Descent, pt. 4

This is the fourth entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, and Descent, pt. 3.

Catabolic Collapse

In one sense, The Long Descent is nothing but 250 pages of Greer's commentary on his own 14-page paper written in 2005, How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. In that paper, somewhat obscured in awkward academic prose, Greer presents what I think is the most plausible single explanation for why civilizations cycle through rises and falls. From the paper's abstract:

The collapse of complex human societies remains poorly understood and current theories fail to model important features of historical examples of collapse. Relationships among resources, capital, waste, and production form the basis for an ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital. Societies facing such crises after having depleted essential resources risk catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste. This model allows key features of historical examples of collapse to be accounted for, and suggests parallels between successional processes in nonhuman ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies.

In a nutshell, the theory of catabolic collapse states that civilizations rise when their consumption of resources nets them a positive return on investment and thus allows for greater systemic complexity, and they fall when that consumption nets them a negative return and requires a return to lesser systemic complexity. The Long Descent applies the theory of catabolic collapse to modern industrial civilization.

The Four Horsemen

My previous post briefly describes Greer's idea of “the stories we tell ourselves”. Through most of the remainder of The Long Descent, Greer explains with a tad more specificity what he thinks we should expect in the decades to come owing to our own catabolic collapse, and he advises what we should be doing about it.

As for what Greer expects, he outlines what he calls the “four horsemen” of catabolic collapse: (1) declining energy availability, (2) economic contraction, (3) collapsing public health, and (4) political turmoil. Anyone who has been following the news since 2008 with even the slightest attention towards long-term trends should recognize an eerie familiarness here.

Basically, Greer starts with the first horseman of declining energy availability following directly from peak oil and the apparent lack of adequate energy substitutes. Declining energy availability leads to breakdowns in system complexity and the second horseman, economic contraction. Economic contraction happens while we find ourselves most needing to spend to rebuild and replace existing infrastructures to accommodate the new and old technologies that supersede our current fossil-fuel-based ones, and this leads to a difficult allocation of resources, likely leading to the third horseman, collapsing public health, where even “absolutes” like sewage treatment become as intermittent and non-existent as they are in the Third World today. Amidst all this breakdown, Greer expects the political system to be less functional and less capable of solving real problems than it is today. This fourth and final horseman, political turmoil, will feed into the other three, as they all feed into each other, in a vicious circle until our consumption level is brought back into balance with what our resource base can sustain.

What to do? What to do?

Is it time to panic? The Long Descent is titularly a user's guide, and Greer has a few suggestions for what we as individuals should be doing about this. On the whole, his advice is rather modest. We face a predicament, not a problem, and there are no silver bullets. We shouldn't expect the political system or any other top-down power structure to solve the problem. On the other hand, we shouldn't “[hole] up with guns and food in a fortified enclave”. Rather, we should be enacting practical changes in our own personal lives that make our lives more sustainable in a world increasingly pressured by those four aforementioned horsemen. Mainly, this reduces to simplifying our lives and equipping ourselves with skills and knowledge that will be useful during the long descent ahead.

None of the four horsemen … are new to human experience. Our great-grandparents knew them well, and today they are familiar to the vast majority of our fellow human beings. Only the inhabitants of the world's industrialized societies have had the opportunity to forget about them, and then only during the second half of the 20th century. Before then, most people knew how to deal with them, and most of the strategies that were developed and used in the past will still be viable far into the future. The one hitch is that we have to be ready to put them into practice. Since governments have by and large dropped the ball completely, it's up to individuals, families, groups, and local communities to get ready for the future ahead of us. Each of the four horsemen requires a different response, and so different preparations will be needed for each.

Plan to cut your energy use “by half, to start with, and be ready to cut it further as needed.” Choose a viable profession whereby you produce a necessary good or service. “Take charge of your own health”. Become an active participant within your community. Basically, Greer offers as mitigation for each horseman suggestions and strategies that are straightforward and logical extensions of his core argument. These suggestions and strategies are all things we can enact in our own lives now, without waiting for some organized power or institution to give us the okay and show us the way. But though simple and practical, these suggestions and strategies also happen to be things most of us would rather not do, given the choice.

There's more to The Long Descent than I can explain in a few blog posts, but that wraps up my summarization on the book. Next week, I'll editorialize and give my thoughts on it, its predictions and its advice.