Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXXV–Collapse Now To Avoid the Rush: The Long Emergency
(Original posting date: June 6, 2023)
Mexico (1988). Photo by author.
Collapse Now To Avoid the Rush: The Long Emergency
Today’s Contemplation has been prompted by yet another conversation I have had with a person who prefers not to believe the stories I tell about our predicament. Which I am totally fine with. I attempt to present my case and once the person devolves into personal attacks, childish suggestions, or simply ignores/denies the evidence (usually by way of never actually addressing the points I raise), I tend to end the dialogue with an agreement to disagree. We all believe what we want to believe so little point in belabouring the discussion with someone entrenched in their narrative.
Of the rhetorical fallacies that tend to be used against me when I highlight skepticism towards certain narratives, the latest is something along these lines: You want/wish for ‘collapse’ and a massive die-off…why don’t you start by eliminating yourself.
The thing I wish to stress is that I DO NOT wish for any type of decline/collapse, and I’ve most certainly never advocated for it to happen. I am as dependent upon our complexities as the next person, although I am working to lessen that.
As I more-or-less replied to the person: I do not want what I am writing about to occur; I am a student of pre/history observing the world and sharing my story about what I see and occasionally making suggestions on what might be wise actions to help mitigate it. In other words, ‘collapse’ appears to be happening so let’s try to prepare for it.
Do I argue for certain ‘strategies’ that would seem prudent given the biological and pre/historical precedents that suggest where our future is likely headed? Absolutely. If you have the slightest appreciation of the precautionary principle, and even some awareness of what has befallen previous complex societies throughout pre/history and how they have ‘handled’ similar situations, you would too.
But this does not mean I am looking forward to the long emergency/long descent (or worse) that appears increasingly to be where humanity is headed. In fact, given the argument that we are significantly into ecological overshoot this time around the argument for preparatory actions is quite called for. In fact, much of what I argue for is because I believe it would be wise for humanity to pay heed to John Michael Greer’s advice to ‘collapse now and avoid the rush’ so that we are better prepared for the future that we are likely going to get, whether we wish it or not.
If you’re not familiar with Greer’s reasoning for this phrase, I suggest reading the above linked post. For those who wish my take, here it is…
Industrial society (and all the complexities it entails) has been possible primarily because of the “…immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy…” To replace this foundational energy source in order to maintain our complex, industrial society “…has turned out to be effectively impossible.” While a ‘managed descent’ may have been possible 50+ years ago, sociopolitical decisions (along with continuing unchecked population growth) have closed off that option and instead pushed us significantly into overshoot.
Rather than thoughtfully descend (i.e., the type of ‘managed’ decline the Degrowth movement advocates), we have burned through our fundamental energy resource believing a story that the laws of physics and geology can be suspended via socioeconomic abstractions, human ingenuity, and our technological prowess.
Pre/historical evidence suggests our ‘fall’ will not be sudden in nature (commonly thought of as a ‘collapse’) for “…civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall…”. This ‘fall’ — that appears to have already begun and will pick up steam — will not be smooth but a series of crises across space and time, with relatively stable interludes (perhaps even some ‘recovery’) between them.
There are still choices to be made in the face of this, particularly between clinging to current lifestyles until the floor drops out from beneath that to learning the knowledge and practising the skills necessary to live well in a world of declining energy and complexities.
“Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush.”
What are some of the suggestions Greer makes?
Figure out how to live after the next crisis arrives and begin to live that way now. For example, if your income may be in jeopardy, begin living with less now. Get out of debt. Find much less expensive shelter. Learn practical skills so you can meet your own needs or barter with others. Weatherise your home so utilities cost less. Begin growing some of your own food.
While some envision living on an off-grid homestead away and insulated from the various crises, it is better to look at where one lives currently and how that can be made more resilient and/or self-sufficient. Take note of local resources, including human ones.
As for the utopian dream of a fanciful, high-tech future, Greer argues “There’s quite a lot of money to be made these days insisting that we can have a shiny new future despite all evidence to the contrary, and pulling factoids out of context to defend that increasingly dubious claim; as industrial society moves down the curve of decline, I suspect, this will become even more popular, since it will make it easier for those who haven’t yet had their own personal collapse to pretend that it can’t happen to them.”
