The Long Emergency – A Review

The Long Emergency – A Review

By Alan Danesh

THE LONG EMERGENCY

By James Kunstler

Atlantic Monthly Press

Copyright © 2005 by James Howard Kunstler

“The most significant characteristic of modem civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.” – William James

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Preface: This book is even more relevant today than the time it was published. Much of the converging crises the author writes about are now confronting humanity – climate change, forest fires, water shortage, wars and social conflicts, and the ineffectual role of political systems, especially in Western democracies, in dealing with the emerging crises. The author writes in detail about the discovery of oil and the steady reliance of our civilization on cheap fossil fuels.

Kunstler’s book parallels Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age, first published in Britain in 1974, where the author, one of Europe’s foremost computer and electronic systems authorities, shows how all major technological systems on which we depend – electricity, water supply, communications and transport – will collapse in the near future due to their complexity and overpopulation, and mankind will be forced to live a primitive life.

In this review we focus on the warnings offered by James Kunstler about the future scarcities and the drastic life changes the looming crises will bring about in the shape of the present civilization and the lives of all who live within it.  A D  

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“Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that ‘people cannot stand too much reality.’ What you’re about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which time and events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.” (Source: The Long Emergency by James Kunstler, p. 1)

“If I hope for anything in this book, it is that the American public will wake up from its sleepwalk and act to defend the project of civilization. Even in the face of epochal discontinuity, there is a lot we can do to assure the refashioning of daily life around authentic local communities based on balanced local economies, purposeful activity, and a culture of ideas consistent with reality. It is imperative for citizens to be able to imagine a hopeful future, especially in times of maximum stress and change. I will spell out these strategies later in this book.” (Source: Ibid. p. 2)

“The decline of fossil fuels is certain to ignite chronic strife between nations contesting the remaining supplies. These resource wars have already begun. There will be more of them. They are very likely to grind on and on for decades. They will only aggravate a situation that, in and of itself, could bring down civilizations. The extent of suffering in our country will certainly depend on how tenaciously we attempt to cling to obsolete habits, customs, and assumptions – for instance, how fiercely Americans decide to fight to maintain suburban lifestyles that simply cannot be rationalized any longer.” (Source: Ibid. p. 3)

“It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly about when the industrial adventure began to gain traction. It has been inferred from this that a billion people is about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 5-6)

“Malthus (1766-1834), an English country clergyman educated at Cambridge, has been the whipping boy of idealists and techno-optimists for two hundred years. His famous essay proposed that human population, if unconstrained, would grow exponentially while food supplies grew only arithmetically and that therefore population growth faced strict and inevitable natural limits. Most commentators, however, took the math at face value and overlooked the part about constraints. These “checks” on population come in the form of famine, pestilence, war, and ‘moral restraint,’ i.e., the will to postpone marriage or forgo parenthood (from a perhaps antiquated notion that the ability to support a family might enter into anyone’s plans for forming one, or even that society could influence such choices). Malthus’s essay has been mostly misconstrued to mean that the human race was doomed at a certain arbitrary set point, and the pejorative ‘Malthusian’ is attached to any idea that suggests that human ingenuity cannot make accommodation for more human beings to join the party on Spaceship Earth.” (Source: Ibid. p. 6)

“The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, as some seem to believe it was, but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era. The primary enabling mechanism was a world-scaled oil market allocation system able to operate in an extraordinary sustained period of relative world peace. Cheap oil, available everywhere, along with ubiquitous machines for making other machines, neutralized many former comparative advantages, especially of geography, while radically creating new ones -hyper cheap labor, for instance. It no longer mattered if a nation was halfway around the globe, or had no prior experience with manufacturing.” (Source: Ibid. p. 12)

“I will also propose that globalism as we have known it is in the process of ending. Its demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. As markets close, societies will turn increasingly to import replacement for sheer economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and probably by more intensive hand labor as oil and natural gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all of the economic relationships among persons, nations, institutions, and things that we have taken for granted as permanent will be radically changed during the Long Emergency. Life will become intensely and increasingly local.” (Source: Ibid. p. 17)

“I view the period of history we have lived through as a narrative episode in a greater saga of human history. The industrial story has a beginning, middle, and an end. It begins in the mid-eighteenth century with coal and the first steam engines, proceeds to a robust second act climaxing in the years before World War I, and moves toward a third act resolution now that we can anticipate with some precision the depletion of the resources that made the industrial episode possible. As the industrial story ends, the greater saga of mankind will move on into a new episode, the Long Emergency.” (Source: Ibid. p. 20)

“The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that two hundred years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a worldwide power shortage. The prospect will be so grim that some individuals and perhaps even groups (as in nations) may develop all the symptoms of suicidal depression. Self-genocide has certainly been within the means of mankind since the 1950s.” (Source: Ibid. p. 20)

“The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope, that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. I say this as someone who has not followed any kind of lifelong organized religion. But I don’t doubt that the hardships of the future will draw even the most secular spirits into an emergent spiritual practice of some kind. There is an excellent chance that this will go way too far, as Christianity and other belief systems have done at various times, in various ways.” (Source: Ibid. p. 21)

