IT ALMOST LOOKS as though the Romans could bend rock, I thought. I was standing on one of the sides of the channel of an ancient Roman aqueduct. The channel, now dry, had once carried millions of litres of water. As I studied its design, I again marveled at Roman engineering’s singular blend of pragmatism, elegance, and genius. But there was something peculiar about the material that formed the channel’s interior wall—the side closest to the once-flowing water. It wasn’t masonry or concrete. It was rock. And it didn’t look like any rock I’d seen Romans use before. It didn’t consist of individual pieces carved and chiseled to fit tightly together. Instead, it was a seamless whole, and it curved smoothly around a bend as the aqueduct turned a corner. Most peculiar of all, the material was striated, with countless lines running lengthwise along the curved wall’s surface, almost as if it were petrified wood that had been steamed and bent for the purpose. How could this be?
Some months after my visit to the Forum in Rome, I was continuing my search to understand the links between energy and society—and ultimately to understand how civilizations fail and recover. And this search had brought me to the region of Languedoc in southern France to visit one of the ancient world’s great architectural marvels, the Pont du Gard. Erected to carry an aqueduct across the Gard River, it is perhaps the finest example of Roman bridge engineering and, quite simply, one of the most beautiful structures humans have ever built. That day in the fall of 2003, the bridge looked particularly grand, as the late-afternoon sun highlighted it against the dark oak, olive, and arbutus forests of the surrounding valley.
The Pont du Gard, just northeast of Nîmes, France
But I wasn’t visiting the Pont du Gard to marvel at another Roman structure made of rock. I was there because a few days before I’d visited the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie on the campus of the University of Paris in Nanterre, a Paris suburb. In a small, spartan cafeteria, I’d talked to Sander van der Leeuw, an archaeologist who studies how people and the natural environment interacted in ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He encouraged me to go to the Pont du Gard, and my later review of both his research and the voluminous studies of his colleagues helped me understand the connection between the bent stone and our circumstances today—especially our rapidly changing energy situation.1
During the empire’s heyday, Roman cities and towns used huge amounts of water for public baths, fountains, artisans’ workshops, and the dwellings of the rich, so engineers laid down aqueducts throughout the empire—in the process building countless bridges, siphons, and tunnels.2 The Pont du Gard’s three tiers of voussoir arches stand almost fifty meters high, and the original bridge extended nearly five hundred meters across the narrow but deep valley below. Erected in about five years sometime in the middle of the first century CE (not long before the Colosseum was built), and made of fifty thousand metric tons of stone, it was a key part of a system that carried water from the Eure and Plantery springs near the present-day town of Uzès to the Roman provincial settlement of Nemausus, which has since become the city of Nîmes. After decades of testing and refinement, the aqueduct eventually carried some forty thousand cubic meters of water a day, enough to fill sixteen Olympic swimming pools. Yet over its entire fifty-kilometer length—as it twisted and turned across very rough terrain—it descended only thirteen meters, or barely twenty-five centimeters per kilometer. The best engineers today would have trouble equaling this construction feat.3
The water from the springs at the origin of the aqueduct carries a heavy load of minerals, especially calcium carbonate. As this water coursed through the aqueduct over five centuries, some of the dissolved material was deposited on the channel’s sides. Each year another layer was laid down, and over time the material accumulated into the thick deposits of limestone on the channel’s interior walls.4 So it was indeed rock that I could see along the channel’s sides—very similar, in fact, to the travertine used in the Colosseum—and it did indeed bend smoothly around corners, having accreted on the sides one microscopic particle at a time. Along some sections of the Pont du Gard, these deposits are almost half a meter thick on each wall, an accumulation that must have greatly restricted the water’s flow.5
These hundreds of thin layers of limestone—the striations that I’d observed—are like tree rings, because they give us an indelible record of the aqueduct’s long history. And archaeologists of the Roman period have studied them carefully. They’ve learned that when the Romans were properly maintaining the aqueduct, including the various reservoirs along its length, the water it carried ran clean and clear, and the material deposited on the walls formed a light gray layer of firm, pure limestone.6 When the Romans neglected maintenance, debris washed into the reservoirs, and plant roots penetrated the channel itself. The aqueduct’s water then carried a heavy load of dirt and organic material, and the deposits on the channel’s sides became brown and soft— almost like a sponge.
Limestone deposits of the Nîmes aqueduct provide a record of its past.
(The interior surface of the aqueduct channel is immediately to the right of the sunglasses, which are resting on the striated deposits; the channel itself is at the far right.)
The interior of the aqueduct, in other words, tells a story about year-by-year changes in the capacity and competence of Roman administration—and about the disintegration of Roman power—in southern Gaul in the waning days of the western empire.7
Looking carefully at the bent rock, I could see clearly the difference between earlier and later deposits. Reaching down, I felt the brown material that had been deposited most recently. It crumbled under my fingers.
The story of that crumbling rock begins with the relationship between Romans and nature. It turns out that they dominated the natural environment of the Mediterranean basin and surrounding regions, just as we dominate Earth’s biosphere today.8 Romans deforested, drained, irrigated, terraced, and overgrazed hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land.9 “Indeed, one of the most striking parallels between the Roman exploitation of much of Western Europe and the comparatively recent exploitation of North America,” write van der Leeuw and his colleague Bert de Vries, “is the checkerboard of roads and drainage ditches that divides both landscapes into square miles.”10
A checkerboard landscape—what an evocative image. It gives us a feeling for the monumental investment the Romans made in organizing their territory. And how remarkable that this pattern has persisted through the millennia. But why did the Romans make this investment? The thermodynamic theory I outlined in chapter 2 suggests an answer: societies can sustain themselves—especially their complex hubs, like their towns and cities—only with copious inputs of high-quality energy, and to get this energy they must dominate and organize the territories that supply it.
