Part One: Peak Oil Goes Mainstream
The Archdruid Report (June 09 2010)
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society
Longtime readers of this blog will recall that one of its central projects
early on was an attempt to deconstruct the most deeply entrenched set of
myths industrial culture uses to define the future. To borrow a phrase
from Carlos Castaneda, the myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse
were worthy opponents, and I hope the confrontation with them was as
educational, and occasionally entertaining, to my readers as it was to me.
I'm pleased to say, though, that the dubious choice between a future of
endless progress toward some technocratic Utopia and a future of sudden
cataclysmic collapse into some romantic Utopia has lost much of its grip
on the peak oil scene.
That's not to say these particular narratives have gone away completely. I
don't recall the last time a week passed without at least one message in
my inbox claiming that I'm all wrong and humanity will keep on marching
onward and upward to a destiny among the stars, and at least one more
claiming that I'm all wrong and industrial civilization will blow itself
to smithereens at some vague but imminent point in the very near future.
Still, such comments no longer make up most of the responses to each
week's post here, as they once did. The Archdruid Report was only one of
many voices in the conversation that midwifed that change, of course, but
I like to think that it helped.
That shift needed to happen, not least because today's peak oil movement
may be standing on the brink of a momentous shift very few of us are
expecting. For just over a decade now, since the first peak oil activists
blew the dust off M King Hubbert's predictions and realized that they made
a great deal more sense than the easy optimism of the cornucopians, people
concerned about peak oil have daydreamed of a future when the rest of the
world would finally get around to noticing that you can't extract an
infinite amount of oil from a finite planet, and that technological,
economic, and social arrangements predicated on endless supplies of cheap
oil might be a good deal less clever than they looked. Very few of us,
though, have really taken that possibility seriously, which makes it all
the more ironic that peak oil may be on the brink of going mainstream in a
big way.
Place the peak oil movement in its context and the dynamic is hard to
miss. Fifteen years ago the idea of peak oil was so far off the radar
screens that serious books on energy published by academic publishers -
Janet Ramage's Energy: A Guidebook (Oxford University Press, 1997) is a
good example - no longer remembered that oil production would crest long
before the last barrel was pumped out of the ground. Ten years ago the
peak oil movement was the outermost fringe of the fringe, a tiny network
of retired petroleum geologists and engineers crunching numbers to predict
the timing of an event most experts claimed would never happen. Five years
ago the first really good books on the subject - Kenneth Deffeyes'
Hubbert's Peak, Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over, James Howard
Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and a few others - were in print, and
denunciations were beginning to issue forth from pundits who, until that
time, had considered the peak oil movement to be beneath their notice.
Over the last year or so, the journey from fringe to mainstream has
shifted into high gear. Peak oil has become a known quantity in the
financial media, with a growing number of market pundits treating it as a
real and inevitable phenomenon; blue-ribbon panels of various kinds are
advising various governments that they really had better start paying
attention to the future of petroleum; the US military has given dwindling
energy supplies a place high up on the list of imminent threats to
America's security; even the world of haute culture, so often last in line
to notice even the biggest changes sweeping through society, has been
served up with a jumbo helping of peak oil courtesy of the Dark Mountain
Project {*}. All that remains is for the political leaders of an
industrial nation to start talking about peak oil, and to judge from some
of Barack Obama's recent press conferences about the BP oil spill, that
day may not be too far away.
{*} http://www.dark-mountain.net/
What will happen then? It's interesting to note that slightly muted
versions of the two mythic narratives I discussed earlier in this post
play a large role in speculations about the impact of peak oil going
public. Some people - not many of them, but there are some - still cling
to the hope that the people of the world's industrial societies will take
a deep breath, face up to the challenge of peak oil, and rescue the
project of progress and the hope of brighter futures ad infinitum. Others,
rather more of them, are convinced that a public announcement that the age
of oil is ending will result in mass panic and the collapse of public
order in an orgy of rioting, looting, and target practice with live ammo.
