No. 144 - March 2004

by Richard Heinberg

Götterdämmerung

(We encourage you to get books through your local bookstore or from your library. If this is not practical, ordering through our links provides Museletter with a small commission. Book links are to Powell's or, if unavailable there, Amazon. These links are also useful to find out more about the book: price, content and reviews.)

With the publication of recent books by former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies) and former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips (American Dynasty), and with revelations from former Treasure Secretary Paul O'Neill (in The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind), the current administration appears to be uncomfortably on the defensive. Attacks from the left are to be expected and can be shrugged off relatively lightly; but the defection of insiders capable of lifting the shroud of secrecy surrounding White House deals and decisions poses a real problem. Add to this the boggling revelations in Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, and the potential for a meltdown of the still-formidable Bush political machine starts to look possible - perhaps even inevitable.

Of course, incompetence and corruption are hardly the monopoly of the Republican Party. Moreover, I hold out little hope that either the Democrats or the Greens could actually do much at this point to avert the impending collapse of the American Empire. To my mind, however, the crowd currently in charge of US policy is guilty of more than the usual levels of incompetence and corruption. I believe that the neoconservatives now in power are extraordinarily dangerous people by any historical measure. In four short years, Bush, Cheney, and company have managed to do the following:

1. Steal an election. The means by which Bush and Cheney gained office were profoundly subversive of the democratic process. Florida, under the direction of governor Jeb Bush, had illegally purged its voter rolls of thousands of eligible voters, most of them Democrats. At the time the vote count was halted by a highly politicized decision of the US Supreme Court, Bush was ahead by a mere 300 votes. Had the election been conducted legally, there is no doubt that Al Gore, who led by half a million votes nationwide, would have become president.¹

2. Place criminals and human rights violators in prominent policy-making positions. As a result of former President Reagan's Contra war against Nicaragua, the United States became the first country in history to be convicted of international terrorism in a world court tribunal and to be condemned by the United Nations. Several key Reagan administration officials were indicted or tried in connection with the massive human rights violations that occurred in Central America during the Contra war. In the early months of the G. W. Bush presidency, several of these officials were given prominent new jobs: Elliott Abrams, who was convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal, was appointed National Security Council (NSC) Special Advisor on Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. John Poindexter, the mastermind behind the Iran-Contra scam (guns for hostages), had been found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and destruction of evidence; he was made Director of the Information Awareness Office (IAO), a new agency "to counter attacks on the US." John Negroponte, whom rights groups charge with covering up political killings and purging information from embassy human rights reports that implicated the military and CIA in disappearances of civilians, became US ambassador to the UN. Other criminals and purported human-rights violators appointed to high posts included Roger Noriega, John Maistro, and Otto Reich.²

3. Facilitate a terrorist attack on the US in order to consolidate political power. After spending countless hours sifting the evidence, I find the conclusion inescapable: persons within the US government had clear foreknowledge of the attacks, and efforts to prevent those attacks were systematically thwarted on orders from higher levels. Moreover, the collapse of the three buildings in New York has been inadequately explained. Many warnings had been received by the US government that a terrorist attack would occur in the week of September 9 - some specifying that commercial airliners would be hijacked and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon would be targeted. Then, after the hijackings occurred, no fighter jets were dispatched to intercept the airliners, despite the fact that there was plenty of time for this to have occurred, and that it is standard procedure. There are many other serious holes in the official version of the events, too numerous to discuss here. Finally, the administration has engaged in public - and largely successful - efforts to prevent or limit any serious inquiry into the 9/11 attacks (the recent public hearings of the 9/11 Commission went to great pains to avoid nearly all of the serious questions that independent researchers have been asking for many months, and members of the commission have numerous and obvious conflicts of interest). In short, lines of evidence point to foreknowledge, complicity, and cover-up at the top levels of government. These are extraordinary assertions, and they require extraordinary evidence to support them. The detailed presentation and discussion of that evidence is beyond the scope of this article; however, I have appended print and online resources. See especially David Ray Griffin's excellent book, The New Pearl Harbor (Interlink), which has just been released.³

4. Lie to the American people and the world in order to justify the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. Again and again, the administration cited Iraq's continued possession of weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the invasion. Iraq permitted UN weapons inspectors back into the country in the waning months of 2002, but this step was deemed insufficient, so great and immediate was the threat from that country's alleged nuclear weapons and remote-controlled delivery systems. As of this writing, it is abundantly clear that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that administration officials knew this but deliberately concocted "evidence" with which to sell the invasion to the gullible American public.⁴

5. Undermine the system of international law by proclaiming the validity of a policy of pre-emptive attack. We have yet to see the ultimate fallout from this brazen action. The neoconservatives in charge of American foreign policy have essentially put forward the view that the US is above international law. The Bush administration has refused to join the World Court and has undermined existing conventions on nuclear missiles. The unprovoked invasion of one sovereign nation by another (of Iraq by the US and Britain) is a direct violation of the UN Charter; indeed, it is exactly the sort of behavior the UN was established to prevent. In addition, the United States' actions with regard to prisoners held at Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay naval station have directly violated the Geneva Conventions: the prisoners are being held as "unlawful combatants," a term with no meaning in international law. By asserting unique rights, immunities, and privileges, the US has alienated the rest of the international community. Eventually, such behavior will cause other nations to form political and military alliances to oppose US hegemony. While the US has the military capability of defeating nearly any individual foe, it cannot subdue the rest of the world working in concert. And economically America is in a far weaker position than it is militarily: if only a few key nations were to cease supporting US trade deficits and government borrowing, the results would be catastrophic. Unilateralism sets the stage for a battle that America cannot win; indeed, it is one that the entire world is certain to lose.

6. Use weapons that kill indiscriminately - i.e., "weapons of mass destruction" - in the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. While time has shown that Saddam Hussein did not possess banned weapons, the Americans and British did possess indiscriminately lethal and possibly illegal weapons, and proceeded to use them - as they had done in the 1991 Gulf War and (with other NATO forces) in the former Yugoslavia. The UN has sought to ban depleted uranium munitions and cluster bombs (the US has objected), and a recent UN report stated that these weapons breach several international conventions.⁵ Some allege that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, and tens of thousands of American soldiers, have been sickened or killed by DU weapons, which disperse radioactive particles throughout the battlefield landscape. Each M1 tank round consists of 10 pounds of uranium 238, which vaporizes into a highly toxic aerosol upon impact. Much of Iraq is now covered with tons of the stuff. Major Doug Rokke of the US Army, who was assigned by the Army in 1990 to assess the health effects of DU ammunition, told a Palo Alto audience in April 2003 that "When I did their research, [I found out] that you can't use [DU munitions] because you can't clean up and you can't do the medical." According to Rokke, the effects of DU on American soldiers themselves have been horrific (so much for supporting our troops); but for the land and people of the nations we are "liberating," DU carries far longer-term consequences: soil and water are poisoned virtually forever. In May, 2003 a Christian Science Monitor correspondent took a Geiger counter to areas of Baghdad that had been subjected to heavy shelling by US troops and found radiation levels 1,000 to 1,900 times higher than normal. To be fair, it should be emphasized that DU munitions had been deployed prior to the advent of the Bush administration; however, these weapons' continued and expanded use (between 1,100 and 2,200 tons used during the 2003 invasion of Iraq versus 300 tons in the 1991 Gulf War and 10 tons during the bombing of Serbia in 1999) in a war fought ostensibly to prevent another nation from using banned weapons is a bitter irony.⁶

7. Subvert the US Constitution. Since 9/11/2001 the Bush administration, the US Justice Department, and the Congress have enacted a series of Executive Orders, regulations, and laws that have seriously undermined civil liberties and the checks and balances that are essential to the structure of democratic government. The framers of the US Constitution sought to prevent any one branch of government from accumulating excessive power. By using Executive Orders and emergency interim agency regulations as standard tools to combat terrorism, the Executive branch has chosen methods largely outside the purview of both the legislature and the judiciary. Many of these Executive Orders and agency regulations violate the US Constitution and the laws of the United States, as well as international and humanitarian law. In addition, these actions have been shrouded in a cloak of secrecy that is incompatible with democratic government. Hundreds of non-citizens have been rounded up and detained, many for months, in violation of constitutional protections, judicial authority, and INS policy. The government has repeatedly resisted requests for information regarding the detainees from loved ones, lawyers, and the press; it has denied detainees access to legal representation; and has conducted its hearings in secret, in some cases denying the very existence of such hearings. In a democracy, the actions of the government must be transparent, or our ability to vote on policies and the people who create those policies becomes meaningless. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the government's actions has been its attack on the Bill of Rights, the very cornerstone of American democracy. The War on Terror has seriously compromised the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights of citizens and non-citizens alike. From the USA Patriot Act's over-broad definition of domestic terrorism, to the FBI's new powers of search and surveillance, to the indefinite detention of both citizens and non-citizens without formal charges, the principles of free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law have been seriously undermined. At the time of this writing, three states and 246 cities, towns, and counties (including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) have passed resolutions, ordinances, or ballot initiatives condemning, or refusing local cooperation with enforcement of, the Patriot Act.⁷

8. Undermine the US economy through unwise tax cuts and vastly increased government borrowing. The administration's evident goal is to bankrupt the US government so that social programs (including Social Security) can be entirely privatized or eliminated. However unwise (to put it charitably) that strategy may be on its own terms, the timing for its implementation could not possibly be worse. Since World War II the world has relied on the US dollar as the basis for monetary stability. Increasingly, the US has taken advantage of this situation by running up ever-larger trade deficits and more foreign-financed government debt. The current level of American debt - internal and external - is unprecedented and unsustainable, and Treasury officials made efforts in 2003 and early 2004 to gently lower the value of the dollar in relation to other currencies. However, if the dollar is devalued too much, other nations (including China) may decide to cease investing their savings in American stocks and Treasury securities; this in turn could trigger a dollar collapse. In short, the global monetary system that has maintained relative stability for the past several decades appears to be fraying. Just when the nations of the world need to invest heavily in renewable energy systems, efficiency measures, and sustainable agricultural production in order to deal with problems previously mentioned, investment capital may disappear altogether in a global financial crisis. The Bush administration's response - sweeping tax cuts and immense borrowing to fund an elective war in Iraq - greatly exacerbates the situation. The damage is by now likely irreparable. At the end of 1993, According to Al Martin, "The total national debt of the United States on a fully realized basis, inclusive of federal, state, county and local debt stood at a record $20.613 trillion (83.73% of said debt having been created from 1981-92 and from 2001 to present.) The total public and private indebtedness of the United States ended the year 2003 at $39.384 trillion. The total public and private assets of the United States ended the year 2003 at $26.134 trillion. Thus, the United States by the end of 2003 has a negative net worth of approximately $13 trillion. The total debt service of the United States ended the year 2003 at 309.4% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). These are numbers never before seen. This is a higher debt to gross domestic product ratio than [that of] any other country on earth, which still services its debt. For instance this is a higher fraction of debt service to GDP than [that of] the government of Nigeria. The United States federal government, as of the end of 2003, was servicing 41.3% of total debt - the only first-world nation on the planet that services less than 100% of its debt."8 This is an extraordinary performance by any measure. In the current Bush administration we see a combination of gross incompetence, high criminality, ideological monomania, and almost limitless power - and this in the context of a time that requires the deftest and most visionary of leadership if we are to avert or at least minimize ecological and human catastrophe. It is difficult to overstate the peril inherent in such a combination. These people will not easily be unseated: if they stole one election, why not another? And if various legal battles threaten to overtake them, why would they not resort to facilitating another "terrorist" incident as justification for declaring martial law? In an interview in November, 2003 former US General Tommy Franks, who led America's campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, stated that if a WMD attack were to hit the US, the Constitution probably would not survive: "the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."⁹ Was Franks giving us a heads-up on what is in store?

The Neocons and Machiavelli

The current US leaders' actions are so clearly sabotaging the very system that sustains them that an explanation is in order. What motivates these people? Is it mere thirst for wealth and power? Perhaps we can gain some insight by examining the philosophies they espouse.

Neoconservatism, the political movement to which most of the current administration belongs, is widely attributed to be the intellectual offspring of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a Jewish scholar who fled Hitler's Germany and taught political science at the University of Chicago. According to Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right (Griffin, 1999), Strauss advocated an essentially Machiavellian approach to governance; he believed that

• a leader must perpetually deceive those being ruled;
• those who lead are accountable to no overarching system of morals, only to the right of the superior to rule the inferior;
• religion is the force that binds society together, and is therefore the tool by which the ruler can manipulate the masses (any religion will do);
• secularism in society is to be suppressed, because it leads to critical thinking and dissent;
• a political system can be stable only if it is united against an external threat, and that if no real threat exists, one should be manufactured.

Drury writes that, "In Strauss's view, the trouble with liberal society is that it dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on secular rational foundations."

Among Strauss's students was Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading hawks in the Defense Department who urged the invasion of Iraq; more distant followers include Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Irving Kristol, William Bennett, John Ashcroft, and Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (Griffin, 1999), is a policy advisor (via Karl Rove) to the Bush administration. His fascination with Machiavelli seems to be deep and abiding, and to be shared by his fellow neocons. "In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments," writes Ledeen, "the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still. . . ."

Machiavelli's books, The Prince and The Discourses, constituted manuals on amassing political power; they have inspired kings and tyrants including Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin. The leader, according to Machiavelli, must pretend to do good even as he is actually doing the opposite. "Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them. . . . Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and praised by everyone, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances. . . ." It is to Machiavelli that we owe the dictum that "the end justifies the means."

But what are the ends to which neoconservatives strive? Briefly: in foreign policy, American supremacy; in domestic policy, reactionary "values." We can get a sense of what makes these people tick by reviewing a little recent history.

