Afternoon musings, on constructing an optimistic scenario for the human future

Earth, viewed from Apollo 8 spacecraft in orbit of the moon, December 24, 1968

When thinking about the collective future of the human race, you have to envision the planet Earth as one big computer simulation. In your mind's eye, picture a giant blue sphere populated by seven trillion bustling little actors called "humans." Each one of them sucks energy and raw materials from the huge material infrastructure smothering the blue sphere. That infrastructure, in turn, extracts extra-mondo-stupendously-gigantic flows of energy and raw materials from the sphere. The bustling bee-hive of humanity strives desperately to maintain the planet-smothering engine of production. They know they can't live as they now do without it, so they maintain it, even though it poisons and destroys ecosystems with its waste, super-heats the climate with more waste, and strips the spherical planetary subsurface of finite minerals and metals.

All of this normally happens beyond our everyday perception, but if you picture it all as one big game, you understand how it works. It's one planet-sized machine consuming what it needs to keep going. As long as it does keep going, we continue to live the way we do now.

Simulation of planetary human infrastructure, seen from Earth orbit at night

But it can't keep running. It simply can't. When you run the simulation forward in time, to the year 2100 and even further out, far into the new millennium we've just entered on the Christian calendar, you come up with only a single outcome.

Overshoot.

While details of the scenario may vary from one play of the game to the next, the result is always the same: infinitely growing consumption outstrips a finite stock of resources. The humans run out of stuff they need to keep the planetary infrastructure running properly. Without it, the greater part of the human population dies, circa 2050-2200. Population stabilizes at a much lower level by the twenty third century or so, with much lower technology and living standards. Medieval, by today's standards.

That's what we face if human consumption of materials, emission of wastes, and damage to the climate continues unabated. The resource base and climate will be too heavily damaged to keep the human infrastructure going and human population expanding. There won't be enough food, water, and energy, and so increasingly more humans will die each year than are born. Population crashes, machine stops. Maybe this die off can be delayed a few decades. But it doesn't really matter. On our current path, based on existing social institutions, cultural norms, and economic systems, the die-off can't be stopped.

 The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day: planetary infrastructure failure

Mainstream policy-making and planning, of course, doesn't accept this. Or even think in terms that come remotely close to acknowledging that such an outcome is possible. The people who control the infrastructure today simply assume the planet-sized machinery will keep running. They don't know how to think about the machinery as a finite thing dependent on finite inputs. So they practice what amounts to magical thinking, about specific problems in isolation from each other. Based on the unacknowledged assumption that the inflow of energy and materials necessary for problem-solving will continue, indefinitely.

I have friends and associates who work in mainstream policy settings. Mostly in health care or academia. They write about health care reform or U.S. policy in Afghanistan as if climate change, peak oil, or resource depletion aren't relevant or don't exist. My sense is that my policy wonk buddies are about as anxious to discuss resource limits in a serious way as I am to bother with 9/11 conspiracy theories. Probably for the same reason: because such a viewpoint seems so amazingly weird (and likely to be expressed in an off-putting way), that taking time and energy to deal with it simply isn't worth the trouble.

Still, I need to find ways to make a hairline fracture in the armor of denial. I'm about to enter a three year professional degree program in environmental law. Which means I'm deliberately injecting myself into a mainstream setting where "out there" views face extremely tough going, to put it mildly. My goal in the next three years, and beyond, will be to express what I really think about the global situation in a way that won't automatically result in eye-rolling dismissal.

I want to communicate the reality of ecological overshoot as something that is (A) inevitable and (B) survivable. We can't stop it, but that doesn't mean we should all just blow our brains out. It means all of our policy paradigms are obsolete, but we can construct new ones. The future we imagined isn't physically possible, but planning is still necessary, hope is not pointless, and the human story is worth following through to whatever awaits. We need a different vision of the world to come after us. One that accepts both ecological reality and the human yearning to make gentle the life of this world.


I think, on better days, that I'm on my way to fashioning a futurescape that works for me. I've been thinking about this stuff for 23 years -- since watching James Hansen testify on climate change to Al Gore's old committee in the United States Senate, on a burning summer day during the drought of 1988. On that day I had intimations of an apocalypse other than the nuclear inferno that haunted my imagination growing up. The world, it seemed, would still end in fire, just not the one delivered by ICBMs. There are many possible ends to the world, but we always imagine only one.

