The Hundredth Post

I started writing this blog a couple of years ago, on a rainy fall afternoon. At the time, the Gulf Oil Spill was still in and out of the headlines, with the well recently having been stopped up at least. There was still quite a lot of news coverage about the effects of the spill, who was responsible, what the lasting environmental damage was, and so on. As of today, the full impact of the spill is not known, but things like increases in the death rates of large marine mammals, mutations are widespread in smaller marine animals, and much of the information related to the environmental impact is still suppressed due to an "ongoing criminal investigation," so the full extent of damage may not be public for a long time, if ever.

Back in October of 2010, the event was still so fresh that these issues were not yet identified on any scale, but it was clear that we were dealing with something unprecedented related to the consequences of our reliance on cheap energy. If an oil well could blow and poison a massive body of water, what other consequences could the addiction to energy produce? Fukushima was still months off, but it seemed clear that the consequences had been identified, at least on some level. Remember, also, that this was two years into the global economic downturn, brought on by an addiction to spending and overconsumption, the need for MORE. In June of 2012, the gulf is still reeling from what was released into it, then dumped into it, Fukushima is still smoldering, real unemployment in America and elsewhere is around 20%, gas has not fallen back down to affordable levels, the stock market is increasingly looking like a minefield, pick something.

In the almost four years since October 2008, the world has not shown signs of recovery. The green shoots dry up and blow away as soon as they emerge, in spite of what optimists says, and another "downturn" is around the corner. These things are not "stumbles" on the road to a brave new epoch, but signs that we have exceeded our grasp as a civilization, both in terms of using them, and understanding them. Humanity has become the equivalent of a child who finds the door of the candy store unlocked and decides to go in and have "just one piece." With half the store eaten up, and a bellyache like no other, it's come time to decide how to proceed.

Is there a plan for dealing with the world, and a way forward to a more sane and sustainable civilization? Clearly, political "leadership" has become playing to the polls and trying to catch up with what people want to hear -- the expression "The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable" tells you all you need to hear about the attitude toward "American Exceptionalism." It's a grand, fine-sounding "line in the sand" type of expression, but falls short of physical reality.

The human imagination is both our greatest friend and worst foe. We can imagine wonderful things like travel to other stars, thinking computers, and worlds of fantasy. In the past, we've been able to implement some of these dreams, too, such as the airplane, the telephone, and so on. However, it's also our worst enemy in many ways. We become so focused on the "possible," that we ignore the "practical" and the "realistic."

Right now, we still have the ability, as a civilization, to begin examining our models and deciding what the best course to take is. There is still enough in the way of resources, wealth, and energy to begin promoting alternative ways of doing things. Rail, an end to widespread automobile use, turning grass into gardens, an end to consumerism and overspending. It's not a question of whether or not we need to make adjustments, but whether or not we will choose them or be forced into them. In this, civilization is not unlike a boat at sea with a storm coming -- we can choose our own harbor while there's still time, or get smashed against the rocks from forces we cannot control.

Unfortunately, like political leaders who adopt a "No Compromise" position on the consumer-driven lifestyle on campaign stumps, our society, from businesses, civic organizations, institutions of higher learning, religious organizations, down to individuals has also preferred to ignore reality and continue doing things as they have. After all, there is no such thing as Peak Oil, our oil-industry connected scientists tell us. Our bankers say there is no problem with the economy and not to worry. Our priests and preachers tell us "God will provide." All is well, don't worry.

For people who have taken the time to study the issue, and listen to the voices crying in the desert in the past such as Thomas Malthus and M. King Hubbert, who have examined the science and numbers, and even lies and distortions, for themselves, the picture is sobering, if not bleak. We have overshot our planet's carrying capacity for people by a factor of thirty or more, based on the use of fossil fuels to create massive short-term surpluses of artificial labor and resource utilization.

Think about that for a moment, and take a look around you. Count out thirty people. Pick one of them. The earth only has enough capacity for that one person, without the application of cheap energy to act as a surrogate "slave." This is less than the population of America, much less the world. It is a sobering exercise, but one we have ignored to the peril of our species and human civilization.

