What we Leave Behind

I think we can probably agree right off the bat that many of these changes would be welcome. “Less behavioural control and regimentation” for one. I would welcome “a lower degree of stratification,” “less centralized control . . . less regulation . . . by elites.” And we should also remember that these are changes within the collapsing society, not necessarily within smaller communities. So even though there might be “less flow of information” in the collapsing civilization (for example, fewer television channels) there might be more flow of information in actual human-scale communities (for example, I might talk to my neighbours). Collapse on the large scale can make room for a blossoming on the community scale.

There are many factors likely to drive industrial collapse. Two of the largest are energy decline and rapid climate change. It almost goes without saying that cheap oil undergirds virtually every aspect of industrial society, starting with agriculture. For every calorie of food we eat, something like ten calories of fossil energy are expended, both in farming and food transportation. It is cheap oil that allows global shipping and travel, that permits large-scale manufacturing and construction, that builds and runs the global energy and communications infrastructures.

It’s this change that’s likely to set off a long series of cascading effects. Without cheap oil, essentially everything we buy will get more expensive. This will certainly happen with food, a process which has already begun in part because of competition between food crops and biofuels.²⁹⁶ But it will also happen with other products, many of which (like plastics) are literally made out of oil, and virtually all of which are processed and shipped long distances using fossil energy. Increasing costs mean increasing prices for practically all commodities and consumer items, which will cause a decrease in consumption as people literally can’t afford to buy as much. Because of this, people will shift their limited funds toward more essential items, like food, transport, housing, and utilities. Purchasing of nonessential services and items will fall off, and the people who manufacture or sell them will be out of their jobs.²⁹⁷ Increased unemployment will drive down wages across the board, and the growing numbers of unemployed or poorly paid people will spend even less money.

This will drive a vicious circle of economic contraction. It will be especially evident in places like the housing market. Most Americans have debt, and most Americans who own a home have a mortgage on it. But rampant unemployment would render many unable to scrape together their mortgage payments, and houses would be seized by banks, thus worsening the situation for individuals and families.

In terms of trash production, though, things are looking up. It takes a lot of energy to produce disposable junk. And it requires a lot of disposable income to buy that junk. Industrial collapse means a significant and rapid decrease in the production of waste, both because of a shift toward more reusable items and because of a general economic slowdown. (There’s a lot of talk in some quarters these days about how waste costs money, and therefore capitalism will act to decrease waste. But as long as energy is incredibly cheap, we aren’t going to see that happen.)

A reciprocal change to this is a dramatic increase in the value of waste. A recycled aluminum can requires 95 percent less energy to manufacture than one made from new materials. Recycled paper uses 60 percent less energy. Recycled glass uses 50 percent less. A decrease in overall manufacturing, and an increase in costs of new materials, means that recycled materials will be more economically appealing and make up a greater proportion of the raw materials used by factories.

And remember the rag collectors who were common on this continent barely more than a century ago? Remember the repair workhouses of the Salvation Army? Heck, remember the garbage pickers and cardboard collectors currently common in the majority world? Well, expect them to make a comeback. A new depression, a major economic contraction, means decreases in both employment and wages. That means it will be more economically feasible for relatively labour-intensive activities like repairing broken items that would otherwise be disposed of, and for the manual collection and sorting of virtually all refuse.

A little while ago I wrote that unsustainable societies have the choice to change or collapse, and then said that was blurring the truth. Well, here’s what I meant: societies don’t choose to collapse; they choose to continue doing whatever it was they thought made them successful in the first place. If a society knows it’s in trouble, it sticks to its main problem-solving method, its main indicator of success, whether that’s building stone heads, increasing production, developing new technology, or raising the GDP. A society, or more specifically those in power in a society, never say, “Well, I guess that’s it then, boys; we might as well collapse.” They always insist on doing what they wanted to do all along, even though, more likely than not, that’s what brought them to the brink of collapse in the first place.