The neoconservative movement began to coalesce in the 1970s amid the Supreme Count mandated legalization of abortion, court-ordered busing, rising crime rates, and the disruption of urban cores by major highway projects. Otherwise liberal wite urbanites began fleeing to the suburbs. Meanwhile in foreign affairs, the US was in a state of paralysis as a result of the Vietnam debacle. American elites were losing confidence in their own Cold War rhetoric. However, Israel, in contrast, had just trounced its enemies during a six-day war that had devastated the armies of the Arab world. Catholic and Jewish Democrats, many of them followers of Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (who mounted three unsuccessful bids for the presidency), began entering the GOP establishment. Disagreeing with their party's positions on social issues (busing, welfare, secularism, and campus revolts) these voters were also looking for a way to regain lost US prestige. For them, Israel served as a positive example: the solution to America's foreign policy directionlessness was a turn to the right. An early intellectual leader of the movement was the Jewish former Trotskeyite New Yorker Irving Kristol, whose book Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea describes the events or the era from the neocons' perspective and gives considerable insight into their motives. Kristol founded Public Interest, one of the primary organs of the movement. Another Jewish former radical, Norman Podhoretz, founded the equally influential magazine Commentary. Podhoretz later defined neoconservatives as "liberals who had been mugged by reality." Two other neoconservative former Democrats, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had been members of "Scoop's Troops" (Jackson's cadre of young activists) during the 1970s, but jumped the Democratic ship during the Carter years. Both came to advocate a values-driven, hard-line approach to American intervention. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the UN under Reagan, was yet another former Democrat turned neocon hawk.

On the domestic front, the neocons learned first to speak the language of southern Democrats - a language of carefully veiled racial fears and resentments - and thus gained the entire South for the Republican Party. In some respects, this was part of a larger strategy to emphasize values as a way of motivating support among the lower and middle classes. The somewhat independent neoconservative Ben Wattenberg explained this strategy in his book, Values Matter Most: How Republicans or Democrats or a Third Party Can Win and Renew the American Way of Life (Free Press, 1995). Right-wing think tanks, funded by wealthy right-wing foundations, spent years systematically and scientifically identifying the "values" issues that would connect with the masses. In the process, they cemented important alliances with a cultural group that was itself becoming increasingly organized, activist, and powerful.

Enter the Religious Right

Strauss's belief that religion is a tool that leaders can use to manipulate the masses naturally leads one to wonder about the history and nature of the collaboration between neoconservatives and the Christian evangelical movement. Clearly, the neocon agenda is not what most people would traditionally have thought of as exemplifying the teachings of Jesus; how, then, has the philosophy of Strauss, Kristol, Podhoretz, and Wolfowitz come to achieve virtual sanctification in the eyes of tens of millions of devout American Christians? To answer this question, we must first examine developments within the more conservative US Christian churches in the past few decades.

In her essay The Despoiling of America, investigative reporter Katherine Yurica explains the origins of the now-dominant faction of the Christian Right, which she calls "dominionism," and how it has found common cause with the neoconservative movement.¹⁰ Dominionism, closely related to another Christian movement called "reconstructionism," was founded by the late R. J. Rushdoony, who also co-founded the Council for National Policy - which has been called the politburo of the American conservative movement, since it is composed of top political and business leaders who set the national agenda for the vast network of right-wing foundations, publishers, media, and universities that have schooled a whole generation in the ideology of neoconservatism, much the way the extremist Wahabbi religious schools funded by Saudi billionaires have seeded the Middle East with Islamic fundamentalism. Dominionism began to flourish in the 1970s as a politicized religious reaction to communism and secular humanism. One of its foremost spokesmen, Pat Robertson (religious broadcaster, former presidential candidate, and founder of the Christian Coalition), has for decades patiently and relentlessly put forward the dominionist view to his millions of daily TV viewers that God intends His followers to rule the world on His behalf. Yurica describes dominionism as a Machiavellian perversion of Christianity.

The original and defining text of Dominionism and Reconstructionism is Ruchdoony's 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, (1973) a turgid exegesis of the Ten Commandments that sets forth the Biblical "case law" that derives from them. "The only true order," Rushdoony wrote, "is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion." Further, "Every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare."

Reconstructionism argues that the Bible must be the governing text for all areas of life - including government, education, law, and the arts. Reconstructionists examine contemporary issues and events in the light of a "Biblical world view" and "Biblical principles." Reconstructionist theologian David Chilton summarizes this view as follows: "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law." Reconstructionists espouse the goal of world conquest or "dominion," assured that the Bible has prophesied their "inevitable victory."

Reconstructionists would replace democracy with a theocratic elite who would govern according to "Biblical Law." They would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would leave the work force and return to the home. Capital punishment would be applicable to crimes such as blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality. While not all viewers of Robertson's popular daily 700 Club television program would agree with the most extreme dominionist and reconstructionist dogmas, most have been conditioned to believe that the US is a "Christian nation" that is under attack from within by secular humanists, homosexuals, and socialists; and that George W. Bush has a mandate from God to govern America (on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ) during these troubling times. The rise of the religious right has so shifted the American political landscape in recent years that a law, the "Constitution Restoration Act of 2004," which would have been unimaginable only a decade or two ago, is now making its way through Congress. Introduced in February, the new law would, if enacted, "acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law, liberty [and] government" in the United States. Thus, in effect, the arbitrary dictates of a "higher power" - as interpreted by a judge, policeman, bureaucrat, or president - could override existing legal precedent. Any judge who presumed to overrule "God's sovereign authority" as so interpreted could be removed from office.

All of this provides tinder for the spark of Mel Gibson's recent film The Passion of the Christ, which Roger Ebert has called "the most violent single movie I have ever seen." In my view, the film's danger is not merely its anti-Semitism (Bible scholars have pointed out that the New Testament was written several decades after the events it describes, and after the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome; evidently, in that context the Gospel authors hesitated to saddle Romans with the primary responsibility for Jesus's death, and thus settled on the Jewish aristocracy as the best available scapegoats). Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, perhaps comes closer to capturing the inherent danger of this movie phenomenon when he calls The Passion "fascistic" because of its glorification of violence. Others have made light of the film's goriness: Maureen Dowd notes that The Passion "has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western; you might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, 'A Fistful of Nails'"; the online magazine Slate described it as "a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie - 'The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre'"; while Steve Martin suggests it should have been called "Lethal Passion."

For the devout, however, the blood and flying flesh are sacred reminders of what our Lord endured for us. They are a measure of the wickedness of the secularists, the Muslims, the unbelievers. "See what they did to our Lord!," the well-schooled dominionist must thing when leaving the theater. "When the time comes that we have them supine before us, we must show them no mercy!"

And so, for the next few months, until the election, we will, all of us - like it or not - be marinating in a dangerous mixture of religious fanaticism, political intrigue, economic upheaval, and unraveling scandal. The people in power (and their supporters) are not open to logic or compromise. Nevertheless, challenges to their power are arising in ever-greater number and intensity. An irresistible force is about to encounter an immovable object.

[Portions of this essay are excerpted from the forthcoming book, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society, June 2004), by Richard Heinberg. Richard Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003); he is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community." His essays and articles have appeared in many journals including The Futurist, Earth Island Journal, Wild Matters, Alternative Press Review, and The Sun.]

Notes

1. See Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporteer Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters. Pluto Press, 2002.

2. George Freimoth, The Return of Cold War 'Terrorists, Marin Interfaith Task Force on Central America newsletter, Spring 2002.

3. See also Eric Hofschmid, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack. Endpoint Software, 2002; www.fromthewilderness.com; www.cooperativeresearch.org; www.globalresearch.ca; www.whatreallyhappened.com.

4. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report says Iraq didn't have WMD, released January 8, 2004.

5. In January 2001, the European Parliament approved a resolution imposing a ban on the use of DU munitions while investigations were carried out into the links between DU and cancer. In August 2002, the UN published a report citing a series of international laws and conventions breached by the use of DU weapons, including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the UN Charter; the UN Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 which all forbid the deployment of "poison or poisoned weapons" and "arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering."

6. See: www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm See also Iraq: Experts Warn of Radioactive Battlefields, by Katherine Stapp, Interpress News Service, September 12, 2003; Scott Peterson, Remains of Toxic Bullets Litter Iraq, Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 2003.

7. This paragraph is adapted from The State of Civil Liberties: One Year Later, Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Post 9/11 Era, by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

8. Scoreboard 2003, by Al Martin, accessed January 12, 2004.

9. December 5, 2003 edition, Cigar Afficionado. Reported, for example, in John O. Edwards, Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack, November 1, 2003.

10. (www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm)

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.

No. 148 - July 2004

by Richard Heinberg

Boomers' Last Chance?

(We encourage you to get books through your local bookstore or from your library. If this is not practical, ordering through our links provides Museletter with a small commission. Book links are to Powell's or, if unavailable there, Amazon. These links are also useful to find out more about the book: price, content and reviews.)

In his best-selling 1998 book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw extolled the virtues of the American women and men, now deep into their retirement years, who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. Brokaw's book drew an implied contrast between "the greatest generation any society ever produced" and those that preceded and followed it. The cohort born during World War I and up to 1930 faced immense adversity and made sacrifices that ensured the survival of freedom and democracy; as a result, their children have enjoyed the most extended and exuberant period of affluence in the history of any nation.

Brokaw and I are children of that generation; ours is the so-called Baby Boom generation, about which an oil tanker's worth of ink has been spilled in self-adulation, self-criticism, self-analysis, and general self-obsession. I hesitate to join in the orgy of demographic mirror gazing, but lately I've begun to reflect on a simple fact: during my lifetime - and that of my cohort - about half of the non-renewable resources of the planet will have been used. Gone, forever.

This is a generation that has practised diachronic competition (that is, competition with future generations) more ruthlessly than has any other since the dawn of our species. The implications are devastating.

I might dispute Brokaw's assertion that the World War II generation was the best in history (in fact I will do so below); nevertheless, a good case could be made that my generation, because it so threatens the perpetuation of its kind and the survival of countless other species, is the worst ever.

Mea culpa

Of course, in a way the very idea of a "generation" is arbitrary. The notion implies uniformity where there is endless diversity, discreteness where there is continuity. Worse still, discussion of "better" or "worse" generations entails a moral judgment, as though all of the members of a demographic cohort somehow deserve equal praise or blame, when in fact this is never the case. Who is the exemplary Boomer - Karl Rove or Ron Kovics? Laura Bush or Amy Goodman? It may make sense to speak of the moral triumphs or failures of individuals, but the application of such judgments to whole generations is problematic.

However there is one respect in which the discussion has merit: Much of Brokaw's argument (if it can be called that) revolves around the truism that a demographic cohort is shaped by historical circumstances. Individuals within that cohort inevitably respond to events differently and help shape subsequent history in divergent ways, yet members of each generation undeniably share a certain commonality of experience - notably so during periods of large-scale, dramatic change.

Brokaw's "greatest generation" was tempered by adversity. In contrast, the Boomers have been spoiled by abundance. One generation presided over America's ascendancy while the other is overseeing its peak in power and wealth and its inevitable decline.

That's the conventional-wisdom summary of the situation, but it is in many ways a misleading one: a closer look might reveal that the World War II generation was not so praiseworthy after all, nor are the Boomers uniformly culpable. All of us are mostly responding to circumstances beyond our control.

In this essay I hope to explore some of the circumstances that have made us Boomers what and who we are, and to argue that, having failed to live up to some of our expressed ideals and now finding ourselves in power just as the industrial world is beginning its inevitable decline, Boomers may have one last opportunity to redeem themselves.

What Made the "Greatest Generation" Great

Brokaw's book was in some respects a peace offering - an attempt to close the generation gap that opened up in the 1960s as young people wrangled with their parents over drugs, sex, music, hairstyles, and the Vietnam War. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan was perhaps another bouquet thrown from the younger (now aging) generation to its elders. The message implicit in both: We, the Boomers, appreciate and respect our parents' sacrifices and hard work, which made it possible for us to enjoy the peace, freedom, and affluence that we have mostly taken for granted throughout our lives.

The bouquet is perhaps deserved - no doubt so in many individual instances. The Greatest Generation is filled with stories of undeniable heroism (for more politically informed anecdotal reports of the experiences and contributions of the elder cohort see Studs Terkel's Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, published by Norton in 2000, and The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, released by New Press in 1997).

However, the freedom and affluence of modern Americans are due not just to courage and endurance but also sheer luck. Let us not forget that the people who inhabited the United States in the early 20th century happened to be sitting on one fabulous pile of natural resources - everything from forests, fresh water, fertile soils, and fish to minerals (gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, copper) to energy resources (oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium). Moreover, the US has enjoyed a geographic isolation from Eurasian intrigues, which enabled it to thrive during occasions when Europeans were tearing each other to bits.

Thus the payoff that came at the end of World War II carried an historic inevitability: with its resource base, factories, and highly motivated work force, the US had won the war without damage to its internal infrastructure. In contrast, Britain and the USSR had also emerged winners, but only after having seen their cities, railroads, and factories bombed. While the rest of the industrial world lay in ruins, America stood unscathed.

Because of the American economy's stability, the US dollar was adopted as a reserve currency by other nations. American oil wells were then supplying over half the total amount of petroleum being extracted globally. Sixty percent of all export goods delivered throughout the world carried a "Made in USA" tag. General Motors was the world's biggest corporation and Hollywood films were on screens everywhere.

US factories made so many manufactured goods that Americans had to be cajoled into a permanent buying frenzy by the greatest propaganda system the world has ever seen - the American advertising industry - which made brilliant use of history's greatest propaganda medium - television. In fact, the consumerist project had gotten under way in the 1920s as fuel-fed American capitalism searched for solutions to the problem of over-production (a problem that was in fact one of the Depression's causes). But World War II's insatiable need for materiel and the post-war expansion of advertising and credit made the Depression vanish like a bad dream and sent the economy into warp drive. Indeed, in the 1950s human beings habitually came to be referred to not as "people" or "citizens," but as "consumers."

Having lived through a decade when starving would-be employees competed for the few jobs available, people worked hard when finally given the chance. They saved. They believed in the American Dream and in the essential goodness of America's international leadership. They bought homes and raised families.

And that's where the Boomers come in.

The "Me" Generation

When people feel optimistic about the future they tend to have more children. And so, after the War's end, as soldiers came home and went to work building the suburban utopia, they sired the most numerous generational cohort America had ever seen. Demographers define baby-boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964 (as of 2004, members of the Boomer cohort are between 40 and 58 years of age). There are about 76 million US Boomers, representing over a quarter of the population. And their tastes, lifestyles, and ambitions have transformed the nation - and to a large extent the world beyond - in a myriad of ways.