The Romans vigorously organized their territory to aid both commerce and tax collection. The late empire’s main tax was imposed on agriculture—it was essentially a direct extraction of energy from the countryside. Farmers paid their taxes mainly in silver coin or in foodstuffs that tax collectors converted to coin, and this coin was then often exchanged for gold coin.11 The gold was essentially distilled solar energy. It took a staggering amount of labor—powered by food energy from the sun—to dig the gold ore from the ground, and then it took additional energy—in the form of wood energy also from the sun—to smelt it. The gold could easily be carried long distances and used to buy grain or human and animal labor far from the field where the farmer’s crops first captured the sun’s rays. But the Romans couldn’t effectively administer agricultural taxes if they didn’t know where the farmland was, who owned it, and whether the soil was good.12 So when they took control of a new region in Western Europe, they would dispatch a professional class of surveyors—the “agrimensores”—to map the land and carve it into square-mile blocks.13
Mapping the landscape wasn’t enough, though. The conquerors needed to control it too, which the Romans did in the most efficient way possible. Instead of setting up an entirely new administrative system, they exploited a new territory’s existing social and technological infrastructure, especially its cities and towns.14 Julius Caesar and other great Roman generals in fact found it hard to hold on to territories that didn’t have enough cities and towns.15 When they captured a territory, they immediately garrisoned its urban nodes with Roman troops. Then they co-opted the local urban elites to help manage— and in particular to tax—the surrounding countryside by granting them various types of association with the empire, sometimes including citizenship.16 Finally, they integrated the new regions into the larger Mediterranean economy by improving a region’s existing roads and building new links to the empire’s superb interregional system of highways. In time the newly conquered region was suffused with the empire’s common institutions—its language, writing, coinage, and administrative and judicial systems.
The empire’s roads served many purposes. Not only were they corridors for moving troops rapidly, but they also served as the empire’s fiber-optic cables, carrying the vital information—mail, contracts, administrators’ reports, tax assessments, government orders, military intelligence, and maps—that allowed it to function and solve its problems.17 Flows of information and flows of energy reinforced each other: information was needed to organize the extraction of high-quality energy from the countryside, but high-quality energy was also needed to produce, transfer, and store huge quantities of information.
Roads also let Romans move their products.18 Along the empire’s highways and byways, unsettled land was cleared, drained, and irrigated, and new estate farms were set up to make foodstuffs for export—especially wine and olive oil. These farms and their processing and storage facilities were often industrial in size and organization: in southern France, for instance, archaeologists have discovered the remnants of huge oil and wine cellars, including one that could have held 400,000 modern-day bottles of wine. Factory-size pottery workshops also made tens of thousands of the large jars, or amphorae, used as transportation containers.19
In this way, the empire became an early version of today’s globalized world—a highly interconnected economy from Britain to Egypt, in which individual regions could specialize in producing things they made best. This helped boost the economy’s overall resilience: variations in local geography, climate, and soil across the Mediterranean basin allowed farmers to cultivate diverse crops, so a shortfall in one area could often be addressed by imports from other areas where harvests were better.20 Economic integration spurred economic growth, especially in the provinces. Partly for these reasons, during the first century CE southern Gaul became, in the words of one expert, “the most productive, most industrialized, and indeed most civilized province in the empire.”21
All these practices—regimentation of the landscape, co-optation of urban elites, expansion of road networks, and integration of regional economies—helped the Romans extract the energy needed to sustain their empire’s growing complexity. “For societies powered by solar energy,” Tainter and his colleagues note, the main way to increase wealth is “to control more of the earth’s surface where solar energy falls.”22 As van der Leeuw and de Vries put it, the Roman empire is best understood as a gigantic system that “slowly structures an increasing area and a growing number of people into a coherent whole. In return, it draws energy (human and animal) and raw materials (food, minerals and water) from the area thus colonized.”23 Wealth was transferred from the provinces back to Italy, mainly to Rome, as taxes, provincial tributes, and customs duties, and as rents from both imperial properties and provincial estates owned by the Roman aristocracy.24 And much like our modern global economy, the empire had its own growth imperative. “[It] was dependent on continued expansion for survival,” continue van der Leeuw and de Vries. “More and more resources—including raw energy in the form of slaves— were brought from an increasingly distant periphery to the center and transformed into a growing range of artifacts and other objects.”25
As Rome moved into the second century CE, the system became increasingly unstable. For one thing, just as Tainter argues, the cost of a larger and more complex empire eventually rose faster than the benefits it produced.26 The empire lacked natural frontiers to its north beyond the Rhine and Danube and to the east in what is now called the Middle East. So up to the time of Emperor Trajan’s death in 117 CE, Rome’s generals often protected each new territory they seized by capturing adjoining territories farther afield.27 As these territories were incorporated into the empire, Rome’s frontiers became longer, as did its lines of communication from the center of power. Also, advanced knowledge about administration, military organization, and weapons flowed to the people in the new territories, boosting their power relative to Rome. So Rome spent ever more resources keeping in line ever more distant and often restless territories and preventing incursions by barbarians—such as Celtic, Germanic, and Gothic tribes—across ever more remote frontiers.28 Unfortunately, the croplands in the cold climates of Northern Europe produced little surplus wealth or energy to provide for their own control and defense, let alone to sustain the empire’s rising core complexity.29
The Roman empire maintained a permanent army big enough to respond to a range of contingencies—the first state to do so until modern times.30 Considering the empire’s expanse, it wasn’t an excessive force, averaging around thirty legions through much of the second century, or a total of about 300,000 to 350,000 men. Luckily, until the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180), the frontiers were relatively stable. All the same, the army remained stretched dangerously thin along the empire’s ten-thousand-kilometer perimeter.31 And even this limited force imposed a huge burden on Rome because it had to be provisioned, armed, and paid.32 Simply feeding it required something in the neighborhood of 200,000 metric tons of grain each year.33 Also, between the middle of the first century CE and the early part of the third, a soldier’s pay nearly tripled, to encourage recruitment and ensure the legions’ loyalty. “Army pay was by far the largest item in the budget,” writes the historian A. H. M. Jones, and the effect of the increases on the empire’s finances was, in his view, “catastrophic.”34
There were other problems, too. Widespread deforestation not only raised the price of fuel wood—a principal source of energy—but also dried the landscape in many places, left hillsides exposed and vulnerable to erosion, and increased flows of silt that plugged irrigation systems. Intensive, industrial-scale use of farmland damaged cropland and lowered grain yields.35 Also, as the empire grew in size and complexity, the amount of information needed to keep it orderly and coherent grew exponentially, as did the difficulty of managing and moving the information across the empire’s territory.36 And the Mediterranean economy’s tighter integration turned out to be a mixed blessing: at the same time that it helped to increase the economy’s overall resilience by diversifying the empire’s sources of key products, the connectivity made highly specialized local producers— often surviving on razor-thin profits—more vulnerable to distant shocks.37
Imperial costs continued to rise. A larger empire required more complex administration, so bureaucracy and officialdom ballooned. And not only did 200,000 people remain on the grain dole in the city of Rome, but to maintain the state’s legitimacy as slums overflowed with people migrating from the countryside, emperors supplemented the dole with free oil, pork, and wine.38 They also boosted spending on extravagant spectacles and public works. The cost of building and maintaining public baths, in particular, must have been huge: by the fourth century, Rome alone had one thousand baths, and many were unbelievably ostentatious.39
For a long time, Rome escaped its mounting problems by spending the treasure—especially the accumulated gold—of conquered territories.40 When Rome captured the king of Macedonia’s treasury in 167 BCE, it was able to lift taxes on Italy. Gold from the kingdoms of Pergamon and Syria bankrolled huge jumps in Rome’s budget in 130 and 63 BCE. And when Caesar conquered Gaul, so much gold flooded the Mediterranean economy that its price fell 36 percent. “By the last two centuries BCE,” writes Tainter, “Rome’s victories may have become nearly costless, in an economic sense, as conquered nations footed the bill for further expansion.”41
The captured gold—much of it held in the Temple of Saturn in the Forum—was essentially a massive energy subsidy of the empire’s rising complexity and reach.42 And because this gold represented far more energy than Rome had invested to get it, the empire enjoyed a highly favorable energy return on investment—or EROI. But after the subjugation of Egypt by Octavian (later Augustus) in 30 BCE and Trajan’s seizure of Dacian gold and Transylvanian gold mines in 106 CE, Rome ran out of rich kingdoms to plunder, and its EROI shifted dramatically downward. Abruptly Rome found itself overextended: the empire’s now vast territory, much of it captured and till then administered using the proceeds of conquest, had to be run using the solar energy from its annual food output, a flow barely enough to cover the empire’s normal needs.43 Emperors and their administrators soon found they had no buffer—no surge capacity—to cope with nasty surprises. The situation became acute in the years following 165 CE, when Marcus Aurelius faced converging challenges, including repeated poor harvests, savage barbarian attacks that penetrated as far as Italy itself, and a devastating plague that killed one-quarter to one-third of the population.