Joseph Tainter hypothesized that something a bit like this is the general model for historical collapses. He wrote that complex societies solve their problems by increasing complexity, whether that means trying to develop new technologies, making government bigger, or what have you. Now, initially this has certain benefits. If you and I are making a lot of clay pots, for example, it might make sense for one of us to specialize in forming the pot shapes, and the other on decorating them. This way we could make pots more quickly than we could before. But as complexity increases, the costs of supporting that process start to increase as well. Our pottery operation has expanded, and now we have apprentices, and special rooms for different operations, and plenty of specialized clays and pigments for very fancy pots. And the price of that is incorporated into our very nice, but now quite expensive, pots. Around this point, the costs of complexity start to outstrip the benefits. This means that, as nice as our pottery is, people aren’t sure they want to spend that much on a vase.

So what do we do with our pottery business? We’ve come so far, but we’re in trouble: our customers are discontented! Well, obviously the solution is to make a larger number of more elaborate pots! Hire clay moisture technicians, make larger kilns, bring in scientists to develop new levels of pottery glaze technology! After all, that’s what made this pottery company great. Some nay-saying doom-mongers say we should go back to making simpler, tastefully designed pots since that’s what people “really need.” But we can’t go back to making simpler pots. That’s absurd! We must go forward and continue making ever more expensive pots that are so fancy people will buy them without question! Besides, if we made simpler pots and sold them for less, how could we afford payroll for our large staff of moisture technicians and kiln-tologists?

If our pottery business were a society, this is around the point it would probably begin to collapse. The costs of complexity have far outstripped the benefits, but complexity itself has become entrenched, self-perpetuating, and an end to itself. The same is true with our pottery corporation. At this point, the customers would reasonably abandon us, our company would run out of cash, the staff would leave when they didn’t get their pay-checks, and we would go bankrupt. But we, like some of the more “successful” complex societies, have a few tricks up our sleeves. We’re not going down the tubes yet.

First, we’re going to need some money so we can make payroll this month. We’ll just dip into the pension fund a bit. And we’ll get a loan from the bank and go into a little bit of debt. This is a very popular strategy for complex societies, especially in ecological terms. Whenever a society starts using something faster than it can grow back—cutting down too many trees, or drawing down an aquifer faster than it can recharge—it’s going into ecological debt.

Second, there are other small businesses out there, on the fringe of our vast pottery empire, that are making inexpensive but functional pottery. The nerve! We’ll put them out of business, and make it a monopoly. That way people will have to buy from us if they want pottery. That’s another big difference between a business and a civilization. If you’re dissatisfied with a company you can, in theory, take your business elsewhere. A civilization does its best to make itself the only game in town, removing all other options.

If people don’t like the monopoly, well, don’t they realize how much choice we offer? Heck, we have fancy pink pottery, and fancy red pottery, and even some fancy pink pottery. Next year we’re coming out with some fancy green pottery; we promise. And besides, you don’t really want to use that other pottery, do you? It doesn’t have our patented On-Glaze™ technology, which is far too fancy for you to make yourself. And don’t forget, our Center for Clay Moisture Research has determined that using pottery not made by us can lead to excessive pottery mold, as well as many lonely nights: scientific studies have shown that only our pottery will gain you friends, and, ultimately, help you find your soulmate™. Best of all, we’ve been making pottery for a long time now, and people don’t really remember what pots were like before—all they remember is that pots in the last few years have definitely gotten fancier. We’ll just tell them that pottery before us was nasty, brutish, and short.

Now, whether in our pottery business or in real life, none of this can go on forever. Societies can put off collapse by expanding, by going into ecological debt, by limiting people’s options for escape. But none of that changes the underlying fact that they’re still unsustainable, and that they’re unsustainable on a finite planet. Eventually all of these efforts do fail, but the longer they go on, the worse the collapse is when it does happen because there’s so little left of the environment, and because people have become so dependent on the system.

In historical collapses, people were not as dependent on the system as they are now, and the system did not have such a monopoly. Many complex societies were formed because they offered real benefits to their members, whether in terms of information exchange, or limited specialization and barter. And many of those societies did not become civilizations, which is to say that they didn’t control the food supply and other essentials of their members. Which is to say that they weren’t capable of effectively forcing people to continue participating in that society if it no longer benefited them. That’s a crucial difference between a complex society and a civilization. It’s the difference between a healthy relationship and an abusive one. In a healthy relationship, both partners are getting something out of it, and both are free to leave the relationship if they want. In an abusive relationship, this is not the case.

