To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind
than to be hopelessly in love with spring. ~George Santayana~
The appearance of springtime in North America may be more welcome this
year than at anytime in recent history. The winter has been long, cold,
and dreary—particularly in the Rust Belt where the devastations of
housing foreclosures, unemployment, and the resultant blight have left
a trail of human misery and degradation not seen since the Great
Depression. Ten percent of the population of Ohio now relies on food
stamps while hordes of domestic animals abandoned in foreclosed homes
endure long and grotesque deaths from starvation.
For countless Americans across the nation, this winter has brought with
it something far more distressing than brutal, bone-chilling
temperatures—horrific, traumatic revelations that the American dream,
neatly packaged and sold for decades, has become their worst possible
nightmare. Should they happen to see on TV the guy from the Countrywide
commercial greeting them with “Homeowners…”, they are probably
wondering why he hasn’t been assassinated and at the very least
wondering why Countrywide is still in business.
Something is festering in the psyches of the formerly middle class of
this nation—something far more ominous than burgeoning public
assistance and food stamp applications or mushrooming meth labs. If the
subprime mortgage massacre had occurred in a vacuum, the dirty little
secret might have been kept a bit longer, but juxtaposing it with Peak
Oil, skyrocketing food prices, wacky weather and debilitating droughts,
not to mention proliferating pink slips, it daily becomes
embarrassingly obvious that Jim Kunstler was spot-on when he uttered
his infamous declaration in the documentary, “The End Of Suburbia” that
“the entire suburban project is the greatest misallocation of resources
in the history of the world.”
And yet during this “winter of disconnect” we have heard delusional
economists and the President himself describe the current horrors in
terms of “a soft patch” or the need to “ride this one out until things
bounce back.” And overall, the human race is virtually ignoring climate
change and perseverating in the madness of the ethanol panacea.
And speaking of insanity, Europe is rapidly returning to coal-fired
power plants, while in China, coal “remains the major source of fuel
for two billion people”—nightmare scenarios with respect to global
warming and climate change. Meanwhile, Monsanto and other genocidal
monsters of food and population control, tout ethanol as an energy
panacea--the only tangible result of their hype being mass starvation
and astronomical food prices. Or as a friend recently commented:
Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will
provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food.
The Four Seasons Of Civilization
Duane Elgin, author of numerous books including Voluntary Simplicity,
postulated fifteen years ago that civilizations evolve through specific
stages which ironically follow the shape of a bell curve, similar to
the Peak Oil curve, in their development and to which Elgin refers as
the “four seasons” of growth. This was long before the bell curve of
Peak Oil was familiar to many other individuals besides M. King
Hubbert, father of the Peak Oil theory, who died four years before
Elgin’s book was published.
According to Elgin, Stage I of the development of a civilization,
“Springtime” is characterized by high growth and an era of faith in
future potential. During springtime, there is little bureaucratic
complexity, and activities are largely self-regulating. Stage II or
“Summer”, is an era of reason where social consensus begins to weaken
and bureaucratic complexity increases with less self-regulation and
more external regulation. “Autumn” follows, ushering in an era of
cynicism where consensus weakens considerably, special interest groups
surpass the power of a shared social purpose, and bureaucratic
complexity mounts faster than the ability to effectively regulate.
An era of despair characterizes Stage IV, “Winter”, and the collapse of
consensus is supplanted by conflicting social purposes. Bureaucratic
mechanisms and their complexity become overwhelming, and society begins
to break down. Elgin believes that three possible outcomes are likely
to emerge from the breakdown of the system. One outcome is collapse as
the biosphere is pushed beyond its limits and can no longer support the
burden of humanity. Stagnation is another option, in which members of
the system expend energy on simply maintaining the status quo.