Rome’s emperors had few options to cope with financial deficit. Raising taxes or creating new ones was seldom politically and administratively feasible, even when inflation eroded the value of revenues. 44 Instead, emperors sold off state property, confiscated the aristocracy’s assets, and turned to the age-old but self-defeating strategy of debasing the currency. Between 50 and 200 CE, the silver content in Roman coinage dropped almost 50 percent, and by the year 269 it had plummeted to almost zero.45
Rome was thus locked into a food-based energy system that left little room for maneuver. Without the scientific skills, institutions, and culture to make the jump to a new kind of energy system—like one based on fossil fuels—the empire was trapped in a thermodynamic crisis that exacerbated its underlying brittleness.46 This story has been illustrated, in a truly fascinating way, by archaeologists working in the Rhône valley, not far from the Pont du Gard.47
By the time Julius Caesar finished pacifying all Gaul in 51 BCE, much of the region’s substantial population—estimated at nearly 6 million— was concentrated in towns in the Rhône delta and the lower Rhône valley, from the present-day city of Marseilles west to Montpellier, and northward through Arles and on to Orange. Because this area was relatively urbanized, the Romans colonized it first. Then they moved north up the Rhône valley to less inhabited territory. To guide their colonization, in the last decades BCE the emperor laid out a master plan for roads, settlements, farms, drainage canals, and ditches. We’re lucky today to have a remarkable record of this plan: a tax and property map engraved around 77 CE on a marble tablet, now preserved in a museum in Orange. This map shows an astonishing ten thousand square kilometers of the valley divided into a neat grid of fifty-hectare plots. Much of the unsettled land in the north, especially a zone called the Tricastin, was parceled out as retirement sinecures to ex-legionnaires. Better to keep former soldiers happy on the farm than have them rebelling in the provinces.
It’s clear from this map, from archeological surveys of nearly a thousand settlements in the region, and from analysis of aerial photographs that the Romans organized the Rhône valley—in particular the Tricastin—to grow agricultural products for export to the regional and Mediterranean economies. It’s also clear that the surveyors who laid out the grid of ditches and property boundaries had an urban fetish for straight lines and right angles not suited to the land’s natural features. Their drainage grid, in fact, cut directly across the natural flow of rivers and streams at an angle of forty-five degrees, so storms often washed out the ditches or filled them with dirt and rubble.48 Because the components of the system were highly interdependent, the failure of a single section of ditch could cascade to cause a far larger breakdown.49
In Buzz Holling’s terms, the Romans’ agricultural and irrigation system in this region was intricate, tightly connected, highly regulated— and brittle. It worked fine as long as there was enough labor—or energy— to maintain the entire system. But the advent of peace in the empire in the first century CE slowed the flow of ex-legionnaires to the more distant parts of the Rhône valley. More important, by the second century CE, agricultural colonization in the region came to a standstill, and the Romans began abandoning hundreds of farms, first in the southern part of the Rhône valley and delta and later in the north. This rural crisis occurred throughout Gaul and across much of the empire, continuing and deepening into the third and fourth centuries. We don’t really know its causes, but the fact that it happened in many places suggests that local factors related to climate, soil, or government weren’t key. More likely a general downturn in the interconnected Mediterranean economy hurt all farms producing foodstuffs for export.50 Also, the great plague of the late second century and general civil instability in the third century probably left farms short of labor. Finally, as I’ll show in a moment, the rising tax burden on agriculture forced many farmers to leave their land.
The Rhône valley
In the Tricastin, the abandonment of farms and decline in population were devastating. There weren’t enough people to repair the region’s intricate drainage system, so it fell apart. Erosion worsened, ditches filled with debris, and more farms—especially marginal ones with poorer soil and fewer road connections to markets—were abandoned. Over time, similar events unfolded across much of the western empire. Economic integration among regions declined and information flows dwindled. Towns and cities went their own way and turned inward, their command of the countryside fading.51
The deposits on the inside of the Nîmes aqueduct tell this story. During these centuries, the city of Nemausus lost control over the aqueduct’s route. Powerful local landowners along the structure’s length—normally responsible for keeping the aqueduct maintained— instead cut holes into the channel to get water for their farms. And as regular cleaning of the aqueduct stopped, its once-crystal-clear water turned brown.
For over a millennium in Western culture, Rome’s collapse has been an emblem of social catastrophe, one often used as a cudgel in political debate. When people don’t approve of a particular social, political, or economic trend, they’ll often assert that it caused Rome’s demise. So explanations have proliferated. In 1984 the German historian Alexander Demandt listed more than two hundred different explanations for Rome’s fall that he found in the historical literature since 1600—from epidemics, plutocracy, and the absence of character to vainglory.52
Perhaps it’s rash, then, to add another one to the list. Still, recent work by archaeologists, economic historians, and complexity theorists gives fresh insight into what happened. And their story, which has immense relevance to our situation today, comes down to this.
