The Brooklyn Rail

T. S. Eliot, somewhere in the Four Quartets, says, “hope would be hope for the wrong thing…” As the world careens towards a cliff, to use a cliché of contemporary conversations about a future that is increasingly the most urgent item on all agendas, hope for the wrong things springs eternal. Foremost among these is the hope that, with the will to act finally mobilized, we will make the transition to a decarbonized economy, based on clean and renewable solar and wind power, which will be a continuation of the industrial development of the world that began roughly 250 years ago.

I want to persuade the reader at least to consider that this is hope for the wrong thing. Because solar and wind energy are industrial technologies, the building-out and maintenance necessary to solve our carbon problem will entail more of the same environmental damage, biodiversity loss, and resource draw-down, which has already brought the biosphere to a near breaking point. Modern industrial systems cannot operate in any other way; they can’t be redesigned to be “sustainable.” In fact, because of looming limits to resource extraction and energy, so-called renewable infrastructure will not serve to energize industrial production over time. Because eliminating fossil fuels is vital, and because our primary energy source, oil, is well on its way to depletion, I believe that a de-industrialized future is our only future. Do we get there with our eyes wide open or with eyes closed, hoping against hope? This is a dire prognosis, but our best intentions and our worst follies (often one and the same) have driven us into a very tight corner in which we have very few options. Still, there are possibilities for a de-industrialized future we can hope for, though its lineaments cannot be extrapolated from current trends, and I will discuss them briefly at the end.

I am not an expert in any of the fields relevant to the subject of this essay. But I have pursued these ideas for years, learning from print and online sources, as the reader can do as well. My position is based on one commonsensical premise: that endless growth on a limited planet is not possible. That the final limits to growth have not been reached, so that economists, ideologists of all stripes, and various experts can continue ignoring them, does not invalidate this premise. I offer this text as a thought experiment, intended to prompt the reader to look at our situation in a different light before a growing climate action consensus, reinforced by Wall Street and industrial buy-in, hardens into an orthodoxy.

(Note: I will not be discussing nuclear power. Disregarding the nuclear option’s many downsides, the decades it takes, in the US at least, to go from planning to final construction of a nuclear plant renders nuclear power a non-starter in the race to decarbonise and forestall excessive global warming. Its advocates are simply wasting our time promoting it as a climate solution. And for those who still cling to the dream of fusion energy, well, what to say, except to quote the wag who once defined fusion as the miracle energy source that is perpetually twenty years away from commercial applicability.)

1.

First, let’s clear away a logjam that obstructs our thinking about all of this: the use of the adjective “renewable” to talk about solar and wind energy. These forms of energy generation are not renewable. Yes, the energy of the sun and the wind energy created by atmospheric temperature differentials are flows that will last as long as the solar system exists. But the conversion of these flows into electrical energy is performed by machines made of materials that are not renewable; as we use them, we use them up. The iron ore that we use to build these machines is abundant, and also recyclable to a considerable extent (in processes requiring tremendous amounts of energy and heat), but many of the raw materials vital to these very sophisticated machines are not so abundant—some so much the opposite that they are called “rare earth” minerals.

Moreover, the storage batteries that are vital to solar and wind energy generation, because of the intermittency of the sun and wind, are also made of non-renewable materials, including more rare earths. Not to mention the new smart grids that will have to be built in order to deal with this intermittency. “Smart” refers to the integral role computers will play in tracking and coordinating this activity. This means a component in these smart grids will be server farms, vast consumers of energy themselves.

Building such systems, from the solar and wind generators on up, spanning, at least in North America, the entire continent, will be the largest feat of engineering and construction ever attempted. It will also be an unmitigated environmental disaster. Putting aside the local effects on ecosystems of gigantic arrays of wind turbines and solar panels, the amount of extraction required to source the raw materials will be monumental, and enacted on a global scale. The processing of these raw materials, and the manufacturing of the millions of components of such a system will generate various kinds of pollutants, often toxic, as almost all industrial production does, and require unprecedented amounts of energy. (Various innovative techniques for eliminating or reducing industrial pollution at the source hold some promise, but scaling them up as we scale up “renewables” would be one more monumental task.) The energy needed for this project as a whole, from extraction to installation of finished units, will be, at least for the foreseeable future, fossil fuel energy, until the transition advances to the point that renewables can take over. (Whether this can actually be done is doubted by many experts.) So the attempt to create a green, renewable future will actually involve amping up business as usual, destroying habitats and biodiversity, further unbalancing a severely traumatized biosphere, because everything else that we already do that uses energy and resources will continue as we build the new infrastructure.

