What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

A couple of days ago Tim commented on the weather report. The temperature that day, May 1st would reach a record high of 93. Today, three days later, the forecast is for a high of 64. That’s a drop of 29 degrees in three days.

Most people, at least most people in the privileged middle, upper middle, and upper classes of America, probably don’t think much about that. They don’t think about it because they don’t feel it. They move from one climate controlled environment at home to other climate controlled environments where they work and shop. All this “climate control” is based on huge expense of energy, fossil fueled energy. The discomfort of an abrupt move into 93 degree weather is minimal, only experienced on the short walk from sterile environment to sterile environment. And the wild fluctuation of nearly 30 degrees over three days is hardly noticed.

How do these huge temperature fluctuations affect the cycles of plants? What are the ramifications of such swings in temperature?

We don’t know. We don’t know because recent climate history has been characterized by relative stability for the past at least 2000 years. Many historians suggest that it is the relative stability of climate that has allowed a civilized lifestyle to develop. Civilized, settled, city-based lifestyles require permanent settlement in one place. That could only happen in conditions where climate was stable enough to support agriculture and the storage of excess foodstuffs (grain) to keep people fed during minor and short-lived climate fluctuations that affected food availability. Nomadic life meant people moved to where the food was. Nomads don’t build skyscrapers and wield cell phones.

But we do. We build skyscrapers and freeways and cell phone towers and box stores and totally unnecessary single family homes of many thousands of square feet. We think nothing of it. We take it for granted. This is progress. This is how it is supposed to be.

Industrial civilization based on burning fossil fuels has messed seriously with the climate.

The “reversal” of the months of March and April temperatures this year is a taste of what is to come. People intimately connected with the natural world see up close what this means.

There will be areas this year where there are no nuts or fruits as a result of this freakish weather pattern. This will be devastating to wild life. Very little has been said about this in the mainstream press. It ought to be front page headline news, week after week. This kind of weather pattern will come to be seen as commonplace rather than freakish.

The wild temperature fluctuations of this week remind me that we are entering a period of huge uncertainty.

I found a book at Nice Price a few days ago entitled Rooted in the Land, edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson. It is a collection of essays and articles on community and place. I started reading it halfway through because the title of the essay “Coming In to the Foodshed” caught my eye.

I heard the term “foodshed” for the first time several weeks ago. It’s an evocative word. Like the word watershed, it conjures an appealing image of food flowing into an area through the action of natural forces.

This book was published in 1996. The authors do not account for Peak Oil or Climate Change explicitly. They write from a philosophical vantage point and ask the reader to entertain the notion that a “moral economy” cannot be based on exploitation. A “moral economy” must be grounded in concepts like “foodshed” which tie humans and their lives, the whole of their lives, including their economic lives, to the land where they actually live. What is right and moral, they suggest, is to use the goods that one needs to live from the bounty of one’s own area and to leave the bounty from other’s areas alone, so that they may be stewards of those goods.

This is so obvious to me to be wisdom it is kind of astounding that it needs to be written about. But our whole culture, our complete way of life is antithetical to such a moral economy.

We’ve got to look at this if we are going to come to grips with the magnitude of change we face.

In light of what is becoming clear about how seriously we have affected our environment, that “moral” definition is obviously also ecologically practical. We cannot survive in the long run if we keep depriving other life forms of their right to survive.

It’s going to come crashing in on us at some point. And it’s looking like sooner rather than later.

This brings up the problem of cities. In What A Way To Go we note that cities are dependent on the importation of resources to exist. As we live now, people in cities need both food and energy in order to survive that come from somewhere else, someone else. Those “someones” are other human beings or other species, and are often both.

And fully half of all humans now live in urban areas. Half.

Yikes.

If cities, by defininition, exceed the carrying capacity of their local environment, and if half of the current and rising human population live in these places called cities, what does that mean? If, on top of that, we are entering a period of reduced energy supplies, increasingly unstable climate, reduced top soil, and drought, what does it all mean?