Because energy is a society’s master resource, when Rome exhausted its energy subsidies from its conquests—when it had to move, in other words, from high-EROI to low-EROI sources of energy—it faced a critical transition. And, at least in the Western part of the empire, it didn’t make this transition successfully.53 It couldn’t sustain the cost and complexity of its far-flung army, ballooning civil service, hungry and restless cities, elaborate information flows, and intricate irrigation systems, like the one in the Tricastin. Not that it didn’t try. Rome’s prodigious effort to save itself by putting in place a system to aggressively manage its energy problem was simultaneously one of history’s greatest triumphs and tragedies. It was a triumph because, for a while at least, the effort reversed what seemed like the empire’s inexorable decline; but it was ultimately a tragedy because it didn’t address the empire’s underlying problem—complexity too great for a food-based energy system—and was thus bound to fail.
After years of warfare, plague, and weak harvests, Marcus Aurelius left the state treasury almost empty when he died in 180 CE. For nearly a century after his death, turmoil, civil war, and barbarian attacks racked the empire, in no small part because of a chronic fiscal crisis. As barbarian tribes coalesced into powerful federations to the north, Rome’s control of its frontier territories disintegrated and many were aban-doned.54 Travel and trade became unsafe, and literacy and record keeping plummeted; commerce declined. Although tax revenues were static or declining, government costs continued to go up as emperors tried to secure their power by expanding the dole, increasing the size of the army, boosting soldiers’ pay, and holding more games and spectacles.55 The empire verged on collapse.
The downward spiral stopped only when the emperors Aurelian (270–275) and Diocletian (284–305) revamped Rome’s finances, administration, army, and tax system. Diocletian, in particular, introduced complex and harsh measures to extract more energy from the land. Two centuries of debasing the currency had so eroded money’s value that Rome now insisted that it receive the bulk of its taxes not in money but in kind—in grain, meat, and the like. But because surpluses of foodstuffs couldn’t be stored easily, Diocletian realized that Rome needed to match its annual intake of such goods to its requirements. The result was Rome’s first rudimentary state budget. At the beginning of each financial year on September 1, officials calculated the government’s needs for the coming year and divided the total by the number of units of land in the empire. In this way, the tax rate could be adjusted every year according to Rome’s needs.56 Meanwhile, other officials conducted new censuses and resurveyed the countryside to identify and measure every scrap of potentially productive land. “The tax rate was established from a master list of the empire’s resources,” write Tainter and his colleagues, “broken down province by province, city by city, field by field, household by household. Never before had the state so thoroughly penetrated its citizens’ lives.”57 The historian Chris Wickham concurs: “Taxation dominated the economy and was the economic foundation for the state. Nothing in the late Roman economic system escaped the state’s embraces.”58
From the point of view of the landowner, the tax system was cruelly rigid. Taxes stayed the same even if the land was poor or the harvest failed. Villages, towns, and cities were responsible for taxes levied on their surrounding populations, so if one farmer didn’t pay his share, others had to make up the difference. Even uncultivated land was taxed, and if the owner couldn’t be found, the land was compulsorily assigned to someone who could farm it and pay the taxes.59 Widows and children inherited tax obligations. The result, writes the historian Edward Luttwak, was “a perfected system of taxation-in-kind, which ruthlessly extracted the food, fodder, clothing, arms, and money needed for imperial defense from an empire which became one vast logistic base.”60
Ruthless extraction was essential, because complexity and costs continued to climb. Diocletian stabilized the frontiers by building more roads and fortresses along the empire’s boundaries. He enlarged the army to around 600,000 soldiers, or somewhere between fifty-six and sixty-eight legions—a force that required conscription of nearly 100,000 new soldiers every year.61 To reduce the likelihood of revolt, he divided provinces and split the imperial administration into four parts, multiplying a bureaucracy that became increasingly segmented into specialized units. To supply the state and army’s essential needs, he and his successors made many occupations—like milling, baking, weaving, dyeing, and shipping and transport—compulsory and hereditary. And because the debasing of currency continued to produce inflation, Diocletian promulgated in 301 his famous Edict on Prices, stipulating the price of hundreds of goods and services.
All these innovations brought relative prosperity and calm to the empire for much of the fourth century.62 But the cost was extreme and unsustainable. The tax rate was now set annually, which meant emperors could finally raise taxes easily, and before long they did indeed raise them—a lot. Between 324 and 364, taxes apparently doubled, and the result was a sudden deepening of the rural crisis.63 From Africa to Gaul to Asia, vast numbers of farmers, especially those with small plots or marginal cropland, abandoned their farms. Some sought the protection of large landowners, while others moved to cities. Those who remained on the land had steadily less food for their families and no longer the wherewithal to protect their cropland from long-term damage.64 Malnutrition and outright starvation appear to have caused rural death rates to surge beyond birthrates, so the empire’s population never recovered from the plagues of the second and third centuries.65 And as peasant populations fell, finding enough conscripts for the army became difficult. Still, with famers chafing under the burden of rising taxes, the army was an increasingly vital source of the emperor’s power and legitimacy.66
By the fifth century in the West, the empire was literally burning through its capital—its productive farmland and its peasantry. Peasants deserted their lands, so power and wealth were increasingly concentrated in the hands of large landowners, who then used their influence to evade taxes.67 By 400, fewer than a dozen senatorial families owned most of Gaul and Italy, and they largely controlled the reins of power in the West.68 As state finances deteriorated, public services like roads, bridges, aqueducts, and the postal service broke down. The army’s quality declined, and information flows were attenuated, which sapped the empire’s ability to identify and solve its problems. As the empire grew weaker, it started to disintegrate from the periphery toward the core. Barbarians saw opportunities to attack along the West’s long and poorly defended frontier, and an apathetic and overtaxed peasantry often did little to resist. The loss of territories to barbarians further undermined the empire’s finances, debilitated the army, and invited more attacks.69
The western empire was again caught in a downward spiral toward collapse and simplification, and this time there was no rescue. Rome’s strategy, Tainter writes, had been “to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of the primary problem-solving system—the government and its army.” The imperial government’s aim hadn’t been further conquest but just maintenance of the status quo. In the end, as costs outstripped revenues, the western empire “could no longer afford the problem of its own existence.”70
The western Roman empire couldn’t make the transition from high-EROI to low-EROI sources of energy. Today, our societies are headed toward a similar transition as oil becomes harder to find. Sometime in the 1960s the United States crossed a critical threshold when its EROI for domestic petroleum extraction started to fall, and it’s likely that since then just about every other oil-producing region in the world has crossed the same threshold (often it takes a while for data to show clearly that the threshold has been crossed).71 Very few people—certainly not our society’s leaders—grasp the significance of this change, yet it’s of epochal importance. It marks the beginning of a shift from our modern industrial civilization to some other kind of civilization.