Furthermore, everything that we build on the way to a “renewable” future will wear out. Solar panels today have a lifespan of about twenty-five to thirty years. No doubt that that will be improved upon, and even now good maintenance can extend the life of a panel. But wear out eventually they will, as will wind turbines, batteries, and all the other components of the new infrastructure. So the damage done to the environment building the first generation of “renewables” will be an ongoing process. Along with the other consequences of industrial extraction and production, resource depletion will continue. Experts disagree about the extent of reserves of specific resources, and in some cases, as supplies run low, substitutes may be found. Regardless, the arc will always tend towards depletion and scarcity. In practical terms, this means that, according to the “low-hanging fruit” principle, the easiest way to get to resources will be (or already have been) used first, so that continued use depends on exploiting sources increasingly difficult to access. This drives up the cost to the extractor, and inevitably, to the consumer, whether that refers to the manufacturer, or the final consumer of energy. To offset this trend, recycling as much of these components as possible will be necessary. Even with recycling, “renewable” energy will over time become more and more expensive. Maintaining infrastructure will become progressively more costly, which means, realistically speaking, less and less of it will be maintained. Need it be pointed out that without the energy to drive them, industrial systems will falter and finally fail?

And this absolutely unprecedented technological effort will need to be made in a world wracked by climate disasters, population displacements, and varying degrees of societal trauma and breakdown. Assuming capitalism continues, as “green growth” enthusiasts generally do, this will dry up the investment capital and government funding needed to build the new infrastructure and maintain it into the future. Increasingly catastrophic consequences of the warming that has already taken place are, according to current estimates, already locked in. Even if we were to miraculously stop burning carbon tomorrow morning, further warming, and more disasters, are inevitable.

All this suggests that the trend of renewable energy development would be one of diminishing returns, with the original buildout of solar infrastructure shrinking over time as costs go up and up and the necessary raw materials become scarcer. Eventually segments of the population would be “left behind” as the infrastructure contracts. This will, of course, happen along a wealth gradient, with poorer communities watching the lights go out first, until finally it might be only the very rich who have access to electricity generated by these systems. Indeed, the original buildout will happen along a global wealth gradient, so that even with all the lip service paid to a “just transition,” the chasm currently separating the richer from the less rich world will be locked in—poorer countries will never be able to catch up, as renewable energy becomes more and more costly.

Many economists project encouraging scenarios in which building these new energy systems will cost only some negligible fraction of global GDP over X number of years. Solar advocates remind us almost daily that solar/wind electricity just gets cheaper and cheaper. These optimistic scenarios are based on economic thinking’s chronic habit of treating energy and resources as externalities which are not factored into their projections. Once the cost of extraction and production is established, neoclassical economics proceeds as if resources and energy were limitless. Fossil fuels created such an energy bonanza that the fatal shortcomings of this kind of blindness to the finite material realities underlying economic growth could be ignored throughout most of the last two centuries. Despite increasingly strident signals from the environment that such blindness is exactly that, economists continue to talk as if energy and resources were limitless.

In North America alone, full transition to solar and wind would require the manufacturing of billions of solar panels, and millions of wind turbines, which would require the construction of a whole series of megafactories across the continent. To mention only one factor, the concrete used for footings of turbines and panels will be required in the millions of tons, at a time when the global concrete industry is hard put to find enough of the specialized kinds of sand and gravel required to meet current demand. All of the components of the new energy infrastructure would be under similar resource and energy constraints. After two hundred years of fossil-fueled industrial development, even abundant non-renewable resources are not as abundant as they once were. Most of the remaining metallic ore stocks are of less than optimal quality, requiring more refining to be usable—the low hanging fruit principle again. Moreover one such constraint is almost never discussed: The first large solar and wind arrays will be, or have already been, sited in the best locations. After that, less reliably sunny or windy locations will be used, resulting in less efficient arrays. As more and more infrastructure is built to meet demand, it will be increasingly inefficient in terms of energy invested for energy returned.

