Chapter One: The End of the Industrial Age
1. My summary of Hubbert’s work is primarily based on –Deffeyes 2003, Duncan 1993, and Heinberg 2003.
2. Rather 1979 summarizes these views.
3. See the summary of oil production in Deffeyes 2003 and Williams and Alhajji 2003.
4. See, for example, the discussion in deMoll 1977.
5. For example, see the discussion in Ramage 1997, pp. 289–90.
6. Heinberg 2003, pp. 115–6.
7. For example, Heinberg 2004, pp. 62–75.
8. Hirsch et al. 2005.
9. See, for example, Neff 2007.
10. For the National Academy of Sciences study, see Brierley et al. 2007.
11. Ramage, 1997, pp. 12–13 and 68.
12. Nature’s successful fusion reactor is, of course, the sun, which produces the vast majority of its heat and light by nuclear fusion.
13. Data for this calculation are from National Agricultural Statistics Service 2003, National Corn Growers Association 2007, and Shapouri et al. 1995.
14. Ramage 1997, p. 69.
15. For the optimist’s case, see Heinberg 2003, pp. 142–46. For the pessimists, see Odum 1996.
16. Harrington 1970, p. 6.
17. See Webster 2002 for a good summary of the Maya collapse.
18. Data on Maya diets is from Reed 1998.
19. Hanson 1995.
20. Reed 1998.
21. See the case studies in Tainter 1988.
22. The Olduvai theory was originally published in Duncan 1993.
23. Orlov 2008 for a good description of the Soviet collapse and its aftermath.
24. According to the 2005 UN Human Development Report, for example, rates of child mortality in the United States in that year were on a level with those in Malaysia. See Watkins 2005.
Chapter Two: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
1. This does not necessarily mean, as some alternative theorists claim today, that the ancient Egyptians had some equivalent of modern technology; precisely no evidence supports that claim, and it’s far more likely that the Egyptians worked out some clever way to use their own Bronze Age technology for the purpose. The fact remains that for the last three thousand years nobody has known what that clever way was.
2. One of these devices was recovered from the remains of an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901. See Freeth et al. 2006 for a history and reconstruction of the device.
3. See Drachmann 1963 for information on Hero’s steam turbine.
4. The term “immanentizing the eschaton” comes from Voegelin 1952.
5. See, for example, Greer 2006.
6. This is discussed in Jacobs 1988.
7. Lamy 1998.
8. See Beyer 1992 and Stone 1993 for the role of apocalyptic myth in contemporary culture.
9. Toynbee 1956, p. 4.
10. Danaher 1994 and Stiglitz 2002 document the consistently disastrous results of World Bank and IMF “structural adjustment.”
11. Catton 1980, pp. 154–55.
12. Most famous for its involvement with trance channeling and its claim that “you create your own reality,” the New Age movement is extremely diverse, and my comments on its history here are in some ways oversimplified. See Drury 2004, –Hanegraaf 1996, and Kyle 1995 for the history of the movement.
13. Festinger et al. 1956.
14. Byrne 2006.
15. Icke’s many books present the same ideas in varied forms; Icke 2001 is representative. See also Michael Barkun’s discussion of Icke in Barkun 2003.
16. See von Franz 1964 for the concept of “projecting the shadow.”
17. Lasch 1991.
Chapter Three: Briefing for the Descent
1. Spengler 1926–29 and Toynbee 1934–55 are the works in question.
2. This is discussed in Toynbee, op. cit., vol. 4 pp. 245–584.
3. Webster 2002.
4. Elvin 1993.
5. This was originally published on the Internet and is included as an appendix to this book.
6. See, for example, Abelson 1999 and Roy et al. 2006 for emerging shortages of phosphate for fertilizer; and Postel 1999, Roy et al. 2006, and Simon 1998 for the worldwide shortage of fresh water.
7. See Darley 2004 for the imminent crisis in North American natural gas supplies.
8. This is a point usefully made by social critic James Howard Kunstler in several books, particularly The Geography of Nowhere (1994).
9. Compare, for example, Barkun 2003 and Braithwaite 2000 with MacGregor and Charles 1999 and Van Boven and –Gajilan 1998.
10. Galbraith 1954, while it focuses on a single example, remains one of the best studies of the psychology of speculative bubbles and crashes. See also Kindleberger 1978.
11. In his book Friendly Fascism (1980).
12. Gross 2004.
13. Garrett 1994 is one of the few books on this problem aimed at the general reader, and it provides the background to this section. See also Lappé 1986.
14. See Lappé 1986.
15. See Epstein 1999, McMichael et al. 1996, and Monastersky 1996.
16. The population of the Russian Federation, 149 million in 1990, is expected to decrease to 111 million by 2050. See Becker and Bloom 1998 and Chawla et al. 2007.