The "Father Knows Best" years in which the Boomers grew up were ones of unprecedented abundance and safety. Yes, there was a Cold War, there were a couple of recessions, and the last few of the Boomer cohort's formative years (from 1968 on) were tumultuous. But compare this quarter-century to any previous one in history: in Europe - one of the wealthiest regions of the planet - hardly a decade went by for centuries without a significant famine affecting an entire region. For Boomers the word famine held about as much personal relevance as Bible verses about leprosy or marauding Philistines. No one in America actually starved to death - at least not in modern times, and certainly no one we knew. Far from it: Boomers knew only supermarkets filled with cheap, packaged, refrigerated foods in a numbing variety, all conveniently accessed by way of automobiles (every family now had one) rolling serenely over smoothly paved streets and highways.

One measure of this new abundance was power available per-capita. In the 19th century, most of the work being done in America was accomplished by means of animal or human muscle-power. In 1850, fuel-fed machines supplied only about 18 percent of the total horsepower in the economy; the rest came from horses, oxen, and human labor. Domestic servants were common. However, by 1960 machines were supplying virtually all of the power in the economy. People were still working, of course, and there were lots more of them (though by now there were far fewer working horses, and far fewer domestic servants), but their contribution had become inconsequential in terms of applied energy. Machines - and the fossil fuels that made them go - were supplying power for greatly expanded manufacturing, transportation, information storage and transmission, and so on. And so by the 1960s the typical American - even if his or her near ancestors had been slaves or servants - had access to power equivalent to that exerted by scores of laborers: it was as though each citizen could command a small army of "energy slaves."

In short, Americans had every reason to believe that they were living in the best of all possible worlds, in the greatest of nations, in the best of times.

Why, then, the generation gap? Was there trouble in paradise?

Again: people are to some extent the product of the circumstances and events of their historical era. The younger generation, growing up in affluence, was freed to take survival - even abundance - for granted. And we are discussing a level of abundance significantly greater, in some respects, even than exists today: at that time, the US was still solvent, still a net exporter of credit. In the 1960s an entire family could live on a single average income. Rents were cheap, land was cheap, and college was cheap.

Therefore rebellion was cheap, too. The young people knew they were different from their parents (though they usually couldn't articulate how or why). They could afford to question their parents' seeming obsession with discipline and hard work, their conformity and unflinching patriotism.

Meanwhile America was visibly and quickly changing: graceful old downtown buildings were collapsing under the wrecking ball while monotonous suburban housing developments and strip malls were sprouting where farmland used to be. America's wealth was being spent in a tasteless nouveau-riche spectacle designed by bored and overpaid Madison Avenue huckster-bureaucrats in gray suits. The older generation was mostly proud of this transformation, but many youth couldn't help but notice the vapidity and emptiness of the corporate-sponsored theme-park way of life and had the free time to indulge in irony and sarcasm.

As young people went to college (a greater percentage of them did so than in any previous generation) they started asking questions, and the answers they found were troubling. They learned that the shining image of America the Free and Brave hid a history of slavery and genocide. Moreover, in their extracurricular reading they discovered that an increasing share of US wealth was emanating from an international imperial system enforced by the American military and the CIA.

This latter fact was driven home by the greatest single perception-shaping circumstance of the Boomers' young-adult lives - the Vietnam War. Pampered American teenagers were being called up, trained, and airlifted around the world to fight and die in a conflict they didn't understand. And an alarming number of them were coming home in pine boxes. Was this a heroic campaign against a malevolent foreign enemy bent on our destruction? Or was it an imperialist war of aggression on a Third-World nation led by a man widely regarded as his country's equivalent of George Washington? Disputes over the War divided families across America - my own included - and ran deep: for people on both sides of the debate what was at stake was nothing less than the essential character and future of the nation.

The Boomers' Defining Moments

Many of the happily memorable moments of the Boomer generation's early years are etched into the national psyche and have been recalled endlessly: teenage girls' shrieking response to the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show; the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967; Grateful Dead concerts jammed with tripping, giddy hipsters; communes and head shops; Woodstock. But other images are more sobering: the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King; the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention; the shootings at Kent State; the stirring to life of the Black Power movement, the American Indian Movement, the women's movement, and the Chicano/farm workers' movement; and the massive antiwar demonstrations that closed many colleges and universities in 1971.

However, the two events of that era that had the potential to most profoundly shape the remainder of the Boomers' lives, and that of their children, are less often dwelt upon. Both occurred in 1970: the peak in US oil production and the first Earth Day.

At the time it happened, the US oil production peak went unnoticed; it was observed in hindsight a couple of years later, though even today it is scarcely mentioned in the press. One of the few who really understood its significance was the scientist who had anticipated it - geologist M. King Hubbert. Its consequences for the US economy and for global geopolitics would only gradually reveal themselves, with the first strong hint appearing in 1973's Arab oil embargo. Those consequences will eventually include the undermining of the entire American consumerist-imperialist project.

Of course oil was and is central to the automobile and airline industries, which have been major drivers of the US economy. Less obvious is oil's role in modern industrial agriculture. However, if one looks more deeply, the very fabric of 20th century America is petroleum-soaked. In 1900 the world's wealthiest and oiliest man was John D. Rockefeller, whose company, Standard Oil, had cornered the national market. Rockefeller himself was an abstemious churchgoer who believed that wealth was a sign of God's favor; what does such a person do with so much money? All sorts of things! Why not go into banking in order to make even more money? The Rockefeller family did so with a vengeance and was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve System - the banking cartel that quietly controls the US currency and economy. If one is exceptionally wealthy it is also handy to have some influence over public opinion - and so Rockefeller wealth found its way into controlling positions in media organizations. Even scientific research can have its uses: when I was researching the history of genetic engineering for my 1999 book Cloning the Buddha, my most troubling discovery was that the inception of molecular biology (the basis for all subsequent developments in genetic science) came in the 1920s as a result of strategic grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in its quest for a means of eugenic "social control." Politics, geopolitics, war, weapons manufacturing, education - all were deeply impacted by the Rockefeller oil fortune. Oil wasn't just a subsidy to American wealth; it had come to be the very substance of American wealth.

Therefore the fact that by 1971 US oil production had peaked and was in terminal decline was momentous (if unheralded) news. America could no longer be a source of wealth in the same way it had been; if it were to maintain its privileged position globally it would have to become the world's moneychanger, banker, landlord, stockbroker . . . and enforcer. American military force would have to be used increasingly to safeguard and protect US access to the resource wealth of other countries, while international trade agreements would have to be written and enforced to the advantage of American corporations. And those corporations would be ever less involved directly in manufacturing, but more in trading, branding, and licensing.

The other signal event of 1970 - the first Earth Day - was well noted at the time. The brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day was reported prominently in the New York Times, Time Magazine, and most other significant media outlets. Legislation followed: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments, the Resource Recovery Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

Perhaps even more important than this legislation was the symbolic value of the occasion in giving voice and identity to a growing minority who viewed the fossil-fueled industrial project as having dire consequences for humanity and nature, and who advocated a dramatic change of direction for society as a whole away from consumerism and toward conservation, away from militarism and toward nurturance of life. The Earth Day message - which would be given renewed force two years later with the publication of the Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth, and then again with the Arab oil embargo of 1973 - appealed to many young people's intuitive longing for a return to a simpler, more localized and agrarian version of America, an America that didn't meddle in other nations' affairs.

The Earth Day message might have been still more compelling had Americans been aware of the fact and significance of their nation's oil peak. However, though the message evoked legislative and cultural responses, it sank in only so deep. It was, after all, difficult for many Americans to accept the notion that they should voluntarily give up their material privileges, their control of global resource streams, their entitlement to a glittering technotopian future of effortless abundance, and accept instead a self-disciplined and self-limiting future of hard work and dwindling material aspirations. The difficulty was compounded by the existence of an international rival - the USSR - that would presumably fill the void if America were to shrink from its imperial duties. The Soviet Union was also a competitor in the oil business and had actually out-produced the US in recent years. Wouldn't stepping off the consumerist treadmill mean giving in to the Commies?

It was a contest of visions and values, and that contest was to be decided in the election of 1980.

The Path Taken

Jimmy Carter was far from being a perfect president (his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was positively Machiavellian); nevertheless he somewhat understood the Earth Day message. I was living in Canada during the mid-1970s and almost never watched television, but I somehow found myself viewing a Carter speech in which he told Americans that they would have to change their material way of life in order to keep their freedoms. I was so amazed to hear an American president saying such things that I moved back to the US. But the Carter years were destined to be few.

For over three decades the American Right had been searching for ways to overturn the New Deal. Corporate leaders backing the Republicans had managed to make common cause with the burgeoning Christian fundamentalist movement and the anti-Communist fringe; Nixon had perfected the Southern strategy; and the party had found its perfect pitchman - a former film star and ex-shill for General Electric. Ronald Reagan and the Republican PR machine pushed all of the right buttons, even resorting to an "October surprise" to manipulate the Iranian hostage crisis to their benefit.

Reagan and G. H. W. Bush (who, during the mid-1980s, may have been the de facto president) were the last US leaders of the World War II generation, their cohort's final gift to the nation. It was morning in America, but let the Earth be damned: the Republicans had found an electoral strategy so successful that Democrats began trying to copy it, so that since 1980 the entire US political system has lurched ever further toward increased economic inequality, globalization, imperialism, and militarism.

So what did the Boomers do after 1980?

Having already taken a detour into the bleary world of recreational drugs, many of the more spirited Boomers now turned to gurus, meditation, and cults: politics was a bummer; if we really wanted to change the world we should change our heads first.

Other Boomers steered toward the stock market and scrambled up the corporate ladder. They got jobs, made money, and discovered that "greed is good." By the end of the decade it was apparent the Boomers were divided, with some upholding the Earth Day vision, others honing their skills as right-wing radio talk show hosts, and the rest just trying to get by.

Another Fork in the Road

Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president (born in 1946), elicited high hopes among his generational peers feeling battered by a dozen years of Reagan/Bush. But as governor of Arkansas Clinton had already learned the necessity of obeying entrenched power-holders in order to get along in politics. Moreover, by now the American governmental-corporate system was far too large and complex, and had far too much momentum behind it, to permit a fundamental change in direction.

In the late 1960s and early '70s many of us had believed that when our generation eventually took over the reins of power we would change the world. Well, here we were with one of our cohort as president and the country was more deeply mired than ever in the banality of consumerism. The WWII generation was increasingly filling obituary pages and populating nursing homes; now we had no one to blame but ourselves. The generation of peace and love had become the generation of SUVs and fast food.

It was clear that we had deluded ourselves by thinking of our cohort as united in its values, or by imagining that those values were somehow immutable. Just as Brokaw's "greatest generation" had started out in the 1930s battling the evils of unrestrained capitalism and went on in the 1940s to fight the menace of fascism only to end by electing Nixon, Reagan, and Bush and supporting the Vietnam war, we were now doing something similar.

This is not to say that all of our number had sold out: we could count as generational heroes and heroines thousands of scientists, activists, artists, musicians, and writers who kept alive the Earth Day ideal of a society that lives in harmony with nature rather than parasitically destroying it. However, with each passing year that ideal seemed ever more elusive - especially so following the 2000 election.

We watched as that election was stolen, and our outrage only grew as we saw prominent Democrats quietly acquiescing to the evisceration of what was left of American democracy. The events of 9/11 jolted even the drowsiest awake, and some of us began paying attention as never before when we realized that mainstream news organizations were failing to ask the most obvious questions about the events - about the mysterious collapse of the towers, the failure of officials to dispatch jet fighters, the immediate confiscation and destruction of evidence, the suspicious airline stock trades, the thwarted warnings, and much more. With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the detentions in Guantanamo, and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, it became clear that the US had entered an entirely new historical period. The current pseudo-president was another Boomer, but his shortcomings didn't end with corruption and simple-mindedness: he was, in the words of George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, "an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies," and his cronies were evidently dedicated neo-fascists with every intention of turning America into a Disneyland Reich. That they were ridiculously inept made them all the more dangerous.

In response, in recent months, some Boomers have honed their political consciousness. Michael Moore has most publicly led the way in this regard, but Cynthia McKinney, Michael Ruppert, and Catherine Austin Fitts are perhaps more emblematic of the leading edge of this reinvigorated political awareness and commitment.

With the 2004 election season the two poles of the Boomer generation are facing off over America's future, and that of the world. But this is to be no ordinary election. There is little chance today of any broad public discussion of the real issue that will impact our lives in the next few years - that the generation that grew up expecting always more will soon be faced with less. The nation, now hallucinating uncontrollably from toxic exposure to Fox News, is in debt to the point that no conceivable decision made today will prevent a devastating implosion of the US economy. Global oil production is going to peak before 2010. And the election itself may already be rigged, with remotely programmable electronic voting machines in place in the few strategic counties that can deliver the needed Electoral College tally.

It may seem cynical to some if I say that it is too late to salvage America's political system, its economy, its suburban way of life; that it is even too late to contemplate an easy and peaceful transition to a different socio-ecological reality - that possibility probably died in 1980. But as far as I can tell, these are the facts. As they say these days, get over it.

This doesn't mean that life will end tomorrow. The American dream is going down, yet we still have some control over how it goes down. And it is in this remaining arena of choice that we Boomers might partially redeem ourselves.

While our current struggle is not entirely defined by the project of trying to elect John Kerry (whose policies are "Bush Lite" in many respects), the expulsion of Bush and the neocons from power is a necessary immediate goal.

But there is a far more momentous long-term test ahead. During the next two decades we Boomers will assume the role of elders. We will have amassed considerable financial capital, as well as human capital in the forms of competence, credibility, and connections. How will we use this capital?

If we use it for any purpose other than to help awaken all and sundry to our collective plight, and to lead a change of course toward a peaceful, local, slow, and self-limiting post-fossil-fuel way of life, it will all have been wasted.

In the decades ahead we will be going through hell. That is an awful thing to contemplate, but the only alternative to accepting the fact is to live in denial until the reality is inescapable and our room for maneuvering is even more restricted than it has already become. What we must do now is to lay the groundwork for collective survival. We must build lifeboats, or support the younger lifeboat-builders among us.

This is not the grandiose project we imagined for ourselves back in the 1960s and '70s. Maybe people who are around decades from now will again be able to contemplate the creation of ecotopia - let us hope so. We Boomers have stolen much from those future generations; the main question remaining is, can we now give back at least the possibility that those generations will be permitted to exist?