And as he concludes: “… if you’re trying to exempt yourself from the end of the industrial age, nothing you can do can ever be enough. Let go, let yourself fall forward into the deindustrial future, and matters are different.”
I would tend to agree with Greer as far as the idea of a cataclysmic future being improbable, not impossible, just highly unlikely on a global scale. There are such issues as nuclear war or a large meteor strike that could occur but are far less likely (although nuclear war is appearing more probable than a large meteor hitting the planet for when hasn’t the latest, greatest weaponry not been used during war).
The highest possibility of ‘collapse’ comes from the process that archaeologist Joseph Tainter lays out in The Collapse of Complex Societies. Basically, as we encounter increasing diminishing returns on our investments in complexity, fewer and fewer benefits are accrued from our support of/investments into the sociopolitical systems that organise our society and a point arises where more and more people withdraw that support until the complexities can no longer function properly and supportive subsystems begin to fail.
As Tainter points out, a society can go a very long time experiencing this decline, with each step down in living standards being relatively minor and, with time, are accepted and adapted to as the ‘new normal’.
I have highlighted in a few multipart posts what may befall humanity as we stumble into the unknowable future:
Infinite growth. Finite Plant. What could possibly go wrong? Parts One & Two.
Energy Future. Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4.
That Uncertain Road. Parts 1 & 2.
And please note that I do refer to this inevitable simplification as ‘collapse’ not because I believe it will be a sudden, punctuated, and global event but because I tend to view the process in a broader, temporal perspective. While our ‘collapse’ may play out over a number of human generations (and be barely noticeable to many except in the sense of the past being ‘better’), in the grand scope of human 200,000–300,000 year existence, a century or three is a bump in a long and winding road.
View the following graph. If you feel this is sustainable and growth can continue because, you know, human ingenuity, you can ignore everything I’ve written above and carry on. If, however, this suggests to you an impending (or passed) tipping point of unsustainability, then you need to consider the story I’ve shared…and how you will react and act.
As I conclude in one of the posts linked above:
“And, I offer no ‘solution’ to any of the above. I have increasingly come to hold that this is all one humungous predicament without a ‘solution’. The best we might hope for is to increase local self-sufficiency of communities and cross our fingers that some might make it through the impending transition that will be the result of complex society collapse compounded by ecological overshoot. On the other hand, all the other species on our planet might be hoping for our extinction given our track record of destructive tendencies…”
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
Released September 30, 2024
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 2
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword by Erik Michaels and Afterword by Dr. Guy McPherson, authors include: Dr. Peter A Victor, George Tsakraklides, Charles Hugh Smith, Dr. Tony Povilitis, Jordan Perry, Matt Orsagh, Justin McAffee, Jack Lowe, The Honest Sorcerer, Fast Eddy, Will Falk, Dr. Ugo Bardi, and Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.
After exploring the possible ways the West could (continue to) collapse in Part 1, let’s turn our mental gaze towards the East, and see what are the global implications of such a shift in centers of power — if there are any…
No single crisis is permanent — it is a series of them which will cease to end. It looks increasingly safe to say, that now we are already knee deep into the ‘long emergency’ — which has raised its ugly head in 2008 then, after a couple of years, went back to sleep… only to return with a vengeance. It is a fast deepening series of crisis though, one, that now threatens the West with the deepest recession in living memory and with a complete collapse of Europe’s economy — together with the West’s global hegemony.
However, it will be China who will take the brunt of the damage made to the world’s production facilities, as it was producing a myriad of goods for Europe and for the States to consume and built their products from. Even if the West would enter a decade long depression though, China would still recover after going through its own round of deepest recession in living memory. They would eventually reorganize their economy to fit the needs of the BRICS states, serving them with products instead of Europe and the US. They could do this on the back of a yet to be released common currency of the block (replacing the Dollar in international trade) and based on resources suddenly becoming relatively cheap and abundant, as the West would consume a fraction of what it used to.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Rising costs signal the ‘long emergency’ we face after glutting on cheap energy. Part one of two.
Volatile energy prices are no mere brief glitch in the global economy. They are now a feature because we’ve met the end of easily extracted, cheap fossil fuels. Image via Shutterstock.