It means the shit is about to hit the fan in a big way.

It means that what is “moral” is going to become synonymous with what works for survival. In the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties we were pulling for a “moral” economy because it was right. It was the good thing to pull for. It was what seemed fair.

Now we are facing the breakdown of all natural systems: the climate, the soils, the availability of drinkable water.

The Prius is not going to fix this.

Once I got the implications of Peak Oil, that fact became obvious. It’s not going to be a CHOICE to act locally. There will just flat out not be energy resources available for us to keep ripping off the rest of the world for their stuff: their topsoil, their water, their human labor, or their oil.

Nike sneakers from sweatshops in Nicaragua will not be available.

I’m so glad.

We’re going to have to learn to cooperate on every level within our local foodshed. And we’re going to have to reduce our population drastically.

Did you read that?

We’re going to have to reduce our populaton drastically. That means by a LOT.

We’re going to have to turn ourselves from computer programmers into farmers and farm every square inch of sunlit areas in the cities to make any sort of humane transition from the excesses of Empire to life based in the local foodshed. If you want to see how to do that watch The Power of Community: How Cuba Faced Peak Oil.

And when that happens, if that happens, we will feel better.

It doesn’t feel good to live with the gnawing awareness that almost everything that my lifestyle and comfort are based on come from exploiting someone else’s foodshed and/or someone else’s slave labor. It feels plain awful when I look at the fact that my ability to hop in the car and go buy half and half for my coffee in the morning means someone else in the world is denied the opportunity to live a dignified life grounded in their own foodshed.

People don’t get this. Virtually everything about the American lifestyle is based on exploiting something or someone. If you don’t believe me read Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe. American intelligence and ingenuity are not what make it possible for us to live the way we do. American intelligence and ingenuity only make it possible to exploit others in such sophisticated and remote ways that we don’t have to see or feel the consequences of our actions.

But all of that is about to come to a screeching halt.

I’m so glad.

Between Peak Oil and Climate Change, the piper is arriving to be paid. It is time to come to terms with the limits. And as any angry, neglected two-year-old or sixteen-year-old knows, there is great relief when Mother comes and wraps her arms around the tantrum or takes away the car keys and grounds us so we can’t do any more damage. At first we get mad, but with time, we relax. We’re not meant to live without limits. We’re drunk and out of control. And we’re bored with it all.

Mother is about to call a halt to all of this nonsense. She’s begun to impose the limits which, if we live through as a species, will return us to our rightful places as younger members of the great family of life. She’s signaling that the time has come, that we must stop this insane acting out and come back to our more sane, more related, selves.

We can see the limits coming and accept them and settle into them. We can quiet down and thoughtfully consider what’s going on and why. We can change how we live. We can, en masse, quit working for Empire, stay home and start planting gardens and building water cisterns. We can see economic collapse, food and energy shortages and heightened global political tensions as the natural consequences of an immature and arrogant adolescent culture gone wild.

We can do these things. But we will have to choose to do so.

Or we can remain in denial and pretend that we can technofix our way out. We can go into debt buying hybrid cars and bigger and bigger houses with bigger and bigger mortgages in a real estate bubble that is ready to pop.

That would be a big mistake. That will only prolong the destruction and increase the consequences by further and more profoundly damaging all of the natural systems we’ve already damaged.

Perhaps we will wake up soon and see collapse as the natural and constructively critical consequences of our actions in this insane culture of Empire.

Perhaps we, as a species, will survive. Perhaps we will live through this crazy adolescence to emerge at some time in the future as mature members of a climax ecosystem, grounded in our Mother’s love. If we do, it’s not going to be because we all put solar collectors on our roofs and began to eat locally grown food. Not that those things are not good to do during the transition.

It’s just not going to be that easy. It’s going to require something more profound of us. It’s going to require fundamental change in who we are and how we relate. We’re going to have to grow up and learn to get along.

And that’s the good news.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Sally's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.