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.

No. 149 - August 2004

by Richard Heinberg

The Endangered US Dollar

(We encourage you to get books through your local bookstore or from your library. If this is not practical, ordering through our links provides Museletter with a small commission. Book links are to Powell's or, if unavailable there, Amazon. These links are also useful to find out more about the book: price, content and reviews.)

To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.

- Thomas Jefferson

For decades the US dollar has served as the world's default currency. The phrase "sound as a dollar" has expressed the faith and confidence of generations, not only of Americans, but people worldwide.

That situation is coming to end, and the consequences will be far-reaching.

A Brief History of Money

In order to understand why this sea change is about to occur, and what is at stake, it is necessary to begin by examining in the briefest terms the history of money, banking, and the dollar.

Hunter-gatherer societies typically enjoyed a gift economy in which trade and barter occurred only with people external to the tribe or band. Everyone within the band was treated as family: whatever was available was shared without expectation of reciprocal exchange. The story of the rise of social complexity is also the story of the gradual shriveling of the gift economy and the expansion of the scope of trade - a story that culminates in our situation today, in which the market mediates nearly all categories of transactions between and among humans, sometimes even within families.

Even many relatively complex societies of the past (such as the ancient Egyptian and Inca civilizations) managed to do without money. However, this new tool, wherever it appeared, served to facilitate and accelerate trade. Its effects are predictable; French Historian Fernand Braudel, writing of Europe in the Middle Ages, described them as "steep variations in prices of essential foodstuffs; incomprehensible relationships in which man no longer recognized either himself, his customs, or his ancient values." The individual caught up in medieval Europe's monetization process found, again in Braudel's words, that "his work became a commodity, himself a 'thing.'"

The kinds of money people have used are almost endless; however, in societies that have adopted the widespread use of money, coins made of precious metals long ago became favored over other options (including shells, beads, cattle, and, in China, paper) due to their relative durability, portability, and rarity. Since money serves several possible functions-a store of value, a measure of value, a medium of exchange, and a standard of deferred payment - in some cases individual societies have used two or more forms of money simultaneously.

Monetary history took a decisive turn with the emergence of banking in Europe during the Middle Ages. Since traveling traders were frequently robbed of their coins or metal ingots, they took to depositing their metallic currency in the strongboxes of silversmiths and goldsmiths, and carried redeemable receipts instead. Gradually these receipts came to be regarded as being equivalent to the metal itself. This was the first paper money. Meanwhile, gold- and silversmiths discovered that it was possible to issue receipts for metal coins which they did not actually possess, a practice that would eventually give rise to fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking.

Fiat currencies did not appear in the West in any significant quantity until the 19th century, when governments and national banks began issuing notes not backed by any precious metal coinage whatever.

Fractional reserve banking emerged at about the same time as a system whereby banks were legally permitted to loan more money than they retained in deposits (regardless of whether those deposits were in the form of gold or fiat money). This process seems mysterious and perhaps even a tad unethical to most people when they initially learn of it. However, it has become the foundation of modern banking and currency systems. In effect, when a commercial bank makes a loan, it creates money from nothing; when the loan is repaid and is stricken from the books, that money effectively disappears. Since it has been loaned into existence, virtually all fiat currency in modern money economies is tied to debt, which requires the payment of interest. The regulation of the money supply therefore depends on someone's ability to set interest rates and thus encourage or discourage the seeking of more loans.

Early Life of the US Dollar

From this point on, we will focus our attention on a particular currency - the US dollar.

During the Revolutionary War the provisional authorities issued paper money, which led to counterfeiting by the British and various other forms of fraud.

The 1792 US Coinage Act provided for a national Mint where silver dollars were to be produced along with gold coins, beginning in 1794. The Act states: "The Dollar or Unit shall be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, to wit, three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver." The Act also prescribed the death penalty for anyone debasing the national currency.

The framers of the American Constitution were divided on the question of whether their new nation should have a national bank. Proponents (who were themselves bankers or future bankers) argued that a national bank would be necessary for the proper regulation of a national currency; opponents argued that such an institution would effectively give a tiny banking elite control of the nation's economy. The opponents won: Article I of the US Constitution gave Congress the power to coin money.

However, the proponents of a national bank, led by Alexander Hamilton, did not give up. At the time, in addition to the fledgling national currency, other currencies were issued by local banks. The nation needed a single money and a way of financing the government. All of the government's financial needs, said the Hamiltonians, should be underwritten by funds borrowed from the national bank, and repaid by the government with funds raised by taxation from the people. Thomas Jefferson led the opposition.

Twice in the 19th century a national bank was established (in 1791 and 1817), and twice abolished (the first in 1811, the second in 1832, both times on charges that the bank was corrupt and unconstitutional). Further attempts were made to establish a national bank until the early years of the 20th century, but were rejected on constitutional grounds. The nation's money, controlled by the government, was sometimes a fiat paper currency, and sometimes gold- or silver-backed. Periods of inflation or deflation led to depressions. Private banks continued to issue their own bank notes as currency until the end of the Civil War, during which Lincoln floated millions of dollars in fiat "greenbacks" in order to finance the army. In 1878, Congress began to redeem greenbacks into gold, which effectively put the US back on the gold standard until 1933.

In general, the Republicans were married to gold, while Populists, Democrats, and the "Greenback Party" promoted silver and/or the printing of lots of paper money. They argued that gold had become concentrated in the hands of the bankers; if money were to get into the hands of "real people," the government would have to issue more fiat or silver-backed paper notes. The monetary question split the nation for decades. Clearly, gold as money acts as a barrier to the expansion of credit money. This can be both good and bad: it prevents hyperinflation, but it can also put a brake on economic activity, leading in the worst instances to deflation and depression. In 1896, the conflict came to a head as Populist William Jennings Bryan ran against pro-gold Republican William McKinley. Though McKinley won, gold's time had passed.

Following the depression of 1907, Congress passed the Owen-Glass Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which established the national banking cartel that controls the nation's currency to this day. The Federal Reserve (known colloquially as the "Fed") is a peculiar hybrid government-private institution whose chairman is appointed by the US president but whose stock is entirely owned by member banks. In effect, the Fed is a private corporation owned by the interests that it nominally regulates on behalf of the people.

After the Fed's establishment the government quickly recalled its Treasury Notes and the Fed began issuing Federal Reserve notes with a promise to redeem them for gold upon demand. Congress also handed the Fed control of the nation's gold. The Fed then began loaning back the gold, at interest.

The Fed's tools for controlling the economy are few but powerful. It sets the rules for member banks for fractional reserve banking (money creation), and sets the discount rate (the rate of interest charged to member banks for the privilege of creating money). When the federal government wishes to take out a loan to pay for a new bomber or highway, it effectively borrows the money from the Fed (though the debt usually then gets spread around to various domestic and foreign investors), which thus controls not only the nation's monetary system but government credit as well. The benefits issuing from the flow of insider information that results from that control are unknown but surely considerable. The Fed's deliberations occur in secret and the institution has never been audited.

Even after the Fed's creation, several kinds of currency existed from time to time during the early 20th century, including United States Notes, Gold Certificates, and Silver Certificates. But, from about 1965 to the present, virtually all US currency has consisted of Federal Reserve Notes - i.e. money created not by the government (which merely prints the paper notes themselves, which it sells to the Fed for the cost of printing), but by Federal Reserve and its member banks.

On March 9, 1933, at the deepest point of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Orders 6073, 6102, 6111, and 6260,effectively declaring the US bankrupt. On April 5, 1933, Roosevelt declared a National Emergency that made it unlawful for any citizen of the United States to own gold, and ordered all gold coins, gold bullion, and gold certificates turned in to Federal Reserve banks by May 1 under the threat of imprisonment and fines. On June 5, 1933, Congress enacted a joint resolution outlawing all gold clauses in contracts.

Henceforth, for the next forty years, a dual monetary system would prevail which denied gold redeemability to Americans, while retaining it for foreigners.

The Dollar Triumphant

This brings us to the story of the dollar's rise to international prominence.

Prior to World War II the British pound sterling came close to being a globally accepted standard currency, largely as a result of the fact that it was issued by an Empire upon which the sun never set. However, neither the Empire nor the British economy survived the War intact. The US economy, meanwhile, though having been hammered by the Depression, emerged from the Second World War more robust than ever.

A post-War economic and geopolitical regime gradually emerged during the years 1944 to 1948. Postwar geopolitics would consist of a long political Cold War (which was also an economic war between the US and the USSR, itself a major oil producer and goods exporter within its sphere); meanwhile, the non-Soviet-dominated global economy would be shaped in agreements settled upon at international meetings in held Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The Bretton Woods meetings of 1944 led to the establishment of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (which later became the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund. The chief feature of the Bretton Woods system consisted of the obligation for each country to maintain the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed range - plus or minus one percent - in terms of gold. This well suited the United States, which at the time happened to have the largest gold reserves of any nation.

The arrangement worked reasonably for all concerned, as long as America remained the world's foremost energy producer and goods exporter - which permitted it in turn to maintain its gold reserves. The US extended dollar credits by way of the Marshall Plan to finance the rebuilding of post-war Europe, while American oil companies (and the Texas Railroad Commission) maintained stable prices for petroleum globally.

During this period US foreign and domestic policy were characterized by liberalism: at home, economic inequality was at the lowest point in modern American history; while abroad the United States maintained minimal trade barriers between itself and Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea. It could easily afford to absorb exports from these nations in return for their commitment of support for the duration of the Cold War.

The US exercised leadership by consensus - again, because it could easily afford to do so. This consensus evolved through both GATT trade negotiations and geostrategic Bilderberg meetings, in which the main Western powers conspired to effectively control the economies and political destinies of most of the rest of the world's nations.

However, this first relatively benign phase of what Henry Luce called the "American Century" came to an end as a result of the confluence of three factors: the decline of US oil production, spiraling national debt brought on by the Vietnam War, and increasing European and Japanese economic strength.

1973-1999: The Petrodollar Era

The members of the US-dominated consensus, while agreeing to cooperate, still had their own interests at heart, and sought advantages wherever possible. F. William Engdahl, in an essay in Current Concerns titled "Iraq and the Hidden Euro-Dollar Wars", describes the subsequent unraveling

All during the 1960s, France's de Gaulle began to take . . . dollar export earnings and demand gold from the U.S. Federal Reserve, legal under Bretton Woods at that time. By November 1967 the drain of gold from U.S. and Bank of England vaults had become critical. The weak link in the Bretton Woods Gold Exchange arrangement was Britain, the "sick man of Europe." The link broke as Sterling was devalued in 1967.That merely accelerated the pressure on the U.S. dollar, as French and other central banks increased their call for U.S. gold in exchange for their dollar reserves. They calculated that, with the soaring war deficits from Vietnam, it was only a matter of months before the United States itself would be forced to devalue against gold, so better to get their gold out at a high price.

By May 1971 even the Bank of England was demanding gold for dollars, and the drain on US reserves had become intolerable. Nixon did the only thing he could under the circumstances: he abandoned the Gold Exchange program altogether, and in August of that year a system of floating currencies was instituted. Engdahl again:

The break with gold opened the door to an entirely new phase of the American Century. In this new phase, control over monetary policy was, in effect, privatized, with large international banks such as Citibank, Chase Manhattan or Barclays Bank assuming the role that central banks had in a gold system, but entirely without gold. "Market forces" now could determine the dollar. And they did with a vengeance.

In 1973, with the dollar now floating freely, the Arab nations of OPEC embargoed oil exports to the US in retaliation for American support for Israel in the Ramadan/Yom Kippur War. By this time it was clear that US oil production had peaked and was in permanent decline, and that America would become ever more dependent upon petroleum imports. As oil prices soared 400%, the US economy took a nose-dive.

The US and Saudi Arabia had formed a cooperative partnership in 1945, following meetings between FDR and King Ibn Saud. US oil companies (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco) were already controlling Saudi discovery and production through a partnership with the Kingdom, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco). In 1973, the Saudi Government increased its partner's share in the company to 25%, and then 60% the next year. In 1980, the Saudi government retroactively gained full ownership of Aramco with financial effect as of 1976.

At about the same time this was happening (1975), the Saudis agreed to export their oil for US dollars exclusively. Soon OPEC as a whole adopted the rule. Now, as a result, the dollar was backed not by gold but, in effect, by oil. Had the US permitted the Saudis to nationalize their oil industry in return for this extraordinary favor? Because the Saudi royal family and the oil companies are all notoriously tight-lipped, we may never know.

In any case, the oil shock created enormously increased demand for the floating dollar. Oil importing countries, including Germany and Japan, were faced with the problem of how to earn or borrow dollars with which to pay their ballooning fuel bills. Meanwhile, OPEC oil countries were inundated with oil dollars. Many of these oil dollars ended up in accounts in London and New York banks, where a new process - which Henry Kissinger dubbed "recycling petrodollars" - was instituted.

The process worked like this. OPEC countries were receiving billions of dollars they could not immediately use. When American and British banks took these dollars in deposit, they were thereby presented with the opportunity for writing more loans (banks make their profits primarily from loans, but they can only write loans if they have deposits to cover a certain percentage of the loan-usually 10% to 15%, depending on the current fractional reserve requirements issued by the Fed or Bank of England). Since the economies of industrialized nations were in no position to take on much new debt, the banks were faced with a problem: to whom could they loan a boatload of new petrodollar-based money? Kissinger, an advisor to David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank, suggested the bankers use OPEC dollars as a reserve base upon which to aggressively "sell" bonds or loans, not to US or British corporations and investors, but to Third World countries desperate to borrow dollars with which to pay for oil imports. By the late 1970s these petrodollar debts had laid the basis for the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s (after interest rates exploded). Most of that debt is still in place and is still strangling many of the poorer nations. Hundreds of billions of dollars were recycled in this fashion. (Incidentally, the borrowed money usually found its way back to Western corporations or banks in any event, either by way of contracts with Western construction companies or simple theft on the part of indigenous officials with foreign bank accounts.)

Also during the 1970s and '80s, the Saudis began using their petrodollar surpluses to buy huge inventories of unusable weaponry from US arms manufacturers. This was a hidden subsidy to the US economy, and especially to the so-called Defense Department.