From many endings, one: hypothetical asteroid impact

In any case, the apocalypse is here, not to be denied. Sometimes life is like that. The biopsy comes back and the results are not what you wanted. But there they are. What now?


Here are some of the still disconnected, mostly abstract fragments that float in my head when I try to imagine what will one day emerge from the apocalypse we have made, that will define the remainder of our time in this life.


1) Steady state economics. For the last five hundred years, human institutions dominated by the conquering societies of the West have assumed endless economic growth is not only possible but is the only conceivable basis for a free, humane way of life. We know now, or soon will, that such growth actually isn't possible. A few notable thinkers, like political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and economist Herman Daly, have dared to voice the unthinkable. Once their realization becomes the dominant mode of thought in social power centers, humans will face the task of building totally new economies. We will have to use energy and materials only at the rate nature replenishes them. We'll have to limit our production of machines and gadgets, restricted by the amount of accessible raw materials left in the ground, by our ability to keep existing devices repaired, and by the salvaging of parts from the former industrial societies. No more endlessly increasing production, from ever more numerous factories, fed by expanding transportation nets and by mining operations devouring ever greater mountains of ore from the Earth. If you're lucky enough to have an electric stove in your dwelling in the twenty second century, you'll have to keep it running for decades, because there won't be a new one rolling off the assembly line. Ever.

2) Post-capitalist political economy. The breaking of supernaturally-based authoritarianism as the dominant organizing principle of human societies in the centuries after 1500 was one of the most important developments in the 200,000 year history of our species. Among our intellectual achievements, this monumental break with the past ranks alongside the development of literacy, music, and mathematics. But we flatter ourselves that the replacement of theocratic monarchy with capitalist parliamentary systems represents the end of social evolution. It doesn't. Capitalist parliamentary systems centralize control of resources -- and therefore politics -- in a tiny, elite few. This few lives in luxury, while everybody else lives in shit. One guy in a corporate headquarters can destroy an entire town by deciding to move a factory overseas; the town turns into a poverty-ridden hell hole while the peasants overseas turn into industrialized slaves. The town and the overseas slaves never got to vote on their own destruction. So much for "democracy." But the destruction of capitalism's ecological foundation will at least give our species the chance to develop a new, more humane way of distributing resources and making economic decisions. In a society that accepts resources as finite, ethics will require what's available to be distributed equitably, much as democratic political theory demands the equitable distribution of political power. There is a word for democratic decision-making applied to achieve equitable distribution of both resources and political power. That word is "socialism."

3) Spiritual pluralism. Societies based on equitable distribution of limited resources will need to be buttressed by compatible belief systems about the ultimate nature of reality -- i.e., by religion. Over the last two thousand years, the most expansionist human societies have been dominated by two monotheistic religions: Christianity and Islam. Both of these religions, in their dominant forms, claim that all other visions of ultimate reality are false. It is possible, however unlikely, that the ecological devastation of expansionist societies will discourage imperialistic religions. That result could transform Christianity and Islam, but also nurture the less missionary traditions of other cultures, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, animism and more. Or, maybe we'll see a diverse patchwork of new and old faiths, more attuned to the reality of limits, to economies and societies centered on preservation rather than expansion.


4) Large-scale non-carbon electricity. Civilization as we know it depends on electricity. Not oil or coal or natural gas but the primal stuff that zapped Ben Franklin's kite. If we can find a way to generate decent amounts of it, we can still have a future not made purely of stone knives and bear skins. We may not have endless energy for infinite economic growth, but we could still fashion a decent, finite flow of electricity for a few essential purposes. The key is to generate electricity from a renewable source with abundant energy yield, reasonable maintenance costs, zero carbon emissions and manageable waste streams. Wind, hydro, and solar sources get the most attention, but we will need others. One promising candidate, according to Thomas Homer Dixon, is deep geothermal electric power. This technology involves drilling miles into the Earth's surface and injecting water into the depths, where the natural heat of the Earth's crust generates enormous amounts of steam for turning electrical turbines on the surface. The technology is enormously expensive and fragile today, but it exists, and might be further developed, in the right circumstances. We will need to investigate such possibilities, and deploy them consistent with available resources, in the years ahead.

