MuseLetter 319 / December 2018

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MuseLetter #319 / December 2018 by Richard Heinberg
Dear Reader,Warm Solstice greetings! This month's MuseLetter is an overview of what we're
about at PCI. It's also a preview of what we'll be working on increasingly in 2019and beyond. A year-end contribution to our work would be greatly appreciated!
Best wishes always,
RichardThe Big Picture
Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic
inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble arejust a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without
leading to a serious failure of our civilization’s ability to maintain itself. Taken
together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kindof historic discontinuity.
Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies(another name for civilizations—that is, societies with cities, writing, money, andfull-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations
all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades
seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure—a general unified theory ofcivilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could
serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science, a branch of
ecology (the study of the relationship between organisms and theirenvironments).

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Why Civilizations Collapse: The Adaptive Cycle
Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass throughfour phases of the adaptive cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, andreorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a
disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released into theenvironment), hardy and adaptable “pioneer” species of plants and small animals
fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.
This reorganization phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation phase, inwhich those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species
start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at theexpense of diversity.
During the conservation phase, resources like nutrients, water, and sunlight are sotaken up by the dominant species that the system as a whole eventually loses its
flexibility to deal with changing conditions. These trends lead to a point where thesystem is susceptible to a crash—a release phase. Many trees die, dispersing theirnutrients, opening the forest canopy to let more light in, and providing habitat for
shrubs and small animals. The cycle starts over.
Civilizations do roughly the same thing. In their early days, complex societies are
populated with generalist pioneers (people who do lots of things reasonably well)living in an environment with abundant resources ready to be exploited. These
people develop tools to enable them to exploit their resources more effectively.
Division of labor and trade with increasingly distant regions also aids in morethorough resource exploitation. Trading and administrative centers, i.e., cities,
appear and grow. Money is increasingly used to facilitate trade, while debt
enables a transfer of consumption from the future to the present. Specialists inviolence, armed with improved weaponry, conquer surrounding peoples.
Complexity (more kinds of tools, more social classes, more specialization) solves
problems and enables accumulation of wealth, leading to a conservation phaseduring which an empire is built and great achievements are made in the arts andsciences. However, as time goes on, the costs of complexity accumulate and theresilience of the society declines. Tax burdens become unbearable, natural2

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resources become depleted, environments become polluted, and conquered
peoples become restless. At its height, each civilization appears stable andinvincible. Yet it is just at this moment of triumph that it is vulnerable to external
enemies and internal discord. Debt can no longer be repaid. Conquered peoples
revolt. A natural disaster breaks open the façade of stability and control.
Collapse often comes swiftly, leaving ruin in its wake. But at least some of thecomponents that made the civilization great (including tools and elements ofpractical knowledge) persist, and the natural environment has opportunity toregenerate and recover, eventually enabling reorganization and a new exploitation
phase—that is, the rise of yet another civilization.
Energy Is Everything
Global industrial civilization shows significant signs of being in its conservation
phase. Our accomplishments are mind-boggling, but our systems areoverstretched, and problems (including climate change, inequality, and politicaldysfunction) are accumulating and worsening. However, our civilization is different
from any of its predecessors. Unlike the ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians,
Shang Dynasty Chinese, Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans, we have built a civilizationthat is global in scope. We have invented modes of transportation andcommunication previously unimaginable. Thanks to advances in public health andagriculture, the total human population has grown to many times its size when
Roman armies marched across North Africa, Europe, and Britain. Have weperhaps outgrown the adaptive cycle and escaped natural checks to perpetual
expansion?