We can’t yet say what form this new civilization will take, but we can be fairly certain that compared with our experience over the century and a half since the industrial revolution, energy will become far more costly as nonconventional and renewable sources replace cheap oil. The price rise won’t be steady and linear: we’ll see sharp spikes and dips as the global economy tries to adjust. Even an average increase in real energy costs of just 2.5 percent each year—a rate we’ve consistently exceeded in recent years—will compound into a tenfold increase in a century.
Can we get through this transition wisely and safely? Not if we refuse to understand its implications and simply continue what we’re doing now. In Buzz Holling’s terms, we’re busily extending the growth phase of the adaptive cycle of our planetary economic, ecological, and social system. In the process, this planetary system is becoming steadily more complex, connected, efficient, and regulated. Eventually it will become less resilient; it may, in fact, have already started to lose resilience.
A number of factors drive these changes. First, the desperate need of companies, economies, and societies to maximize performance and productivity forces them to steadily boost their organizational and technological complexity, their internal efficiency and regulation, and their speed of production and transport of materials, energy, and information. Also, as the world economy expands relative to the size of Earth’s resource base and biosphere, we have to use resources and energy far more efficiently and manage our interactions with nature with ever greater care—and this means progressively more elaborate technologies, procedures, regulations, and institutions. Based on current trends, global output of goods and services will quadruple from $60 to $240 trillion (in 2005 dollars) by 2050.72 If we’re going to keep such a gargantuan economy humming—and if we’re going to avoid simultaneously wrecking the planet’s environment—we’ll need everything from high-tech energy and water conservation programs to huge bureaucracies that find and punish the people and companies that emit too much carbon dioxide. And finally, as our EROI declines in coming decades, we’ll need far more sophisticated technologies and organizations to scavenge small pockets of oil from all over the world and to pull together lower-quality energy from a myriad of solar, wind, and geothermal generating plants. We’ve seen this particular outcome before: Diocletian, remember, had to impose an immensely elaborate and intrusive tax regime to gather tiny amounts of solar energy from farms spread across the Roman empire.73
In short, in coming decades our resource and environmental problems will become progressively harder to solve; our companies, organizations, and societies will therefore have to become steadily more complex to produce good solutions; and the solutions they produce—whether technological or institutional—will have to be more complex too.74
Today’s Holland gives us a hint of what this future might be like.75 One of the world’s most crowded countries, Holland has a heavily industrialized, energy-intensive, high-consumption economy, and its people must constantly fight back the sea to survive on their small patch of territory—much of it indeed reclaimed from the sea.76 Over the centuries, the Dutch have responded by putting in place astonishingly complex systems of technology and social regulation. These have included block-by-block urban residential committees to prevent flooding, detailed laws to maximize efficient use of land, and of course an intricate system of dikes, canals, and pumping stations.77 As Holland has become progressively wealthier, more crowded, and more hemmed in by resource and environmental pressures, the regulations and technologies have become steadily more intricate and costly.
But if we end up with a global society and economy like Holland’s, would that really be so bad? After all, the Dutch live very well. Sadly, even the enormous complexity of today’s Holland won’t be remotely adequate for the host of planetary challenges we’re going to have to address soon, like climate change and worsening shortages of high-quality energy. We’ll have to create a global society that I’ve come to call “Holland times ten,” with vastly more sophisticated, pervasive, and expensive rules and regulatory institutions than anything the Dutch live with today. Do we really want such a future for ourselves and our children?
And even if we do, can we really create it? First of all, Holland is in some ways an inadequate example. It’s a small, ethnically homogeneous society with relatively low economic inequality, a deeply rooted culture of collaboration, and a citizenry that’s receptive to social policies intended to change people’s behaviors.78 These are hardly features of our world as a whole. Also, today’s Holland maintains its comfortable lifestyle by importing energy, food, and natural resources from far beyond its boundaries, and by expelling much of its wastes, such as its carbon dioxide, outside its boundaries too—Holland’s carbon dioxide ends up traveling in the atmosphere around the planet. 79 Humanity as a whole, though, can’t get its resources or expel its pollution beyond Earth’s boundaries.
More important, as our global social-ecological system moves through the growth phase of its adaptive cycle—toward a Holland-times-ten future—it’s losing resilience because of processes I’ve outlined in this book. Capitalism’s constant pressure on companies to maximize efficiency tightens links between producers and suppliers; reduces slack, buffering, and redundancy; and so makes cascading failures more likely and damaging. As well, capitalism’s pressure on people to be more productive and efficient drives them to acquire hyperspecialized skills and knowledge, which means they become less autonomous, more dependent on other specialized people and technologies, and ultimately more vulnerable to shocks (remember how most of us were so ill equipped to deal with the 2003 blackout). Meanwhile, worsening damage to the local and regional natural environment in many poor countries is fraying ecological networks and undermining economies and political stability. And finally pressure is increasing within both rich and poor societies too—from tectonic stresses like demographic imbalance, growth of megacities, and widening income gaps.
All these factors are creating the overload condition I talked about in chapter 5—just at the moment when we’re entering an epochal shift from high-EROI to low-EROI sources of energy. Because it takes energy to create and maintain complexity and order, and because energy will become steadily more expensive, we’ll find it steadily harder to implement complex solutions to our complex problems.
Indeed, in a world of far higher energy costs, a Holland-times-ten global system is likely impossible. Even today’s globalized economy won’t be viable, because it takes too much energy to keep it running. As energy prices rise, we’ll first see cutbacks on long-distance travel and trade.80 Instead of becoming increasingly “flat” as barriers to commerce and economic integration disappear—as some commentators, such as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, suggest—the world will become more regionalized and even hierarchical because manufacturing, commerce, and political power will shift to countries with relatively good access to energy.81 Eventually those of us in rich countries will have to change many things in our societies and daily lives—not just the machines we use to produce and consume energy but also the work we do, our entertainment and leisure activities, how much we travel in cars and airplanes, our financial systems, the design of our cities, and the ways we produce our food (because our current agricultural practices consume a huge amount of energy).
The growth phase we’re in may seem like a natural and permanent state of affairs—and our world’s rising complexity, connectedness, efficiency, and regulation may seem relentless and unstoppable—but ultimately it isn’t sustainable. Still, we find it impossible to get off this upward escalator because our chronic state of denial about the seriousness of our situation—aided and abetted by powerful special interests that benefit from the status quo—keeps us from really seeing what’s happening or really considering other paths our world might follow. Radically different futures are beyond imagining. So we stay trapped on a path that takes us toward major breakdown.