Along with this prodigious effort on the systems level, millions of electrified consumer goods will have to be manufactured—induction ovens and stove tops, heat pumps for home heating and cooling, not to mention electric vehicles. None of these technologies are currently in wide use—even electric cars comprise only a small fraction of the global automobile fleet. We have yet to approach anything like the scale of penetration of the consumer market that will be required to decarbonize our economies. The manufacturing capacity to produce these goods at scale does not yet exist. All of this will put further strain on material resources and the environment. Moreover, adopting these new electrified goods, replacing older fossil-based technologies, will at least initially happen through individual choice, given current economic institutions. EVs might gradually replace gas vehicles as older models age out, but property owners’ poor incentive for replacing still functional gas stoves or heating systems with new appliances can be seen in the current Herman experience with the replacement of furnaces by heat pumps.

Consider that nothing like the capacity to deal with these material demands exists at the moment. Where are the plans to set us on the path? Where are the government programs and funding, the massive private investment, needed to implement these plans? The answer to both questions is the same—they are nowhere to be seen. Plans to deal with these “technical problems” don’t exist because they are not problems but inherent shortcomings of the transition away from fossil fuels as presently conceived that no amount of innovation and planning will be able to overcome.

The Inflation Reduction Act, hailed by many as a “great leap forward” in the climate fight, a first step in the progressive dream of a government-incentivized market-driven just transition to a Green New Deal, is even gaining support in a newly coalescing post-denialist segment of the Right as industry and Wall Street begin to see the “renewables” market as a new growth sector. But even if we ignore the material difficulties of a full transition to a carbon-free energy economy it is unlikely that the haphazard workings of the market, even with government direction, could achieve it in a time frame that would forestall the worst effects of climate disruption. The longer politics and market fickleness slow progress towards a transition, the more economies will inevitably falter as they struggle to deal with two looming factors: first, the shrinking of oil reserves as we enter the era of peak oil. Less, and more expensive, oil means shrinking economies, shrinking investment and government funding, and less energy to build the “renewable” infrastructure. And second, financial losses the coming disasters will bring also diminish the capital needed for transition. The negligible fraction of global GDP highlighted by expert projections will become an ever increasing fraction of an ever shrinking global GDP. Since on the likelihood scale, peak oil and more disasters are very high up and free markets/Green New Deals taking the situation fully in hand are quite low, we must face the sobering probability that the “bright green future” promised by some politicians and economists will never materialize.

Even if the world’s ruling elite finds both the political will and the money necessary to carry a green transition to completion, the economy which it will make possible would be much smaller than the current global economy. This is a controversial point, but many experts see the shrinking of economic activity in a fossil-free decarbonized world as unavoidable. Coal and oil, for all their drawbacks, are dense with energy potential and easily transportable; they have allowed the human species to expand its ability to modify its environment well beyond our innate physical capacities. For the last couple of centuries humanity has enjoyed an energy surge that has transformed the world in ways that are both wonderful and terrible. This high energy pulse is unsustainable once fossil fuels are removed from the equation. Solar and wind energy are not substitutes for fossil fuels; their limitations make it unlikely that even at full build-out they can provide the cheap and abundant energy that fossil fuels provide. We can’t just swap one for the other, and have our prodigal, high energy way of life simply continue on a new, carbon-free basis.

As is very rarely acknowledged in discussions about the transition, electricity accounts for only about 20 percent of energy use world-wide. While we can electrify more of our way of life, electrifying everything is not possible. What will supply the non-electric energy that is needed for the transition, and the future? Many of our industrial processes depend on the combustion of fossil fuels. The energy locked into a barrel of oil or a ton of coal is tremendous. Without going into detail, the technologies being considered as substitutes—biomass, hydrogen, etc.—for current non-electric fossil fuel energy are all highly problematic; most are unproven at scale, and all have considerable environmental impacts because they would require more resource extraction, infrastructure build-outs, and the creation of new manufacturing and processing capacity on levels replicating those required by the new solar/wind infrastructure. Biomass, for instance, would require vast tracts of agricultural land to grow the feedstocks, putting them in competition with food crops.