As Engdahl points out, the petrodollar era was characterized by the US attempt to slow its geopolitical decline (arising from imperial over-extension abroad and resource depletion at home) by making the dollar a hegemonic currency The IMF "Washington Consensus" was developed to enforce draconian debt collection on Third World countries, to force them to repay dollar debts, prevent any economic independence from the nations of the South, and keep the U.S. banks and the dollar afloat. The Trilateral Commission was created by David Rockefeller and others in 1973 in order to take account of the recent emergence of Japan as an industrial giant and try to bring Japan into the system. Japan, as a major industrial nation, was a major importer of oil. Japanese trade surpluses from export of cars and other goods were used to buy oil in dollars. The remaining surplus was invested in U.S. Treasury bonds to earn interest. The G-7 was founded to keep Japan and Western Europe inside the U.S. dollar system. From time to time into the 1980s various voices in Japan would call for three currencies - dollar, German mark and yen - to share the world reserve role. It never happened. The dollar remained dominant.

Simultaneously, during the 1980s the US effectively bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing the Soviets to pump their oil reserves at the maximum rate in order to pay for the escalating arms race with America and the US-fomented Afghan war, while reducing oil income to the Soviets by asking the Saudis to keep world oil prices low. As foreseen by the CIA, Soviet oil production peaked; and, as it declined, the nation's economy imploded. The Cold War had been won.

The petrodollar era had worked to the American financial elite's advantage, but at a horrendous cost to the people of the Third World and to those of the former Soviet Union as well. Living standards declined in all of these countries as IMF "structural adjustment" policies opened markets to the predatory process of globalization led by US-based multinationals seeking cheap labor and raw materials. The people of the US suffered also, as America's manufacturing base was "hollowed out" through outsourcing. While a quarter-century previously 60% of the world's export goods had carried a "Made in USA" label, now American companies were interested primarily in "branding" products made in China or Central America. Jobs for US workers were consequently down-sized.

During the petrodollar era, American foreign economic policy and military policy continued to be dominated by the voices of the traditional liberal consensus, which required that the US acted in concert with its allies. But this was about to change.

1999-Present: Hegemonic Decline, Imperial Hubris

As the Cold War ended, Europe was in the process of forging political and economic unity. Today the European Union and the euro - an entirely new pan-European currency - present a subtle but serious threat to continued American monetary hegemony. This challenge has developed slowly over the past 15 years, but its effects are cascading into view. In the US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq we see the dynamics of this new challenge at play, including the American response to it. The Washington neoconservatives have a term for this response: "democratic imperialism."

As Jeremy Rifkin documents in his new book, European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Europe is ever less a collection of squabbling nations and ever more a cohesive economic superpower -one that exceeds the US in GDP, population, and productivity. Europe shares America's dependency on depleting foreign sources of oil and gas, and will likely be hit hard by the effects of global climate change. Thus, over the long term, Europe's prospects are dim-though no dimmer necessarily than those of any other region.

However, in the short term Europeans will enjoy some advantages over their American counterparts, including much greater energy efficiency (Europeans use energy at one-half the per-capita rate as Americans) and much less debt, resulting partly from much smaller military budgets. Moreover, Europe sits next to Russia, which still has considerable quantities of exportable oil and gas and stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons. A Eurasian alliance between Russia, Germany, and France would be a geopolitical nightmare for Washington -and such an alliance is beginning quietly and tentatively to emerge. Europe is also geographically closer to the oil and gas reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia, which are increasingly accessible to it by pipeline (the US must rely on tankers).

The development of this Eurasian challenge comes at a bad time for Washington, which is in no position to offer the kinds of trade concessions it did in earlier decades in order to maintain the G-7 consensus. America's only remaining strong suit is raw military power, and thus its only options are either to decline gracefully from its position as sole superpower, or use its military to enforce global dominance.

Engdahl suggests that the neo-conservatives gained influence in Washington because a majority in the U.S. power establishment finds their views useful to advance a new aggressive U.S. role in the world. Rather than work out areas of agreement with European partners, Washington increasingly sees Euroland as the major strategic threat to American hegemony, especially "Old Europe" of Germany and France. Just as Britain in decline after 1870 resorted to increasingly desperate imperial wars in South Africa and elsewhere, so the United States is using its military might to try to advance what it no longer can by economic means. Here the dollar is the Achilles heel.

To understand why the dollar is America's Achilles heel, a metaphor is useful. Imagine being able to write checks and then convince the people you give them to not to cash them. Perhaps they find the checks themselves comforting to hold onto; or maybe you have a friend who agrees to sell groceries or gasoline for your checks only, and then happily stockpiles and re-circulates them. In either case, you may be tempted to write checks for much more than you have in your bank account. As long as the checks themselves are regarded as valuable and not cashed, you get a free ride. But if people stop finding your checks comforting to hold onto, or if your friend starts selling groceries for other people's checks or for gold or silver, then the game is up. It will be revealed that your account is overdrawn and you will be in trouble.

The metaphor is not perfect. In fact, every nation in the world is attempting to write checks beyond its means. But the US has managed to do by far a better job of it than any other nation. The checks we are not talking about are not just hoarded paper dollars (though there are billions of these stuffed in mattresses around the world) but dollar-denominated investments and securities, including T-bills, stocks, and mortgages. Currently the US is running a $700 billion per year trade deficit, this on top of trillions in government debt and trillions more in consumer debt. No other nation in the world comes remotely close to this level of bad-check writing, on either a total or a per-capita basis.

If a run on the US dollar were to occur, then the only financial solution would be to create even more dollars (presumably through government borrowing), which of course wouldn't actually solve the problem and would in the long run make matters worse. The currency would become almost worthless, and in the process real wealth (land, factories, and natural resources) would be confiscated and turned over to creditors.

What could cause this to happen? A decision by OPEC to openly sell oil for euros could be a trigger. Some oil is already quietly being sold for euros, and several countries including Iran and Saudi Arabia have floated the possibility of valuing oil against a basket of currencies (meaning, effectively, dollars and euros). The Arab OPEC states have also toyed with an idea that must be equally worrisome to Brussels and Washington: to sell oil for gold (the gold dinar). If and when this happens, the full wrath of America will descend upon the Arab Middle East - and that's why it hasn't happened yet.

The other likely trigger would be a collapse of the US economy from within resulting from a bursting of the mortgage bubble. The recent US economic "recovery" arose almost entirely from low mortgage rates (set ultimately by the Fed), which allowed families to refinance their homes, cash out some of their equity, and use the money for immediate consumption. With oil prices soaring, the Fed will eventually have to raise interest rates steeply in order to contain inflation. But this may cause millions of homeowners to default on their currently low-interest adjustable-rate mortgages. In that event, property values would plummet, and with them would go the stock market and the economy as a whole.

If the Fed's real owners are confident in the present Washington leadership, they will do everything in their power to delay the inevitable until after the election (and this is what they seem to be doing). If they think it is time for a regime change, we may see the great unraveling begin even before November.

In either case, the response of US political leaders may be merely to seek foreign scapegoats. As Stan Goff writes in his recent essay, "Persian Peril" (www.fromthewilderness.com), it appears as if Iran is currently being set up as the next domino in the neocons' crusade for democracy in the Middle East. With Iranian and Russian cooperative energy agreements blooming, a US attack on Iran could be the trigger for another all-out conflict on the order of the World Wars of the 20th century. On the other hand, it is possible that the disastrous outcome of the Iraq invasion has sunk deep enough into the awareness of Washington elites that further similar adventures (however desperately sought by the neocons) will be headed off by cooler minds.

 

* * *

 

There is no solution to any of this - in that there is nothing we can do to make the problems go away. Their origins go far back in time and are intertwined with the history of money itself, though money per se is not at the heart of the matter. Access to resources is, as ever, the ultimate determiner of human destiny, but money has become a tool universally used by humans to gain and hold access to resources, and as such it introduces its own set of possibilities and perils.

While there is no solution, there must be responses, and some are better than others. Relocalization of economies (moving producers and consumers closer together) and local currencies are good places to start.

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.

No. 152 - December 2004

by Richard Heinberg

Beyond the Peak

 

Closing Address, by Richard Heinberg, to the First US Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions, Yellow Springs Ohio, November 14, 2004

 

First let me take this opportunity to express my great thanks to Pat Murphy, Faith Morgan, and Megan Quinn of Community Service, who have organized this conference so thoughtfully and successfully.

We have already heard a lot of talk this weekend, and I don't want to tax us further with yet more information. I see in the program that I am supposed to speak on "Hope and Vision: Solutions for Planet Earth." It seems to me that several other presenters have already given us plenty of hope and vision; I am not sure I have much to add in that regard. But perhaps I could take these few minutes to share with you some philosophical thoughts on the big picture - on our plight and opportunity from a historical perspective.

We are, it seems to me, seeing the beginning of the end of industrial civilization.

That word civilization is a tricky one. We are trained to think of it as connoting everything refined, cultured, and secure. The alternative is barbarism, is it not?

Well, not necessarily - not, at least, from a historical or anthropological perspective.

For several years in the 1990s I was a member of an academic organization called the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, which, like most such outfits, holds yearly meetings at which professors entertain one another with their latest iterations of sometimes indecipherably subtle theories. The members of ISCSC, or "issy" as it is affectionately called, could never quite settle on a definition of the word civilization, but there was general agreement that civilizations are good and very worthy of comparative study. Thus the paper I read one year, "A Primitivist Critique of Civilization," didn't go over particularly well.

But while the word civilization may be hard even for experts to define, its derivation is clear enough; it comes from the Latin civis, meaning "city." Civilized people are city builders. But this is hardly a complete or even useful explanation; there are surely other factors involved, including writing, numeracy, trade, and a system of social classes. According even to these few criteria, there have been about 24 distinct civilizations so far.

Now, I think we all have a clear sense that our particular civilization is qualitatively different from any other in history - from the Chacoan, for example, or the Mayan, or the Mesopotamian, or the classical Roman or Greek. Ours is the first, and will be the only, fossil-fueled civilization. It is civilization on steroids, civilization on multiple carafes of espresso, civilization on rocket fuel. We supersize it; we want it done yesterday. Consequently we have chewed up and spit out more of the Earth's resources more quickly than any other group of humans has ever managed to do.

Of course, civilizations produce wonderful cultural artifacts: pyramids, temples, literature, music, and so on. Perhaps because the American oil empire has grown up so quickly and rootlessly, its cultural products - though admittedly impressive in some ways (consider the modern Hollywood blockbuster movie with its multi-million-dollar special effects) - often have an ephemeral quality, a superficiality, and an emotionally manipulative commercial utilitarianism, that makes many of us less than proud.

Our buildings, clothes, utensils, containers, and tools - all aspects of our designed environment - have come to be shaped by fuel-fed machines rather than by human hands. If we can make them faster, or if we can make more of them more cheaply with machines, economics requires that we do so. As a result, we have become starved for beauty - the beauty of nature, and the beauty of careful, skilled, individual hand production rooted in slowly and painstakingly evolved culture that is itself rooted in a particular landscape. Perhaps we suffer unknowingly from an unrecognized mass disease: chronic, pernicious beauty deficiency.

One interesting thing to note about civilizations is that they have a nasty habit of collapsing. Many of them have come to their ends for similar reasons, and often the process of collapse has begun within only years of their reaching their maxima of geographical extent, military power, and accumulated wealth. Clive Ponting, in his marvelous book A Green History of the World, offers a familiar explanation: ancient societies typically drew down their resource base and destroyed their habitat. They cut too many trees, exhausted their topsoil, emptied their wells.

Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies, provides a more subtle account. He attributes collapse to declining returns on investments in complexity. And he defines collapse itself as a reduction in social complexity. A flattening of the pyramidal class structure, a withdrawal of imperial overreach, a rupturing of trade relations - all are symptoms of the involuntary simplification of a society.

Parenthetically, I should note that Tainter, who certainly respects indigenous cultures, is not saying that non-civilized societies aren't complex in terms of their rituals and myths, or their ecological understandings. He defines complexity in terms of quantifiable social elements like the number of distinctive tools and tool systems, or the number of social classes and occupations present.

Societies become complex in order to solve their problems. We adopted agriculture to make up for the caloric deficit consequent upon our overhunting of megafauna during the late Pleistocene. We irrigated so that we could practise agriculture in seasonally arid places. We built social hierarchies to allocate irrigation allowances from a single river to hundreds or thousands of individual farmers, or to store and distribute grain from seasonally abundant harvests.

At first, such investments in social and technological complexity may yield dizzying returns, and societies that make them often grow quickly and tend to overpower their neighbors. An empire may develop, and may persist for centuries.

But the strategy of social complexification imposes hidden costs that gradually build up. The support population eventually tires under the burden.

Once the point of declining returns is reached, almost anything can push a society into decline. Climate change and other environmental disasters sometimes play a role. Typically, civilizations that are near their point of collapse become involved in wars over resources, and they are often plagued by poor leadership that is unable to understand the nature of the challenge or to propose effective responses.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Surely a civilization whose entire basis rests upon the extraction and use - and thus the depletion - of a few non-renewable resources is the most vulnerable sort of civilization that has ever existed.

Most scientists I know who study these things have come to the conclusion that we are living near the end of the current empire, the first truly global empire in the history of our species. By "end" I don't mean that the whole thing will come crashing down tomorrow or next year. Historically, collapses have usually occurred over a period of decades or centuries. In our case the signs of diminishing returns, and of overextension, are already unmistakable. And, perverse as the comment may seem, I don't think collapse, in this instance, would necessarily be such a bad thing.

As Tainter points out, collapse really just means a return to the normal pattern of human life - life, that is, in tribes or villages: small communities, if you will. Collapse is an economizing process in which a society reverts to a level of complexity that is capable of being sustained.

This is all so easy to understand from an academically detached perspective. But of course we are not Martian anthropologists observing the events through a telescope; we are talking about the circumstances of our lives.

So what do you do if you are living at the end of an empire? I suppose one rational response would be to eat, drink, and be merry. Why not? It sure beats worrying oneself to death over events one can't control, and thus squandering whatever moments of normalcy and chances for happiness may remain before the end comes.