The longer a system is “locked in” to its growth phase, says Buzz Holling, “the greater its vulnerability and the bigger and more dramatic its collapse will be.” If the growth phase goes on for too long, “deep collapse”—something like synchronous failure—eventually occurs. Collapse in this case is so catastrophic and cascades across so many physical and social boundaries that the system’s ability to regenerate itself is lost.82 The forest-fire described in chapter 9 shows how this happens: if too much tinder-dry debris has accumulated, the fire becomes too hot, which destroys the seeds that could be the source of the forest’s rebirth.
Holling thinks the world is reaching “a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a rare and major ‘pulse’ of social transformation.” Humankind has experienced only three or four such pulses during its entire evolution, including the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural settlement, the industrial revolution, and the recent global communications revolution. Today another pulse is about to begin. “The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative,” he writes. “The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.”83 We’ll see shortly that exuberant experimentation is essential to social resilience.
A buildup of pressure from multiple stresses, a rapid-fire series of shocks, and a weakening of resilience can combine to push a society over the edge, as indicated in chapter 5. From the third century on, these processes pum-meled the Roman empire: contemporary writers noted that everything seemed to be going wrong everywhere at the same time—that Rome had to cope with a seemingly never-ending barrage of barbarian attacks, assassinations, internal unrest, troop revolts, famine, plague, and financial crisis.84 Rocked by these foreshocks, the empire started to crack apart.
As we go through our own EROI transition in coming decades—in a world far along the growth phase of its own adaptive cycle and under enormous pressure from multiple stresses—what can we expect to happen?
In coming years, I believe, foreshocks are likely to become larger and more frequent.85 Some could take the form of threshold events—like climate flips, large jumps in energy prices, boundary-crossing outbreaks of new infectious disease, or international financial crises. In poor countries where environmental, population, and economic stresses are already severe and social capacity to manage them remains low, we’ll probably see a steady increase in outbreaks of civil violence—including riots, insurgency, guerrilla war, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. Severe spikes in energy costs, especially, could trigger violence in megacities in poor countries, while a combination of higher energy costs and shifts in climate could cause food shortages that spur guerrilla war in rural areas already suffering from serious cropland and water scarcity. Such events could culminate in larger social earthquakes, as multiple shocks topple regimes in zones of geopolitical importance, like the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. If this turmoil is unchecked, world order could disintegrate in stages—from the poorest countries at its periphery to the richest countries at its core, much as happened in the western Roman empire. Even early on, though, instability is likely to penetrate into rich countries as terrorism and urban unrest surge where there are large, ghettoized concentrations of underemployed and unemployed young men.86
This scenario may be scarily plausible, but it’s not inevitable. For example, more stresses acting on our societies don’t automatically translate into more instability and violence. Since the 1960s, social scientists have made remarkable strides in understanding the causes of civil violence.87 They’ve found that two factors dominate: motivation and opportunity. One or other isn’t enough by itself; lots of both are needed to generate upheaval.
People usually won’t participate in group violence unless they’re powerfully motivated to do so, because the cost of participating might be very high—they could die, and so could their loved ones. In most cases people will join only if they feel that a particular group or governing regime is treating them extremely unfairly. Generally, too, they must believe that violence offers a genuine opportunity to improve their lot. This means they must believe that the balance of power favors them—that in a violent struggle with the prevailing group or regime they have enough power to eventually get their way.
Because so much rests on these two apparently simple factors, we might think it’s pretty easy to predict when and where civil violence will occur. Alas, both motivation and opportunity are a messy mixture of objective and subjective factors. For instance, whether people believe their situation is unfair depends not only on objective facts—their income relative to others, their political and economic freedoms, and the like—but also on their subjective notion of what’s just and unjust. Also, whether they believe they have an opportunity to succeed in their uprising depends not only on their access to the objective instruments of power—like money, explosives, and guns—but also on subjective factors like group identity. A potentially rebellious group will feel more powerful if it believes that other people and groups share its identity—that they are part of its “we” group, so to speak—and could therefore be allies.88
The tectonic stresses I’ve considered in this book negatively affect people’s objective situation. Energy shortages and environmental damage dislocate people’s lives and can make them poorer, while widening demographic and income gaps allow people to make invidious comparisons between themselves and others. But something else— something subjective—must be added to the mix if these changes are to motivate people to become violent: leaders must frame these changes in a particular way for their followers. This means they must tell a story that connects the dots of the available evidence in a way that convinces people that they’re being treated unfairly and can do something about it. This story is, essentially, a mini social theory that draws on people’s shared values, myths, and symbols to give them a satisfying explanation of their unsatisfying situation. It tells them that their situation is unjust, it identifies who’s to blame, and it explains what they can do to ensure that they’ll triumph over the injustice they’re experiencing.89
Dislocated lives, worsened poverty, and wider income gaps affect the motivation to participate in violence by providing fodder for extremist leaders. They create in people general feelings of frustration and anger that leaders can shape and focus—through clever framing—into powerful resentments against governments or specific groups. Income gaps are especially good fodder because people care far more about their relative than their absolute status. People on the losing side of the gaps— or who strongly identify with those who are—can be made to feel profoundly humiliated.90
Unfortunately, as I showed in chapter 8, the income gap between the world’s rich and poor will widen quickly in coming decades: if current trends continue, the gap will more than double in the next forty years. And the world’s connectivity makes the reality of the widening gap inescapable. Our increasingly global society is intimately linked together by fiber-optic cables, air travel, and trade, and suffused with information from TV, videos, and the Web. Millions know what they’re missing, whether it’s something right next door or on the other side of the planet.91 And millions—especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—feel they’re being left behind: they see no clear route to success in the modern global economy or even a real role for themselves. Many of these people also live under semi-authoritarian regimes that don’t allow for peaceful expression of discontent, so they’re left with no political options other than passivity or revolt.
As the income gap widens, our global society is becoming increasingly polarized between rich and poor classes. Political theorists going back to Aristotle have argued that a large and successful middle class is important to peace in any society because it moderates conflict between rich and poor and tempers political extremism.92 But the world’s middle class is in precipitous decline. According to the World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, over 77 percent of the world’s people are now poor (with a per capita income below the Brazilian average), while about 16 percent are rich (with incomes above the Portuguese average), which leaves less than 7 percent in the middle.93 Relative to rich countries, almost all the middle-income countries in 1960 dropped into the ranks of the poor by 2000, and the club of rich countries became largely Western.94 The poorest countries will almost certainly stay where they are—at the bottom of the world’s economic ladder. “Unless there is a remarkable discontinuity with the patterns of development that have lasted during the past half-century (and possibly longer),” Milanovic writes, “the likelihood of escaping from the bottom rung is almost negligible.” This is not a prescription for a stable world order.