In order to answer the question, we must first inquire why modern civilization has
been so successful. The rise of technology, including advances in metallurgy andengineering, certainly played a part. These provided better ways of obtaining andharnessing energy. But it’s the rapid shift in qualities and quantities of energy
available to us that really made the difference.
Previously, people derived their energy from annual plant growth (food andfirewood), and manipulated their environment using human and animal muscle
power. These energy sources were inherently limited. But, starting in the 19 th
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century, new technologies enabled us to access and harness the energy of fossil
fuels. And fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—were able to provide energy inamounts far surpassing previous energy sources.
Energy is everything. All terrestrial ecosystems and all human societies are
essentially machines for using (and dissipating) solar energy that has beencollected and concentrated through photosynthesis. We like to think that money
makes the world go ’round, but it is actually energy that enables us to do
anything at all—from merely getting up in the morning to launching a spacestation. And having lots of energy available cheaply can enable us to do a great
deal.
Fossil fuels represent tens of millions of years’ worth of stored ancient sunlight.
They are energy-dense, portable, and storable sources of power. Accessing themchanged nearly everything about human existence. They were uniquelytransformative in that they enabled higher rates of harvesting and using all otherresources—via tractors, bulldozers, powered mining equipment, chainsaws,
motorized fishing trawlers, and more.
Take just one example. In all previous agrarian civilizations, roughly threequarters of the population had to farm in order to supply a food surplus to
support the other 25 percent—who lived as aristocrats, traders, soldiers, artisans,and so on. Fossil fuels enabled the industrialization and automation of agriculture,
as well as longer-distance distribution chains.

Harvesting corn by hand (left) versus harvesting by machine (right). Image
sources: The Harvest Cradle by John Linnell, Public Domain (left). Deer Harvesterby Wesley Hetrick, Creative Commons Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic License(right).
Today only one or two percent of the U.S. population need to farm full-time inorder to supply everyone else with food. The industrialization of food systems has
freed up nearly all of the former peasant class to move to cities and take up jobs
in manufacturing, marketing, finance, advertising, management, sales, and so on.
Thus urbanization and the dramatic expansion of the middle class during the 20 th
century were almost entirely attributable to fossil fuels.
But fossil fuels have been a bargain with the devil: these are depleting, nonrenewable resources, and burning them produces carbon dioxide and othergreenhouse gases, changing the climate and the chemistry of the world’s oceans.
These are not small problems. Climate change by itself is far and away the mostserious pollution dilemma any human society has ever faced, and could lead tocrashing ecosystems, failing food systems, and widespread forced humanmigration.
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Replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources is possible in principle, but doing
so fully would require massive investment, not just for building solar panels, windturbines, or nuclear reactors (there are some other serious problems with thislatter option), but also for the retooling of manufacturing, transportation,buildings, and food systems to run on electricity instead of solid, liquid, or
gaseous fuels. An energy transition is needed, but it’s not happening at evennearly the pace that would be required in order to forestall catastrophic climatechange or to prevent economic decline resulting from the depletion of the world’s
highest quality oil, coal, and gas resources. Industrial society’s failure to make thisenergy transition is no doubt due not just to well-funded opposition by the fossil
fuel industry, but also to the enormous technical challenge posed, and to thefailure of policy makers to champion and implement the carbon taxes andalternative energy subsidies that would be needed.
And so we accelerate toward ecological and economic ruin.
Why It’s So Hard to See that We’re Headed for the Biggest Crash Ever
This is fairly typical of what happens toward the end of the conservation phase of
every civilization’s adaptive cycle. Each problem that arises, taken by itself, isusually solvable—at least in principle. But, as problems accumulate, leaders who
are accustomed to (and benefit from) the status quo grow increasingly reluctant
to undertake the changes to systems and procedures that would be required inorder to address worrisome trends. And as those trends are ignored, the level ofeffort and discomfort needed to reverse them soars. Once solving problems
requires too much perceived sacrifice, the only realistic ways to deal with them
are to deny their existence or to blame others for them. Blame has theadvantages of enabling leaders to look as though they’re actually doing
something, and of winning loyalty from their followers. But it does nothing toactually stave off snowballing crises.
It’s easy enough to see how elites could lose touch with reality and miss signals ofimpending collapse. But why would everyone else follow suit? Recent discoveriesin neuroscience help explain why it’s hard for most of us to grasp that we’re on anunsustainable path.
We humans have an understandable innate tendency, when making decisions, togive more weight to present threats and opportunities than to future ones. This iscalled discounting the future—and it makes it hard to sacrifice now to overcome
an enormous future risk such as climate change. The immediate reward ofvacationing in another country, for example, is likely to overwhelm our concern
about the greenhouse gas footprint of our airline flight. Multiply that futurediscounting tendency in one instance by the billions of individual decisions withclimate repercussions and you can see why it’s difficult to actually reduce our total
greenhouse gas emissions.
We humans are also wired to respond to novelty—to notice anything in ourenvironment that is out of place or unexpected and that might signal a potential
threat or reward. Most types of reward increase the level of the neurotransmitter
dopamine within the brain. Experiments have found that if an animal’s dopamine
receptor genes are removed, it explores less and takes fewer risks—and withoutsome exploration and risk taking, individuals have reduced chances of survival.
But the human brain’s dopamine reward system, which evolved to serve thispractical function, can be hijacked by addictive substances and behaviors. This isespecially problematic in a culture full of novel stimuli specifically designed to
attract our interest—such as the hundreds of advertising messages the average