Somehow, I think that you here have other ideas about what to do. I suspect that if you had been passengers on the Titanic, you would not have been drinking yourselves into a stupor at the bar; you'd have been strapping deck chairs together, finding a way to increase the signal strength of the ship's radio, or inventing waterproof buoyant suits that could be remanufactured from hemp ropes using equipment commandeered from the ship's machine shop.

I probably can't tell you anything you should be doing that you are not already doing about as well as you can under the circumstances. We all know the drill - grow more of your own food, conserve energy, become active in your local community, learn useful arts and skills, stock up on hand tools. In essence: we must plant the seeds for what can and will survive, for a way of life as different from industrialism as the latter is from the medieval period, a way of life whose full flowering we ourselves may never see in our brief lifetimes.

Many of you have been teaching this stuff for decades; you don't need a "how-to" lecture from me.

However it can be helpful to know that there are others thinking the same thoughts, grappling with the same challenges, and finding different but complementary strategies; and it seems to me that this conference has helped immeasurably in this regard. We know each other now, and we know that we are in this together. We know also that we have passed a few recent signal events and are approaching another very important one. It's helpful to compare notes.

Somewhere this weekend I heard the inevitable comment that we are preaching to the choir. That's not the way I look at it. To bend that metaphor, I feel as though in this moment I am addressing a council of preachers.

We have only a dwindling amount of time to build lifeboats - that is, the needed alternative infrastructure. It has been clear for at least 30 years what characteristics this should have - organic, small-scale, local, convivial, cooperative, slower paced, human-oriented rather than machine-oriented, agrarian, diverse, democratic, culturally rich, and ecologically sustainable. We have known for a long time that the status quo - a society that is machine-oriented, competitive, inequitable, fast-paced, globalized, monocultural, and corporate-dominated - is deadening to the human spirit and ecologically unsustainable.

Sustainable. Unsustainable. What do these words really mean?

Perhaps peak oil at last provides the word sustainability with teeth. People now speak of "sustainable development," "sustainable growth," and "sustainable returns on investment." That, my friends, is sustainability lite. The word has been diluted and denatured almost beyond recognition.

An understanding of peak oil provides us with a minimum definition of the word: can we do this, whatever it is we're talking about, without fossil fuels? If we can, then it just might be a sustainable activity or process. There's no guarantee: there are a lot of human activities that don't involve fossil fuels and that are not sustainable - like large-scale whaling with sailing ships, or intensive irrigation agriculture in soil that isn't properly drained.

But if you can't do it without fossil fuels, by definition, it ain't sustainable.

And that includes most of what we do in North America these days.

What we here are saying is that a transition to a lower level of social-technological complexity need not be violent, need not be chaotic, and need not entail the loss of the values and cultural achievements of which we are most proud as a society. And the end result could be far more humane, enjoyable, and satisfying than life currently is for citizens of this grandest of empires.

Even though this conference is spectacularly well attended from the standpoint of the expectations of the organizers, we are comparatively few. And the message we are communicating is not being heard by the great majority of our fellow citizens. It is probably optimistic to think that it will be understood by more than one or two percent of the population. However, if that seed nucleus of the total citizenry really gets it, we may have a chance. We all know what seeds are capable of.

I'm reminded of the Populist rural movement of the late 19th century, which altered America's political landscape and very nearly diverted the US away from its imperial, corporatist destiny back toward the agrarian ideal of Jefferson. The Populists spread their word, starting in rural Texas, to nearly every county in the South, East, West, and Midwest. Their method? They trained 40,000 public speakers. Then, at grange halls, county fairs, and Chautauquas, they painstakingly educated their fellow citizens about the banking cartels, the trusts, and the currency system, and about how local communities could take charge of their own economies once again.

The 1898 presidential election proved to be the undoing of the movement: the Populists had decided to bet the farm on electoral politics and ran William Jennings Bryan, who was beaten by the arch-imperialist William McKinley, himself soon to die at the hand of an anarchist assassin.

We've just had an election too. And, unless it is contested, it may well mark the unequivocal end of the Republic, and of national electoral democracy in this country.

But just as it is becoming altogether clear that we are living in an empire, we are seeing clear signs that the empire is itself nearing its fate.

My friends, it is a time to be hopeful. It is a good time to cherish one another and embrace the young and fortify them with our experiences and vision, and to trust in their ability to find their own appropriate response to the events ahead.

There will be sustainable human cultures on this planet a century from now. In fact, that's the only kind of cultures there will be. And I think we can reasonably hope that at least some of those cultures will be able to trace their lineage to the seemingly marginalized hippies, activists, energy geeks, permaculturists, communitarians, organic farmers, eco-city planners, and plain citizens who started educating their neighbors about peak oil early in the century.

We have done some good work already, but we have a lot more to accomplish. Perhaps we now have a better grasp of the context in which our work must continue, and of its crucial importance for the survival of our species.

May we apply ourselves with renewed confidence, commitment, and good humor. We can create beauty and live in beauty. We can live in joy, knowing that our efforts will sprout roots, trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. We can dwell in community, as we share each other's lives and visions, talents and resources, concerns and needs, and learn to support one another and work together.

It is a scary time to be alive, but it is a wonderful time to be alive. It is good to know that there is so much accumulated intelligence and compassion among us. This has been a fabulous conference with extraordinary presenters and presentations, and even more amazing participants. We leave here with gifts of knowledge, encouragement, perspective, and passion. Thank you.

[For more information about the conference, and to find out about Community Service, go to www.communitysolution.org.]

 

Observations on the Whimpering Extinction of American Electoral Democracy

November the second 2004 was a dark day for the future of our world. Just how dark we are likely to find out soon enough.

Like many other people whom I've since compared notes with, I wandered around in a depressed daze Tuesday evening and much of the next day. The two questions I asked myself are ones that millions were no doubt pondering: What can we learn from these events, and where do we go from here?

It seems to me that the answers to these questions are going to take a while to emerge. One thing is clear, though: We have to start with a realistic understanding of what happened.

In the days before the election I anticipated a Bush win, primarily because of the numbers of electronic voting machines in place in strategic states and counties. At least a third of voters used these new "black box" paperless touch-screen machines; the problems with them - their vulnerability to tampering and their inability to provide the basis for a verifiable recount, as well as the political partisanship of their manufacturers - have been discussed extensively for the past two years. I predicted to friends that only a landslide vote for Kerry could give him the White House.

On the day of the election, as I learned of the high voter turnout, I became guardedly optimistic about a Kerry victory. People rarely vote in record numbers merely to endorse the status quo; usually a high turnout means that the electorate wants a change. Informal early exit polls showed strong numbers for Kerry. Was this the landslide that might overwhelm Bush's secret weapon?

Then the official vote counting began, and the news was grim. By Wednesday morning everyone was agreed: Bush had won, Kerry had lost. The people had spoken.

Within hours, leftist spokespeople were offering radio and newspaper commentaries that offered one or both of two rather predictable responses. First, the Democrats blew it: they misread the electorate; they didn't get out the vote; they didn't put forward a sufficiently (fill in the blank) program. Second, people on the left need to regroup, organize, and hone their message so that it appeals to more voters next time around.

It seems to me that both responses are pointless. Why? They miss the single most important aspect of the situation.

This election, like the presidential election of 2000 and several of the mid-term elections of 2002, was stolen.

The evidence of massive voting fraud in this instance is convincing but - due to the nature of the voting machines themselves - probably impossible to prove legally. That, of course, is the genius of the fraud strategy.

In most states where there was a paper trail, exit polls matched the official tally closely. In states where there was no paper trail, exit polls diverged widely from official tallies, in Bush's favor in every instance. The odds against this occurring, absent fraud, are staggering (one statistics professor calculated them as 250,000,000 to one).

In Florida, exit polls favored Kerry by 0.7 percent, while Bush officially won by 5.1 percent. If the election results had been based on exit polls rather than official tallies from computer voting machines, Kerry would easily have won a minimum of six more states and the presidency.

In Ohio, the strategy (implemented in this case by Republican secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell) included placing fewer voting machines than needed in Democratic areas, leading to hours-long waiting lines that discouraged thousands of voters.

Bizarre as it may seem, the counting of 80 percent of the total votes nationally - whether from computer touch-screen machines or optically-scanned paper ballots - was delegated to two private companies with strong family ties to one another. Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, is also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company of which his brother Todd is currently vice president. Both brothers are millenarian Christians, and both are avowed and dedicated Bush supporters.

The details of the fraud may emerge gradually as the result of painstaking research. They will be reported only haphazardly and dismissively in the mainstream press. A recount of the vote in Ohio, and perhaps in a few other states, which is being mounted by the Greens and Libertarians, may succeed in highlighting some of the voting irregularities.

The outcome of the election is unlikely to be altered in any case.

The lessons we draw from the events need to reflect the reality, not the illusion. If it is true that Bush won only as a result of massive voting fraud, then telling people that "we need to work harder to get out the vote next time" or "we screwed up by not sending a message that resonated with the electorate" is an insulting misdirection and waste of everyone's time and attention.

Meanwhile, one party now controls all three branches of government and the machinery that decides who wins elections. There is every reason to assume that the engineers of this power grab will use the next months and years to consolidate their gains by attempting to destroy the entire infrastructure of environmental, consumer, and human rights nonprofit organizations in this country, perhaps using "tax reform" as the means. Who is to stop them?

We have finally reached the point where we must sadly declare that national electoral democracy in the US is dead. What we have instead is a single-party fascist state. Yet most people seem still to be muddling along under illusions drilled into them as children in civics class. They are living in a holographic projection of democracy, a Matrix of normalcy, while the reality is something very different.

One indication as to just how we have already traveled along the road to stealth dictatorship is the fact that there are growing numbers of binding federal regulations that are unpublished and entirely inaccessible to citizens. According to Secrecy News, such regulations include the one that authorizes airport security screeners to randomly pat-search passengers. When an ultra-conservative former Republican Congresswoman asked to see a copy of the statute that authorized the procedure, she was told that the regulation was categorized as "sensitive security information" that could not be viewed by citizens. The Homeland Security Act creates an entire system of such secret laws.

Does anyone suppose that a second Bush term will lead anywhere but further along the path to secrecy, the curtailment of constitutional rights, detentions without charges or trials, universal surveillance, the torture of prisoners, the abandonment of international law, more bombings of populations in resource-rich regions, and the deployment of more imperial forces in other nations?

What follows are some of my recent, admittedly rather dark, ruminations on how political events in the US may play out in the years ahead.

The genius of the framers of the US Constitution lay in their creation of a system whereby tepid periodic reforms could be implemented by means of the ballot box, thus forestalling violent revolutions. That system, which actually had as its main purpose the protection of wealth and privilege, has become gradually more corrupted with each passing decade. Evidently, the elites became greedier over time and decided that they wanted it all.

Historically, the political pendulum in the US has had a tendency to swing from left to right, or right to left, about every 35 years. That metaphorical pendulum should be due for a swing to the left. Due to changing demographics - growing Hispanic and African-American populations, and expanding numbers in Democratic-majority regions - it would seem that (under ordinary conditions) Democrats should be expected to control the nation's politics for the next few decades.

By colonizing the media, by packing the courts, and now especially by taking charge of the very machinery of democracy, the Bush-led Right has succeeded in nailing the pendulum in place at its furthest extreme.

This can work for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later, the momentum will build until it is unstoppable. But because it has been held back, the pendulum will swing with a violence and vengeance not seen in recent US history. Whether this happens in six months or twenty years, it will happen as surely as day follows night.

Meanwhile, the current administration is gloating insufferably, its hubris unbounded. Bush and his extreme right-wing advisors are purging the CIA and the State Department, removing competent careerists and inserting ideology-driven loyalists. But there are not enough competent loyalists to go around, and so the government itself is destined to become increasingly dysfunctional. Valuable intelligence information will be suppressed; yes-men will continue to be promoted. A society cannot function forever on the basis of convenient illusions.

As the economy founders and resource wars require military service from unwilling young people, the nation will begin to come apart at the seams. The lower classes will deliberately be further impoverished to provide an incentive for enlistment in the quickly expanding armed forces and domestic police forces that will be required to maintain order throughout the American Empire. Eventually, however, attempting to maintain order with force alone will be about as successful in New York or Miami or Seattle as it is in Fallujah.

The revolution may initially be spearheaded by idealistic leftists. But the heavy lifting, when it finally occurs, will be accomplished by others: at some point, disaffected elements of the military, the CIA, and the international financial elite will weigh in; and when they do, the seemingly impregnable fortress of the Bushites may be shaken to its foundations. If by this time the Bush crew has managed to precipitate a global resource war, other nations will become involved. The US may end up being "liberated" from Bush in a manner vaguely analogous to the way the German people were relieved of Hitler, or the Italians of Mussolini.

Since it is the heavy lifters who will have turned the tide, they will also seek to take credit for, and determine the outcome of, the events. The result will likely not be a leftist utopia, but some reformist state that is (as usual) friendly to the interests of the elites.

All of this is what should be expected if we simply imagine the twenty-first century to be a continuation of the twentieth. However, from the standpoint of population and resources the new century represents an entirely different era in the human journey. The ground is shifting under us. Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.

In the days ahead we will each have to think about where we are going to put our energy and effort during this time. The overthrow of tyrannies is certainly a worthy occupation, and those who devote themselves to the task in this instance will have many opportunities for conspicuous heroism.

However, at this point in history, as industrial civilization crumbles, lifeboats are needed - survivable local communities capable of weathering the storms of war, ecological collapse, and economic calamity. At least some of us must devote our efforts to these practical infrastructural needs, which center on the building of local networks for food, water, energy, and monetary security.

Perhaps the choice need not be an exclusive one. Up to this point I have attempted to pursue both lines of effort in my writings. However I am unsure whether it will remain possible to be effective at lifeboat building while being politically active within the developing context of state repression. We shall see.

For more information on the election fraud: Black Box Voting

Richard Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003). He is a journalist, educator, editor, and lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community."

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.

No. 154 - February 2005

by Richard Heinberg

Meditations on Collapse

A review of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Civilizations collapse. That is the rule that we learn from history, and it is a rule whose implications deserve careful thought given the fact that our own civilization - despite its global extent and unsurpassed technological prowess - is busily severing its own ecological underpinnings. Thus we should pay close attention when Jared Diamond, one of the world's most celebrated and honored science writers, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, devotes his newest and already best-selling book to the subject of how and why whole societies sometimes lose their way and descend into chaos.

