Abstract
James Howard Kunstler wrote an extremely important book in 2005 titled, The Long Emergency. It traced what the world will be like after peak oil occurs. Post–peak oil is the time when oil production will decline and the price of a barrel of crude oil will skyrocket because all the easy oil targets (i.e., the low-hanging fruit) will have been exhausted. The second half of the world’s crude oil supplies (e.g., heavy crude, tar sands oil, deep ocean wells) will cost much, much more to extract and refine. Kunstler’s analysis is unrelentingly pessimistic, and I believe that too few of us have read the entire book because it paints so stark and frightening a picture of humanity’s prospects. Orwell’s dystopic future in 1984 is a “walk in the park” next to Kunstler’s vision of life 30 or 40 years later.
Criticisms of The Long Emergency usually emphasize how much Kunstler underestimates some of the alternatives to obtaining energy from oil. For example, many people believe that solar power has far more to contribute to a future solution to our energy problems than Kunstler allows. Similarly, it is already clear that Kunstler badly underestimates the quantities of natural gas available in the United States because he failed to anticipate the amount of gas locked in coal shale seams that now can be released by horizontal drilling techniques. Even with these caveats, however, our energy for the future looks bleak, and so the thrust of Kunstler’s analysis remains untouched. Into this conversation slips Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (2007).
From the 1960s onward, we have witnessed a parade of books warning of the dangers brought about by the geometric growth in the human population (e.g., The Population Bomb, The Population Explosion, etc.). In various ways, these books explained that if the human species did not voluntarily limit its numbers, then the world would control our numbers for us in the most horrifying ways (i.e., wars, famines, plagues, etc.). I first became aware of Bill McKibben (1998) when I read his book, Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families. The author simply pointed out that there is enormous prejudice (most of it unjustified) against families with only one child. Because he raised only one child, and the experience was good for all three family members, he figured an apologia for single-child families was in order. Reading Maybe One was an absolutely delightful experience. Discussions of population in my environmental psychology class immediately went from knock-down, drag-out battles to pleasant discussions of the relationship between family size and children’s welfare, society’s biases and ones freedom to sidestep them, and how population relates to the future of humans on this planet. My class was in educational heaven until Maybe One went out of print. Now the class discussions have returned to a stroll through the circles of Dante’s Hell on issues of global overpopulation, family size, and the like.
I was still licking my wounds from reading The Long Emergency when I picked up Deep Economy. Half way through it, I realized (to my delight) that I was being McKibbenized once again. While Kunstler hammered away at the losses and pain that a post–peak oil world will endure, McKibben calmly notes that such changes will soon be on us. He then demonstrates concretely how he is preparing himself to live in the brave new world—a world that in many ways will resemble human life as lived one or two centuries ago.
All of us will spend much more time producing our own food. That is because our current food system is totally dependent on cheap oil. (See also the movie Food, Inc.) From ploughing and planting to packaging and transporting, the approaches to the production and transport of food by Archer, Daniels Inc., Cargil, Monsanto, etc. cannot survive in a post–peak oil world. Whatever can be grown in your immediate vicinity will constitute the bulk of your diet. As unappealing as that prospect sounds, McKibbin puts on a brave face as he describes the winter fare of food that is grown in Vermont. More than just food, the author probes other vital topics (e.g., communities, retailing, housing, etc.) for a world with far less energy produced by burning hydrocarbons. But for my money, his most devastating critique is of our Western approach to economics.
Since McKibbin uses references sparingly, it is difficult to know the intellectual lineage of his critique of contemporary economic theory. His thoughts reminded me of E. F. Schumacher’s (1973) book Small is Beautiful. Many aspects of Western thought were confronted by Schumacher, but his prime target was “bigness” or “large size.” Large entities inevitably create problems, which simply do not exist in smaller units—and that is why small is beautiful. McKibben also loves small things: small communities are an antidote for the problems of a post–peak oil world; maybe a family with only one child is a superior situation to a family impoverished by a dozen children; and finally wise indeed is a person who truly knows when enough of a good thing is enough—when more only creates problems.
To my way of thinking, Schumacher’s best chapter in Small is Beautiful is titled, “Buddhist Economics.” In that essay, Schumacher approaches the central assumption of Western economics; maximization of various sorts (e.g., of profits, efficiency, marginal utilities, etc.). Conversely, human welfare is the supreme value to a Buddhist. Thus, Schumacher urged Western economists to consider worshiping at a different totem (i.e., human welfare) than its present assumed God (i.e., maximization). Clearly, contemporary economics has not listened to Schumacher.
Now, almost 40 years later, McKibben is issuing a similar challenge to Western economics. (Keep in mind that you are being McKibbenized: what follows is a critique of philosophical presuppositions, not just a folksy tale.)
For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. The idea that individuals, pursuing their own individual interests in a market society, make one another richer and the idea that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth has indisputably produced More. It has built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading this book. It is no wonder and no accident that they dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.
But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It’s More or Better. (p. 1)
I believe that the Newton of economics is out there somewhere. She or he is probably below 40 years old, but in time she or he will create a new religion for economists—one where maximization is only one of a pantheon of lesser gods. Economics, Newton has a long row to hoe, and if the longest journey begins with just one step, then I would choose the quote above of McKibben as my starting point.
I look forward to a postmaximization economics for I fear it will be the only economics of value in a post–peak oil world. You and I helped to create our present world: where too many people burn too many hydrocarbons to stimulate too much consumption, which produces too much pollution. We created this nightmare world in a misguided effort to fill the hole that lies at the heart of all human nature. There must be a better way to fill that hole that now plagues all of us. Perhaps that is what psychology and ecopsychology ought to be about—we should not be ruining our only world as we struggle to find meaning in our lives.