Many Western journalists, commentators, and policy makers heatedly reject the argument that poverty and income gaps help cause civil violence. To them this argument is little more than a thinly disguised effort to blame the world’s dominant economic system—globalized capitalism—for phenomena like international terrorism or instability in poor countries. And they point out that many terrorists—including the members of Al Qaeda who carried out the 9/11 attacks—are well educated and come from relatively comfortable backgrounds.
It’s true that extremely poor people are often quite fatalistic about their poverty, so they generally don’t feel really angry about it, which weakens their motivation to join in civil violence of any kind. They’re also so busy surviving that they don’t have much time to think about whether their situation is unfair or to organize themselves to make it better. And because they usually have limited educations, they have limited knowledge of things beyond their immediate situation. The people who are most likely to participate in violent groups have more time and resources to reflect on their circumstances, more information to know that things could be better, and more opportunity to become radicalized by finding and exchanging ideas with others who share their views.
Yet we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that poverty and income gaps are irrelevant to the incidence of violence. First of all, social scientists have found that poor societies are much more prone to civil violence.95 Even though we don’t yet fully understand how these two factors are linked, we can be pretty sure they’re linked somehow. Also, it’s a mistake to assume that because many of the participants in certain types of civil violence—such as terrorism—aren’t desperately poor, poverty can’t motivate them. People who are relatively educated and wealthy can still identify strongly with people who are deprived—less fortunate members of their ethnic or religious group, for instance— and be very motivated by this deprivation. They can feel what one expert has called “vicarious humiliation.”96 Finally, it’s important to take account of all the participants in acts of civil violence: although the leaders of insurgent or terrorist groups are often relatively educated and well off, it turns out that the people who do most of the work, take most of the risks, and actually launch attacks are in many cases much poorer.97
Dislocated lives, worsening poverty, and income gaps can affect the opportunity for violence too. In a poor country, they can undermine the economy and in turn the financial and the military strength of the governing regime, which can weaken support for the regime among powerful elites. They can also erode the regime’s moral authority or “legitimacy” in the eyes of the general public: if people are becoming poorer or feel they’re falling behind everyone else, they usually conclude that their government is doing a bad job. As the regime loses elite and popular support, potentially rebellious groups may think their chances for a successful uprising are getting better—especially if they receive help from discontented elite factions.98
But the factor that has the biggest impact on the likelihood of violence in our world today is the second of this book’s two multipliers— what some experts have called the “power shift.”99 Technological change has generally boosted the capabilities of small groups and individuals relative to large institutions and governments. Sometimes this power shift makes our lives better, as when the Internet helps citizens engage in democratic debate about contentious public issues. But sometimes it makes our lives worse, because one kind of power that’s diffusing to small groups is an extraordinary capacity to destroy.100 Put simply, technological change is allowing fewer people to kill larger numbers of people more quickly than ever before.
This trend is particularly visible in poor countries that have been flooded with small arms and light weapons, including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and small but deadly land mines. In a long list of poor countries, these weapons have given militias, ethnic groups, political factions, and gangs the opportunity to wreak havoc. Some countries have become trapped in perpetual cycles of attack and counterattack, and in places like Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and eastern Congo the result has been a virtual collapse of government authority. Organized crime backed by heavily armed militias has been quick to fill the vacuum, and criminal activity—from the production of phony passports to trade in illegal diamonds—is an important source of revenue for insurgents and terrorists operating elsewhere. Both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, for instance, have exploited the West African diamond trade to finance their operations.101
New information technologies are also boosting violent groups’ power relative to governments. Satellite phones, the Internet, and portable computers allow groups—including transnational terrorist networks—to share information on weapons and recruiting tactics, arrange surreptitious fund transfers across borders, and plan attacks around the planet. Such groups can now communicate almost invisibly using the enormous power available in everyday computers—a common laptop today has as much computational punch as all the computers available to the U.S. Defense Department in the mid’ 60s—and state-of-the-art encryption software that can be downloaded as freeware off the Web.
Developments like this are certainly worrisome, but they’re not even close to the greatest concern. Violent small groups will achieve their ultimate technological leverage when they start using weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. Most specialists believe it’s just a matter of time before they do so, because the world can’t bottle up forever the technologies or knowledge needed to make the devices.
I earlier mentioned the risk that terrorists could get hold of enough nuclear material, especially highly enriched uranium (HEU), to make an atomic bomb. Given the huge amount of HEU sitting in insecure stockpiles around the world, and the tiny fraction needed to make a crude but very effective bomb (with roughly the explosive power of the one that obliterated Hiroshima), some experts say the probability of a nuclear attack by terrorists in the next decade is greater than 50 percent.102 They have been especially alarmed by one shocking discovery: Western intelligence agencies uncovered a sophisticated and illicit international network, originating in Pakistan, set up expressly to transfer nuclear-weapons technologies and materials to such rogue countries as North Korea, Iran, and Libya.103 Many experts now believe that, based on this intelligence, nuclear materials and technologies are leaking into international criminal syndicates, from where they may be transferred— for a price—to terrorist groups.
Other possibilities are on the horizon. For example, molecular biologists have lately learned how to create viruses using genetic codes available on the Internet and DNA from companies that sell custom-made genetic material.104 The codes of devastating diseases, including smallpox and the 1918 Spanish flu, are now publicly available, and the machines that allow biologists to mutate the genes of common viruses to make them more lethal, or even to construct viruses from scratch, can be found in laboratories around the world.105
Because of these technological trends, small groups of people will soon be able to humble entire nations. We haven’t even begun to grasp the implications of this possibility for our economies and democracies. What, really, would it mean for the liberty, democracy, and prosperity of Western societies if one or more nuclear bombs exploded in the West’s great cities? We already know one thing, though: as enormous destructive power diffuses down the social hierarchy from governments to groups and even to individuals, protecting our societies becomes exponentially harder. We have to pay attention to—and potentially control—smaller and smaller details of our security environment.
The intelligence and defense agencies of countries used to focus their resources mainly on tracking, assessing, and responding to threats from large agglomerations of military force, like armies massed along borders, naval fleets at sea, and missiles in their silos. Today such agencies have to pay much more attention than before to small groups and even single persons. A meeting of a half-dozen people in a restaurant in Peshawar, Pakistan, may seal the fate of Washington, D.C.; and if a few people can destroy a city, every cluster of people is potentially a mortal threat. In other words, as destructive power diffuses downward, Western intelligence agencies will argue that they need a progressively higher-resolution picture of what’s going on around us, and they need this picture not just of things happening in our own countries but also of events all over the world.