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child sees each day. We have become addicted to stimuli that our culture has
multiplied and refined specifically for the purpose of grabbing our attention (forfun and profit) to such a degree that we barely notice long-term trends that areas threatening as a charging rhino.

The power holders in society incentivize smart people below them in rank andwealth to normalize the unsustainable, deny impending consequences, anddistract one and all from worsening contradictions. Economists who claim that
economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet win Nobel Prizes.
Politicians who argue that climate change is a hoax attract big campaign
contributions. Pundits and entrepreneurs advance along their career paths byasserting that society can grow its way out of climate change and resource
depletion traps through “decoupling” (service economies, it is claimed, can expand
in perpetuity without requiring additional energy or physical resources).
Technology mavens win fame and glory by informing us that artificial intelligence,
3D printing, or Blockchain will usher in the “singularity,” at which point no one will
have to work and all human needs and desires can be satisfied by selfreproducing machines.
Denial comes in shades, some of them quite benign. Many thoughtful andinformed people acknowledge the threats of climate change, species extinctions,soil depletion, and so on, and insist that we can overcome these threats if we justtry harder. They are often on the right track when they propose changes. Elect
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different, more responsible politicians. Donate to environmental nonprofit
organizations. Drive an electric car. Put solar panels on our roofs. Start solar coops or regional non-profit utility companies that aim to source all electricity fromrenewable sources. Eat organic food. Shop at local farmers markets. These are all
actions that move society in the right direction (that is, away from the brink offailure)—but in small increments. Perhaps people can be motivated to undertakesuch efforts through the belief that a smooth transition and a happy future arepossible, and that renewable energy will create plentiful jobs and lead to aperpetually growing green economy. There is no point in discouraging such beliefs
and their related actions; quite the contrary: they should, if anything, be
encouraged. Such practical efforts, however motivated or rationalized, could help
moderate collapse, even if they can’t prevent it (a point we’ll return to below). But
an element of denial persists nonetheless—denial, that is, of the reality that theoverall trajectory of modern industrial society is beyond our control, and that it
leads inexorably toward overshoot and collapse.
What to Do?
All of the above may help us better understand why the world seems to berunning off the rails. But the implications are horrific. If all this is true, then we
now face more-or-less inevitable economic, social, political, and ecologicalcalamity. And since industrial civilization is now global, and human populationlevels are multiples higher than in any previous century, this calamity could occur
on a scale never seen before. Although no one can possibly predict at this point
just how complete and awful collapse might actually be, even human extinction isconceivable (though no one can say with any confidence that it is likely, muchless inevitable).
This is more than a fragile human psyche can bear. One’s own mortality is hardenough to contemplate. A school of psychology (“terror management theory”)
proposes that many of our cultural institutions and practices (religion, values ofnational identity) exist at least in part to help us deal with the intolerable
knowledge of our inevitable personal demise. How much harder must it be toacknowledge signs of the imminent passing of one’s entire way of life, and theextreme disruption of familiar ecosystems? It is therefore no wonder that so manyof us opt for denial and distraction.
There’s no question that collapse is a scary word. When we hear it, we tend to
think immediately of images from movies like Mad Max and The Road. We assume
collapse means a sudden and complete dissolution of everything meaningful. Ourreasoning shuts down. But this is just when we need it most.
In reality, there are degrees of collapse, and history shows that the process has
usually taken decades and sometimes centuries to unfold, often in stair-steps
punctuated by periods of partial recovery. Further, it may be possible to intervenein collapse to improve outcomes—for ourselves, our communities, our species,
and thousands of other species. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, medieval
Irish monks may have “saved civilization” by memorizing and transcribing ancient
texts. Could we, with planning and motivation, do as much and more?

