Is Industrial Civilization Doomed?

By Rick Docksai

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

It is the middle of the twenty-first century, and the only countries that can still afford to use fossil fuels are those that are producing them. Half those countries’ populations — and 90% of the populations of the non-fossil-fuel-producing countries — labor at subsistence agriculture. Most of the rest eke out livings in factories converting salvaged materials with hand tools. Public health has collapsed, literacy rates are in steady freefall, and poverty and hunger are everywhere. Dozens of nations are mired in civil war, and populations are migrating in hordes, some to flee rising sea levels and encroaching droughts.

This is the future that ecologist John Michael Greer anticipates in The Ecotechnic Future. He argues that our industrial civilization is headed for its final fall. It doomed itself by exhausting its natural resources and mistakenly assuming that technology freed human communities from their natural environments’ constraints.

The population boom of the last few centuries, Greer explains, was made possible by massive advances in living standards, economic growth, surpluses of food, and vastly improved public health. All of this, however, was sustained by fossil fuels. Once fossil-fuel reserves peak —as they are expected to do between 2020 and 2030 — production, growth, and the amenities of modern life will gradually halt. Contemporary industrial society will downgrade into a “scarcity society” that manages on minimal energy, after which it will become a “salvage society” that scrapes survival from the refuse of the defunct urban buildings, information networks, and industrial centers. Populations everywhere will shrink. Civic unrest will simmer, and epic migrations will sweep continents. Power will shift from multinational corporations to national governments, which in turn will lose power to local communities. Cultures will disintegrate, the Internet will collapse, and cultural exchanges across nations and continents will be few.

Greer sees hope, however: The industrial age’s end might lead to the rise, centuries from now, of a new “ecotechnic” society that supports complex technology and sustainable relations with the rest of the biosphere.

No one knows for sure what this ecotechnic society will look like, he explains. Through diversity and experimentation with many piecemeal solutions — not grandiose, radical agendas — we will gradually construct it. It will help if we embrace sustainability and wise lifestyle changes now, not later; then the decline will be less drastic, and the ecotechnic world’s arrival much sooner.

Every aspect of our daily lives must manage on much less energy, Greer says. We will need to implement massive changes in eating habits, land use, food distribution, and waste management. Homes will have to transition to compactness, energy efficiency, and production of their own electricity and food. Economies will have to rely more on human labor and domestic production. In all, we will need to recognize our role as one species among many, subject to the same natural laws and ecological patterns.

This book is as realistic a portrayal of the end of civilization as one is likely to find. It is a worthwhile read for all who think about the far future.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.