of the year 3650 or
so, outlining The Decline and Fall of the American Empire as he
strolls past sheep grazing on the mossy ruins of ancient Washington
DC, all this will doubtless seem traumatic enough. For those who
experience that transformation first hand, though, it will likely have
a much different appearance. The young Parisienne whose image I
invoked at the beginning of this essay, after all, did not go to sleep
one night in the agrarian, half-feudal France of the Ancien Régime and
wake up the next morning as a grandmother in the nascent industrial
nation that France became in Napoleon's wake. Even those changes in
the interval that brought her grief – any sons she had, for example,
would have faced high odds of dying a soldier's death – would have
been spread out over the years, part of a fabric of many other
experiences.

Similarly, the unraveling of today's industrial society can be
expected to follow a similar tempo of change. If the scenario I've
outlined above is anything close to the shape the future holds for us,
we can expect to witness economic, social, and political turmoil
beyond anything the industrial world has experienced in living memory.
We will all be attending more funerals than we do nowadays, and our
appearance as the guest of honor at one of them will likely come
noticeably sooner than it otherwise would. Most of us will learn what
it means to go hungry, to work at many different jobs, to have paper
wealth become meaningless, and to watch established institutions go to
pieces around us. A quarter century or so from now, the world may be a
very different place, but on the way there each of us will have had to
deal with the same unoriginal challenges of everyday life we face today.

The continuity of history as a lived experience imposes requirements
on planning for the post-peak future that haven't always been noticed.
Like the imaginary lifeboat ecovillages that would make perfect
economic sense in an imagined world, but can't even scrape together
the funding to get built in this one, a good many of the plans and
projects that have been discussed as a response to peak oil make no
provision for the fact that people will still have to live their lives
and make a living while they wait for those projects to justify
themselves. Those projects that make good practical sense here and
now, or at least place no great burden on the people who choose to
pursue them, will be a good deal more viable than those that can only
support themselves in a radically different world than the one we
inhabit. In the weeks to come I plan on sketching out some outlines of
how such an approach to the future might be crafted.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/08/tempo-of-change.html