End-Time for U.S.A. Upon Oil Collapse  

Jan Lundberg's analysis at Culture Change is getting grimmer by the month, with his latest article being a pretty dystopian look at the current state of affairs.

After the devastation of the petroleum-powered civilization and its broken, smoldering aftermath, there will not be any other choice than sharing the world. If not, and sustainable models do not become the rule, then humanity will not pull through to keep evolving biologically. We are flirting with extinction in several ways: climate change, nuclear holocaust, and infertility from plastics, pesticides and other threats. Only with careful, respectful "precision living" that corrects all past mistakes of significance, can the human race endure -- given we are not already too far along in bringing about extinction of other species as a prelude to our own extinction.

As soon as people try to rebuild life as working members of a community, because they found right away that they needed each other to grow, gather, hunt and prepare food, a quasi tribal social system will form that looks out for members and maintains armed defense. However, after the rediscovered practices of mutual aid and cooperation bear fruit, there is too much proof of the value of solidarity and sharing resources and skills for there to be a serious threat from the outside. Die off will have taken care of even desperados who scrounged as lone wolves for a while. Life will for a long time not be much better for members of community, as they must eat strangely such as vermin for protein, perhaps cooked over furniture fires.

Bart makes some good comments following the piece on Energy Bulletin (see below). Personally I prefer Alex Steffen's "Post Oil Megacity" vision to Jay's "Dieoff" vision, but it is worth keep both extremes in mind (which is why I bring up Jay and Dieoff every now and then in between my more frequent Viridian notes), especially as we don't seem to be making much of an effort to solve the problem as yet.

I'm also reading Catton's "Overshoot" at the moment, which does tend to bring Jay's thoughts to the front of ones mind all too often (as it was probably a major influence on them).

Jan Lundberg has been a long-time writer and activist opposing the baleful influence of petroleum and automobiles on society. I've read his Culture Change newsletters and been influenced by him. I'm sorry to see him take up the thesis of Die-off. It's quite a jump from saying that our high-energy consumerism isn't sustainable, to saying that 95% of the population will die of starvation. (Fortunately, the rest of Jan's essay is vintage Lundberg, alternately acerbic and hopeful.) The Die-off concept is brilliantly documented on the dieoff.org website and is discussed on multiple forums such as peakoil.com . As the peak-oil idea becomes diffused, the Die-off idea won't be far behind.

To my mind, Die-off is bad analysis, based on fear and escapism. The fatalism and hysteria implicit in Die-off lead to very bad politics. Desperate people do not make wise choices, nor will they take part in the the co-operative efforts necessary to re-create our civilization after Peak Oil. I'm not sure why people in the richest, most technically advanced societies ever known on the planet are attracted to the fatalism of Die-off. Difficult times are coming, but humans have confronted difficult times before. Is there an element of self-pity in our fatalism? I think of France in 1939, with a World War raging and a Nazi victory likely, when the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was writing:

Sartre teaches that we are constantly tempted to escape our responsibility for creating ourselves from what we have been made - there is something comforting, after all, in feeling that things are beyond our control. But, as he also teaches, to accept this is to enter into complicity with the powers that would dominate us. Sartre demands that we see ourselves as active agents, even when we might prefer the irresponsibility of seeing ourselves as victims.

Today Sartre is still as troubling and annoying as ever. He demands that we see a world seemingly out of control as made up of human choices and the structures these create. When he demands that we take responsibility for our lives, for the shape of our world, for the situation of the least favored - for others as well as ourselves - he is expressing decisively important conditions for learning to live as responsible citizens in this globalized world.

Ronald Aronson in the International Herald Tribune on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Sartre's birth.

Meanwhile Jay is making waves as usual over at Alas Babylon with his theories about plutocracy (feudalism ?) being the natural result of human evolution and the return of slavery being likely as we travel down the peak (I'm over-simplifying of course and no doubt he's playing games - I hope - with the readers to a certain extent).

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