Collide-a-scape

The NYT uses the Gulf oil disaster as a hook to examine the peak oil “collapsitarians.” Some of them are a bit overwrought, it seems, and want to do more than rub their worry beads. Fortunately, there’s a new cottage industry catering to their anxieties. The theme of the NYT story can be gleaned from this opener:

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year — that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Indeed there is. Click on the link for that telephone course. Check out its marketing pitch:

How do you feel about the current unraveling of industrial civilization and the coming transition? Do you long for a place to discuss your feelings, thoughts, and methods of preparation? Do you long to feel less alone as you live with all you know?

Now that’s some serious fear mongering, served up with a soothing New Age veneer. Sure enough, click on the instructor’s bio and homepage, and you’ll learn that she’s a former psychotherapist, whose latest book is called Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Path.

What’s that sound you hear? The wonks at The Oil Drum retching in unison. Because I’m sure that’s just what they want, their high-minded debates on overshoot being co-opted by pseudo-spiritualist claptrap.

Still, you gotta admire that singularly American can-do entrepreneurial spirit. If industrial civilization is going under, someone might as well cash in on the collapse.

Who else but Clay Shirky would draw on Joseph Tainter’s seminal 1988 book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” to discuss the downfall of a once dominant business model?

Noting the regeneration of media on the web, Shirky also makes this very interesting observation:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Hmm, I wonder what the The Oil Drum gang or the Resilience folks would make of this.

Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book:

Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of discontinuity and cultural extinction. Almost universally written from a European perspective, the mythologies of conquest have helped render Native Americans invisible.

Part of what’s bugging Wilcox is also the focus of a new volume of essays (by a number of scholars, including Wilcox), that challenges the research behind Jared Diamond’s popular and influential tome, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It so happens that just yesterday, Rex over at Savage Minds covered this renewed debate in a detailed post.

Not having read either of the newer books, it’s impossible for me to offer any informed comment on them. But the Stanford piece quotes some provocative Wilcox statements, such as this one at the end:

I may be critical of archaeology, but what I am saying is that it makes sense to do work that is responsive and includes the opinions of indigenous populations. The more that archeologists and Native communities work together, the better things get. I really want this field to do well, and I believe it can be much better. It has to because stories of the past matter.

On this, he’s likely to get little argument from southwestern archaeologists, as many have become increasingly receptive to Native American concerns and oral history. But there’s something about that last sentence–because stories of the past matter–that might set off alarm bells in some quarters. Because, in fact, there are points where science and tribal stories of the past collide.

It’ll be interesting to see how Wilcox and his colleagues reconcile the tension between science and oral tradition. As my recent piece on the contested Navajo history in the Southwest suggests, science can be trumped by the politics of this newfound, well-intentioned sensitivity.

There’s an interesting exchange over at The Oil Drum about the legacy of President Carter’s infamous 1977 energy speech. For my money, this commenter (who also posts essays at The Oil Drum), is spot on:

It is almost impossible to quantify the damage that this one speech did to the very real need for a modern restructuring of the advanced world’s energy systems. Such is the terrible damage caused by false alarm. To this day, that time period (the late 1970’s), that speech (the Carter energy speech) and that period of press hysteria has ingrained into my mind the absolute need to be cautious about making or accepting hysterical pronouncements of “we are running out of oil”, “by the year XXXX we will consume more oil than we can produce {you actually heard this said in the 1970’s, but of course on a worldwide basis it is a statistical impossibility) and all such claims that the end is nigh.

There can be nothing more damaging, NOTHING, than false alarm. It destroys for decades the credibility of the perhaps well intentioned campaigners issuing the warning, it destroys support for the cause (whatever cause it may be) among the most able and dedicated potential recruits to the cause, it gives the enemies of the cause needed ammunition to rip apart the cause on the sword of it’s own words.

I have always believed, and still do, that Jimmy Carter was and is one of the most honorable politicians in American hitory, one of the few men of absolute conviction and decency to ever become President of The United States of America.

I also believe that the speech he gave on energy on the fateful day was one of the most damaging speeches ever given, to the future of the United States, to the future of rational planned transition to a modern energy system, and by extension, to the future health and prosperity of the world.

Jimmy Carter armed the enemies of modern energy, he destroyed the credibility of those who knew the need for change and modernization was real and imperative, and he drove a generation away from taking seriously one of the most serious issues of our era. No enemy could have done as much damage to the cause of a real humane transition away from our enslavement to fossil fuel as this friend of the cause Jimmy Carter did by way of a poorly researched, poorly thought out false alarm. His hysteria helped waste a third of a century.

Any cautionary lessons here for climate catastrophists? Will people be making similar observations about the climate crisis in thirty years?

One of the more amusing (and popular) voices in the the enviro/peak oil doom-o-sphere is James Howard Kunstler, perhaps best known for his book, The Geography of Nowhere. Once a week, he issues a rambling missive on all issues related to society’s imminent collapse from his profanely titled blog, Clusterfuck Nation. People seem to eat it up. This week, his curmudgeonly schtick is about the biggest climate story of the year (pre-Copenhagen):

Against a greater welter and flow of incoherence jerking the nation this way and that way en route to collapse comes “ClimateGate,” the latest excuse for screaming knuckleheads to defend what has already been lost.