When historical societies collapsed, their members had real alternative options. There were still healthy communities they could rejoin, communities that had skills like growing their own food, and building shelters—essentially, those healthy communities possessed a full gamut of democratic technics. It was the existence of options that made societal collapse fairly painless for most people. They just had to walk away and return home, to what their people had been doing for thousands of years.

Back to the real-world collapse scenario: economic depression and energy decline. Aside from voluntary recycling of refuse, there’s bound to be an upswing in involuntary recycling as well, especially because of rising prices for metals as easily available ore deposits become mined out. Prices for metals like copper and aluminum have been pushed toward historic highs. The past few years have seen a sharp increase in the theft of standing infrastructure to be sold on the black market for recycling. This has caused some bizarre headlines. In Germany last year, someone dismantled and removed five kilometers of disused railroad track to sell for scrap metal.²⁹⁸ In British Columbia, law enforcement agencies have been trying to stop people from stealing thousands of pounds of aluminum in the diverse forms of goal-posts, aluminum sockets on scoreboards, seating, and pipes.²⁹⁹ The city of Toronto found that aluminum cans were being taken from recycling bins in such large quantities that it asked that “bylaw-enforcement officers be moved to the overnight shift to monitor blue boxes.”³⁰⁰

In the United States, both aluminum and copper are being targeted in the forms of pipes, radiators, air conditioners, electrical wiring and cables, and even aluminum siding from houses. In Alabama, someone stole an eight-mile-long stretch of power line. That kind of scale sounds like “organized crime,” but according to a detective tracking metal thefts, that’s not the case: “There’s no one or two, there’s no six people that are specifically responsible for this. Everybody’s doing it. People know the prices are up.”³⁰¹

Electricity tapping is surprisingly common in the Majority World, especially in slums. Illegal connections to the power grid are common enough in South Africa that utility companies have hotlines they encourage people to call to report “electricity abuse” (and it’s interesting to note that by “electricity abuse” they don’t mean such abuses of electricity as LED video display billboards, retractable stadium roofs, and bug-zappers; but rather the unpaid use of electricity by the desperately poor). One pamphlet on electricity thefts proclaims that “People who continue putting others at risk through these criminal and negligent acts are snakes and must be reported.” Modifications to power lines and substations sometimes cause blackouts, injuries, and death. In South Africa between 2000 and 2003, there were at least 260 deaths caused by electrocution from power line tapping. ³⁰² Dangerous as it may be, the very poor have few choices. “There is no other way,” noted one slum-dweller in India, because poor people have to choose between spending their limited funds on “either food or electricity, and food is a natural choice.”³⁰³ In Delhi, about 42 percent of the electricity is lost to tapping, and as much as half is lost is lost in the rest of the country. Power cuts are already a regular event in Indian cities, and generating capacity would need to increase seven-fold in the next twenty-five years to meet current demands, while many Indian utility companies are on the verge of bankruptcy.³⁰⁴

In some areas in Sri Lanka, the amount of electricity used illegally is actually greater than the legal electrical usage, and “sudden power fluctuations are causing damage to domestic electrical equipment.” Those tapping the power are usually poor, of course, but they are sometimes militant as well. A representative of the Electricity Board in Sri Lanka complained that when Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) tapped electricity “it was difficult to arrest them, as IDP camp members attacked officers of the board whenever they went to check the connections.”³⁰⁵

The Niger Delta offers a different and even more sobering example. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, as well as being the single largest exporter of oil. Much of that oil is extracted from the Niger Delta, where industrialization and frequent spills have degraded living conditions. Years of military rule and the refusal of (mostly Western) oil companies to share oil revenues with the people have led to increasing social unrest in the area. Writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was famously executed—read, murdered—by the Nigerian government in order to silence his opposition to oil interests, Shell in particular.

Oil extraction processes in the Delta are even worse than the oil industry usually is, which is saying a lot. In order to concentrate on extracting crude, most of the natural gas found in the same well as crude oil is simply flared—burned off at the top of smokestacks. The amount burned is equivalent to 40 percent of the natural gas used on the entire African continent. The gas flaring in the Niger Delta is the single largest source of greenhouse gases on Earth.³⁰⁶ The burning also creates toxic gases and soot that affect those living in the Delta. Ironically, Nigeria imports many petroleum products, such as gasoline, as the county has very few functional refineries.

