Introduction

The future is going to be far different than the past. The next decade is going to look vastly different than the last decade. This blog is about the transition.
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What I am concerned with is the collapse of industrial civilization. "The way things are" is built on a narrative of exponential growth, which by definition eventually hits limits of resources - in terms of money needed, ecosystem destruction, pollution, destruction of landbases, etc. These limits are far more complex than simple population size. In this blog I will talk about why we are hitting limits, how it will play out, and what we can do about it. But make no mistake, the coming years will be marked by shocks to the system. And it won’t be long until our way of life looks decidedly different. Decline is certain. But we can empower ourselves and our communities to become more resilient.

Faced with such a grave situation, I think that if it was known rather than hidden the majority would come to agreement that we need to radically alter the way we live in order to save ourselves. The point is that if we do not do something radical we will experience something radical. If we do not choose the way in which we transition we will hit limits that will force us towards what many have termed “de-growth,” and it won't be nearly as pretty. These limits are already hitting now, and will only get worse and worse as time goes on.

Most people’s solutions and questions assume that we have time to slowly ease our government and populace to a “more reasonable" type of solution. But what I am saying is that we don't have time for all that. We can't muck around with idealistic philosophy like "if we had a free market system it would all eventually work itself out." That may be (probably isn’t) true, but we're not going to ever see it implemented. There is no free market and there is no political will to pry off the greedy hands of the wealthy and the corporations in order to give such a free market to the people. So talking like that does us no good. It's ethereal mumbo-jumbo, practically speaking.

The thing we must change is our understanding (in our society, culture, and world-view) of how the world should operate - because that is the culprit that is driving us to extinction and forcing us towards limits to growth. We have to change the narrative. It's the narrative that's killing us. The narrative is based on exponential growth and we have to change that perspective if we are to have any hope of safely transitioning. 

At this point it's pretty clear that we are going to experience a crash/collapse of "the way things are." The only thing to do now is talk about how we can manage the transition to a far different future that is rising up to meet us whether we are ready or not and whether we have prepared or not.

We can make this transition overall easier, if we willingly radically change… but make no mistake, it will require radical changes - not just signing petitions or magically creating hundreds of new nuclear power plants a decade or more from now. So how do we do this, if we cannot legislate it away? if the problems are altogether too massive to make go away by building a few nuclear power plants and calling it good? if we cannot go into debt any more in order to massively change infrastructure? if we cannot simply trust the politicians to make it unlawful for the corporations to take the oil from the ground or water from the aquifers?

Some have asked what specific laws we would have to change on a national scale in order to mitigate the problem sufficiently. Such a thing is a massive and complex undertaking that would require all of the huge corporations to literally stop operating - which would require massive lay-offs and would require a lot of people voluntarily quitting their careers for the sake of humanity. That's a lot to ask. And it will never happen unless the public at large is heavily inundated with the message that if we do not do this - if we do not voluntarily choose to stop the large-scale actions that are killing our planet - then those systems will involuntarily crash and even worse result will occur. The difference being that voluntarily choosing a Second Great Depression would allow us to transition to a more sustainable way of life, whereas ignoring it will hit limits so hard that the more gradual slope we could have had will be a cliff of epic proportions. 


The picture is bleak. Trust me, I know. And it is compounded by the fact that no one in a position of power is talking about it. Because they would be required to have a plan of "what to do" were they to take the stage and lay out the facts. It is far easier to just keep doing what we've been doing, seeking solutions from where we've always sought them, than to completely change everything and trumpet the news onto every television and radio until it forces the populace at large to confront the reality that we are facing, and have a public conversation about what we want to do about it. 

We came together in WWII as a country and the common man and the average family completely changed their way of life for a greater good. Would that we now had that kind of public perception of the problem, then we might be able to collectively come up with the courage necessary to confront it. 

I think that there is some room for hope though. There is plenty that individuals can do to prepare for the transition. And there are plenty of organizations and collectives who are making their communities and regions more resilient. Even if this never hits a national scale conversation (which I honestly doubt it will before everything starts crumbling and people's way of life is finally impacted on a large scale) there will be those who shepherd others through the transition. There are solutions that individuals can implement and there is work being done by organizations to make their communities resilient and to help people transition through.

Think of the difference between two scenarios:

Scenario 1:

We voluntarily start a "crash program" and start using less and less oil and voluntarily start using less and less water for industrial uses such as fracking and all the rest, and start destroying less and less rainforests, and start pulling back our military from around the globe, etc. In this scenario we basically hugely diminish our footprint, but in a controlled way that mitigates the impact significantly (though it will still hurt immensely and require a complete re-structuring of how our society works - with way less transportation, less cars, less grocery stores, less consumer goods, etc). 


Now, compare that with scenario two:

Scenario 2:

In this scenario we pretend everything is ok, that we will somehow find a magical energy source that gives us the same or better EROEI (energy return on energy invested) as oil without the negative side-effects. We believe that maybe we can indefinitely go into more and more debt in order to finance our standard of living. We put off doing anything drastic on the off chance that those 'crazies' are right and instead want to believe that unsustainability is a word that does not apply. In this scenario, which many have termed "business as usual," we continue on the way we have been. Every year more limits are reached, and more shocks to the system occur. We have another financial meltdown like in '08, we see oil prices untethered from demand and price spikes occasionally rear their head, we watch more and more countries around the world collapse economically. We see these things as the years roll by and the year becomes 2020. We think all these things are just road bumps. The experts come up with myriad reasons why they are happening that seem plausible as long as we don't dig too deeply and we believe they have nothing to do with us in this great nation anyway. Eventually (and here I will interject a personal year-marker, from what I've seen projected) around the year 2025, things start going completely haywire. Maybe the government defaults on our debt, oil is completely wild, irregular, and we cannot import enough of it to meet demand. The banks go bankrupt. Every country in the world seems to come apart at the seams. We have rolling blackouts in giant regions of the US that last weeks on end. People are in the streets rioting in the millions. Bankers and politicians are hanged. Violence becomes epidemic. 

​The point of course is that there is a vast difference. Don't get caught up in the timeline of events or the specifics of the events. It's just a story. It could play out any number of ways. The thing to remember here is that scenario 1 is an option, albeit an honestly very unlikely one if past experience is any indication. We need to fight to make that scenario as likely as possible though. So that more and more individuals will equip themselves to be able to handle the transition and so that more and more organizations can make their communities more resilient and prepared to transition and deal with a world that is very different from the one we inhabit now.