by John Michael Greer

The mismatch between the narratives of sudden apocalypse that shape
so much of today's debate about the future, on the one hand, and the
sluggish pace at which the predicament of industrial society unfolds
in the real world, on the other, found a poster child of sorts last
weekend. During the days of uncertainty before Hurricane Gustav's
arrival on the Louisiana coast, some enthusiastic soul posted claims
to the peak oil newsblog The Oil Drum that the hurricane would bring
industrial civilization itself crashing down in ruins.

I was pleased to note that this announcement seems to have fallen on
unsympathetic ears. The Oil Drum's forte is shrewd technical
analysis, and its staff – if I may so describe the loose association
of regular posters and commenters who give that excellent site its
tone and direction – set aside such speculations and did their usual
exemplary job, mapping out the oil platforms and refineries likely to
be affected by Gustav and posting damage estimates that turned out to
be fairly close to the picture now emerging on the ground. Gustav was
a moderately strong storm; it forced the evacuation of nearly every
offshore and coastal petroleum facility in the Gulf of Mexico,
causing substantial short-term production losses; the long-term
effects of the storm will not be clear for weeks, but all by itself,
$30 billion or so in estimated damage piled atop an already faltering
economy will certainly have an impact.

The difference between the fantasy of sudden collapse and the reality
of one more localized jolt piling additional burdens on a stumbling
society is well worth keeping in mind. Like the proverbial frog in
the saucepan, those who think of apocalyptic collapse as the only way
industrial civilization can break down are far less likely to notice
the gradual changes in their environment that are leading in the same
direction, just more slowly. It's as though, to shift stories, the
boy who cried wolf was convinced that immense armies of wolves would
suddenly swoop down and eat up all the sheep in the world at once,
and mistook every whistle of wind in the trees for the distant
howling of the wolf pack to end all wolf packs; meanwhile,
practically under his nose, real wolves – scruffy, undersized, and
quite depressingly few in number compared to the massed uber-wolves
of the fantasy – were picking off a sheep or two each day from the
fringes of the flock.

As both these metaphors suggest, the fixation on sudden collapse has
practical disadvantages. If you're a frog in a saucepan, and the only
idea of heat you're willing to consider involves all the water in the
saucepan suddenly flashing into steam, you probably won't jump while
your legs are still uncooked enough to do so; if you're guarding
sheep from wolves, and groups of wolves numbering fewer than fifty
are beneath your notice, your sheep are going to be eaten. In the
same way, there are plenty of practical steps that can be taken here
and now by individuals, that will likely make the slow unraveling of
industrial society much less horrific than it might otherwise be.
Most of those steps would be, or at least appear to be, irrelevant in
the face of sudden global catastrophe, and in fact it's not uncommon
to find believers in some such catastrophe dismissing these practical
steps in exactly those terms.

Mind you, there are other reasons why those steps are easy to
dismiss. Every one of them has a price tag of some sort, denominated
in money, labor, comfort, convenience, or unimpeded access to the
smorgasbord of distractions today's industrial civilization offers
its inmates. By contrast, our culture's two dominant narratives about
the future – the narrative of apocalypse and its twin and shadow, the
narrative of inevitable progress – are popular at least in part
because they push the necessity and the costs of change onto somebody
else: the "they" who are expected to think of something just in time
to keep progress on track, for example, or the supposedly faceless
billions who are expected to hurry up and die en masse so that the
flag of some future utopia can be pitched atop their graves.

I've talked about some of the steps in question already on this blog,
but today I'd like to turn to something a bit different from those
previous discussions: the question of how people will make a living
during the long unraveling of the industrial age.

That's a question that has received surprisingly little attention in
recent years, and a good deal of that neglect, I think, can be laid
at the door of the apocalyptic narrative. According to that
narrative, after all, nothing much changes until everything does; you
keep on punching the timeclock at your present job until the day that
civilization falls apart, and then, if you happen to be among the
survivors, you step into whatever new role the apocalypse has
ordained for you – subsistence farmer, tribal hunter-gatherer,
protein source for the local cannibal population, or what have you.
At the same time, the absence of a 9-to-5 routine on the far side of
apocalypse is likely to be an important source of the narrative's
popularity; I'm far from the only person who noticed, during the
runup to the Y2K noncrisis, how many people predicting imminent doom
seemed exhilarated by the notion that they would not have to go to
work on January 2, 2000.

If I'm right and the descent into the deindustrial future unfolds
over generations, though, that enticing prospect is not in the cards.
Rather, the vast majority of us will need to earn our livings in a
world that, while it will be changing around us, is extremely
unlikely to change in ways that will make that process any easier
than it is now. During the period I've described in other posts as
the age of scarcity industrialism, something like today's money
economy will likely remain firmly in place, though the household
economy and other forms of production and exchange outside the money
economy will likely play a steadily growing role. During the age of
salvage economies that I expect to follow the twilight of the
industrial system, money of some sort will likely remain in use on a
small scale, as it does in most dark ages, but most day-to-day
transactions will take place via barter or other systems of exchange
outside the money economy; again, that's standard practice in dark
ages. In both periods, though, people will work for their livings –
and will likely work a good deal harder than many Americans do today.