We are still collectively toward the cliff, but individually, we have begun to wake up, here and there. The critical model of mass consumption is not going to be untied and discarded on a mass scale, but we can begin to understand where we are headed and what our seat on that "bus" is going to be. Do we join in with the mass of people who are like bipedal locusts, congratulating themselves on their latest purchase? Or do we take a measured approach to life, live with low-impact, and prepare for when the "black swans" take to wing en masse?

The Leibowitz Society has gone through a couple of iterations since I originally defined it. In the beginning, I had looked at it as being a stuctured sort of thing, combining both a running analysis of our descent into a new Dark Age, with efforts to collect and store as much relevant knowledge as possible. Allied with these goals was the idea of trying to raise some level of awareness as to where we are, and what can be done about it, if anything, including defining how society may reorganize itself and what we can do as responsible people to make things better locally, even as they get worse globally.

Discussing the events leading to the Dark Age quickly moved the other considerations to the back burner, and I suppose it's a natural reaction. When Rome fell, there was a Dark Age on three continents (the Byzantine Empire survived, of course, but often felt "under siege" through most of its existence), as the mechanisms which had built daily life up to a high level fell apart. Now, America is stumbling and the coming Dark Age, brought on by resource scarcity, environmental failure, and economic mismanagement, is going to cover the entire globe. It will unfortunately be a collapse of unprecedented proportions, where the conditions on the other side of the globe will be no difference from what they are down the weed-dotted and decaying street. Like a train wreck, we can't look away from this.

However, the study of our near future is at some point going to become the study of our past, and it's the far future which will take precedence. As responsible people, we understand where the world is headed. We also know that this understanding doesn't lead to a comfortable complacency. We will all likely only live to see the early manifestations of the new Dark Age -- wars, riots, starvation, looting -- but our children and grandchildren will be there to see the dust settle and try to make sense of it all. They will have questions and will need answers. How did they get to where they're at? How to go forward? And what to go forward with?

One of the most sobering ancedotes I have ever read concerned a village in the south of France, not long after Rome collapsed. It had been an agricultural area, and it doesn't take much to imagine how many people it supported. Within a generation or two, human remains showed signs of starvation or even death by starvation, as the knowledge of high-intensity farming was quickly forgotten. And, this was just one village in one area. How many places like this existed, but were not known about in remains of Rome? This was not in a time and place where the science of agriculture depended on high technology to make it work, but on remembering procedures that had been discovered and modified over several generations. Even if we take slave labor out of the picture, figure that people would shift priority to food production away from whatever other pursuits they had.

If you take modern America, where even fewer people are connected to food production -- maybe three percent at most -- and most of them are involved in the "high energy input" tye of farming, are we going to fare much better when the cash runs out and the cupboard is bare? And what about other things, like medicine, governing ourselves, maintaining our structures, and so on?

We can save books on things that interest us, and it's a start, but we also need to think in broader terms. If we accept that information is DNA, then knowledge is an organism built from it. Do we really know what the books mean? And how to use them? Are we missing areas of knowledge that would be vital? Would we have any way to pass this on to another person or people? Or form a community of learning?

This was the original intention of the Leibowitz Society and where I want it to go toward again. This doesn't mean we can't talk about the path we're headed down, only that we need to think clearly about what we do once we get there. And it's likely that none of us will survive to see the "hard landing" when it finally happens. Rome's collapse took several generations. We started ours in 2008 and have not managed to reverse course, although we limp along, meaning our children or grandchildren will be the ones to see "lights out," more likely.

I don't see all this as being pessimistic, no more than someone who looks up at a darkening sky and says it's going to rain is being a pessimist. We're gifted with reason and foresight and would be fools not to use them. We can make a difference in our futures, and the futures of people yet to come, by taking steps now to preserve thousands of years of wisdom and knowledge, and having a plan to pass it on. The problems we face now are not going to go away, but only get worse, and it's up to us to light the future.