My guess, for what it's worth, is that neither of these is particularly
likely. A great deal depends on the circumstances, to be sure, but I
suspect the first reaction will have a good deal in common with the oil
shock of the 1970s, when the United States passed its own Hubbert peak and
a nation used to limitless cheap energy had to face shortages and soaring
prices. When that happened, some people buckled down and got to work;
others panicked to one degree or another, though the rioting mobs of
survivalist fantasy were in notably short supply; still others dismissed
the entire thing as a Communist, liberal, conservative, or Fascist plot -
I don't think anybody but the Amish missed being blamed for the energy
crises of the 1970s - and something close to a majority just shrugged or
grumbled, according to temperament, and muddled through.
In the midst of these disparate reactions, a great deal of constructive
work got done, and it's arguable that even now the alternative energy
scene hasn't caught up to the point that the leading edge of the
appropriate technology movement had reached when funding cuts and
ultracheap oil brought the boom down on the whole thing in the early
1980s. If we get a similar muddle of disparate reactions, another round of
equally constructive work is potentially within reach. Of course there
will probably also be another round, on a larger and louder scale, of the
debate between the myths of progress and apocalypse mentioned earlier in
this post, and there will doubtless be plenty of flailing as people work
their way through the five stages of peak oil - those are denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, and getting off your rump and doing something, in
case you didn't know.
Still, it's also uncomfortably possible that we could also get something a
good deal more destructive than what emerged out of the Seventies. For all
the troubles of that decade, energy resources were still relatively
plentiful and the economies of the industrial nations were far less
topheavy with financial hallucinations, profiteering, and outright graft
than they have since become. The limits to growth were in sight, but they
had not yet begun to clamp down hard, and energy researchers could
reasonably trace a curve of transition that could get the world's
industrial nations to sustainability without massive social and economic
trauma.
That possibility was foreclosed when the leaders of the major industrial
nations embraced short term politics instead of meaningful planning in the
years right after 1980. At this point, the resources that might have
powered a transition to sustainability have been burnt to fuel one last
orgy of conspicuous consumption, and the consequences of that final spree,
combined with epic economic mismanagement and a good solid helping of
chicanery and outright fraud, have tipped the industrial nations of the
world over into what promises to be a long and difficult period of
economic malfunction.
When familiar myths fail and life gets difficult, in turn, the results
rather too often include a form of collective flight into fantasy well
known to sociologists and students of history. Think of cargo cults, Ghost
Dancers, Americans waiting in a suburban Chicago backyard to be taken off
the planet by the Space Brothers, and every other example you recall of
people responding to a difficult situation by a leap of faith to a farther
shore that didn't happen to be there. Now think about it again,
remembering that this time the motivating factors may well include the
symbols and slogans and passionate hopes that matter most to you.
The standard jargon for phenomena of this kind is revitalization
movements. They happen when a society is hit by repeated troubles that cut
straight to the core of its identity and values. In such times, when
existing institutions fail and the collective foundations of meaning
crack, there's a large demand for some new vision of destiny that will
make sense of the troubles and offer a way past them to some brighter
future. The economics of popular belief being what they are, that demand
very quickly finds an ample supply.
Revitalization movements, like new cars, come with standard features and a
range of optional gewgaws that can be added on to suit the tastes of the
buyer. The standard features include a thorough critique of the existing
order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have occurred
because either the people who have suffered from them, or some other group
that's to blame for them, have misbehaved and are being punished; a vision
of a Utopian future that will arrive right after the troubles if the right
things are done; and a straightforward plan of action to make the
transition from the troubles to the Utopian future. The problem is that
the plan of action can't actually deliver the goods; that's what defines
something as a revitalization movement rather than, say, an ordinary
movement seeking social change. Revitalization movements emerge when all
the practical options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.
