The Long Descent (6 page)

The reasons behind the failure to switch from corn to other crops is relevant to our own time because corn farming was central to Maya political ideology. The power of the
ahauob,
“divine lords” who ruled the Maya city-states, depended directly on control of the corn crop and indirectly on a religious ideology that made corn farming a core metaphor for government — Maya ceremonial art often showed the ahauob of great cities as farmers planting and cultivating corn fields. Because corn was a central cultural metaphor and a key resource of political power, abandoning it for other crops was unthinkable. Instead, the ahauob responded to the collapse of their agricultural base by going to war to seize fields and food supplies from other city-states, making their decline and fall far more brutal than it had to be.

Even so, the Maya decline wasn't a fast process. Maya cities weren't abandoned overnight, as archeologists of two generations ago mistakenly thought; most of them took a century and a half to go under. Outside the Maya heartland, the process took even longer. Chichen Itza far to the north still flourished long after cities such as Tikal and Bonampak had become overgrown ruins. Some small Mayan city-states survived in various corners of the Yucatan right up to the Spanish conquest.

Map the Maya collapse onto human lifespans and the real scale of the process comes through. A Lowland Maya woman born around 730 would have seen the crisis dawn, but the
ahauob
and their cities still flourished when she died of old age seventy years later. Her great-grandson, born around 800, grew up amid a disintegrating society, and the wars and crop failures of his time would have seemed ordinary to him. His great-granddaughter, born around 870, never knew anything but ruins sinking back into the jungle. When she and her family finally set out for a distant village, leaving an empty city behind them, it likely never occurred to her that their quiet footsteps on the dirt path marked the end of a civilization.

This same pattern repeats over and over again in history. Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end. On average, it takes about 250 years for a civilization to complete the process of decline and fall.
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This casts a startling light on the crises we face as we collide with the limits to growth. It took the Western world more than two centuries of incremental change to transform itself from an agrarian society to its current status. Now, with its resource base failing and the consequences of its maltreatment of nature piling up around it, it faces the common fate of civilizations. Yet if that fate follows its usual timeline, it could easily take two more centuries of incremental change to transform the industrial world to an agrarian society again.

Startling as this seems, it's supported by telling evidence. Consider our dwindling oil resources. The Hubbert curve we examined at the beginning of this chapter tracks production over time for any scale of oil reserve from a single oil well up to a planet. It's a bell shaped curve: oil comes slowly at first, rises to peak production, then falls gradually to zero. The peak arrives when roughly half the oil is gone. The crucial point here is that after the peak, oil production declines at about the same rate it rose before. If peak comes around 2010, production in 2040 will likely equal something not far from production in 1980 (about 20 billion barrels). The oil produced in 2040 will have to meet the needs of a much larger global population and a world in crisis, but 20 billion barrels is still a lot of oil. In the same way, as reserves are depleted and production continues to slump over the decades that follow, the available oil will fall further and further below the levels needed to maintain a modern industrial society, but for a long time to come there will still be some petroleum available.

To misquote T. S. Eliot: this is the way the oil ends, not with a bang but a trickle. Other fossil fuels and uranium are headed the same way, but all of them can help cushion declining oil production for a while before they hit their own Hubbert peaks. Renewable energy sources can provide only a small fraction of the energy we now get from fossil fuels, but that fraction can also help cushion the decline and stretch dwindling fossil fuel reserves. The dilemma we face isn't having no energy at all. It's having to make do with less and less each year, until finally we get down to levels that can be sustained indefinitely.

The Olduvai Theory

The logic of the Hubbert curve provides the framework for the Olduvai Theory, an uncompromising look at the future in the aftermath of peak oil proposed by Dr. Richard Duncan, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering, who was also one of the most influential voices in the first days of the peak oil community.
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Duncan's theory (named for the Olduval Gorge, the famous archeological site where Duncan first conceived the theory's central concepts) starts with White's Law, a widely accepted rule in human ecology that takes energy use per capita as the primary measure of economic development. Globally, energy per capita stood at very modest levels until 1800, when fossil fuels sent it skyrocketing to its all-time peak in 1979. At that point, Duncan's figures show, two centuries of explosive progress began to unravel.

After 1979, global energy use per capita declined as rising population outstripped modest increases in energy production. Once the Hubbert curve reaches its peak and energy production begins to decline, the downward arc of energy per capita will accelerate. Follow the curve, and by 2030 global energy per capita will be where it was in 1930, about a third of its 1979 peak. Duncan argues that the industrial age is a
pulse waveform,
a single, bell-shaped, nonrepeating curve centered on 1979. Since no renewable energy resource can provide more than a small fraction of the immense amounts of fossil fuel energy we've squandered in the recent past, he predicts that the millennia of low tech cultures preceding the industrial pulse — before the fantastic treasure of fossil fuel was discovered and unlocked — will be balanced by millennia of low tech cultures after the industrial pulse — when the treasure will be gone forever.

Such ideas are unthinkable to most people, especially in North America, where the industrial system has arguably achieved more than anywhere else. From the first years of European settlement, the faith that the New World would avoid the mistakes and follies of the old helped drive a dizzying range of social and political experiments. What French president Jacques Chirac mocked as the United States' “almost messianic sense of national mission” has deep roots in our national psyche. Perhaps the most potent of these roots is the rarely expressed but widely held conviction that the United States is exempt from history. The idea that North America's gleaming industrial cities might someday become crumbling ruins no different from the remains of other civilizations is outside the realm of the imaginable for most people today.