The task of gathering, processing, and interpreting this information is almost incomprehensibly demanding. And even if we can identify the genuine threats our countries face around the world, we almost certainly can’t afford a police and military force large, complex, and sophisticated enough to respond to them all. The problem is particularly acute for the United States, the world’s remaining superpower and a target of anger practically everywhere. For all intents and purposes, the country now has an infinitely long defensive perimeter: it must now defend itself and its allies against attacks that could come at any time in any corner of the planet, from the Golden Gate Bridge at home to the nightclubs of Bali in Indonesia and the tourist hotels of Mombasa in Kenya. It doesn’t have the option of ignoring this threat, because successful attacks have a huge symbolic effect. They demonstrate the weakness of American military and political authority, which exposure, of course, simply invites more attacks.
Rome, remember, found itself fatally overextended. Given its energy and financial resources and manpower, its frontiers were too distant and too long, and it eventually succumbed to relentless barbarian attacks. Soon the United States—faced with declining EROIs and the steadily increasing destructive power of our modern-day barbarians—may also be stretched beyond its breaking point.106
We’re awed by Rome’s buildings because they were built to inspire awe. The empire derived its authority partly from its fabulous engi-neering—and from its everyday display of precision and power with mere rock. Engineering ideology helped justify the construction of the Pont du Gard, just as it justified the Colosseum. That the aqueduct was built in a remote corner of southern Gaul only reinforced its underlying message of timeless accomplishment: we have the power and the will, the Romans were saying, to do the work of gods wherever we choose.107 But today another, very different and even contradictory, message—a message about the ultimate limits of human power—hides inside the aqueduct, where most people don’t see it. When Romans no longer properly maintained the aqueduct and its water turned brown, the layers of limestone along its interior became soft. So when I touched this limestone and it crumbled under my fingers, I touched the story of Rome’s disintegration.
Some people would say that it’s absurd to draw a parallel between Rome’s fate and the prospects for today’s world. Far from seeing the disintegration of world order, they’d say, we’re actually seeing its progressive reinforcement and increasing coherence, as global trade advances and as countries (with some notable exceptions) sign treaties to manage global problems from genocide to climate change. And, they would go on, despite high-profile conflicts in places like Iraq and Afghanistan— and an upsurge in Islamic terrorism—violence has, in reality, steadily declined around the world for a decade, as war between Cold War proxies has ended, democracy has taken root, and the United Nations and other organizations have intervened to stem conflict in poor countries.108
This is a dangerously simplistic view. Not only does it downplay the reality that dozens of societies around the world are still experiencing vicious civil conflict, but it also extrapolates a few positive trends linearly into the future. However, complex systems don’t advance in a straight line. They develop with progress and setbacks, thresholds and flips, and sudden shifts in direction. In human societies, periods of relative calm that might seem permanent are sometimes interrupted by extraordinary turmoil, when deep stresses combine to release their energy with sudden force.
Today, just as in the late Roman empire, deep stresses are rising and system resilience is declining. Just as was true then, too, the coherence of world order depends critically on the economic, political, cultural, and military might of a single superpower.109 The foundation of this might is access to abundant energy. “More than in any other modern nation,” writes the eminent energy specialist Vaclav Smil, “the United States has acquired its power and influence largely through its extraordinarily high use of energy.”110 And America survives, as the ancient city of Rome did, on lifelines of energy from distant regions.
As American leaders grasp how the shift from a high-EROI to a low-EROI world jeopardizes their country’s dominance, they’ll do exactly what Rome’s leaders did: they’ll use every means—including, when necessary, force—to organize and control the world’s territory to permit the extraction of energy. In the process, they’ll run headlong into other energy-hungry societies trying to do the same thing—in particular, India and China, two rising giants without remotely enough energy at home to satisfy their ravenous appetites.
The likely result: widespread conflict over energy resources, especially since many of the world’s large remaining reserves of oil are in geopolitically unstable regions, like the Middle East and Central Asia.111 Some analysts dispute oil’s importance as a factor in the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq, but no one can dispute the fact that the Middle East is a major focus of American foreign and military policy because it has a lot of oil. America’s need for overseas energy forces it to ingratiate itself with corrupt, authoritarian, and often unstable regimes in regions rife with ancient conflicts. The people of these countries frequently despise their governments and, because the U.S. supports the governments, they despise the U.S. too. In September 2001, we all learned how dangerous such hatred can be.
So in the next decades, while the U.S. desperately tries to extract energy resources around the planet and likely gets into fights with other countries as a result, it will also have to fight another battle spawned partly by its thirst for energy—an endless battle along an infinite frontier against a largely unseen and protean enemy.112 Modern networks of terrorists and insurgents often aren’t scale-free. They don’t have static, highly connected hubs—like a cluster of leaders at the top of an organizational hierarchy—that can be identified, targeted, and destroyed with potentially devastating effect on the overall network.113 Instead, their connections are loose, limited in number, and constantly changing, depending on immediate tactical needs.114 The people in such networks are bound together mainly by radical ideologies that give them only the most general framing and injunctions for action. So Al Qaeda, in the wake of heavy pressure from the United States and its allies, has mutated from a coherent global organization into a motivating symbol or potent idea—that of Al Qaedaism and its resistance to Western oppression of Muslims.115 This means that the U.S. “war on terrorism” can’t be war in any conventional sense. It’s more like a worldwide guerrilla conflict, in which the enemy shifts its tactics as necessary, chooses where to strike at will, and then disappears into a vast crowd of passive supporters, all deeply resentful of the U.S., its allies, and their policies and power.116
In the spring of 2003, at the beginning of my journey for this book, I sat in the Roman Forum and reflected on America’s military triumph in Iraq. At the time, the U.S. vice president, secretary of defense, and their advisers were supremely confident that America could achieve its military and political interests in both the country and region. This confidence seemed justified: after all, the American victory over conventional Iraqi forces had been swift and utterly decisive. But the guerrilla war that followed has proved bloody and intractable, and America has gradually learned a rude lesson in the limits of modern military power.117
The lesson has far broader implications. It’s one bit of anomalous data that, together with many others, contradicts the explanation offered by conservative elites, especially in the United States, of how things are supposed to work in our world. The assumptions that energy will be endlessly abundant, that economic growth can continue forever, and that American military dominance is unchallengeable are essential parts of today’s armillary sphere—that smoothly functioning machine of cycles within cycles, of intermeshed bands, that gives us an explanation of our world’s order. Yet despite the miracles of the market, energy constraints are worsening. Global warming fundamentally challenges capitalism’s growth imperative. And too many people in the world’s distant corners aren’t awed by America’s military power any more. The armillary sphere’s bands are starting to break. At some point the sphere will shatter, as will its reassuring predictability and order. When this happens, we need to be ready.