The inhabitants of the Delta, largely indigenous people who subsist on fishing and horticulture in the ecologically rich region, have become understandably angered by the situation. Living next to such ostentatious wealth and waste, which despoils their land while giving them nothing, it’s become common practice for those living in the region to tap oil pipelines passing through their land to gather fuel for cooking or for resale on the black market. This can be a dangerous undertaking. Tragically, many have died when tapped pipelines have caught fire and exploded upon being accidentally ignited by a cigarette or motorcycle engine. The flaming blasts can be enormous, and the (human) death toll equally so. It’s not unheard of for hundreds of people to die in a single explosion—on one occasion in 1998, one blast killed more than a thousand people.³⁰⁷

Those were terrible accidents, but militant indigenous groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) have taken an organized approach to breaking apart the oil infrastructure. MEND has destroyed major oil pipelines, razed oil industry facilities, skirmished with Nigerian soldiers, and kidnapped foreign oil workers. In a 2006 communiqué to foreign oil companies, MEND warned, “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it. . . . Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”³⁰⁸

There’s no reason to think actions like these will wane in the coming years, in South Africa, in the Niger Delta, in the world. As the oil supply dries up, as the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, tapping the grid may be more and more rewarding. And attacks on the grid, whether those attacks are masterminded by freedom fighters, warlords, or foreign nations, will offer greater and greater impact.

Everything we’re talking about here has to do with energy and complexity. Modern day industrial civilization is, in material terms, the largest and most complex society ever to exist. That complexity depends on easily available energy. That energy is required to build factories and machines, and to ship them and their products around the world. With enough cheap energy, you only need one factory in the world to build a given product. And you can ship that product everywhere. Because that factory is the only one in the world, and because making that one product is the only thing it has to focus on, it’s going to be pretty efficient at making that product (regardless of social and ecological costs). And you can put that factory wherever it’s going to be cheapest for it to make that one product. And because, in economic terms, that product is so cheap per unit, you can afford to make many different items in similar factories. That’s where complexity and specialization pay off.

Of course, the natural world doesn’t take this to such an extreme. Imagine if the world had, for example, only a single gigantic tree, that specialized in doing all of the “tree” things really well. That sounds kind of stupid, doesn’t it? Partly because it would look so silly, and partly because there isn’t only one “tree” thing, and partly because relationships in the natural world can’t be FedExed or packed into container ships. Trees do many things, have many relationships, some of them awe-inspiringly grand, some invisibly subtle. Complexity in civilization is usually built at the expense of much greater complexity, subtlety, and sophistication in the real world.

As energy decline begins, it will be impossible to maintain that global level of industrial complexity. And the way this plays out will vary greatly from place to place. We’ve seen some contrasting real-world examples of this in Cuba, North Korea, and the USSR. Communities that are less entangled in the global industrial system, that maintain skills for community sufficiency, and that have a healthy landbase, will fare better. Populations that are thoroughly entangled in that system, that have lost their community sufficiency skills—their democratic technics—and that have permitted or been unable to stop the destruction of their landbases will not do as well. Societies in this position—societies that have accepted Mumford’s “magnificent bribe”—will find themselves squabbling with other industrial societies over dwindling supplies of cheap oil.

Large industrial societies require vast quantities of cheap oil to persist. Those in power don’t have misapprehensions about this fact. An industrial society without large amounts of energy will collapse. So as the total supply dwindles, industrial countries have to make choices: maximize industrial potential, and conquer or colonize other regions to ensure a supply of raw resources; or minimize industrial activities, and risk being conquered or colonized by others seeking raw resources. It’s a poor choice, either way. Who wants to be conquered? Who wants to be a colony? And even if you’re one of the conquerors, dwindling supplies mean eventually you’ll be fighting other conquerors just to keep your piece of the pie.

In either case, war has the potential to drastically accelerate collapse. Yes, war has brought countries out of economic tailspins before. The start of the Second World War helped end the Great Depression in the United States. But we aren’t talking just about economics here—economics and finances are largely imaginary, since money itself is just something we all agree to pretend is real. We’re talking about actual, material, real-world limitations that (to the disappointment of magical thinkers) can’t be solved by simply pretending something else.

