by John Michael Greer
The Archdruid Report (September 03 2008)
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society
The mismatch between the narratives of sudden apocalypse that shape so
much of today's debate about the future, on the one hand, and the
sluggish pace at which the predicament of industrial society unfolds in
the real world, on the other, found a poster child of sorts last
weekend. During the days of uncertainty before Hurricane Gustav's
arrival on the Louisiana coast, some enthusiastic soul posted claims to
the peak oil newsblog The Oil Drum that the hurricane would bring
industrial civilization itself crashing down in ruins.
I was pleased to note that this announcement seems to have fallen on
unsympathetic ears. The Oil Drum's forte is shrewd technical analysis,
and its staff - if I may so describe the loose association of regular
posters and commenters who give that excellent site its tone and
direction - set aside such speculations and did their usual exemplary
job, mapping out the oil platforms and refineries likely to be affected
by Gustav and posting damage estimates that turned out to be fairly
close to the picture now emerging on the ground. Gustav was a moderately
strong storm; it forced the evacuation of nearly every offshore and
coastal petroleum facility in the Gulf of Mexico, causing substantial
short-term production losses; the long-term effects of the storm will
not be clear for weeks, but all by itself, $30 billion or so in
estimated damage piled atop an already faltering economy will certainly
have an impact.
The difference between the fantasy of sudden collapse and the reality of
one more localized jolt piling additional burdens on a stumbling society
is well worth keeping in mind. Like the proverbial frog in the saucepan,
those who think of apocalyptic collapse as the only way industrial
civilization can break down are far less likely to notice the gradual
changes in their environment that are leading in the same direction,
just more slowly. It's as though, to shift stories, the boy who cried
wolf was convinced that immense armies of wolves would suddenly swoop
down and eat up all the sheep in the world at once, and mistook every
whistle of wind in the trees for the distant howling of the wolf pack to
end all wolf packs; meanwhile, practically under his nose, real wolves -
scruffy, undersized, and quite depressingly few in number compared to
the massed uber-wolves of the fantasy - were picking off a sheep or two
each day from the fringes of the flock.
As both these metaphors suggest, the fixation on sudden collapse has
practical disadvantages. If you're a frog in a saucepan, and the only
idea of heat you're willing to consider involves all the water in the
saucepan suddenly flashing into steam, you probably won't jump while
your legs are still uncooked enough to do so; if you're guarding sheep
from wolves, and groups of wolves numbering fewer than fifty are beneath
your notice, your sheep are going to be eaten. In the same way, there
are plenty of practical steps that can be taken here and now by
individuals, that will likely make the slow unraveling of industrial
society much less horrific than it might otherwise be. Most of those
steps would be, or at least appear to be, irrelevant in the face of
sudden global catastrophe, and in fact it's not uncommon to find
believers in some such catastrophe dismissing these practical steps in
exactly those terms.
Mind you, there are other reasons why those steps are easy to dismiss.
Every one of them has a price tag of some sort, denominated in money,
labor, comfort, convenience, or unimpeded access to the smorgasbord of
distractions today's industrial civilization offers its inmates. By
contrast, our culture's two dominant narratives about the future - the
narrative of apocalypse and its twin and shadow, the narrative of
inevitable progress - are popular at least in part because they push the
necessity and the costs of change onto somebody else: the "they" who are
expected to think of something just in time to keep progress on track,
for example, or the supposedly faceless billions who are expected to
hurry up and die en masse so that the flag of some future utopia can be
pitched atop their graves.
I've talked about some of the steps in question already on this blog,
but today I'd like to turn to something a bit different from those
previous discussions: the question of how people will make a living
during the long unraveling of the industrial age.
That's a question that has received surprisingly little attention in
recent years, and a good deal of that neglect, I think, can be laid at
the door of the apocalyptic narrative. According to that narrative,
after all, nothing much changes until everything does; you keep on
punching the timeclock at your present job until the day that
civilization falls apart, and then, if you happen to be among the
survivors, you step into whatever new role the apocalypse has ordained
for you - subsistence farmer, tribal hunter-gatherer, protein source for
the local cannibal population, or what have you. At the same time, the
absence of a nine-to-five routine on the far side of apocalypse is
likely to be an important source of the narrative's popularity; I'm far
from the only person who noticed, during the runup to the Y2K noncrisis,
how many people predicting imminent doom seemed exhilarated by the
notion that they would not have to go to work on January 2 2000.
If I'm right and the descent into the deindustrial future unfolds over
generations, though, that enticing prospect is not in the cards. Rather,
the vast majority of us will need to earn our livings in a world that,
while it will be changing around us, is extremely unlikely to change in
ways that will make that process any easier than it is now. During the
period I've described in other posts as the age of scarcity
industrialism, something like today's money economy will likely remain
firmly in place, though the household economy and other forms of
production and exchange outside the money economy will likely play a
steadily growing role. During the age of salvage economies that I expect
to follow the twilight of the industrial system, money of some sort will
likely remain in use on a small scale, as it does in most dark ages, but
most day-to-day transactions will take place via barter or other systems
of exchange outside the money economy; again, that's standard practice
in dark ages. In both periods, though, people will work for their
livings - and will likely work a good deal harder than many Americans do
today.