To underline this last point, the green transition would require both an entirely new electric energy-generating infrastructure and entirely new manufacturing capacity and infrastructure for non-electric energy, a task so unprecedented that visualizing it is almost impossible. Factor in the time constraints—that this transition must be accomplished (or close to it) before the end of the third quarter of the century, to avoid the worst effects of climate warming. Then factor in the hitherto undreamed of levels of organizational coordination necessary, both within borders and across them—an organizational capacity that does not even exist in potentia: there is no Ministry for the Future taking shape behind the scenes. Instead, as our modern globalized economy pushes harder and harder against planetary ecological boundaries, once effective forms of social/political/economic organization are breaking down all around us. Any notion of international cooperation is fast becoming a receding fairy tale as governments gear up for the coming death struggle over the last resources, clinging desperately to outmoded and ultimately suicidal chimeras of dominance and hegemony.

In short, transition to “renewables” is not more than a vague aspiration. Even apart from the material constraints, the fine-tuned dovetailed coordination necessary between so many disparate and often conflicting sectors, public and private, at local, regional, national, and transnational scales, is at odds with the nature of present-day society. It is more likely that our industrial ways of life are headed towards collapse, or decay by stage. Should we even direct our energies to trying to build new energy infrastructures on large scales in the hope that they are not doomed to fail? Does the desperation of our situation demand desperate, last ditch responses? I think the more cogent questions are these: Is our primary concern the flourishing of the planetary biosphere as the only basis for our own long-term existence, or is it perpetuating a destructive way of life? What kind of future could we really build out of the crooked timbers of industrialism? How much more are we willing to eviscerate the biosphere in order to prolong the agony?

2.

I’m sure that many will object to all or some of what I’ve said here. Some will simply reject it as implausible or too grim to contemplate. Many will have facts at their fingertips to refute some of the claims I make, offering examples of advances like AI, quantum computing, or innovations in materials or processes that will “remake the world.” But most of these innovations depend on intensive energy use, and therefore are wishful thinking. This techno-optimism can be summed up as a simple formula—People are Working on It—an article of faith in the Religion of Progress.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution did not promise humanity a future of endless progress and innovation, general uplift, and prosperity. There has never been any empirically justified reason not to expect industrial systems, like everything else, to have a shelf life. Understood properly, the amazing technological age we live in is not the product of the revolutions in thought which took place in Europe in the early modern era—innovations in scientific methods—as we have always been told. It’s not even the product of capitalism as such. It is the child of fossil fuels, which, beginning in the eighteenth century, literally energized all those developments in the history of European thought and social evolution. Without fossil fuels, these revolutions would have altered the political and religious/philosophical landscape dramatically, while leaving the fabric of everyday life much the same as it had always been. No age of technological and engineering marvels, no mind-boggling acceleration of innovation and invention, no mass production of consumer goods, no twenty-four-hour-a-day electricity on demand. Almost every aspect of modernity, as world view and as way of life, was made possible by fossil fuels. Without them, there is no reason to assume that the manic levels of change (progress) they supercharged are not coming to an end.

None of this is meant to be an argument in favor of fossil fuels. They must be eliminated. I am trying to sketch a realistic picture of what a world without them might be like, without wishful thinking and science fiction fantasy. The world in which almost all of human evolution and history has played out will reassert itself as the transition to “renewable” energy either never gets off the ground or fails to provide the energy to support our industrial systems. Those limits have always existed, underlying the world built by fossil fuels. However, these substances made so many things possible that had been previously impossible that the underlying limitations to human endeavor have been obscured by an intoxicating sense of liberation from all constraints. This led to an ideology of endless possibility, as well as economic systems predicated on perpetual growth. This way of thinking is deeply ingrained. Our societies are dedicated to the idea that each generation will have more—more opportunity, more prosperity, more happiness—than the generation before. This has pushed the species into a condition of overshoot, a technical term in ecology that refers to a population, under lush environmental conditions, growing in numbers to the point where the available resources can no longer sustain those numbers. The immediate result is that the population erodes its environmental supports to its detriment and that of other associated lifeforms, leading quickly to population crash. Scientists are now generally in agreement that we use annually many orders more bio-geophysical capacity than the earth can regenerate. We have so far avoided the inevitable consequences by finessing the situation through a precarious framework of financial manipulations and debt, superficial technical innovations and improvements in efficiency, and a general obliviousness to the state of the bio-geosphere.