Diamond uses his considerable popular non-fiction prose-writing skills - carefully honed in the crafting of scores of articles for Natural History, Discover, Nature, and Geo - to trace the process of collapse in several ancient societies (including the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse colony) and show parallels with trends in several modern nations (Rwanda, Haiti, and Australia).

One theme quickly emerges: the environment plays a crucial role in each instance. Resource depletion, habitat destruction, and population pressure combine in different ways in different circumstances; but when their mutually reinforcing impacts become critical, societies are sometimes challenged beyond their ability to respond and consequently disintegrate.

The ancient Maya practised intensive slash-and-burn horticulture, growing mostly corn. Their population increased dramatically, peaking in the eighth century C.E., but this resulted in the over-cutting of forests; meanwhile their fragile soils were becoming depleted. A series of droughts turned problem to crisis. Yet kings and nobles, rather than comprehending and responding to the crisis, evidently remained fixated on the short-term priorities of enriching themselves, building monuments, waging wars, and extracting sufficient food from the peasants to support their ostentatious lifestyles. The population of Mayan cities quickly began a decline that would continue for several centuries, culminating in levels 90 percent lower than at the civilization's height in 700.

The Easter Islanders, whose competing clan leaders built giant stone statues in order to display their prestige and to symbolize their connection with the gods, cut every last tree in their delicate environment to use in erecting these eerie monuments. Hence the people lost their source of raw materials for building canoes, which were essential for fishing. Meanwhile bird species were driven into extinction, crop yields fell, and the human population declined, so that by the time Captain Cook arrived in 1774 the remaining Easter Islanders, who had long since resorted to cannibalism, were, in Cook's words, "small, lean, timid, and miserable."

Regarding the Anasazi of the American Southwest, who left behind stone ceremonial centers that had been integrated into a far-flung empire, I can do no better than to quote Diamond's own summary:

Despite these varying proximate causes of abandonments, all were ultimately due to the same fundamental challenge: people living in fragile and difficult environments, adopting solutions that were brilliantly successful and understandable in the short run, but that failed or else created fatal problems in the long run, when people became confronted with external environmental changes or human-caused environmental changes that cities without written histories and without archaeologists could not have anticipated.

A second important theme in the book is that human choice can make the difference between prosperity and ruin. Diamond is quick to point out that he is not an "environmental determinist": while the leaders of the Maya and Easter Islanders made disastrous decisions that plunged their societies into collapse, others did better. He describes how the Inuit in the Arctic and Polynesians on Tikopia managed to create ways of life that were indefinitely sustainable, and why the Dominican Republic has had a more peaceful and economically stable history than its neighbor, Haiti.

Diamond argues that our modern global industrial society is creating some of the very same sorts of environmental problems that caused ancient societies to fail, plus four new ones: "human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages and full human utilization of the earth's photosynthetic capacity." Echoing the conclusions of the Limits to Growth study of 1972, Diamond notes that many of these problems are likely to "become globally critical within the next few decades."

There is much to admire in this book. Diamond's essential message - that our very persistence as a civilized society may depend upon well-led efforts to reduce the negative impact of our economic processes upon nature - is one that more people desperately need to hear. The author artfully skewers classic one-liner objections such as, "The environment has to be balanced against the economy," "Technology will solve our problems," and "If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need." Collapse draws the reader into rich and fascinating discussions of specific modern instances in which collapse in some form already has occurred, is occurring, or is likely to occur-Rwanda, Haiti, and Montana-showing in each instance how political and economic events, emerging from underlying environmental crises and constraints, can lead to economic reversal, social disintegration, or even genocide.

Yet while this is a helpful discussion of the subject for readers who have never before contemplated the possibility that modern fossil-fuel-based industrialism may be unsustainable in the starkest meaning of the term, for readers who have been contemplating that fact for some time - and especially for those who have already made some efforts to draw parallels between the exuberance of modern industrial society and the similar qualities of ancient empires in their florescent stage immediately before their demise - Diamond's efforts fall short.

While the book is rigorous in detail, it is haphazard with regard to theory. Diamond's methodological prowess shines, for example, as he investigates the reasons for the failure of the Viking colony in Greenland: he uses the most recent archaeological data to build a careful, persuasive case that the Norse farmers simply failed to adjust their cultural attitudes to take advantage of the most abundant local protein source - fish - and hence starved. In the process, we learn a great deal about how these people lived, and about how archaeologists gather and piece together evidence in order to arrive at conclusions about the human past. Details matter, and Diamond is very good at moving beyond superficial similes ("America is like Rome prior to its fall") to look at particular places with care and nuance.

However, when presented with such a sweeping title and subject, readers need breadth of overview as much as depth of specificity. Why did the author select the examples he did? Why did he not choose to discuss Imperial China or Rome, or the ancient Mesopotamians or Egyptians? Why not, in addition to a thorough discussion of a few emblematic societies, also offer a comprehensive and systematic survey of all previous civilizations? This is not as daunting a prospect as it might seem: there have only been about 24 civilizations in all of human history (if we define civilization as a society with cities, writing, full-time division of labor, and relatively high levels of technological complexity). The wealth of data available would permit a fascinating comparative overview using a range of selected criteria.

Diamond refers on only three occasions (and then briefly) to Joseph Tainter's classic The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988), which is widely considered the standard work on the subject. He rightly criticizes Tainter for underemphasizing the role of environmental factors - especially resource depletion - in previous instances of collapse. However, Diamond does not take the time to explain Tainter's valuable contributions to the discussion. It is difficult for the reader to have the sense of building on a previous theory without an understanding of what the previous theory is. Theory was in fact one of the great strengths of Tainter's book: he surveyed all known complex societies, and systematically assessed dozens of prior serious discussions of collapse (including the ideas of Arnold Toynbee, Elman Service, Pitirim Sorokin, and Alfred Kroeber), so that when he got around to introducing his own hypothesis (which can be summarized as the inevitability of the diminishing of returns on societal investments in complexity) the reader felt a sense of participation in the refinement of our collective understanding of the problem. This doesn't happen to nearly the same degree in Collapse. Why? Perhaps Diamond was trying to avoid sounding academic and wanted to write in such a way that the maximum number of readers would commit themselves to the task of wading through a long book on a dreary subject. But something was sacrificed in the process.

Important contributions to the discussion about collapse have been made since the publication of Tainter's magnum opus; one that comes readily to mind is John Michael Greer's paper "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse," with its distinction between maintenance collapse, in which a society recovers and again achieves imperial status, and depletion collapse, in which disintegration is complete and final. Greer's essay - which he has encountered some difficulty in placing in a peer-reviewed journal (it is currently archived on this site) - contains significant theoretical insights, though it comes from a relatively unknown researcher working with easily available historical materials. One cannot help but wonder why Diamond, with the considerable resources of a major publisher and willing graduate students, could not have done much more to advance the theory of collapse.

A second disappointment that readers already familiar with the subject matter may encounter with Collapse is the perception that, while the author is warning us that modern industrial civilization may be headed the way of the Classic Maya or the Easter Islanders, he seems satisfied with this warning. He offers, in essence, a message of the type we have come to expect: Humanity is undermining its ecological viability, but there are things we can do to turn the tide. Indeed, Diamond predictably devotes the last section of his last chapter to "reasons for hope," leaving the reader with evidence for thinking that collapse will not occur in our own instance after all. This excuses him from asking a question that appears to be tugging at more minds, and with more urgency, every day: What if it's already too late? Yes, if collapse can be averted, we should of course be working toward that end. But suppose for a moment that we have passed the point of no return, and that some form of collapse is now inevitable. What should we be doing in that case?

If we simply regard the question as unthinkable (because its premise is itself unthinkable), then we foreclose a discussion that could be extremely important. In a moment I intend briefly to state three good reasons for thinking that collapse is in fact unavoidable at this point. But even if there is only a moderate likelihood that industrial society is headed toward history's dustbin, shouldn't we be devoting at least some mental effort toward planning for a survivable collapse? Shouldn't we be thinking about what needs to be preserved so that future generations will have the information, skills, and tools that they need in order to carry on?

Here are my three reasons for concluding that Diamond has in fact made an extremely timid case for the likelihood of global industrial collapse; there are certainly others.

1. Diamond does not even hint at the phenomenon of the imminent global oil production peak. Even though he cites Paul Roberts' book The End of Oil and Kenneth Deffeyes' Hubbert's Peak in a note on page 551, he shows no understanding whatever of these authors' work. There is no discussion of the fact that oil production capacity is declining rapidly in nearly two dozen countries, while the world's reliance on oil for its essential energy needs continues to grow with each passing year. This is not a minor oversight. At least four independent studies now forecast that the global oil peak is likely to occur as soon as 2005 and probably before 2010, which means that there will not be enough time to invest in replacement energy sources before the decline begins; nor can we be assured that adequate replacement energy sources exist. In the estimation of a growing chorus of informed observers, the oil peak is likely to be a trigger for global economic crisis and the outbreak of a series of devastating resource wars.

2. At the same time, the global economic system and the world's monetary system are becoming increasingly dysfunctional for other reasons. Currently, the US dollar functions as the global reserve currency, and the dollar (like most other currencies) is loaned into existence at interest. This means that continual economic growth is structurally required in order to stave off a currency crash. Yet infinite growth within a closed system (e.g., the Earth) is impossible. So how long can growth continue? There are strong signs that the American economy, and hence that of the entire world, is headed soon toward a "correction" of unprecedented proportions. US debt (in the forms of consumer debt, government debt, and trade deficits) is at truly frightening levels and the American mortgage and real estate bubbles appear ready to burst at any moment. If one looks deeper, there are still other reasons to conclude that the global economy has nearly reached fundamental and non-negotiable restrictions on expansion. In his book The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), business strategist Mats Larsson makes the point that most of technology and business development in the past has had as its goal the reduction of time and cost in manufacturing. But nothing can be done at less than no time or at less than no cost. He cites the example of the printing and distribution of books and other written media: with these, Gutenberg famously reduced time and cost. Now, the Internet enables the electronic reproduction and distribution of books, films, and music at almost no cost and in almost no time. Similarly, labor cost in China is probably now at close to the absolute theoretical minimum. Larsson's conclusion is that economic growth is perilously close to its ultimate bounds, even when resource constraints are not factored into the calculation.

3. Averting collapse would require changes that must be championed and partly implemented by political leaders: unprecedented levels of national and international cooperation would be needed in order to allocate essential resources in order to avert deadly competition for them as they become scarce, and our economic and monetary systems would have to be reformed despite pressure from the entrenched interests of wealthy elites. Yet the American political regime - the most important in the world, given US military supremacy and economic clout - has evidently become terminally dysfunctional, and is now the province of a group of extremist ideologues who apparently have virtually no interest in international cooperation or economic reform. This is a fact widely recognized outside the US, and by many sober observers within the country. The problem is not merely that politicians are being bought and sold by corporations (this has been going on for decades), but that the entire system has been hijacked by partisans who pride themselves on making decisions solely on the basis of ideology and in supreme disdain for "reality." At the same time, the US electoral system has been eviscerated and commandeered by a single party (using various forms of systematic fraud that have now become endemic), so that a peaceful rectification of the situation by a vote of the people has become virtually impossible. Moreover, the American media have been so cowed and co-opted by the dominant party that most oft he citizenry is blissfully unaware of its plight and is thus extremely unlikely to vigorously oppose the current trends. Diamond shows some limited awareness of this truly horrifying state of affairs, and he realizes that wise political leadership would be essential to the avoidance of collapse. Yet he refuses to draw the obvious conclusion: the most powerful of the world's current leaders are every bit as irrational as the befuddled kings and chiefs who brought the Maya and Easter Islanders to their ruin.

None of these three problems can be solved quickly or easily if at all; each of the first two is by itself a sufficient cause for collapse; the third will effectively preclude any attempts to reverse the slide toward international chaos; and all three will no doubt rebound upon each other synergistically.

Diamond's subtitle, "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," implies that, for modern industrial societies, success is still an option. Yet if "success" implies the ability to maintain current population levels and current per-capita rates of consumption, then we may already have exhausted our choices. We cannot replace dwindling non-renewable resources, we cannot make industrial wastes disappear, we cannot quickly restabilize the global climate, and we cannot revive species that have become extinct.

What, then, are Diamond's "reasons for hope"? He offers only two: first, that our problems are, in principle at least, solvable; and second, that environmental thinking has become more common in recent years. But for hope to be realized, he says, modern societies will have to make good choices in two areas. We will need "courageous, successful long-term planning," which, he says, is indeed being undertaken by some governments and political leaders, at least some of the time. What Diamond doesn't mention is that the single instance of long-term planning that might have made all the difference to the survival of our civilization - a sustained choice by the US to wean itself from fossil fuels, beginning in the 1970s at the time of the first oil shocks - was not followed through; as a result, economic crises and resource wars are now virtually assured. We will also, he says, need to reconsider some of our core values, and he cites a few examples of modern societies that have done this (e.g., over two decades ago China decided to restrict the traditional freedom of individual reproductive choice). However, Diamond may be underestimating the degree to which some of the "values" that we would have to change (such as our mania for continuous economic growth) are not mere preferences or easily reversible government policies, but necessities structurally reinforced by multiple layers of institution, privilege, and power.

Perhaps the message of Collapse would have had more of a cutting-edge quality if the book had appeared in the early 1970s, when mere warnings were appropriate. Collapse might have added to the chorus of voices raised on the first Earth Day, and might have helped drive home the importance of the often-misrepresented Limits to Growth study.

Today, however, we are living in a different era. Collapse has, in effect, already begun, even though we have seen only the first of the trigger events that will eventually rivet public attention on the cascading process of disintegration taking place around us. The question is no longer that of avoiding collapse, but rather of making the best of it.

One of the many virtues of Joseph Tainter's book was that he dissipated some of the pejorative cloud surrounding the word collapse, defining it simply as a reduction in social complexity. This helps us to see that the process can manifest in different ways: it can occur slowly or quickly (usually the process takes decades or even centuries); it can be complete or partial; and it can be controlled or chaotic. Such an understanding leads one to envision the possibility of a managed collapse.

Given Jared Diamond's emphasis on choice, it might have been helpful if he had studied what people chose to do during previous periods of collapse, and how certain actions helped or hindered personal survival and the survival of culture.