Nor will their jobs be the same as the ones that employ most Americans
nowadays. The flood of cheap abundant energy that surged through the
industrial world during the twentieth century reshaped every dimension
of the economy in its image, and nearly all the things we have grown up
considering normal and natural are artifacts of that highly abnormal and
unnatural state of affairs. Very few people in the industrial world
today spend their workdays producing goods or providing necessary
services; instead, pushing paper has become the standard employment, and
preparation for a paper-pushing career the standard form of education.
The once-mighty archipelago of trade schools that undergirded the rise
of America as an industrial power sank with barely a trace in the second
half of the twentieth century. I once lived three blocks away from the
shell of one such school; it had been engulfed by a community college,
and classrooms that once hummed with the busy noises of machine-shop
equipment and the hiss of hot solder were being used to train a new
generation of receptionists, brokers, and medical billing clerks.
The postindustrial economy proclaimed by Daniel Bell many years ago, and
accepted as an accurate description of economic reality since then, was
never much more than a shell game. The societies of the industrial world
were every bit as dependent on industry as they had ever been; they
simply exported the industries to Third World countries where labor was
cheap and environmental regulation nonexistent, and continued to reap
the benefits back home. Those arrangements only worked, however, because
cheap abundant energy made transport costs negligible, and systematic
distortions in patterns of exchange pumped wealth from the Third World
to a handful of industrial nations, providing the latter with the
wherewithal to pay a very large fraction of their populations to do jobs
that don't actually need to be done. As energy becomes scarce and
expensive again, and the imperial systems that concentrated the world's
wealth in a minority of nations are shredded by the rise of new centers
of power, those arrangements will break down. As that happens, a great
many goods and necessary services now done offshore will need to be done
at home once again, and a great many professions that produce no goods
and provide no necessary services will likely drop off the economic map.
Prophecy is a risky business at the best of times, but it's worth
hazarding some guesses about the jobs that will fill the post-petroleum
job ads here in America over the next generation or so, through the
years of the Great Recession and the disintegration of America's
overseas empire. Farmers are among the most likely candidates for the
top of the list. By this I don't mean subsistence farmers in rural
ecovillages - their time is much further in the future, if it ever comes
at all. Rather, market farmers tilling what is now suburban acreage to
feed the dwindling cities, and rural farmers producing grains and other
bulk crops for foreign exchange, will likely be in high demand, along
with support professions such as agronomists.
Engineers form another set of trades likely to do well in the generation
to come, especially those who know their way around energy production
and distribution and the design, building, and maintenance of low-tech
transportation networks. In the not too distant future, rail and canal
transport will have to take over much of the work now done by trucks,
and energy networks will have to cope with a fractious mix of
alternative resources, dwindling fossil fuels, and massive conservation
programs. The people who actually put the plans of engineers into
effect, from skilled machinists all the way down to the gandy dancers
who lay the rails, will also be able to count on steady paychecks.
Another suite of professions likely to do well barely exists today,
though demolitions experts, junkyard workers, and people who run
recycling and composting operations represent tentative forays into the
territory. A huge fraction of America's potential wealth in the postpeak
years consists of manufactured objects that can either be refurbished
and put back into circulation, or stripped of raw materials for reuse.
When the electricity needed to power elevators and run heating and
cooling systems is dizzyingly expensive when it can be had at all, for
example, skyscrapers will be worth more as sources of refined metal than
as buildings, and most of them will come down. On the other end of the
spectrum, a great many consumer products that are now consigned to
landfills when they break will be worth salvaging, repairing, and
reselling once the cost of the necessary labor is cheaper than the cost
of the energy and raw materials for a new model - a state of affairs
that existed in America until the 1960s and will likely exist again
within a decade or two. The salvage industries, as we may as well call
them, may well turn out to be one of the major growth industries of the
twenty-first century.
Other professions have their own possibilities. It's a useful exercise
to locate a city directory from the first half of the twentieth century
and flip through the pages, noting the businesses that existed then but
are nowhere to be found today. Those that meet actual needs, however
unpopular they are as career tracks today, are likely to be more viable
and more lucrative in a deindustrializing future than many professions
fashionable today. The pundits and publicists of our economic system
never seem to tire of explaining that tomorrow's jobs will not be the
same as today's, and I suspect they may just be right; what they don't
expect, and I do, is that many of tomorrow's hottest jobs will have more
than a little resemblance to the careers of yesterday.
Those people who make preparations now to move into such jobs as they
come open will be doing themselves and their communities alike a favor
of no small worth. These preparations need to begin soon - while the
time, resources, and knowledge base for many necessary skills are still
readily accessible - and this requires, once again, some sense of the
way civilizations actually fall, and a willingness to apply that slow,
stumbling, unromantic but realistic model to the events going on around
us right now.
_____
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/08/no-different-this-time.html