War machines tend to be very effective at concentrating resources and externalizing consequences, because of their proficiency in using physical and psychological violence to coerce and dominate others. In theory, shouldn’t a little war stave off collapse by simply being such an effective megamachine? I mean, if the US is running out of oil, invading a few oil-rich countries should solve the problem for now, right?

But of course we all know that the United States would never invade a country to take its resources. The United States only invades countries which harbor terrorists and that have weapons of mass destruction. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking a lot about relations between the United States and Canada. If communities in Canada stop transnational corporations from stealing water and turning much of Alberta and Saskatoon into moonscapes for oil—oh, I’m sorry, I guess the polite phrasing would be “developing water resources and extracting necessary oil from tar sands”—how long do you think it would take the US to invade Canada? Of course the United States wouldn’t invade to take those resources, but would only invade to bring Freedom and Democracy™ to that country. So in the interests of the greater public good, we are right here and right now going to start the process of demonizing Canada. Canada clearly harbors terrorists: I’ve long had suspicions about the Toronto Maple Leaf/al-Qaeda connection, and even more damning, have you ever noticed that William Shatner, a known Canadian, has never been seen in the same room as Osama bin Laden, a known terrorist? Further, William Shatner is an actor, and actors are able to assume accents, and to modify their appearance. That’s what they do. So how do we really know that William Shatner and Osama bin Laden are not the same person? Think about it. And of course if Mike Harris (the former Premier of Ontario who spent most of the 1990s slashing health care and social programs to fund corporate tax cuts) doesn’t qualify as a WMD, I’m not sure what would. The United States must no longer ignore these obvious connections, and must act quickly or risk invasion by the power-mad Canadians.

But even invading Canada would not allow the megamachine to continue much longer. War can only perpetuate (and perpetrate) a megamachine for so long. The first problem is that since total resources available are finite, more effective megamachines make the problem worse by using up that finite supply of resources faster. Delaying collapse requires consuming less, the opposite of what is happening now.

The second problem is that war machines have a lot of overhead expenses. The more resources are consumed by military in the act of acquiring those resources in the first place, the fewer resources remain for other uses. If a country uses a million barrels a day, and they need to spend two thirds of that to supply their army’s overseas oil wars, they aren’t going to have much left over. Superficially, this may seem to prolong collapse, but for everyday people it’s going to accelerate it by drastically reducing the amount of oil available for civilian applications like growing food, heating and lighting buildings, and moving things and people around. (Of course, if a society is spending most of its resources on the military, we can have a discussion about the degree to which any aspect of that society is civilian. Oh, and you did know that the US already spends most of its discretionary funding on the military, right?) This is also why “war” doesn’t just mean battles and saber-rattling. War also includes the societal changes required to facilitate on ongoing conflict: militarism, increasing social controls to criminalize dissent, a general trend toward martial law and fascism, massive propaganda campaigns to support all of these, and of course the physical infrastructure necessary to support the military-industrial complex.

The third problem is that even though individual war machines may be good at concentrating resources, they each have the ultimate aim of destroying the other war machines, and capturing or destroying their materiel. But they have a goal beyond that, which is the destruction of “enemy” infrastructures. Destroying “enemy” infrastructures is much more effective than focusing on troops and weapons alone, and for industrial countries with bombers and cruise missiles it’s comparatively easy. Factories, pipelines, bridges, and the like are crucial bottlenecks which have long been recognized by the military as effective targets. In a sense, warfare is about collapse—about inducing collapse in the enemy’s systems, rather than simply trying to destroy troops and armament.

None of this is new. George Washington was known to Indians as “Town Destroyer” because that’s what he did. And of course he didn’t invent that strategy for subduing an enemy. We can go back to the Roman defeat of Carthage, and the salting of Carthaginian fields. And we can go further back then that, to the first cities, which had walls not around the outside of the city to protect from supposed marauders, but around the granaries so that those in power could control food supplies. Those in power have always known that controlling food supplies (and by extension infrastructure) is crucial to your enslavement of the people thus made dependent.

Inducing collapse is also a goal of guerilla or “asymmetric” warfare, conflict between a complex and centralized military megamachine and smaller, decentralized forces. Asymmetric warfare is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s becoming very common around the world, especially in high-profile wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, asymmetric warfare can be highly effective in terms of damage-per-fighter, since successful guerillas can inflict significant damages to their enemy while being less vulnerable to attack. Asymmetric warfare can target the infrastructure required by a large, complex military, even though it requires very little of that infrastructure itself. And asymmetric warfare is likely to become more and more popular in the scenario we’re talking about.