5) Organic, locally distributed farming. Civilization is based also on agriculture -- artificially cultivated food supplies able to sustain a population living primarily in cities. Whatever the grandiose claims of certain ecological radicals, human populations will not willingly return to hunter-gather lifestyles. So we will need farms to feed our populations. Today's farms depend on fossil fuels to run the mechanized equipment, fertilize the fields, and control pests. Since fossil fuels are finite in quantity and super-heating the atmosphere, that's the end of that. New agriculture will be needed, quickly and cheaply. Organic farming, based on simple, low-tech methods, is the easiest alternative that can be introduced on a planetary scale. It will be more labor intensive, meaning that future societies -- even with continued widespread use of renewable electricity -- will incorporate food cultivation into everyday life far more pervasively than most people imagine today. Cuba offers a glimpse of this future. When Soviet oil shipments ended in 1989, the country faced starvation. It rapidly converted to organic, low-tech agriculture, on fields not only in the countryside but on city rooftops and vacant lots. I'm willing to grant that genetic engineering and other high tech methods might be in the mix of agricultural techniques, if they don't overtax limited supplies of energy and materials. But in the future, the best solutions will be those that are cheap, easy, local, and renewable. On that basis, organic will trump gen-engineered, every time.

6) The return of muscle power and low-tech simplicity. In the future I imagine, modern technologies like electrical devices  will co-exist with age-old technologies based on manual labor. This will be most obvious in agriculture, where organic, labor-intensive techniques might be supplemented by electrically pumped irrigation water. But every aspect of human life will display the same mix of modern and pre-modern. That will mean technology left over from the age of capitalist industry will exist alongside the technology and methods of muscle and sweat. We will see far greater reliance on devices like bicycles, spinning wheels, and sail boats. Over time, this will lead to a collective feature of human societies: they will have certain high technology practices, but these will be few in number and extent, conserved for the most vital uses. If a town has steady electricity from a deep geothermal power plant, the electricity will be prioritized for essential community uses. For equipment in a hospital, for example. Or operation of essential farming technology, like irrigation pumps.

Future communities will not be able to waste energy by cabling it into thousands of individual dwellings for profligate private use in non-essential devices like washing machines, plasma television sets, and home computers. Laundry will be done by hand, most likely, because that's cheaper and simpler in resource terms -- albeit a pain in the ass by the standards of my own day. Plasma television sets won't exist, not just because scarce electricity is better used for other purposes but because petroleum-based plastics, plus circuits made of rare earth metals, will be extraordinarily rare and hence hyper-expensive. Same goes for the plastics and electronics in home computers. No doubt computers and electronic communication will continue to be useful. But computers and telecommunications will be reserved for essential services -- government, medicine, infrastructure maintenance, and so on. If a private citizen wants to use a computer or communications net, odds are this will have to be done in the post-2100 equivalent of today's public libraries and internet cafes. The internet itself, if it survives, will be dramatically reduced in scale and bandwidth, probably supplemented by good old fashioned radio, telegrams, and snail mail. Television, too, will be rare. Something seen in public squares instead of the living room comfort known only to your great, great, great grand parents.


7) Adaptation to a flooded, storm-ravaged, super-heated planet. The material culture of farming and communication and the rest of everyday life will unfold on a planet completely alien to the one we know today. Earth of the future will have a dramatically higher average temperature and sea level. Thus, the ecologies, agriculture, and settlements of today will be impossible. They will have to pick up and move to areas not blasted by heat, drought, floods, deforestation, and storms. The continental interior of North America, for example, will become too hot and dry after 2050 to sustain vast numbers of human beings. So the humans will have to migrate north, into the thawing Arctic regions of Canada. That future is inevitable, because the warming of the planet is now beyond control. If all fossil fuels vanished today, the warming would continue to be driven by non-human causes: Arctic methane emissions and general carbon cycle breakdowns. That warming, in turn, will drive additional deforestation, albedo loss from ice sheet disappearance, die off of carbon-absorbing ocean life, and smothering of carbon sinks in terrestrial soil and plants. All of this will drive masses of people to migrate inland from the coasts, as cities like New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver face a sea that will rise steadily for tens of thousands of years. The eventual sea level, millennia from now, might stabilize 80 meters higher than today, after the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have melted away. We're stuck with a super-heating, flooded planetary home, so the only thing left to do is plan accordingly, and save what we can.


* * * * *


So. That's all very general and vague. But useful, for me. It hints at a very different future than the one you'll find in, for example, a World Bank forecast. But it doesn't have to be hellish. It will have room for human beings. And, unlike the sort of future envisioned at the World Bank, it's based on what we can reasonably know about the actual conditions future human beings will face.