Thus we have created societies and economies in which almost every aspect of ordinary human life—food-growing and consuming, working, shelter, clothing, reproduction of the species—has become destructive of nature and, more and more, of society itself. In other words, we depend for our day-to-day survival on a complex of extraction, production, and distribution of energy and resources that so exceeds the limits of the earth and of biospheric capacity that it has become one gigantic world-wide act of ecocide, which threatens much of the complex life on this planet—including us, making continuing in this way an act of eco-suicide. Let me underline this point: it is not just the greed of the few which is taking us over a cliff, but our entire way of life, which is inherently, in its conceptual underpinnings and its operation in the world and its planetary scale, destructive of its own life support systems. Billions of ordinary human beings, simply trying to live as decent a life as they possibly can in their given circumstances, are implicated in a great crime against life itself.

How do we come to terms with all this? One of our first tasks should be to wean ourselves from our fantasies of limitlessness, not just from the economic orthodoxy of endless growth, but from the more deeply-rooted ideas of constant improvement of material conditions. Even when decoupled from capitalist growth imperatives, visions of social justice and equality for all rest, ironically, on unacknowledged blindnesses—to resource and energy limits. To fully implement these visions would continue exacting unsustainable costs from the earth. This endemic blindness informs the Green New Deal, and progressive thinking in general. The solar future is presented as a giant job-creation program, putting the industrial labor force back to work creating a more justly distributed, clean energy prosperity for generations to come. The prohibitive material costs, economic and ecological, of doing this is rarely contemplated, and never comprehensively.

In essence, modernity has ingrained in many of us a vision of material abundance for all that has become the secular version of redemption. Whether material abundance is achieved through unfettered free markets lifting all boats, or through regimes of social justice which give everybody equal access to resources, we have signed up for a project which can only be accomplished through the continued transformation of the Earth into a factory for the production of human life. Like all eschatological thinking, the fact that the final redemptive moment is never achieved is not enough to persuade the true believers from their faith. This is why well-meaning climate activists see only the clean energy generated by a solar panel or wind turbine, and not the dirty processes and the resource requirements that make that energy possible.

In the last half century, local externalities, such as pollution of air and water, often imposed on nearby populations by industry, have been addressed in attempts to regulate and ameliorate them. However, the externalities imposed on more distant places—other countries, other continents, that have been absolutely central to economic expansion in the developed world—do not directly impinge on our awareness. Even with growing understanding of the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and despite growing awareness of exploitation of workers in the Global South as manufacturing has been outsourced to underdeveloped countries, the exploitation of the Earth itself in these faraway places is mostly under the radar. These are externalities which we do not want to confront in their totality, which are absolutely essential to the maintenance of the developed world’s standards of living. We can righteously condemn the underpaying and over-working of those caught in the gears of the globalized economy as we drink our fair trade coffee, but it is more difficult to confront the environmental costs of externalized extraction and production. We take our material affluence so much for granted that we want everybody to be able to enjoy it. We rarely ask ourselves if this is even possible. Hence the compassionate, progressive environmentalists who propose virtuous “just transitions” to a clean energy future that can only be realized by continuing the imposition of distant externalities—resource extraction and manufacturing compromising local ecosystems and exploiting the labor of the poor—which will unavoidably exacerbate the division of the planet’s population into the haves and the have-nots. Or in a more “optimistic” spin, raise standards of living for these new industrial workers, thereby increasing demand—on a biosphere which cannot support it.

Compounding this obliviousness to the material underpinnings of modern life is the fact that our very survival depends upon long chains of production and distribution of the many commodities we buy and consume. By the time they get to us, their point of origin and the processes to which they have been subjected to transform them into commodities are completely obscured. This radical disconnect from the sources of our own sustenance in the world is unprecedented in human history. Before the onset of industrialization anywhere from ninety percent to one hundred percent of the population in most regions was engaged directly in the production of food. Most people lived face to face with the non-human world. The material supports of society were apparent to everybody, as well as the effort that went into their creation. If industrialization was a revolution, it was one primarily in this sense: the transformation of largely agrarian or hunting/foraging societies into ones in which, in the developed world, only a small percentage of the population is directly engaged in what is arguably the most vital of all human activities—food production.