Nor will their jobs be the same as the ones that employ most
Americans nowadays. The flood of cheap abundant energy that surged
through the industrial world during the twentieth century reshaped
every dimension of the economy in its image, and nearly all the
things we have grown up considering normal and natural are artifacts
of that highly abnormal and unnatural state of affairs. Very few
people in the industrial world today spend their workdays producing
goods or providing necessary services; instead, pushing paper has
become the standard employment, and preparation for a paper-pushing
career the standard form of education. The once-mighty archipelago of
trade schools that undergirded the rise of America as an industrial
power sank with barely a trace in the second half of the twentieth
century. I once lived three blocks away from the shell of one such
school; it had been engulfed by a community college, and classrooms
that once hummed with the busy noises of machine-shop equipment and
the hiss of hot solder were being used to train a new generation of
receptionists, brokers, and medical billing clerks

The postindustrial economy proclaimed by Daniel Bell many years ago,
and accepted as an accurate description of economic reality since
then, was never much more than a shell game. The societies of the
industrial world were every bit as dependent on industry as they had
ever been; they simply exported the industries to Third World
countries where labor was cheap and environmental regulation
nonexistent, and continued to reap the benefits back home. Those
arrangements only worked, however, because cheap abundant energy made
transport costs negligible, and systematic distortions in patterns of
exchange pumped wealth from the Third World to a handful of
industrial nations, providing the latter with the wherewithal to pay
a very large fraction of their populations to do jobs that don't
actually need to be done. As energy becomes scarce and expensive
again, and the imperial systems that concentrated the world's wealth
in a minority of nations are shredded by the rise of new centers of
power, those arrangements will break down. As that happens, a great
many goods and necessary services now done offshore will need to be
done at home once again, and a great many professions that produce no
goods and provide no necessary services will likely drop off the
economic map.

Prophecy is a risky business at the best of times, but it's worth
hazarding some guesses about the jobs that will fill the post-
petroleum job ads here in America over the next generation or so,
through the years of the Great Recession and the disintegration of
America's overseas empire. Farmers are among the most likely
candidates for the top of the list. By this I don't mean subsistence
farmers in rural ecovillages – their time is much further in the
future, if it ever comes at all. Rather, market farmers tilling what
is now suburban acreage to feed the dwindling cities, and rural
farmers producing grains and other bulk crops for foreign exchange,
will likely be in high demand, along with support professions such as
agronomists.

Engineers form another set of trades likely to do well in the
generation to come, especially those who know their way around energy
production and distribution and the design, building, and maintenance
of low-tech transportation networks. In the not too distant future,
rail and canal transport will have to take over much of the work now
done by trucks, and energy networks will have to cope with a
fractious mix of alternative resources, dwindling fossil fuels, and
massive conservation programs. The people who actually put the plans
of engineers into effect, from skilled machinists all the way down to
the gandy dancers who lay the rails, will also be able to count on
steady paychecks.

Another suite of professions likely to do well barely exists today,
though demolitions experts, junkyard workers, and people who run
recycling and composting operations represent tentative forays into
the territory. A huge fraction of America's potential wealth in the
postpeak years consists of manufactured objects that can either be
refurbished and put back into circulation, or stripped of raw
materials for reuse. When the electricity needed to power elevators
and run heating and cooling systems is dizzyingly expensive when it
can be had at all, for example, skyscrapers will be worth more as
sources of refined metal than as buildings, and most of them will
come down. On the other end of the spectrum, a great many consumer
products that are now consigned to landfills when they break will be
worth salvaging, repairing, and reselling once the cost of the
necessary labor is cheaper than the cost of the energy and raw
materials for a new model – a state of affairs that existed in
America until the 1960s and will likely exist again within a decade
or two. The salvage industries, as we may as well call them, may well
turn out to be one of the major growth industries of the twenty-first
century.

Other professions have their own possibilities. It's a useful
exercise to locate a city directory from the first half of the
twentieth century and flip through the pages, noting the businesses
that existed then but are nowhere to be found today. Those that meet
actual needs, however unpopular they are as career tracks today, are
likely to be more viable and more lucrative in a deindustrializing
future than many professions fashionable today. The pundits and
publicists of our economic system never seem to tire of explaining
that tomorrow's jobs will not be the same as today's, and I suspect
they may just be right; what they don't expect, and I do, is that
many of tomorrow's hottest jobs will have more than a little
resemblance to the careers of yesterday.

Those people who make preparations now to move into such jobs as they
come open will be doing themselves and their communities alike a
favor of no small worth. These preparations need to begin soon –
while the time, resources, and knowledge base for many necessary
skills are still readily accessible – and this requires, once again,
some sense of the way civilizations actually fall, and a willingness
to apply that slow, stumbling, unromantic but realistic model to the
events going on around us right now.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/post-petroleum-job-
ads.html