Revitalization is the most desirable option which results from a
“period of intense communication and reconciliation that builds a
working consensus around a sustainable pathway into the future.” The
author notes that we get collapse by “perpetuating the status quo and
running the biosphere into ruin. We get stagnation when citizens are
passive and rely on remote bureaucracies and technological solutions to
handle a deteriorating local-to-global situation. We get revitalization
only when we directly engage our predicament as individuals, families,
communities, and nations.”
Although Elgin has presented the three options in this particular
order, it is clear to me that the current civilization has long since
passed through stagnation and is rapidly collapsing. In my opinion,
while revitalization may have been possible decades ago when society’s
elite first learned of Peak Oil, climate change, and numerous renewable
energy options, it is now possible only as a consequence of collapse
for the simple reason that the progression of collapse has rendered
voluntary revitalization extraordinarily problematic, if not
impossible.
Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything reveals unequivocally that virtually
every resource on earth has reached or passed its peak of availability
to the human race. Elgin’s 1993 theory, however, offers a larger
picture in which the likelihood that civilization itself has peaked and
is on the downward side of the bell curve is logically plausible.
The immediate “winter of our disconnect” (and discontent), described
above, has been characterized by an astonishingly rapid unraveling of
civilization which appears to accelerate with every passing day. The
larger winter is not about specific events such as foreclosures,
bankruptcies, food rationing in America, or melting glaciers, but
rather the final evolutionary stage of civilization and its
eventualities in which we now find ourselves embroiled. In other words,
particular occurrences of unraveling indicate irrefutably that we have
entered Peak Civilization.
It is crucial, in my opinion, to comprehend Peak Civilization so that
just as we understand that all of earth’s resources have peaked which
would prevent us from embracing the chimera of a “return to normalcy”,
we more astutely grasp the progression of human evolution and its
implications in the macrocosm. That is to say that a clear
understanding of Peak Oil prevents any rational human being from
assuming that a return to cheap and abundant energy is feasible in
his/her lifetime. Likewise, recognizing that civilization is in an
irreversible trajectory of descent may assist us in conserving our
valuable mental, emotional, and spiritual energy so that we do not
expend it on phantoms of long-term revitalization.
Past-Peak Elections—You Have No Government
At this point it becomes necessary to distinguish between long-term and
short-term revitalization. From my perspective, as stated above,
collapse must occur in order for long-term revitalization to become
possible, so attempting to prevent collapse also prevents one from
honoring the current stage of civilization now unfolding. One example
of understanding civilization’s “winter” is to grasp that the only
thing more futile than addressing energy depletion with ethanol use is
the delusion that legitimate presidential elections actually occur in
America offering valid choices between two genuinely opposing
candidates who represent two distinct political parties and who are
beyond domination, contamination,
or exploitation by the transnational corporations that in fact manage
the United States.
Furthermore, to fully understand Peak Civilization is to understand
that the federal government per se does not exist, but rather an elite
corporate cartel engaged in the management of citizens—citizens who are
now completely on their own in terms of their survival as the
pseudo-government continues to implode. Moreover, the cartel’s direct
intent is the cessation of nation states to be supplanted by
corporations and their subsidiaries. Therefore, the task before us is
not to perpetuate the status quo by participating in the ersatz federal
election debacle, but to, in the words of John Michael Greer
“transition to a Third World lifestyle.” I believe that any politician
who suggests that we can do otherwise and survive as individuals or as
a nation, may be committing a crime against humanity. Politicians and
centralized systems are incapable of effecting meaningful change. Or as
Greer states, “…getting the Federal government to do something
constructive about the situation, for instance – [is] a waste of time.
That sort of change isn't going to happen. It's not simply a matter of
who's currently in power, although admittedly that doesn't help. The
core of the problem is that even proposing changes on a scale that
would do any good would be political suicide.”