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”Desolation” by Thomas Cole (1836), the fourth of a five-part series called The
Course of Empire. Public Domain.
Many of the things we could do toward this end are already being done in order
to avert climate change and other converging crises. Again, people who
voluntarily reduce energy usage, eat locally grown organic food, make the effort
to get to know their neighbors, get off the consumer treadmill, reduce their debt,
help protect local biodiversity by planting species that feed or shelter native
pollinators, use biochar in their gardens, support political candidates who prioritize
addressing the sustainability crisis, and contribute to environmental, population,and human rights organizations are all helping moderate the impending collapse
and ensure that there will be more survivors. We could do more. Acting together,
we could start to re-green the planet; begin to incorporate captured carbon not
only in soils, but in nearly everything we make, including concrete, paper, andplastics; and design a new economic system based on mutual aid rather thancompetition, debt, and perpetual growth. All of these efforts make sense with orwithout the knowledge that civilization is nearing its sell-by date. How we describe
the goals of these efforts—whether as ways of improving people’s lives, as ways
to save the planet, as fulfilling the evolutionary potential of our species, as
contributing to a general spiritual awakening, or as ways of moderating aninevitable civilizational crash—is relatively unimportant.
However, the Big Picture (an understanding of the adaptive cycle, the role ofenergy, and our overshoot predicament) adds both a sense of urgency, and also a
new set of priorities that are currently being neglected. For example, whencivilizations collapse, culturally significant knowledge is typically lost. It’s probably
inevitable that we will lose a great deal of our shared knowledge during thecoming centuries. Much of this information is trivial anyway (will our distantdescendants really suffer from not having the ability to watch archived episodes ofLet’s Make a Deal or Storage Wars?). Yet people across the globe now use fragile
storage media—computer and server hard drives—to store everything from music
to books to instruction manuals. In the event that the world’s electricity grids
could no longer be maintained, we would miss more than comfort andconvenience; we could lose science, higher mathematics, and history.
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It’s not only the dominant industrial culture that is vulnerable to information loss.
Indigenous cultures that have survived for millennia are being rapidly eroded by
the forces of globalization, resulting in the extinction of region-specific knowledge
that could help future humans live sustainably.
Upon whom does the responsibility fall to curate, safeguard, and reproduce allthis knowledge, if not those who understand its peril?
Act Where You Are: Community Resilience
We at Post Carbon Institute (PCI) have been aware of the Big Picture since thefounding of the organization 15 years ago. We’ve been privileged to meet, anddraw upon the insights of, some of the pioneering ecologists of the 1960s, ’70s,
and ’80s who laid the basis of our current understanding of resilience science,systems thinking, climate change, resource depletion, and much more. And we’ve
strived to convey that understanding to a younger generation of thinkers andactivists.
Throughout this time, we have continually grappled with the question, “What plan
for action makes the most sense in the context of the Big Picture, given ourmeager organizational resources?”
After protracted discussion, we’ve hit upon a four-fold strategy.
Encourage resilience building at the community level.
Resilience is the capacity of a system to encounter disruption and still maintain its
basic structure and functions. When it is in its conservation phase, a system’s
resilience is typically at its lowest level throughout the entire adaptive cycle. If it ispossible at this point to build resilience into the human social system, andecological systems, then the approaching release phase of the cycle may be more
moderate and less intense.
Why undertake resilience building in communities, rather than attempting to do soat the national or international level? It’s because the community is the mostavailable and effective level of scale at which to intervene in human systems.
National action is difficult these days, and not only in the United States:
discussions about nearly everything quickly become politicized, polarized, andcontested. It’s at the community level where we most directly interact with thepeople and institutions that make up our society. It’s where we’re most affectedby the decisions society makes: what jobs are available to us, what infrastructure
is available for our use, and what policies exist that limit or empower us. And
critically, it’s where the majority of us who do not wield major political or
economic power can most directly affect society, as voters, neighbors,
entrepreneurs, volunteers, shoppers, activists, and elected officials.
PCI has supported Transition Initiatives since its inception as one useful, locally
replicable, and adaptable model for community resilience building.
Leave good ideas lying around.
Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, quotes economist Milton Friedman,
who wrote:“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When thatcrisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are
lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop
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alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until