The optional features range all over the map from the harmless to the
horrific. A focus on purification, for example, is one common optional
feature, but purification can mean a great many things. In the Native
American revitalization movements of the twentieth century, for example,
it usually meant abstaining from alcohol and other toxic products of white
culture, and did a great deal to help First Nations communities begin to
recover from the ghastly experiences of the previous century. In the
European revitalization movements that sprang up in the wake of the Black
Death, by contrast, it usually meant getting rid of Jews and other social
outsiders who were blamed for spreading the plague, and helped lay the
foundation for the witch hunting mania of the following centuries.
It seems uncomfortably likely to me that such movements could be set in
motion by the emergence of peak oil as a publicly acknowledged crisis.
Tendencies in that direction are already welded firmly in place in popular
culture across the industrial world. The Sarah Palin supporters who turned
"Drill, baby, drill" into their mantra du jour are engaging in
incantation, to be sure, but there's more to the slogan than a comfortable
thoughtstopper; a great many of the people who mouth it believe with all
their heart that all we have to do is drill enough wells and we can have
all the petroleum we want, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to
get those wells drilled. That plan of action can't deliver the goods; they
might as well be out there with the cargo cults, building mock airfields
on isolated Pacific islands hoping to bring back the DC-3s full of
K-rations and cheap trade goods that landed on a hundred archipelagoes
during the Second World War. Still, that's not something they are likely
to grasp any time soon; mere reason has essentially no power against a
nascent revitalization movement.
The shift from incantation to revitalization movement is under way on the
other side of the political spectrum as well, though it hasn't generally
gotten as much traction yet - a reminder that in America, at least, the
ideologies of the left these days tend to be favored by the still
relatively privileged middle classes, while the working classes that favor
ideologies of the right have gotten the short end of the stick for
decades. Still, the tendencies are there. Watch the conversations on most
reasonably active peak oil forums, and you're very likely to see people
insisting that all of us, or at least a chosen few, can make the
transition to a brighter future if only we follow some plan of action they
are eager to share. In those conversations, the seeds of the
revitalization movements to come are putting out their first tentative
shoots.
If those seeds sprout and blossom, keeping a clear mind amid their heady
perfume will be a more challenging task than I suspect most of my readers
realize. What sets revitalization movements apart from the more
incantatory activities of the true believers in progress or apocalypse is
that revitalization movements actually buckle down and do something, and
tolerably often, at least some of the things they do are worth doing. Hope
is an intoxicating drug; hope blended with opportunities for apparently
constructive action is an even stronger one; add the emotional lure of
belonging, the promise of mutual support and encouragement, and the rush
that comes from dropping ordinary concerns for the single-minded pursuit
of a shared ideal, and you've got an addictive high that's hard to resist
and harder to quit. That's why revitalization movements so often gather
large crowds, and proceed to follow out the consequences of their internal
logic to its furthest extreme, no matter how catastrophic the consequences
might be.
In the present case, they could be catastrophic indeed. I think most
people know in theory about the destination of the road paved with good
intentions, but revitalization movements that go awry have a bad habit of
putting that theory into practice. Next week, I'll explore those
uncomfortable possibilities in more detail, and in the process, show how
the magical thinking that underlies revitalization movements could be put
to use in much more constructive ways.
For the moment, though, I want to pass on the counterspell against
incantatory thinking that I mentioned at the conclusion of last week's
post. Like the magic spells in fairy tales, it comes with a taboo that
limits what you can do with it. The taboo is this: you can use it to guard
yourself from incantations, if you think about it and understand it, and
you can pass it on to someone else who's ready to receive and understand
it. If you give it to someone who's not willing to accept it, though, it
will cause exactly the flight into incantation and fantasy it's meant to
prevent. Here it is:
There is no brighter future ahead.
Keep it secret; keep it safe. We'll talk more next week.
_____
John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in
America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement
for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A
User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He
lives in Cumberland, Maryland.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/waiting-for-millennium.html