Although nothing could be more unpalatable for the American public,
transitioning to a Third-World lifestyle is precisely what it is being
forced to do. And as Greer comments:
There's no way to sugar-coat that very unpalatable reality. Fossil
fuels made it possible for most people in the industrial world to have
a lifestyle that doesn't depend on hard physical labor, and to wallow
in a flood of mostly unnecessary consumer goods and services. As fossil
fuels deplete, all that will inevitably go away. How many people would
be willing to listen to such a suggestion? More to the point, how many
people would vote for a politician or a party who proposed to bring on
these changes deliberately, now, in order to prevent total disaster
later on?
What Peak Civilization Really Looks Like
Peak Civilization by definition means the disappearance of public
education, healthcare, government-issued currency, commercial food
production, public access to regional water supplies, interstate
commerce, the North American energy grid, and the very infrastructure
of the United States. Yet one need not succumb to fatalism. While
long-term revitalization cannot be realized now, its seeds can be and
are being planted by the proliferation of vibrant relocalization
movements erupting and evolving around the world, many of which have
been spotlighted at the Truth To Power website. As Duane Elgin
emphasizes: “A revitalizing society is a decentralizing society, with
grassroots organizations that are numerous enough, have arisen soon
enough, and are effective enough to provide a genuine alternative to
more centralized bureaucracies.” The first headlines of food rationing
in America are buzzing across the internet as I write this article.
They underscore the unequivocal reality that collapse is going to
compel us to feed ourselves or quite simply, we will perish. I believe
that food security is the most urgent, the most immediate issue to
which we must attend at this moment of Peak Civilization. For months,
this website has been informing readers about food storage and
preservation and other aspects of preparedness. It is now time, if you
have not already done so, to organize groups of citizens in your
neighborhood, schools, churches, and community centers to plant and
maintain gardens. In addition, collapse is compelling us to rapidly
mobilize our neighborhoods and communities to not only accumulate our
own supply of stored water but to organize citizens to work with local
public water utilities to ensure that they remain public and are not
privatized.
Health care professionals reading these words need to consider offering
local workshops on a regular basis teaching citizens how to treat
injuries
and illnesses in the absence of a viable healthcare system. Doctors,
nurses, dentists, and all manner of medical personnel are likely to be
overwhelmed with patients during and after the full-scale breakdown of
the system when hospitals and clinics have closed and almost no one can
afford health insurance. A recent CBS News video link emailed to
subscribers recently by Truth To Power confirms the imminent, total
collapse of America’s healthcare system and reveals the extent to which
anyone with the slightest bit of training in the field is likely to
find her/himself inundated with throngs of sick people desperately
seeking care.
Seeds Of Revitalization
Greer emphatically stresses that “The key to making sense of
constructive action in a situation of impending industrial collapse is
to look at the community, rather than the individual or society as a
whole, as the basic unit.” Those familiar with Greer’s article, “The
Coming Deindustrial Society”, recall his three requirements for
community: A community must have some degree of local organization; it
must have a core of people who know how to live without fossil fuels;
and it must have food and a production and distribution system for it.
In a future article, Truth To Power will add another requirement,
namely, the ability to communicate clearly and compassionately with
other community members.
Our challenge at this moment in history is to recognize and
intentionally connect with the evolutionary season of winter in which
Peak Civilization finds itself because as Duane Elgin admonishes us:
“It is time to begin the next stage of our human journey.” As I witness
most of humanity’s current “solutions” to its
climate-energy-food-water-population-economic dilemmas, I see only
myopic, psychotic strategies, and I have to ask myself whether or not
it will be necessary for us to annihilate ourselves and the planet in
order to transition into a more advanced evolutionary paradigm that
will not permit the human race to ever again engage in anything like
the current madness. Tragically, I see almost nothing that suggests
otherwise.
It is crucial that we comprehend that not only have we entered winter,
but that that particular season is going to last a long time. As we
navigate that winter, we are allowed our discontent, but we dare not
permit ourselves to disconnect from current reality. Simultaneously, it
is imperative that we hold a vision of revitalization and plant its
seeds everywhere at the same time that we honor more the changing of
the seasons than our addiction to springtime.