This epochal change was liberating, but only in very limited ways, freeing workers to do all sorts of other work (energized by fossil fuels) that served human needs and desires. But since capitalism is based on the making of money, not the meeting of needs, occupations were created doing work that is not necessary for life, so that any industrialized economy is a make-work economy. (This in and of itself generates tremendous amounts of waste.) But it also resulted in what Marx called the alienation of the worker from the products of his own labor, as self-provisioning was replaced by wage labor in which the product of work belongs, not to the worker, but to the entity which pays the worker. This alienation goes even deeper, though—as the wage-earning workforce expanded, as technology—especially the new communications media—became more pervasive, human beings were increasingly alienated from the material ground of their very being, the sources of life itself. This has created a psyche immersed in an almost magical world where the things most vital to life are simply there, available or not according to purely social factors, like income, which have nothing to do with the natural forces that actually create them.

In other words, we exist in a state of radically disempowering dependency on man-made systems so vast, so incomprehensible, and so beyond our immediate control that they constitute a second nature, which some have called a technosphere. We exist as free floating particles in this technosphere, rendering our still fully connected embeddedness in the actual biosphere invisible. This is the ultimate source, psychologically, of the blindness to the consequences and context of our way of life that I am trying to explain. If you are a hunter/gatherer, the plant and animal life around you will absorb your attention, personally and culturally; you will live immersed in it, and nurture it. You know exactly where your food comes from. If you depend on an artificial technosphere for everything, then that will be your whole world. Your vital connections to original nature and the limits it imposes on the human enterprise may be recognized sentimentally and intellectually, but because your food comes from the market, not the Earth, this connection and those limits will never be felt in a truly viscerally way. We may be painfully aware, emotionally, of the damage being done to the Earth, but all our plans and hopes for healing the relationship between humanity and planet are, within the mainstream at least, based on enhancements of the technosphere—in other words, further instrumentalizing nature from a standpoint outside of it that does not, cannot, exist. Since this standpoint is literally utopian—a no-place—all our responses to looming environmental crises will be alienated and unrealistic, because the very nature of our contemporary condition is to be alienated from our rootedness in a reality beyond ourselves and our constructs. If the human, in general, and human consciousness, in particular, are inescapably part and parcel of the manifest reality of the more-than-human universe, to occupy a conceptual space outside of it is literally to be “out of our minds.” Hence our dissociated and largely ineffectual response, over the past half century of growing awareness of them, to signs of burgeoning environmental degradation and crisis, of ongoing ecocide. This is the cutting edge of a reality that, trapped inside the technosphere and its conceptual no-space, we cannot effectively grapple with.

I don’t think a fully developed industrial economy, capitalist or socialist, fossil or renewables based, could be designed to operate so that the population does not become encapsulated within it in this way. Industrialism can function only by destroying all other means of subsistence, thereby creating dependent populations detached from the actual sources of their lives. It will be driven to consume more and more of the Earth, even if for no other reason than to give those trapped within the technosphere more and more things to do, more and more to consume; I mean unsustainable tout court.

3.

Let me put this in a larger frame, where it truly belongs: an evolutionary one. Industrialized economies are evolutionary adaptive strategies, as was the transition to agriculture begun twelve thousand years ago. They are evolutionary and adaptive because they remade, literally from the ground up, the human species’ relationship to its environment, through the transformation of food producing populations into workforces dependent on consumption of resources on an enormous scale. On the micro level, this strategy has been rather successful for a large portion of humanity, making possible the creation of societies and productive systems which are more orderly, and more effective in promoting human population growth than any others in history. However, the operation of these highly organized societies is such that they cannot function without feeding on ecosystem services beyond their capacity, thereby generating greater and greater levels of disorder and chaos on the macro level of Earth systems. The ultimate demands of this strategy in cultural terms—universal betterment of all mankind (or more cynically, ever greater accumulation of capital)—compel those who act within it to exceed the limits of resources, habitats, and climate. Now in a giant feedback loop, the chaos at the macro level is disrupting the micro level in ways that increasingly cannot be ignored. Thus, despite great success in increasing human populations and dominance of ecosystems, this adaptive strategy now stands revealed as ultimately maladaptive.