“The looming worldwide crisis over freshwater beats another path to a crisis of food production. ‘We have created a food bubble economy,’ writes ecological ethicist Bill McKibben. ‘Just as we have built our industrial economy on cheap oil, so have we managed to artificially inflate food production by an unsustainable reliance on underground water. The pumping of groundwater has generated tremendous crop yields… but when the water starts to run dry, that free ride is over and farmers will have to return to growing what they can with the water that falls on their regions.’ A reasonable inference is that some of these regions will not just sink quietly into hunger and desperation but that wars will be fought for survival.” (Source: Ibid. p.  164)

“The huge rise in world population and relative remission of global warfare in the decades since 1945 has also seen a tremendous increase in the factory farming of animals both in sheer numbers and scale of operation. This has led to many unhappy consequences, some of them rather arcane. For instance, when hurricanes Floyd and Irene successively struck North Carolina in 1999, the damage they caused was due not to high winds as much as flooding from torrential rains. North Carolina had somewhat recently developed an enormous pig factory farming industry, which was very hard hit by the hurricane-caused floods. As these storms sent local streams over their banks, untold quantities of pig manure and hundreds of thousands of drowned swine carcasses were distributed over the lowlands of eastern Carolina. In a matter of days, the dead swine began to rot.

Groundwater was compromised for months afterward and homeowners who used wells – which were the majority of residents in these rural counties – had to make other arrangements for their water. The situation could have been much worse had the hurricanes struck earlier in the season and been followed by a few days of late summer heat.” (Source: Ibid. p. 173)

“During the years of its brief reign, free-market globalism was regarded as a permanent institution by a broad consensus of leaders from the most august Harvard economists to the most vulgar corporate buccaneers. The news media and their left-right punditry all bought it, too. The idea was that humanity had arrived at an advanced level of sociopolitical evolution, a new economy that would eventually deliver heaven on earth, where everyone everywhere would be rich. The key word was ‘eventually.'” (Source: Ibid. p. 185)

“Globalism pretended to promise the same nirvana as communism had failed to deliver in its time, and came into full flower just as communism lost its legitimacy. Globalism also had the same tendency to impoverish and enslave huge populations while enriching the elite who managed its operations. The American people were sold on it, even while it destroyed their towns, their landscapes, and their vocations. What a shock, then, to find out that the so-called global economy was just a set of transient economic relations made possible by two historically peculiar circumstances: twenty-odd years of relative international peace and reliable supplies of cheap oil.” (Source: Ibid. p. 186)

Who Needs The Future?

“Globalism was primarily a way of privatizing the profits of business activity while socializing the costs. This was achieved by discreetly discounting the future for the sake of short-term benefits. The process also depended on the substitution of corporate monocultures and virtualities for complex social ecosystems wherever possible, for instance,” (Source: Ibid. p. 186)

The High-Entropy Economy

“Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, says that the change of state in any given amount of energy flows in one direction, from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out; from being ordered to being disordered. A hot cup of coffee cools off sooner or later. Its heat is diffused until the temperature of the coffee stabilizes to equilibrium with the air around it. It never gets spontaneously hotter. A tire goes flat, it never spontaneously reinflates. Windup clocks wind down, they don’t wind up. Time goes in one direction. Entropy explains why logs burn, why iron rusts, why tornadoes happen, and why animals die.” (Source: Ibid. p. 191)

“If we project ‘housing starts’ ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there wouldn’t be a single buildable quarter-acre lot left in the world” (Source: Ibid. p. 193)

The Next Economy

“The salient fact about life in the decades ahead is that it will become increasingly and intensely local and smaller in scale. It will do so steadily and by degrees as the amount of available cheap energy decreases and the global contest for it becomes more intense. The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply. We will be compelled by the circumstances of the Long Emergency to conduct the activities of daily life on a smaller scale, whether we like it or not, and the only intelligent course of action is to prepare for it.” (Source: Ibid. p. 239)

The End Of Suburbia

“The future is now here for a living arrangement that had no future. We spent all our wealth acquired in the twentieth century building an infrastructure of daily life that will not work very long into the twenty-first century. It’s worth repeating that suburbia is best understood as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” (Source: Ibid. p. 248)

“Exhausting resource wars would only accelerate the plummeting standards of living in the United States and speed the loss of legitimacy of the national government. If large numbers of people cannot unload their suburban McHouses and McMansions, then sooner or later many of these buildings will simply be abandoned, or become the slums of the future. I don’t think the transition will be long. Lawlessness may make the continuation of life in the dysfunctional shell of suburbia extra-difficult.” (Source: Ibid. p. 249)

“The Long Emergency will cause unprecedented social and economic dislocation, and the outcome may be a world we would barely recognize. The relatively egalitarian society we knew in the late twentieth century may become drastically more hierarchical as large numbers of desperate people place themselves in the service of those who control land, especially following a period of anarchy. Under such harsh conditions, the weaker individuals will sell their allegiance in return for security. You can’t feed yourself or your family if you are dead.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 286-287)

“The Long Emergency will mark a sharp discontinuity in the circumstances that bred the myth of the perfectibility of man, and all the ideas that grew out of it. Falling standards of living, loss of amenity, shrinking life expectancy, resource scarcity, political disorder, and military strife will present a compelling new set of circumstances that will shatter many of our cherished beliefs.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 301-302)

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Link for downloading a copy of The Long Emergency free of charge for personal reading: https://az.z-library.sk/book/JO7KKeExO3/long-emergency.html