So what does it mean for those of us alive today? That we have a lot of work to do. And not much time.


Here we go.

Earth, seen from the International Space Station, July 21, 2003

Day 2: There must not be blood. An American city confronts peak oil, July 2015

Duke City Commonwealth.com
Saturday, July 4, 2015
9:15 p.m. MDT

Compiled from staff and volunteer reports.

 

1: Downtown Albuquerque, July 4, 2015

22 people are known dead and at least 200 believed wounded in Albuquerque in the last 24 hours, as protesters engage in running street battles with Albuquerque police and elements of the New Mexico National Guard.Casualty estimates come from sources at Albuquerque area hospitals.

All of the dead and injured reported so far are civilians. State government sources have not released casualty figures among police and National Guard forces. Eyewitnesses claim multiple instances of police or Guard personnel being hit by gunfire from street protesters.

Sympathy street demonstrations have broken out in Santa Fe and Las Cruces, although so far the demonstrations there have been peaceful.

New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez has declared a state of emergency in Albuquerque, effectively placing the city under martial law. By the governor's order, a 24 hour curfew went into effect in Albuquerque at 4:00 p.m. today. Persons other than police, military, or emergency services personnel found to be present outdoors will be fired upon. The Speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, Democrat Raymond Lujan of Grants, has vowed to challenge the governor's emergency declaration in court.

Governor Martinez refused to comment on reports that she has asked U.S. President Mitch Daniels to deploy regular army troops to the state. Pentagon sources have suggested in recent months that ongoing combat operations in Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Venezuela would leave little manpower for suppressing domestic disturbances in the continental United States.

The violence in Albuquerque began yesterday, with a clash between protesters and police at a local supermarket that left five demonstrators dead. The protest was called by community leaders in response to the mounting food crisis in the city.

Street battles in the ensuing 24 hours suggest more than anger toward the police. Signs and slogans among protesters have denounced food shortages and high prices, also accusing local supermarket chains of cronyism in food distribution.

More than a dozen supermarkets were reportedly damaged in today's fighting. The South Valley Albertsen's store where the street battles began yesterday has burned to the ground. Fire department personnel trying to respond at the scene were met with automatic weapons fire from surrounding buildings.  

Gunfire from police during the day's violence was repeatedly met in kind by local residents. Protesters used automatic weapons, Molotov cocktails, and rocks to inflict a so-far unknown number of casualties on police and National Guard forces throughout the city.

 2: New West National Bank, near Coors and Central

One report claimed that an improvised explosive device (IED) destroyed a police patrol car in the South Valley, but the report remains unverified.

A source with an Albuquerque activist organization, speaking only under a guarantee of anonymity, claimed that the violence could soon escalate dramatically. According to this source, meetings of key community members at secret locations spent the day debating a coordinated response to the violence. The meetings apparently failed to reach a consensus.

However, one group favored escalating the so far piecemeal armed attacks on police and Guard units into an all-out armed insurgency. Members of this group include several veterans of the U.S. military, with combat experience in wars spanning the last fourteen years.

One veteran is said to favor massively destructive guerrilla style attacks. These attacks would use car bombs and other techniques faced by American forces in the ongoing global U.S. war to suppress Islamic insurgents and other "assymetric" opposition.

Other activists have reportedly gone so far as proposing an alliance with the city's gangs and drug cartels. 

A larger group, according to the source in Albuquerque's increasingly underground activist community, favors a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Under their proposal, the Archbishop of Santa Fe and other religious leaders would mediate an end to the confrontation. Albuquerque residents would pledge to abandon violence, while state and city authorities would accept formal, face-to-face talks with community leaders to address the ongoing food shortage and economic crisis.

 3: Central Avenue, downtown

The source who described this proposal emphasized the growing desperation of many ordinary citizens. "We've got unemployment over twenty percent. A lot of people are running out of food, and they've got sick family members who can't get care because they got no insurance. And the government is cutting people off from all kinds of help. Medicaid, unemployment, welfare. They're closing the schools. They say there's no water rationing but the utility is cutting people off anyway. And it's a hundred fucking degrees every day. Everybody's tired of it. Something's got to give. When people are desperate they can do anything."

The source who made these remarks self-identifies as a supporter of the peace proposal being discussed by activists. The source agreed to speak about the proposal, and the more violent responses under consideration, in order to head off a worsening of the current situation.