Now, with looming changes in climate that may reverberate for tens of thousands of years, and the sixth great extinction event, we are all participants in a major cataclysm in the four billion year history of life on this planet. True as it may be to blame capitalism, the One Percent, and corporate greed for this, the only way we will survive what is to come is to acknowledge our own maladaptation and to end this mode of life.

4.

Some say that the revelation of God vouchsafed to the ancient Israelites at Sinai represented the eruption of the divine into history, eclipsing the endless natural and cosmic cycles that informed all previous religious thought. At any rate, with the climate crisis, resource depletion, and the ongoing sixth extinction, we are witnesses to an eruption of nature back into history. Any version of our ongoing history that does not take the bio-geophysical reality of Gaia as the ultimate determinant of all human action is no more than a suicide note left behind for the survivors to ponder.

The always contestable claims to universal truth of religion and philosophy, and their bias towards supernatural metaphysics and world transcendence, are being superseded by the forceful emergence into our awareness of what we could call a concrete universal: our embeddedness in an evolving universe and an evolving earth. Universal because it is the common ground upon which we all stand, humans and every other living thing and concrete because it is its material reality that makes our existence possible. Its claim to universality cannot rationally be contested. At the present conjuncture, grounding—on the earth, in the flesh—is what’s needed. The first step in preparing for the de-industrialized future I foresee is to take this to heart, and fully embrace our place, not as the summit of creation, but as one thread in a vast tapestry which we cannot stand outside of.

It’s not that people can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of capitalism; it’s the end of industrial economies that is hard to imagine. We simply do not know how to live in a world without its support systems and its amenities, so some of us resort to fantasies of green industrial abundance gently coaxed by wise stewards from a loving and generous earth. For the more steely-eyed Musks among us, we’ll mine the ocean floors and asteroids, or move to Mars. This is whistling past the graveyard. The human population will shrink as economies falter. Much as we may want to prevent that future and the suffering it will bring, we must recognize that we are caught up in an evolutionary process that we cannot stop. At every turn, we are encouraged to think that every condition is a “problem” that can be solved, and that anything is possible if we want it badly enough. Seeing that this is delusional thinking will be one of the hardest things we do. The next several generations are in for a hard, hard time.

5.

So what would hope for the right thing be? Most of human history has been pre-industrial, and if the future is post-industrial, this is simply a return to historical norms. Human beings have survived and thrived in non-industrial societies. We may believe that the conditions of life in those eras were wretched for most, but this belief doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Many of the remains of those pasts testify to peoples who created high and vernacular cultures of incredible beauty and complexity. Life may have been hard, by our lights, but it was only intermittently nasty, brutish, and short. And let’s not forget that those three adjectives describe the lives of all too many during the last two hundred years or so of the Great Expansion, (as some are calling the fossil-fueled explosion of productive activity) for all the improvements in standards of living which it brought.

Rather than despair at the looming end of industrialism’s promise of an infinite future of more of the same, we could see the end of the Great Expansion as a portal to the next stage of human evolution. Even now, new worldviews are evolving which in various ways seek to re-integrate the human with the non-human, science with spirit, human endeavor with the framing processes of the biosphere, rejecting the dualism which alienates. These nascent worldviews look to the whole-systems thinking that has emerged out of the revolutionary scientific breakthroughs of the past century and more. These lines of thought, during my lifetime, have moved from the fringy coffeehouses of the Beats and the conclaves of the early cyberneticists, out into the wider world of the sixties counterculture, and then, decades later, emerged into popular consciousness through the bestsellers of Michael Pollan, Lynn Margulis, Brian Swimme, Wendell Berry and many others. Meanwhile, many have worked to apply these new ways of thinking practically. We need to pay a lot less attention to the antics of Elon Musk and his ilk and more attention to men and women like Wes Jackson, John and Nancy Todd, and Vandana Shiva, to name only four who have toiled for decades to make our relationships to land and life more truly sustainable through biologically informed, rather than technocratic, solutions. And let’s not forget the vital work being done in Indigenous communities to bring age-old traditions of thought and being in the world to bear on today’s most urgent issues. They have much to teach us about living rich lives with simple means. And, last but not least, many young people around the world, rather than succumb to despair, are working on a very pragmatically local and small scale towards the rejuvenation of an ailing biosphere.