If you are sitting around the kitchen table contemplating the escalating cost of your grocery bills (and just about everything else), then welcome to what U.S. writer James Kunstler calls “the long emergency.”
In 2005 Kunstler, famous for his critique of suburbia, noted that civilization’s energy appetites were unsustainable given the declining quality of fossil fuels left in the world.
“We can be certain that the price and supplies of fossil fuels will suffer disruptions in the period ahead that I am calling the Long Emergency,” advised Kunstler. “No combination of alternative energies will permit us to continue living the way we do, or even close to it.”
The inflation we are facing today is a manifestation of that long emergency intensifying. The elephant in the room is the rising cost of all fossil fuels.
That’s not of course what we are hearing from those either trying to calm our nerves or inflame populist emotions.
The experts mostly blame the pandemic, unsettled supply chains and great surges in demand. Don’t worry, the authorities tell us, all of this is temporary and transient.
At the same time political insurrectionists, who now proliferate like rodents in our whack-a-mole culture, have blamed everything from government deficits to carbon taxes for inflation. They do so even though inflation has appeared in jurisdictions with no deficits and no carbon taxes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The wheel of time rolls forward, never retracing its path, but because it is a wheel, and we are riding in it, a persistent illusion persuades us that the landscape is recognizably the same, and that our doings within the regular turning of the seasons seem comfortably normal. There is no normal.
There is for us, at this moment in history, an especially harsh turning (so Strauss and Howe would say) as our journey takes the exit ramp out of the high energy era into the next reality of a long emergency. The human hive-mind senses that something is different, but at the same moment we’re unable to imagine changing all our exquisitely tuned arrangements — especially the thinking class in charge of all that, self-enchanted with pixeled fantasies. The dissonance over this is driving America crazy.
The wheel hit a deep pothole in 2008 turning onto the off-ramp and has been wobbling badly ever since. 2008 was a warning that going through the motions isn’t enough to sustain a sense of purpose, either nationally or for individuals trying to keep their lives together ever more desperately. The cultural memory of the confident years, when we seemed to know what we were doing, and where we were going, dogs us and mocks us.
The young adults feel all that most acutely. The pain prompts them to want to deconstruct that memory. “No, it didn’t happen that way,” they are saying. All those stories about the founding of this society — of those Great Men with their powdered hair-doos writing the national charter, and the remarkable experience of the past 200-odd years — are wrong! There was nothing wonderful about it. The whole thing was a swindle!
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Author and commentator James Howard Kunstler returns as our podcast guest this week for an update on where we are in The Long Emergency timeline.
In this wide-raging discussion ranging from the pervasiveness of propaganda in today’s media to the risk of nuclear war, Kunstler also re-news his warnings of a current secular economic slowdown.
After too many years of market interventions, magical thinking, racketeering, and bleeding the 99% dry, he warns that our culture and economic system will soon reach a snapping point:
The important story is what happens in the financial sector and how it effects the economy in the next twelve to eighteen months. As we know, the financial system is the most abstract and fragile of all the systems that we depend on because the other systems can’t run without it. The trucks won’t make the food deliveries to the supermarkets unless the finance system works. The gasoline won’t get to the pumps at the stations.
Nothing’s going to move if the financial system cracks up. People no longer trust each other to transact, to get paid. And so they stop transacting.
We’re talking about a falling standard of living and getting used to an economy of “less”. It sounds kind of Ebenezer Scrooge-ish to suggest that people may have to do with less rather than more, because more has always been the expectation in our lifetime. But that’s probably a fact. And as I’ve said more than once, reality has mandates of its own. Circumstances are going to inform us about how this economy is emerging and where we need to go with it. And we can either pay attention or just sit there with our fingers in our ears.
What we’re talking about here is the armature of our culture and economy that people hang their lives on. And that armature is crumbling. There are fewer things that people can hang a life on in a meaningful way, or a way that even ensures that they can have a little bit of security looking into even a short-term future.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic. — Tom McGuane
Can a people recover from an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change.
A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency, persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the public to process. It manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major activities we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008, despite official trumpet blasts heralding “recovery” and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets since then.
With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public’s trust in them is at epic lows.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts
