CHAPTER 10 Peak Everything Revisited

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

—CARL SAGAN

The world is leaderless as we face the greatest danger that humans have ever faced.

—ALLAN SAVORY

We all find ourselves thrown into a process of profound transition (and it is a process). We may not be exactly clear about what we’re transitioning to, but we’re increasingly aware of what we’re in the process of transitioning from: an unsustainable way of living on this planet, an unsustainable population level, an unsustainable impact on the biosphere, an unsustainable economic system, and, among other things, an unsustainable exploitation of fossil fuels and a host of other nonrenewable “resources.” What is unsustainable, we are learning, will not continue for long.

Clearly, we are entering into a period of overwhelming change, an era of unintended consequences. The coming changes will alter not only how we live but even how we conceive of ourselves, how we think about the world, and how we see the future. And not only will we have to cope with severe disruption to our conception of ourselves and the world, but we will also need to forge a new vision of the world that we can live by. Where will that vision come from?

All our communities are in transition—and so are all cultures, all nations, and all institutions. We are in a transition as a species, even as a planet in a larger universe. Of course, the outcome of this great transition is uncertain, unpredictable. But this is what we’re preparing for.

We live at a time when the underlying structures of the industrial growth society are beginning to unravel before our eyes, at a time when there is a growing feeling that human civilization is sliding into decline, at a time when ecosystems and species are being ravaged by the early stages of climate change, and at a time when we are learning that human population has likely been, in ecosystem terms, in dangerous “overshoot” for centuries.

We live at a time when we are beginning to wake up to all this and beginning to feel deeply what it all means. And in this uncertain time, evolutionary catalysts are being mysteriously called to an extraordinary level of service in response to humanity’s predicament. We bear with us the seeds of an emergent future, a new story that will carry the essence of what it means to be human far beyond this threshold.

One of the requirements for being an evolutionary catalyst is being able to face reality head-on, without fear or preference. “Being with” uncomfortable realities is a vital skill. This part of the work may not be pleasant, but it is necessary.

A caution—what we’re exploring here could be taken merely as information to be considered. But if we take it that way, we’ll miss much of what’s available. My suggestion is to just take all this in and to let it affect you deeply. Set aside for now your opinions, your beliefs, your defenses, your objections—even your agreement. Just take it all in; see where it takes you. If you will, just trust the process. This is a journey, and it’s going somewhere.

OUR PREDICAMENT

Our collective predicament on this planet is far more dire and urgent than we allow ourselves to recognize. We face multiple converging crises of global scale that together actually threaten the survival of life on this planet. A few years ago Richard Heinberg began calling it all Peak Everything. Since 2005, James Howard Kunstler has called it the long emergency. John Michael Greer prefers the long descent. Environmental writer Ellen LaConte calls it critical mass.

Here’s the brief summary of Peak Everything, just going straight to the bottom line.

Peak Energy

We can expect sharp fluctuations in fossil fuel prices and a decline in fuel availability. This will plunge our economy into chaos, for it is built on false (and unsustainable) premises. We’ve burned up about half of the world’s supply of fossil fuels. From now on, every ounce will be harder and more expensive to get out of the ground. Ultimately (within years or a couple decades), demand will outstrip supply—in spite of the development of tar sands, opening up Alaska, and offshore production. Renewable energy sources will not be available fast enough to maintain our current way of life. There will be a wrenching energy transition that will change how we live, where we live, and even who lives. We cannot prepare our communities with new technology alone or with incremental decreases in energy consumption. We need to live very differently—and we have to hurry.

Peak Climate Stability

First we called it global warming, then climate change, then climate destabilization. And then, as David Orr calls it, climate collapse.55 The collapse of our climate is going to change everything—and quickly. The scientific consensus is that human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions are already having a devastating impact on the ecosphere, and this will get much worse in the future. It is clear that our governments are simply not going to be able to rise to the occasion in time to mitigate the impacts.

Peak Economic Growth

Economic recession will likely soon accelerate to inevitable collapse. There will be no long-term economic recovery. The underpinnings of the global economy are fundamentally unsustainable, and they are beginning to unravel. It is not possible for economic growth to continue at such scale without destroying life on our planet. The economists and politicians who are predicting recovery are the same ones who were recently predicting that there was virtually zero chance that we could slip into an economic recession—and we now understand that they were saying this at a time when we were already at least a year into recession. In the future, we will most likely experience roller-coaster periods of global recession followed by weak and partial recoveries; this will ultimately give way to grinding, long-term global depression. In the process, many of the institutions on which we have come to rely will surely fail, some of them slowly, some of them suddenly and spectacularly. The next several decades will be chaotic, and the chaos will prevail long after most of us have left this planet.