In our own instance, efforts to manage the collapse might take several forms. Initial work along these lines might be indistinguishable from actions taken to try to prevent collapse-the sorts of things many people have been doing at least since the 1970s: the active protest of war, the protection of ecosystems and species, the defense of indigenous and traditional cultures, and the adoption of lifestyles of voluntary simplicity.

Then, as fossil-fuel-based support infrastructures began to disintegrate, other strategies might come to the fore: efforts to re-localize economies, to build intentional communities, and to regain forgotten handcraft skills. Like the European monks of the Middle Ages, forward-thinking groups with useful knowledge and abilities could build cultural lifeboats-communities of preservation and service that help surrounding regions cope with change and stress.

It would be foolish to assert that such a program could avert all of the potholes on the road down to a sustainable level of societal complexity; however, if we do not make efforts to manage the process of economic and societal contraction, it is easy to imagine collapse scenarios that would be hellish indeed.

One hesitates to criticize too harshly a book that tries to tell the world a truth that all too many refuse to hear. And yet this isn't the book that it could have been. At this point in time, we could stand a prominent book by an important author that finally announces what so many of us know all too well: collapse has begun.

Such a message need not be fatalistic in tone, because fatalism implies absence of choice. Diamond is right: we always have some control over events, or at least our response to events. The choice we have now is not as to whether our society will collapse, but how.

Ladies and gentleman, the ship is sinking. I suggest that we set aside our immediate plans and consider how best to proceed, given the facts.

* * *

If Diamond focuses on the environmental aspects of collapse, Jane Jacobs - the legendary historian of cites who, in the 1960s, worked heroically to save the neighborhoods of Manhattan from the automotive fixations of urban redeveloper Robert Moses - explores the cultural dimensions of the process in her recent book Dark Age Ahead.

"Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture," writes Jacobs. The most important aspects of culture are continually reinforced through example, and are thus as perishable as flesh itself. Dark ages are terrible times when entire societies experience mass amnesia, forgetting arts, sciences, mathematics, and even fundamental conventions of conviviality. And this is the future that Jacobs sees as likely for us, given the perceived decay of what she declares to be the five pillars of civilized culture

• Community and family,
• Higher education,
• The effective practice of science and science-based technology,
• Taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities, and
• Self-policing by the learned professions.

Jacobs devotes a chapter to each of these pillars, offering unequivocal examples of dissolution - from soaring levels of household debt to Enron accounting fraud. Many of these individual problems are well known; Jacobs shows how they are related to one another as elements of a systemic cultural decline.

The author also cites examples to show that culture can be protected even in times of great challenge, as Japan managed to do in the late 19th century, or as Ireland did despite British colonization. The clear implication is that we could recover and preserve our own cultural integrity in the face of the threats confronting our own society.

Jacobs' writing is wonderfully sane, urbane, and intelligent. Her prose is never dry or pedantic, but glows with the richness of a lifetime's experience ranging from the Great Depression through activist struggles in the turbulent 1960s and '70s and up to the present.

If the book has a flaw, it is that Jacobs does not appear to understand the relationship between culture and energy: in her last chapter, "Dark Age Patterns," she discusses the differences between agrarian and post-agrarian society, yet she never mentions the single element that mostly accounts for the transformation from one to the other: access to cheap fossil fuels.

Alas, the vibrant urban North American and European industrial culture of the early twentieth century rode on a wave of expanding resource availability, and hence expanding savings, expanding technological competence, and expanding manufacturing capacity. For all its virtues and vices (and there were plenty of the latter), much of that culture is gone forever, as surely as is the oil that was burned to build it. We cannot revive or preserve any part of that culture that depends upon our use of still more fossil fuel. Instead, we and our descendants will have to invent new forms of culture appropriate to the available resource base. If these cultural forms are agrarian in nature, so be it.

* * *

A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, by William Engdahl (Pluto Press, 2004), is essential reading for anyone who wonders how oil shaped world events during the twentieth century.

While Daniel Yergin, in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (Touchstone, 1993), focused primarily on the oil industry per se, Engdahl looks more at the geopolitical situation as it responded to new discoveries in the Middle East and elsewhere, and also brings to bear his considerable insight into monetary policy. The result is breathtaking, as the reader learns the background to wars, assassinations, and political upheavals-from the 1912 battle between the US and Britain for Mexico's oil, to the secret intrigues leading up to Operation Desert Storm.

A major theme in the book is the drive of the British banking and financial establishment to control global resources, and the dominating influence of these same interests in American policy decisions during the latter half of the century as the US became the world's dominant industrial and military power.

Along the way we learn the eerie similarities between Great Britain in the years just prior to World War I, after its own manufacturing and savings base had been hollowed out by its efforts toward globalization; and the US today. Then, Germany was a rival industrial power, seeking to build the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway to open access to Middle Eastern oil for continental Europe; now, China is America's competitor, rapidly industrializing and seeking long-term oil contracts in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Africa, and Canada.

We see how the Second World War grew inevitably from the first, as Britain required the payment of unrealistic and ruinous reparations from Germany, opening the way to the ascendancy of Hitler (whom several top British and American financiers covertly supported).

We also discover the basis of the post-war global economic and petroleum regimes, with the US taking up the imperial mantle from Britain, and the Anglophile East-Coast liberal banking establishment calling the shots.

Unfortunately, toward the middle of the book Engdahl reveals himself to be a pro-nuclear cornucopian who sees no peril in a rapidly expanding human population and who assumes that the answer to global problems lies in more industrial growth. This opinion skews his statements on a number of issues, including the 1972 Limits to Growth study, which he badly mischaracterizes (he says in apparent seriousness that the authors merely "added modern computer graphics to the discredited essay of Malthus"). This is not a small failing, and one cannot help but wonder where else the author's ostensible statements of fact may actually constitute mere supposition or prejudice.

Nevertheless, in other respects the author's account of events meshes closely with other sources, and Engdahl fills in blanks believably and with explanatory potency. Even with its flaws, this book helps immeasurably to make sense of recent history. And without historical perspective, it is almost impossible to understand our current global political and economic situation, or to imagine what to do about it.

Richard Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003). He is a journalist, educator, editor, and lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community."

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.

No. 159 - July 2005

by Richard Heinberg

Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply

A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland

Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and always will.

The same is true for every other species: food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed in order to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results; for an entire species, the outcome is a die-off event, perhaps leading even to extinction.

Humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing the amount of energy - and food - they capture from the environment. The harnessing of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the adoption of ards and plows, the deployment of irrigation networks, and the harnessing of traction animals - developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years - all served this end.

The process was gradual and time-consuming. Not only were new tools developed, but, over centuries, small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools - from scythes to horse-collars - enabled human and animal muscle power to be leveraged more effectively.

This entire exercise took place within a framework of natural limits. The yearly input of solar radiation to the planet was always immense relative to human needs (and still is), but it was finite nevertheless, and while humans directly appropriated only a tiny proportion of this abundance the vast majority of that radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence - giving rise to air currents by warming the surface of the planet, and maintaining the lives of countless other kinds of creatures in the oceans and on land.

The amount of available human muscle power was limited by the number of humans, who, of course, had to be fed. Draft animals (bred for their muscle-power) also entailed energy costs, as they likewise needed to eat but also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crops development and animal breeding, it was inevitable that humans would reach a point of diminishing returns in their ability to continue increasing their energy harvest, and therefore the size of their population.

By the nineteenth century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger had long been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But, for Europeans, the migration of surplus populations to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was again in view.

But again crisis was narrowly averted, this time due to fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen introduced annually by all natural sources combined.

Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.

Early steam-driven tractors came into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia from the 1920s through the '50s. In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses - most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans.

Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after WWII, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.

In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.

At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way.

The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.

William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, terms the trade of essential life-support commodities "scope expansion."¹ Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply, as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century-and-a-half ago. If one region can grow food but has no exploitable metal deposits, its carrying capacity is limited by the lack of metals for the production of farm tools. Another region may have metals but insufficient topsoil or rain; there, carrying capacity is limited by the lack of food. If a way can be found to make up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance (as by exporting metal ores or finished tools from region A to help with food production in region B, and then exporting food from B to A), the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this into a crude formula:

CC of A+B > (CC of A) + (CC of B)

From an ecological as well as an economic point of view, this is why people trade. But trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels temporarily but enormously expanded that limit.

The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just a three-fold leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown five-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.

Agriculture at a Crossroads

All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but, if it proves not to be, then a temporary exuberance of the human species will have been purchased by an eventual, unprecedented human die-off. So how long can the present regime be sustained? Let us briefly survey some of the current trends in global food production and how they are related to the increased use of inexpensive fossil fuels.

Arable cropland: For millennia, the total amount of arable cropland gradually increased due to the clearing of forests and brush, and the irrigation of land that would otherwise be too arid for cultivation. That amount reached a maximum within the past two decades and is now decreasing because of the salinization of irrigated soils and the relentless growth of cities, with their buildings, roads, and parking lots. Irrigation has become more widespread because of the availability of cheap energy to operate pumps, while urbanization is largely a result of cheap fuel-fed transportation and the flushing of the peasantry from the countryside as a consequence of their inability to buy or to compete with fuel-fed agricultural machinery. Roads that cover former cropland are built from oil, and the erection of buildings has been facilitated by the mechanization of construction processes and the easy transport of materials.

Topsoil: The world's existing soils were generated over thousands and millions of years at a rate averaging an inch per 500 years. The amount of soil available to farmers is now decreasing at an alarming rate, due mostly to wind and water erosion. In the US Great Plains, roughly half the quantity in place at the beginning of the last century is now gone. In Australia, after two centuries of European land-use, more than 70 percent of land has become seriously degraded.² Erosion is largely a function of tillage, which fractures and loosens soil; thus, as the introduction of fuel-fed tractors has increased the ease of tillage, the rate of soil loss has increased dramatically.

The number of farmers as a percentage of the population: In the US at the turn of the last century, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and farmed. Today less than two percent of Americans farm for a living. This change came primarily because fuel-fed farm machinery replaced labor, which meant that fewer farmers were needed. Hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of families that desperately wanted to farm could not continue to do so because they could not afford the new machines, or could not compete with their neighbors who had them. Another way of saying this is that economies of scale (driven by mechanization) gave an advantage to ever-larger farms. But the loss of farmers also meant a gradual loss of knowledge of how to farm and a loss of rural farming culture. Many farmers today merely follow the directions on bags of fertilizer or pesticide, and live so far from their neighbors that their children have no desire to continue the agricultural way of life.

The genetic diversity of domesticated crop varieties: This is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Farmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. In 2000, Semenis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, eliminated 25 percent of its product line as a cost-cutting measure. This ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is also being driven by the centralization of the seed industry (the largest three field seed companies - DuPont, Monsanto, and Novartis - now account for 20 percent of the global seed trade), which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.

Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record."³ This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.

Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO² emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.

The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.

Now, let us add to this picture the imminent peak in world oil production. This will make machinery more expensive to operate, fertilizers more expensive to produce, and transportation more expensive. While the adoption of fossil fuels created a range of problems for global food production, as we have just seen, the decline in the availability of cheap oil will not immediately solve those problems; in fact, over the short term they will exacerbate them, bringing simmering crises to a boil.

That is because the scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.

In the US, agriculture is directly responsible for well over 10 percent of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for livestock raising, (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. This does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers, or cooking.

Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.

Processed foods make up three-quarters of global food sales by price (though not by quantity). This adds dramatically to energy costs: for example, a one-pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy.

Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.⁴

But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible. Can we continue to support so many people as the availability of cheap oil declines?

Feeding a Growing Multitude

The problems associated with the modern global food system are widely apparent, there is widespread concern over the sustainability of the enterprise, and there is growing debate over the question of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have clearly emerged.

The first advises further intensification of industrial food production, primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in its various forms - including organic, biodynamic, Permaculture, and Biointensive methods.

Critics of the latter contend that traditional, chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John John Emsley of University of Cambridge, from his review of Vaclav Smil's Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food:

If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost, animal manure and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil, it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed 10 people - provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable, it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with "artificial" nitrogen; this can easily support 40 people, and on a varied diet.⁵

This seems unarguable on its face. However, given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, it will be increasingly difficult to continue to supply chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water, with solar or wind power as a source of electricity. But currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up the process will require many years and considerable investment capital.

The bioengineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering of complex life forms on a commercial scale appears to pose unprecedented environmental hazards, as has been amply documented by Dr. Mae Wan-Ho among many others.⁶ And the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.

Those arguing in favor of small-scale, ecological agriculture tend to be optimistic about its ability to support large populations. For example, the 2002 Greenpeace report, "The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South," while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject, nevertheless notes:

In general . . . it is thought that [organic and agroecological farming] can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to "Green Revolution'"farming systems, OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields, although it brings other benefits, such as reducing the need for external inputs.⁷

Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.

Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.⁸ However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.

Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely-accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth's primary biological productivity.⁹ It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.

Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we are already in view of the global oil production peak, the debate over the potential productivity of chemical-gene engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agroecological farming may be relatively pointless. We must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if it does prove to be less productive.

The Example of Cuba

How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.

Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.

As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.¹⁰

The Way Ahead

The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.

Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.

We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.¹¹ If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.

Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.

Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).

We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.

Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.

Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.

It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.

In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.

Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.

All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.

In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.

Notes

1. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980), University of Illinois Press.

2. Flannery, T. F., The Future Eaters (1994), Reed Books.

3. Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (2004), Norton & Norton, p. 4.

4. David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, "Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy" (1994). See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Eating Fossil Fuels," .

5.www.home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/ pdf_reviews/Nature%202001.pdf

6. See, for example, Mae Wan-Ho, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare?: Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (2000), Continuum.

7. www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/ Live/FullReport/4526.pdf

8. See, for example, www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/brocolli.html

9. P. M. Vitousek, et al., "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis," Bioscience 36 (1986)

10. See, for example, Bill McKibben, "What Will You Be Eating when the Revolution Comes?", Harper's, April 2005. See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Drawing Lessons from Experience,"

11. Conversation with Randy Hayes, Sustainability Director of the City of Oakland, June 2005.

Richard Heinberg is the author of Powerdown - Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. He is a journalist, educator, editor, and lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community."

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.