Abstract
The last few years have produced a minor flurry of scholarship on ‘petroculture’, the cultural politics of oil, and the cultures of energy more broadly across geography, cultural studies, and environmental studies. The broad conclusion of these investigations is that oil fuels not only our material capacities and freedoms but also our everyday ideologies of accumulation and consumption. Yet while many of these studies attempted to encapsulate the planetary forces wielded by the oil industry, lost in the metanarrative were a range of subcultural and heterodox ideologies of oil which don’t quite fit the villainous and secretive world of oil that has been painted. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture offers a keen study of one of the most interesting of these heterodox subcultures.
Peak Oil describes the rise of the ‘peakist’ subculture in the last 20 years – a subculture of doomsday preppers who almost religiously believe M. King Hubbert’s thesis that we have passed peak oil production and consequently will experience in the near-term a civilizational collapse. Schneider-Mayerson tracks the peakist subculture primarily as it has formed through online communities since the early 2000s, surveying a number of self-described peak oilers as well as their general cultural milieu. While we might assume that peakists are political liberals or leftists (and most see themselves this way), Peak Oil argues that the proper context for this community of largely White men is American libertarian individualism. Although they see themselves as a community, peakists can only conceive of individual political action, reforming their lifestyles in preparation for collapse.
Peak Oil proceeds in five chapters. Chapter 1 describes and defines the ‘peak oil subculture’, making use of Schneider-Mayerson’s rich survey responses to investigate peak oil’s ideological framework, its media and personalities, and the results that peak oil conversion has on personal thought and action. Chapter 2 provides the historical context for this subculture, locating peakists in relation to common frameworks of Cornucopian and Apocalyptic environmental discourses. Chapter 3 examines how the online organization of peakists results in its libertarian individualism. Two influential cultural worlds are examined in chapters 4 and 5: the role of disaster films and White masculinity in providing grist for peakist imagination.
Schneider-Mayerson is somewhat ambivalent in his analysis of the peakist movement. On one hand, he argues that peakists are fundamentally correct in their assessment of the unsustainability of resources. He accepts the premise of resource scarcity that underwrites peakism, a claim some economic geographers might contest given the thick social and cultural construction of scarcity. On the other hand, the peakists (like most environmentalists) have been bound by this intractable thesis to small-scale, individualized action, waiting for the resource scarcity problem to solve itself through conquest, war, famine, or death. Yet the ‘vast majority’ of peakists were ‘well –aware that individualistic responses … would be ineffective’! (p. 79). This seeming contradiction is well documented but perhaps undertheorized in Peak Oil, which sometimes prefers description to conceptual analysis. Given the seeming intractability of oil in our social sphere, one might wonder how the last 5 years have produced a massive surge in collective opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure despite emerging from the same political context.
The intricacy of Peak Oil extends well beyond the outline provided above and makes the book a fascinating window into an American subculture often parodied but rarely studied. With preternatural care, Schneider-Mayerson displays an ability to connect the words of his interlocutors with their broader political and social context that makes the book as a whole an enjoyable reading experience recommended for scholars, undergraduate students, and the public at large.