Peak Industrial Agriculture

On a global basis, agriculture is the largest threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function of any single human activity.

—WES JACKSON

We need to stop pretending human agriculture is a given—and especially to stop pretending that we will be able to feed ourselves using the same fragile, annuals-based, fossil-energy-dependent agriculture we now employ. Because we certainly won’t. And heck, we might not be able to employ any agriculture at all—at least not as it’s now recognized.

—DAN ALLEN, “WHEN AGRICULTURE STOPS WORKING”

The way we’re feeding ourselves is devastating the environment. It’s also destroying our soils, undermining our health, and eroding local economies. And this food system is beginning to unravel. It will never be able to feed the world.

Peak Soil

Allan Savory reports that the world is losing soil at the rate of ten billion tons per year. Here in the United States, arable land has already reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution—especially pesticides—have turned most American farmland into dead soils.

Peak Water

Worldwide demand for fresh water is expected to exceed supply by 50 percent as soon as 2025. If the droughts continue, that will happen long before 2025, because agriculture is the biggest user of water. The California drought is a useful example. Recently an observer wrote that perhaps it’s time to stop thinking of it as a drought, but as peak water. In other words, the water situation in California now is likely to be as good as it will ever be. That’s true in many other areas as well.

Peak Health

Peak Population

Perhaps the least discussed aspect of our predicament is that humanity has been in overshoot for some time, perhaps since the time of the American Civil War. Given the earth’s resources, a sustainable population level may be no more than one billion people. If we are to sustain a kind of human society we could call civilized, two things will be required: a much smaller human population and a means of food production that is not dependent on fossil fuels and that does not destroy our soils. We are accumulating a deep deficit to support our population (all in the form of externalized costs). The debt is quickly coming due. Population collapse is inevitable. We could call it population decline, but it is highly unlikely that it will decline quickly enough to avoid collapse. We are heading toward a wall. It is highly likely that food (or the lack of it) will be profoundly involved in this process.

Peak Food

We’re facing a looming global food crisis. Michael Klare has said, “At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects.… Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished, desperate people.”57

Peak Species

And just for perspective, we’re all waking up at the very moment when we’re realizing that we’re also in the midst of a mass extinction of species on our planet, the most dramatic geological event in the last sixty-six million years, a mass extinction that has been caused by the way humans have been living on this earth. We’re adding a total of two hundred thousand new people each day (births minus deaths), and at the same time, up to two hundred species are going extinct, day after day. But we’re not just causing this mass extinction, we are also rapidly eliminating the very conditions for the renewal of life.

Peak Everything is no longer in the future; it is already upon us. It is our predicament. What it all means is that in each of these arenas, going forward, we can expect only decline—and in some cases, collapse.

These are not separate crises; they are deeply interrelated. For instance, our global economy is based on cheap fossil fuels, and burning fossil fuels is dramatically altering our climate and causing mass extinction. Therefore, economic growth cannot and will not continue. The way of life that we have come to consider normal cannot and will not continue. This is really what we evolutionary catalysts are preparing ourselves and our communities for.

THE FULL EXTENT

I think it’s important to communicate as emphatically as possible—even though people generally don’t like it—that the situation is actually far more serious and far more urgent than almost anyone realizes. When, year after year, we see reality exceeding our scientists’ worst-case scenarios, we can be sure that something unprecedented and radically unpredictable is unfolding.

It’s safe to say now that the future—say, just fifteen to twenty years out—will be so different from the world we live in today that it is simply impossible for us to imagine it. While I don’t sense that we’ll see the extinction of the human species in that time, it will probably be apparent that we’re on the kind of trajectory that James Lovelock speaks of—where we’ll wind up with maybe only a few hundred million people on the planet before the end of the century—perhaps long before the end of the century.58 Some of us here may live to see this unfold. And our children? Well, we certainly need to consider that carefully.

I think we’ll see the unprecedented hardship that Bucky Fuller spoke of. Many are experiencing it now, of course, but it will spread like a plague. Frankly, it will be a horrible adjustment. We’re heading toward an evolutionary bottleneck, and it’s likely that, at best, only a few of us will squeak through. The devastation will be profound, though perhaps not quite total.

We’re beginning to understand that it’s simply too late to avoid this. We need to recognize—and help others recognize—that we’re not going to “solve” climate change and related disasters. Instead, at least some of us will learn to adapt to a radically changed environment as our population is being reduced dramatically. Perhaps we’ll even have to live underground.

ABOUT FEAR

I will not attempt to convince you of the impending global disaster and even the possible collapse of human population or the extinction of life on this planet. If you do the homework, you won’t need convincing. I’m fascinated by Margaret Wheatley’s recent observation that information does not change minds any more.59 But we will all need to learn to face the deep fear that comes up. Joanna Macy and others are doing very important work around this, such as “The Work That Reconnects.”