Here’s what I mean: Imagine that two large, oil-dependent, militarized countries come into conflict over a dwindling supply of oil from a shared supply. There just isn’t enough left in the oil fields for both of them. Presume, now, that those in control of those countries aren’t completely stupid. They have information about peak oil. They have information about resource depletion, about climate collapse, and about the (in)feasibility of renewable energy supplies. Whether they get into hot war or a cold war, both of them know that they want control of those oil fields. They know that the oil age won’t last forever, and whoever can keep their industrial system intact the longest will be able to dominate the other, gain territory, exploit distant resources, and build electric turbines or other infrastructure that will allow them to extend their reign. If they have a military stalemate they both lose, because they spend their energy on armament, and both collapse sooner. However, if one country takes a decisive military victory, the other will collapse, and the now dominant country can delay collapse.

That’s where asymmetric warfare comes into the picture. Guerillas require comparatively few resources, and can make very effective use of the materiel to which they do have access. They can continue to operate even when large-scale infrastructure is inaccessible, inoperative, or destroyed. They can work independently, and with minimal communications or centralized control. And of course, asymmetric or guerilla warfare in the past has focused on ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, and the destruction of unguarded infrastructure. By forcing larger military forces to spend limited resources to guard supply lines and infrastructure, and by targeting those lines and infrastructure when they’re unguarded, guerillas can defeat much larger forces at a fraction of the cost. This is especially true when they work with a supportive populace.

Although some previous historians had argued that the decline and fall of Rome was caused by some moral or political change, Toynbee did not agree. In his analysis, the problems had been there all along, and the empire was marching toward its own demise from the very beginning. The problem, according to Toynbee, was that the Roman Empire (like all empires, I would add) was not based on sustainable economics. Instead, he characterized the Roman system as Raubwirtschaft, German for a “plunder economy” or “robber economy,” a word which deserves more use in our everyday discussion of modern economics. Instead of actually producing things, Rome was externally based on continuing conquest and systematic plunder of colonies and subjugated territories, and internally based on the extensive use of slave labor. This of course recalls anthropologist Stanley Diamond’s famous opening to his book In Search of the Primitive, “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”

Writing decades after Toynbee, Joseph Tainter came to conclusions that share similarities with Toynbee’s. In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter observes that the Roman Empire “was paid for largely by the monetary subsidy of successive conquests. Captive peoples financed further subjugations, until the Empire grew to the point where further expansion was exceedingly costly and decreasingly profitable.”³¹⁰ Eventually the Empire had successfully conquered most of its known world, and its series of expansionist wars came to an end in a period remembered as Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. Superficially, Pax Romana was for some an era of relative prosperity, commerce, and peace (since the Empire had essentially expanded as much as it could). Underneath, though, the Empire was in trouble. Since the Empire was funded by continuing plunder, the fact that it could no longer expand meant that its Pax Romana was not a genuine peace, but simply a plateau, like the moment a ball tossed in the air seems to pause at the apex of its trajectory before it plummets back to earth. Also, even though the interior provinces were comparatively tranquil, discontent and rebellions in recently occupied regions on the frontier still made plenty of work for soldiers of the Empire.

Tainter writes that the as the Empire expanded, it required more and more money and resources to maintain its extensive infrastructure and armed forces. Without expansion, the Empire had to increase the exploitation of those already conquered in order to maintain itself. It increased taxation, forced peasant children into slavery, and devalued its own currency in order to artificial inflate the budget. As Tainter writes, the effect of this was to repeatedly pass on current expenses to future generations—again, stop me if you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu.