Terrible as the death throes of industrial society and the transition to a new civilization will be, we are not without tremendous resources. The species that evolved in the warm tropics of Africa and then survived the Ice Ages may well survive this new era of heat, storms, and sea-level rise to evolve low-energy societies that have the potential to release us from our current dependence on industrial systems we do not control or own.

In the end it comes down to this: the primary, yet largely unacknowledged, conviction driving our collective delusional response to environmental calamity is that our industrialized way of life must, at any cost to all other life, be projected into the future. It is the desire to put a straitjacket on all other possibilities of development, of both human societies and of life in general. It is to subject them to the overmastering will of Man. Hasn’t this drive to dominate already given us two hundred years of industrial modernity’s various alienations?  Haven’t they trapped us in a hall of mirrors, where everywhere we look, we see only ourselves, amputated from the rest of the world, from the flow of  life itself? Does anybody, in the most private chambers of their hearts, really want this painful, pathological condition to be perpetuated into the future?

My hope is that the crucible we are about to go through—what some are calling a species-wide near-death experience—will see us emerge, on the other side, transformed. Not through a millenarian apocalypse or New Age transubstantiation into something angelic, but as the result of hard lessons learned: that in an over-heated, resource-depleted world, the economic and material accumulation that the Great Expansion taught us to expect is simply no longer possible. Then we may see that the only path to well-being left to us is to rejoin the commonwealth of the biosphere. Perhaps, that lesson learned, people will create societies as dedicated to the wealth of living nature as we have been to our monocultures of dead nature and money. One can think of this as a kind of animism, in which humans see themselves in deep social and familial relationships of reciprocity with all life, founded on ecology and evolutionary science. Some may think this utopian, but haven’t all human cultures before the industrial age been based on some version, however clouded by superstition, magical thinking, and theology, of this understanding of life as a precondition of human well-being?

What then would be, more comprehensively considered, hope for the right thing? Pouring our efforts into rebuilding the biological health of the planet, as far as we possibly can, to foster as much resilience as we can muster—not just in the earth itself but in local cultures as well—to equip us to weather the coming storms. Reforestation of whole territories, restored grasslands and wetlands on similar scales, healthy oceans: these are sources of life and possibility for the future, as well as carbon sinks of much more value than any technocratic sequestration scheme or carbon-credit market. Corollary to this is the de-industrialization of agriculture, which would entail expanding the percentage of the population directly involved in producing food. Rather than agitating for Green New Deals, which would send the world’s working classes into factories and mines to produce wind turbines and solar panels for the affluent, why not move to regenerative farming and a large-scale return to the land, putting the culture back into agriculture? If the future is one in which economies shrink, and consumption levels drop, a robust agricultural sector—one which is not depleting soils and aquifers and discharging toxins into rivers and oceans—would make it possible for societies of limited means to at least feed themselves.

No doubt such moves will require a thorough transformation of the nature of society: those who run the world today will not give up the industrial system on which their wealth and power depends simply because human welfare requires it. However, I believe that, one way or another, the regeneration of the Earth and the web of life will happen, sooner or later. It is the only path forward that offers real hope. Our active participation in this process would be most desirable but not strictly necessary, since nature can and will do it without us. I don’t know how to begin to implement anything I’ve suggested here. What I do know is that it is high time for all of us to think differently. If we can do that, then and only then will we have staked a claim to a continuing place in the evolution of life on this planet.

1. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980)
2. Richard Heinberg , The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2005)
3. DJ White and NJ Hagens, The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century: Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament (2019)
4. Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (2021)
5. Bruce Clarke, Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics and the End of the Anthropocene (2020)
6. Post Carbon Institute: https://www.postcarbon.org
7. The Great Simplification: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com
8. Fictitious Capital: https://fictitiouscapital.substack.com
9. 100 Percent Wishful Thinking: The Green-Energy Cornucopia: https://www.resilience.org
10. The Global Energy Crisis and the Role of So-called Renewable Energy in Solving It: https://ecologise.in/2017/07/29/global-crisis-role-called-renewable-energies-solving/