I’ve been astonished over the years that almost every time we talk about these things to a new audience, we are admonished by someone saying that we shouldn’t be trying to motivate people using fear. This is a strange response, and it has taught us a great deal. Some have accused us of being doom-and-gloomers.

It’s true that we have followed the tradition of the relocalization movement, especially as expressed in the Transition movement, with a commitment to continually raise awareness about our collective predicament. We’re sometimes criticized for this, and we are hardly alone. The great environmental writer Gus Speth recounts that in The Death of Environmentalism, the authors remind us that Martin Luther King Jr. did not proclaim, “I have a nightmare!” Here’s Speth’s reply to them: “King did not need to say that—his people were living a nightmare. They needed a dream. But we, I fear, are living in a dream. We need to be reminded of the nightmare ahead. Here is the truth as I see it: we will never do the things that are needed unless we know the full extent of our predicament.”60

As a people, we have been in denial about so much for so long that we are dominated by a profoundly distorted view of reality. Ironically, this may be especially true of those who have access to the most data. And the actions and lives based on such a twisted grasp of reality are likely to produce unintended consequences beyond our capacity to imagine or deal with.

The belief that staring reality in the face is an attempt to use fear to motivate action is itself a fear-based response, though it is disguised as being rational and emotionally mature. We need not fear reality, but we do need to face it. Our failure to do so is an act of cowardice. We have the inner resources—the strength and the wisdom—to face all this with equanimity and to respond appropriately.

This is certainly a time of great peril. But it is also a time of great promise. And if we can hold both possibilities in our being, even as we discover that the stakes are far greater and more urgent than we had ever imagined, we will be brought to a moment of decision, of choice, of commitment, and—I would even suggest—a moment of surrender.

Here we are finally motivated by deeper values: authenticity, integrity, genuine emergence—even mystery. Such extraordinary moments in history, such evolutionary thresholds, call for an extraordinary response. If we are open and honest, we will find ourselves being called. Here we begin to yield to the angels of evolution, who are calling us to greater service.

And individuals everywhere are responding. Often they awaken alone, unrecognized, seemingly unqualified, invisible to the world, without the usual trappings of wealth or power.

One of the great dilemmas of our society is the “silo effect,” which essentially amounts to the belief that ours is the only “reality” that matters or is relevant. We are accomplished at this kind of myopia. It is the ultimate form of denial, and it enables a kind of moral relativism. What is being denied is any possibility of an objective reality. There is great fear and confusion underneath this mostly psychological strategy. In its most extreme form, especially in America, it produces severe economic and social disparity, as well as an ever-deeper disconnection from reality.

Thankfully, we are now beginning to awaken to greater realities, which call us to break down the silo walls, to let them dissolve, to not be confined by them (which has often been an unconscious choice).

This does not need to happen violently. As we face bigger and more challenging (and even harsher) realities, we also simultaneously begin to encounter greater possibilities than we have ever allowed ourselves to consider before. Mysteriously—in what many consider to be humanity’s darkest hour—collaboration, community, and cocreation are emerging in the human sphere as never before.

The evolutionary impulse here is to bridge the separation gap, to heal, to regenerate, and to evolve. Emergence itself is coming into focus as how evolution unfolds, and it can do so through humans.

In the emerging picture, it is clear that twenty years from now, life on this planet will likely be unrecognizable compared to what it is today. And what life becomes on this planet—if there is to be any life at all—will basically be up to us.

Given that it is now highly unlikely that industrial nations will be able to unite quickly enough to slow the progression of Peak Everything, we who are aware of these trends are then left to grapple with the urgent question of how humanity will survive and even thrive in the face of this unfolding disaster. That’s the impossible challenge that has chosen us.

The most potentially devastating of all these, of course, is climate change. In Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, Clive Hamilton writes, “We will be powerless to stop the jump to a new climate on Earth, one much less sympathetic to life. The kind of climate that has allowed civilization to flourish will be gone and humans will enter a long struggle just to survive.”61 This means a profound shift for human existence, one that we have hardly begun to accept.

The words of poet Drew Dellinger, from “hieroglyphic stairway,” are relevant here.

It’s 3:23 in the morning

and I’m awake

because my great great grandchildren

won’t let me sleep

my great great grandchildren

ask me in dreams

what did you do while the Planet was plundered?

what did you do when the Earth was unravelling?

surely you did something

when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest

when democracy was stolen?

what did you do

once

you

knew?

Here I ask the reader to begin considering this very personal question: In the face of Peak Everything, what is the urgent, overwhelming, impossible mission that is waiting for you to step forward and accept, that only you can do, that all depends on you, whether you’re qualified or not, whether you’re ready or not?