the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”Friedman and other neoliberal economists have used this “shock doctrine” fordecades to undermine regional economies, national governments, and indigenous
cultures in order to further the project of corporate-led economic globalization.
Klein’s point is that the key to taking advantage of crises is having effective
system-changing plans waiting in the wings for the ripe moment. And that’s astrategy that makes sense as society as a whole teeters on the brink of animmensely disruptive shift.
What ideas and skills need to be lying around as industrial civilization crumbles?
One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting
adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists
back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventuallyreach its limits. Another set consists of consensus group decision-making skills.
The list could go on at some length.
Target innovators and early adopters.
Back in the 1960s, Everett Rogers, a professor of communications, contributed thetheory of the Diffusion of Innovations, which describes how, why, and at what
rate new ideas, social innovations, and technology spread throughout culture. The
key to the theory is his identification of different types of individuals in the
population, in terms of how they relate to the development and adoption ofsomething new: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, andlaggards.
Innovators are important, but the success of their efforts depends on diffusion of
the innovation among early adopters, who tend to be few in number but
exceptionally influential in the general population.
At PCI, we have decided to focus our communications on early adopters.
Help people grasp the Big Picture.
Discussions about the vulnerability of civilization to collapse are not for everyone.
Some of us are too psychologically fragile. All of us need a break occasionally, andtime to feel and process the emotions that contemplating the Big Picture
inevitably evokes. But for those able to take in the information and still function,
the Big Picture offers helpful perspective. It confirms what many of us alreadyintuitively know. And it provides a context for strategic action.
Pro-Social, Nonpartisan
I’m frequently asked if I have hope for the future. My usual reply is along theselines: hope is not just an expectation of better times ahead; it is an active
attitude, a determination to achieve the best possible outcome regardless of thechallenges one is facing. PCI Fellow David Orr summed this up best when hewrote, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
However, if that’s as far as the discussion goes, merely redefining “hope” mayseem facile and unsatisfying. The questioner wants and needs reasonable grounds
for believing that an outcome is possible that is something other than horrific.
There is indeed evidence along these lines, and it should not be ignored.
Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature , argues that we10MuseLetter 319 / December 2018humans are becoming more peaceful and cooperative. Now, it could be argued
that any decline in violence during the past few decades can be seen as yet
another indication that civilization is in a conservation phase of the adaptive cycle:
we have attained a balance of power, facilitated by the wealth flowing ultimatelyfrom fossil fuels; perhaps violence is simply being held in abeyance until the dam
breaks and we head into the release phase of the cycle. Nevertheless, evolution isreal, and for humans it occurs more rapidly via culture than through genes. It is
entirely possible, therefore, that we humans are rapidly evolving to live morepeacefully in larger groups.
Earlier I explained how the findings of neuroscience help us understand why somany of us turn to denial and distraction in the face of terrible threats tocivilization’s survival. Neuroscience also offers good news: it teaches us thatcooperative impulses are rooted deep in our evolutionary past, just likecompetitive ones. Self-restraint and empathy for others are partly learned
behaviors, acquired and developed in the same way as our capacity for language.
We inherit both selfishness and the capacity for altruism, but culture generally
nudges us more in the direction of the latter, as parents are traditionallyencouraged to teach their children to share and not to be wasteful or arrogant.
Disaster research informs us that, in the early phases of crisis, people typically
respond with extraordinary degrees of cooperation and self-sacrifice (I witnessed
this in the immediate aftermath of wildfires in my community of Santa Rosa,
California). But if privation persists, they may turn toward blame and competition
for scarce resources.
All of this suggests that the one thing that is most likely to influence how ourcommunities get through the coming meta-crisis is the quality of relationships
among members. A great deal depends on whether we exhibit pro-social attitudes
and responses, while discouraging blame and panic. Those of us working to build
community resilience need to avoid partisan frames and loaded words, and appeal
to shared values. Everyone must understand that we’re all in this together. The
Big Picture can help here, if it aids people in grasping that the collapse ofcivilization is not any one group’s fault. It is only by pulling together that we canhope to salvage and protect what is most intrinsically valuable about our world,and perhaps even improve lives over the long term.
Hard times are in store. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Eachday of relative normalcy that remains is an occasion for thankfulness and an
opportunity for action.

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