Eventually, of course, the Empire’s strategy of displacing costs and consequences caught up with it. Those living in the Empire became apathetic or disaffected: when they had directly or indirectly reaped the benefits of external conquests and exploitation, the Empire was able to buy their loyalty, but things changed when they were the ones being (openly) exploited. As treasuries emptied, Rome could no longer maintain its military, the outlying territories crumbled, and the “barbarians” moved in. The people were no longer sympathetic towards Rome, and many rose up and joined the invaders. Eventually they succeeded, Rome was sacked, and the Empire was split apart into declining remnants. Some historians mourn the fall of Rome as a descent into “The Dark Ages,” but for the vast majority of those who weren’t part of the elite, the removal of the Empire meant a notable improvement in their daily lives. Despite the mythology of toil developed about the so-called Dark Ages following the Roman collapse, many historians believe that medieval peasants actually worked fewer hours than Americans do today, in part because they didn’t have to support a parasitic ruler class.³¹¹

The collapse of the Roman Empire also underscores the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare. Although the Visigoths and Vandals who sacked Rome weren’t organized along modern guerilla lines, those Germanic groups shared many of the same advantages. They were smaller groups with support from the citizenry, they had short supply lines, they made use of local resources, and many of their military actions served to disrupt and destabilize Rome rather than to engage in an occupation. Though the smaller Germanic kingdoms that succeeded the Western Roman Empire were not ideal societies, they proved more robust and resistant to invasion than that monolithic empire had been.

When I started to write about collapse, I thought it would be the easiest section in the entire book to write. My first book, Peak Oil Survival: Preparing for Life After Gridcrash, was about collapse. My website InThe-Wake. org is about collapse. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words on the subject in various venues. So I thought that a book chapter on the subject would be a cinch: there’s so much to talk about. I could examine historical examples of collapse, starting with the earliest civilizations. I could discuss underlying mechanisms like the concentration of power, resource depletion, and the destruction of agricultural lands that have been common in collapse across millennia. I could bring it up to the modern day, and compare and contrast oil shocks in Cuba and North Korea and examine the dissolution of the USSR. I could outline current trends toward collapse, from Peak Oil to Peak Soil, and catalog the ways that technological and industrial responses to those crises are fundamentally inadequate. I could even talk about how responses to crises like oil depletion—the promotion of biofuels, for example—are making the original crises far, far worse than they were.

When I first started taking issues like peak oil seriously, I began to scour newspapers for clues about how it might be taking effect. When news websites on energy decline and ecological collapse started popping up, I read those, too, often checking several times a day. Part of it was curiosity, and part of it was me looking for cracks in the dominant culture’s façade of invulnerability, which would mean cause for hope (or at least, a decreased level of pessimism). Somewhere between the time I wrote Peak Oil Survival and the time it was published, Hurricane Katrina blew through and obliterated most of New Orleans. The pictures and video in the news looked like a civilization that had already collapsed. I followed the news and analysis, but about eight months later, I stopped reading those news sites. It wasn’t that the information was frightening or depressing (at least, not any more than before), but that there was actually very little that really seemed new or unexpected anymore, and going to such effort to follow the subject seemed, well, maladaptive. It reminds me of a scene in Neal Stephenson’s classic sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which the protagonist, practically dripping with high-tech electronics, sensors, and Heads Up Display info, finds himself the target of some angry and well-armed antagonists: “He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern.”³¹²

What stalled my progress here wasn’t a lack of data or analysis, it was the dearth of action. If you want to know what happens when authoritarian societies run low on oil, look at North Korea. If you want to know the after-math of imperial resource exploitation on a massive scale, look at most of Sub-Saharan Africa. There’s not a lot we can discuss about collapse that hasn’t already happened, or at least begun, somewhere in the real world. That’s not to say you shouldn’t learn about why civilizations collapse, or how, or what is happening now. But eventually a purely analytical approach reaches a point of diminishing returns. It’s long past time to stand around reading statistics about our own demise, and about the demise of the planet. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from everything I’ve read or written about collapse, it’s this: we have a choice, a real choice.

When people are confronted with the likelihood of collapse, I’ve seen their reactions fall into three broad categories. Most people deny that collapse is even possible: having been born after the Second World War, most living Westerners can only remember the constant growth of industry, and other possibilities are almost literally unimaginable. A rather smaller number of people recognize that collapse is likely, but disclaim any responsibility for action: boggled by the scale of the issue they either insist that government or industry will address the problem, or take the “if we’re going to die we might as well party” route. And a much smaller group responds with the resolve, even optimism, that can lead to action.

There’s a quotation that’s been sticking with me for a long time. It’s something that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote while he was imprisoned by the Nazis and awaiting execution for his role in the resistance: “We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For you, thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action.”