Chalk Kunstler up as someone who definitely thinks it’s a piddling story. But that’s mainly because he believes the train to societal ruination has already left the station:

My guess is that the undertow of entropy is now too great to provoke any meaningful unified change in behavior.  The collapse of the US economy is too close to the horizon, and the so-called developing nations will have problems equally severe.  In the meantime, it is unlikely that any of the major players will burn less coal and oil, or not cheat on each other even if they pledge to burn less.  People who are not knuckleheads will make the practical arrangements that they can. These will, by definition, be localized, small-scale, and non-global communities, doing what they would have to do anyway.

Practical arrangements? I don’t even have a key to get into the local community garden. Fuckin a, I’m stocking up on Coco Krispies, Yoo-hoo’s, and devil dogs. That’s what I was fed as a kid (okay, ring dings, too) and I’m still standing. That seems the perfect diet to survive a post-apocalypse landscape, no?

I’ve become increasingly fascinated with the “collapse” meme in environmental and energy circles. It’s really become the secular equivalent of End-Times. I don’t say that to denigrate the peak oil crowd or climate change advocates, because I happen to think the energy/climate intersection is quite serious and may well lead to widespread socio-political turmoil.

Still, I can’t help but be amused by how the debate sometimes plays out on intellectual and pop culture levels. For example, here’s a recent post over at the Oil drum, in which the writer shares a common refrain of her friends, who work in environmental NGO’s:

In brief, many now admit openly that human overshoot has gone way too far and that the programs they run are like band aids when the wound calls for a tourniquet. They lament the rise of expectations for a narrowly defined version of progress that will only deepen our predicament.

Evidently, the writer’s friends are starting to “turn inward” and get in touch with their inner survivalist. Hey, might as well make provisions for that collapse, right? Sounds like a good idea if you think it’s just around the corner and nobody else sees it coming.

So the Oil Drum writer wonders if anyone else is getting the same vibe in their doomer circles and asks six questions to ponder, of which this is tops:

Are you noticing similar conversations, where well-educated and generally well off people are worried about the security of very basic needs, such as food and water.

I gotta admit, that one hasn’t come up yet in my own privileged circle. But I do love this comment in the SF Chronicle, which is in response to a review of a new movie called,  “Collapse: A documentary about our scary fate”:

Our whole house of cards is falling, and I believe this version of civilization is about to collapse. That said, I don’t waste any time or energy complaining about it – how would that change anything?

Have a cocktail, smoke a big fatty. Sit back and relax. Keep your shotgun handy and loaded, and maybe you’ll sneak through to see what rises from the ashes. And then again, maybe you won’t. It’s out of our hands.

Hot damn, if that isn’t Northern California fatalism at its finest!

The Oil Drum is the only site I know of that makes you think seriously about the end of the world. But even Nate Hagens, my favorite commentator there,  feels compelled to offer a disclaimer of sorts for this guest post by George Mobus.  Hagens writes:

As an editor here, I continually struggle to find a balance of discourse that presents scientific reality in ways that don’t come across as apocalyptic or frightening. In my opinion, the larger the lens with which we view our situation, the more informed choices will be made towards more sustainable trajectories.

Well, Nate, this Oil Drum review of William Catton’s new book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, is enough to  make even Richard Dawkins embrace the Rapture.

Black holes and Mayan prophecies do the trick. Global warming not so much.

Few seem to be getting worked up over peak oil, either, which has the resource depletion crowd wringing their hands.

Still, these are boom times for the apocalypse, as this piece in the Chicago Tribune reports.

This story in Nature News about societal collapse in ancient Peru is worth noting, especially for this quote by one of the main researchers:

Dramatic climactic events are always used to explain culture change in the Andes. But this is not satisfying based on what we know about human culture. It paints a picture of culture sitting there, not changing, hit by events over which they have no control. But Native Americans did not always live in harmony with their environment.

That last line provided some fodder for an interesting exchange in the comments thread of the story. I really wish Savage Minds would take up this meme some day. By happenstance, the death of this giant in anthropology is relevant to a wider discussion, which Rex duly notes over at Savage Minds:

First, Lévi-Strauss taught us that culture is a force in its own right.

The question many scholars struggle with is how much of a “force” culture plays in a society’s own demise–be it the Anasazi, the Angkor, or even in the widely cited case of a certain island people.

How is this possible:

One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the surprise is not how much has changed in the financial industry, but how little.

So now that the planetary panic has subsided, is it too late for institutional change? This is the passage from Alex  Berenson’s saturday’s NYT article that caught my eye:

Robert J. Shiller, the Yale University economics professor who predicted the dot-com crash and the housing bust, said the window for change may be closing. “People will accept change at a time of crisis, but we haven’t managed to do much, and maybe complacency is coming back,” Professor Shiller said. “We seem to be losing momentum.”

And Greens wonder why it’s hard to get traction on climate change.