17. Toynbee, op. cit., vol. 5 pp. 35–336.
18. Hearne 1976.
Chapter Four: Facing the Deindustrial Age
1. Meadows et al. 1992.
2. Lefebvre 1947, esp. pp. 7–34.
3. Mills 1958, pp. 10–14.
4. See Costanza 1987 and Cross and Guyer 1980 for the theory of social traps.
5. Barkun 2003 and Lamy 1998 cover the history of the survivalist movement.
6. See McBay 2006 for one example of peak oil survivalism.
7. The 11 volumes of Coin Hoards from Roman Britain, published by the British Museum, should be required reading for anyone who thinks hoarding precious metal coinage is a useful response to social crisis. See British Museum 1982–.
8. Compare Hanayama 1960, Kohn 2003, and Zarnecki 1972.
9. See Manuel and Manuel 1979 for a history of American communal Utopias.
10. Miller 1999 presents a capable study of the commune movement of the 1960s.
11. In 2006, for example, US petroleum production still exceeded 5 million barrels of crude oil a day, plus the equivalent of nearly 4 million barrels a day from natural gas liquids and other unconventional sources. See United States Department of Energy 2007.
12. See Hynes and Lindner 2006 for the recovery of the draft horse industry in recent years.
13. The Homestead Act, originally passed in 1862, permitted any citizen (or immigrant intending to become a citizen) of the United States to claim up to 160 acres of public land, and to receive full legal title to the land after residing there and cultivating the land for three years.
14. See Hanley 1991 for standards of living in Tokugawa Japan.
15. Ramage 1994, p. 11.
16. See especially Leckie et al. 1975 and Olkowski et al. 1979.
17. Coppicing is a traditional craft that produces sustainable wood harvests from tree species that regrow from the stump. Intensively practiced in Europe from Neolithic times until the beginning of the fossil fuel age, it can readily be done with many species found in North America.
18. The paradox is discussed at length in Jevons 1866, chap. 7.
19. In 2001, for example, the toll from iatrogenic (physician-caused) injuries and illnesses, nosocomial (hospital- and clinic-acquired) infections, adverse drug reactions, and other medical causes was 783,736 deaths, compared to 699,697 deaths from heart disease and 553,251 deaths from cancer. See Dean 2005.
20. See Putnam 2000 for the role of voluntary institutions in American community life.
21. See, for example, Carnes 1989.
22. de Tocqueville 1899, vol. 1, chapter 12.
23. Stevens 1907 provides a good survey of American fraternal orders at their peak.
Chapter Five: Tools for the Transition
1. See, for example, Godesky, Jason, “It will be impossible to rebuild civilization,” at anthropik.com/thirty.
2. Szczelkun 1974, among many other sources from the 1970s, gives plans for an alternator-based windpower unit. According to Leckie et al. 1975, pp. 50–52, alternators are superior to most other kinds of generators for home windpower for a variety of technical reasons.
3. See Marks 1973 for plans for scrap-made hydropower installations.
4. Butti and Perlin 1980, pp. 60–111, covers the history of solar heat engines in detail.
5. See Leckie et al. 1975 and Olkowski et al. 1979.
6. Mumford 1934.
7. See Odum 1996.
8. Clarke’s Third Law was originally published in Clarke 1973.
9. For information on slide rules and dealers that offer them, see the website of the Oughtred Society (oughtred.org), a nonprofit group of slide rule historians and collectors.
10. The history and use of the haybox is summarized in –Kirschner 1981.
11. Mumford, op. cit.
12. See Howard 1973 and King 1973 for the origins of contemporary organic farming, Jeavons 1979 for what has become its standard textbook, and Duhon 1985 for documentation of the claims made in this section.
13. This is documented in Duhon 1985.
14. See Economic Research Service, n.d.
15. See Agricultural Marketing Service 2006.
16. Lovelock 1998.
17. See Henderson 2007 for the influence of Isidore’s Etymologiae.
18. The role of Irish monasteries in the preservation of classical culture is discussed in Cahill 1995.
19. See Putnam 2000 for a discussion of this process.
Chapter Six: The Spiritual Dimension
1. From the introduction to his Collected Stories 1947.
2. Herbert 1965, p. 11; the following quote appears on p. 12.
3. For the art of memory, see Carruthers and Ziolkowski 2002 and Yates 1966.
4. Yates, op. cit., p. 120.
5. Butler 1975, p. 12.
6. See Couliano 1987 for a detailed development of this point.
7. See Sagan 1980 for a presentation of this myth.
8. Catton 1980 presents the classic arguments for this analysis.
9. See Beyer 1992 and Kaplan 1997 for the deeply ambivalent relationship of fundamentalism to modern secular ideologies.
10. See Fields 1985 and Goldstein 2002 for histories of the emergence of American Buddhism.
11. Toynbee 1954, vol. 7, pp. 381–524.
12. See Greer 2006 for the history and traditions of modern Druidry.
Afterword
1. Lukacz 1968.