The Long Descent by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026000
ISBN: 9781550923964
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2008-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Tools

for the

Transition

It makes a great deal of difference how we come to view the challenge of the next century. On the one hand, it could be portrayed as a struggle to keep modern industrial civilization moving along the endless upward curve of progress. On the other, it could more usefully be envisioned as a matter of managing the end of the industrial age and coping with the decline to a more modest and less ecologically suicidal deindustrial society. We’re in much the same situation as family members who have to decide on medical treatment for an elderly parent who has half a dozen vital systems on the verge of giving out. If the only outcome we’re willing to accept is keeping Dad alive forever, we guarantee ourselves a desperate, expensive, and futile struggle with the inevitable. People, like civilizations, are mortal; no matter how much money and technology gets poured into keeping them alive, sooner or later it won’t be enough.

On the other hand, if we accept that Dad is going to die sooner or later, and we concentrate on giving him the best possible quality of life in the time he has left, there’s quite a bit that can be done. The last part of Dad’s life can be made better, and so can the lives of the generations that follow him, because the money that might have been spent paying for exotic medical procedures to keep Dad alive for another three months of misery can go instead to pay college tuition for his grandchildren. The same thing is likely to be true in the twilight years of industrial civilization; the resources we have left can be used either to maintain the industrial system for a few more years, or to cushion the descent into the deindustrial future — but not both.

Now, it’s sometimes true that the only way to deal with a hard fact is to take the even harder path of acceptance. In at least one sense, this describes the situation we’re in right now. The current predicament can’t be dealt with at all if “dealing with it” means finding a way to prevent the decline and fall of the industrial system and the coming of the deindustrial age. That option went out the window around 1980, when the industrial world turned its collective back on a decade of promising movements toward sustainability. At this point we’ve backed ourselves into the trap predicted by The Limits to Growth back in 1972; we no longer have the resources to simultaneously meet our present needs and provide for our future. When the future becomes the present, we will no longer have the resources to do either one. At that point, catabolic collapse begins in earnest, and industrial society starts consuming itself.

It bears repeating, though, that this isn’t a quick process, nor is it a linear one. Civilizations fall in a stepwise fashion, with periods of crisis and contraction followed by periods of stability and partial recovery. The theory of catabolic collapse explains this as, basically, a matter of supply and demand.

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