A glance at earlier civilizations on the North American continent offers a useful corrective to our delusion of invulnerability. Huge urban centers existed here long before the first European explorers blundered their way to the Atlantic coast. From Copan in the Yucatan jungles to Cahokia on the plains of the Midwest, urban civilizations in America rose, flourished, and fell in the same slow rhythm that defines the history of the Old World. The fact of the matter is that civilizations don't last forever. For all practical purposes, they have a life cycle like that of other living things, and when it's over, they die. That doesn't make the project of civilization pointless, as some people suggest, any more than the fact that every one of us will die someday makes life not worth living. That latter fact does mean, of course, that someone who insists he's going to live forever, and makes plans for his future based on that premise, may not be quite as clever as he thinks he is. The same thing is just as true of civilizations — including our own.

The conviction that history's cycles don't apply to us is especially counterproductive in our present circumstances. Imagine that someone, confronted with a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness, insisted instead that he would live forever. For that reason, he refused either to treat the illness or make sure his family would have some means of support in the event of his death. He would be considered completely irresponsible by most people — and for good reason. This is exactly the collective situation we're in right now. For more than three decades we've known exactly what factors are pushing industrial society toward its own collapse, and it's no secret what has to be done to make the transition to sustainability, but the vast majority of people in the industrial world remain unwilling to embrace the necessary changes — and nothing currently suggests that they are interested in thinking about the generations in the future who will grow up in the ruins of our society.

At this point it's almost certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed — which it clearly does not. It's not too late, though, for individuals, groups, and communities to make that transition themselves, and to do what they can to preserve essential cultural and practical knowledge for the future. The chance that today's political and business interests will do anything useful in our present situation is small enough that it's probably not worth considering. Oil is to modern industrial nations what corn was to the ancient Maya. The
ahauob
of Washington and Wall Street, “liberal” as well as “conservative,” have turned to the suicidal strategy of war just as their Mayan equivalents did. Fortunately, their participation in the process of transition isn't needed.

Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and fall that so many others have followed before it, and the crises of the present — peak oil, global warming and the like — are the current versions of the historical patterns of ecological dysfunction. To judge by prior examples, we can't count on the future to bring us a better and brighter world — or even a continuation of the status quo. Instead, what most likely lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge.

The Long Descent

Map the likely results of current trends onto a scale of human lifespans and a compelling image of the future emerges. Imagine an American woman born in 1960. She sees the gas lines of the 1970s, the short-term political gimmicks that papered over the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and the renewed trouble in the following decades. Periods of economic and political crisis, broken by intervals of partial recovery, shape the rest of her life. By the time she turns 70, she lives in a beleaguered, malfunctioning city where nearly half the population has no reliable access to clean water, electricity, or health care. Shantytowns spread in the shadow of skyscrapers while political and economic leaders keep insisting that things are getting better.

Her great-grandson, born in 2040, manages to avoid the smorgasbord of diseases, the pervasive violence, and the pandemic alcohol and drug abuse that claim a quarter of his generation before age 30. A lucky break gets him into a technical career, safe from military service in endless overseas wars or “pacification actions” against separatist guerrillas at home. His technical knowledge consists mostly of rules of thumb for effective scavenging. Cars and refrigerators are luxury items he will never own, his home lacks electricity and central heating, and his health care comes from an old woman whose grandmother was a doctor and who knows something about wound care and herbs. By the time his hair turns gray the squabbling regions that were once the United States have split apart. All remaining fuel and electrical power have been commandeered by new regional governments, and coastal cities have been abandoned to the rising oceans.

For his great-granddaughter, born in 2120, the great crises are mostly things of the past. She grows up amid a ring of villages that were once suburbs, but now they surround an abandoned core of rusting skyscrapers that are visited only by salvage crews who mine them for raw materials. Local wars sputter, the oceans are still rising, and famines and epidemics come through every decade or so, but with global population less than half what it was in 2000 and still declining, humanity and nature are moving toward balance. The great-granddaughter learns to read and write, a skill most of her neighbors don't have, and a few old books are among her prized possessions, but the days when men walked on the moon are fading into legend. When she and her family finally set out for a village in the countryside, leaving the husk of the old city to the salvage crews, it likely never occurs to her that her quiet footsteps on a crumbling asphalt road mark the end of a civilization.

This is the process I've named the Long Descent — the declining arc of industrial civilization's trajectory through time. Like the vanished civilizations of the past, ours will likely face a gradual decline, punctuated by sudden crises and periods of partial recovery. The fall of a civilization is like tumbling down a slope, not like falling off a cliff. It's not a single massive catastrophe, or even a series of lesser disasters, but a gradual slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history's dumpster.

Track the impact of decline on public health and you have a model that can be applied to many other dimensions of the process. As domestic heating and air conditioning become too expensive for most, for example, deaths from pneumonia and influenza on the one hand, and heat stroke and insect-borne tropical diseases on the other, will steadily climb. So will infant mortality, while rates of live birth per capita will plunge. Russia is a good model here; since the collapse of Communism, it's seen rising death rates and falling birth rates to such an extent that the population will be cut in half by 2100, and yet there hasn't been any massive catastrophe to account for this — simply shifts in statistics driven by economic and political failure.
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Those same statistical shifts become inevitable when the ecological basis for a civilization crumbles away as a result of its own mismanagement.