"But the government's got to give, too," the source emphasized. "They can't keep doing this shit to people. They've got to talk to us, about ways to start helping people. Organizing neighborhoods to start living a different kind of life. Because the old days, they aren't coming back. Wal-mart and partying on payday and going to the mall. That's done. The government's got to start helping people deal with that."

The source wouldn't offer a precise prediction of what will happen next. Nor would the source speculate on how the debate in Albuquerque's underground will go. The activist only repeated the need for action amidst growing economic collapse. "If this keeps up," said the activist, "things are going to get bad. We won't be a community no more. We'll be the resistance."


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Public domain images from Wikimedia Commons:

1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-1.jpg

2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commercial_Bank_(closer_shot)_(Athens_riots_December_2008).JPG

3: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thess-riot-barricade-2.JPG

They say Albuquerque is dying: an American city confronts peak oil, July 2015

Duke City Commonwealth.com 
Friday, July 3, 2015
11:55 p.m. MDT

Albuquerque police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators outside a supermarket early this evening, killing five people and wounding at least 11 others, according to police and hospital sources.

Incidents of rioting, vandalism, and arson have erupted throughout the city following the shootings at the supermarket. At least two police officers are known dead in the city-wide violence and four others wounded, according to a police spokesman. The number of dead and injured among civilians in the hours after the supermarket clash remains unknown, but numerous eyewitness reports say police have used deadly force repeatedly throughout the evening.

Today's outbreak of mass violence was believed to be the worst civil disorder in the state since New Mexico was occupied by U.S. military forces during the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Numerous, extensive fires have been reported throughout the Albuquerque metro area, affecting commercial and residential buildings as well as vehicles. The glow from the fires was visible as far away as Los Alamos, fifty miles to the north. 

1: Downtown Albuquerque, July 3, 2015

At 10:00 p.m. this evening, Albuquerque Mayor Darren White issued a directive establishing a near-total dusk-to-dawn curfew throughout the city, effective immediately. In a written statement, the mayor officially authorized police to use deadly force at their discretion to enforce the curfew. Police and emergency services personnel are exempted from the curfew. The mayor's office and police have ordered all other city residents to stay in their homes or businesses for the duration of the curfew.

The mayor has reportedly asked New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez for National Guard assistance. Information to that effect comes from sources with the City Council who asked to remain anonymous. Eyewitness accounts of troop carriers moving south on Interstate 25 between Santa Fe and Albuquerque could not be immediately confirmed.

The demonstration and shootings which triggered violence across the city took place at the Albertsen's supermarket on Isleta Blvd SW. At about 6:00 p.m., several hundred local residents began to gather in the parking lot outside the store. South Valley community groups had called for the demonstration the previous day, in response to accusations of hoarding, price gouging, and favoritism against the store's corporate management. The crowd size soon swelled to 2,000 or more, according to eyewitnesses.

Police appeared on the scene at about 7:00 p.m. At least two dozen patrol cars and several SWAT teams were reported gathering on the fringes of the demonstration. Two police helicopters patrolled the airspace in the neighborhood as police ordered the protesters to disperse via loudspeaker. The police warnings came at about 7:15 p.m. The sound of gunshots was heard soon thereafter, according to eyewitnesses. Police and community leaders each accused the other of firing first.

Organizers of the Albertsen's protest say police opened fire indiscriminately, without provocation, pouring dozens of rounds of live fire into a dense crowd of demonstrators. "They just started shooting at anything," said Albert Romero, President of the South Valley Coalition of Neighborhood Associations.  "There was no cause for it, none at all," Romero said, his voice breaking. "These were peaceful people going hungry. What the hell are we supposed to do?"

Deputy Police Chief Joseph Vigil said in a statement to media that police were fired upon by gunmen within the crowd and "used legitimate, appropriate force to defend themselves and stabilize the situation."

Emergency room personnel at University of New Mexico Hospital confirmed five deaths by gunshot wound among victims treated at that facility. Eleven other victims of the Albertsen's violence were treated for various injuries. Four of these are said to be in critical condition. Officials at university hospital and other medical centers reported scores of additional victims as violence spread across the city. Health care providers say precise numbers of dead and wounded are impossible to estimate, owing to "the fluidity of the situation," as one hospital administrator put it. 

2: Barelas neighborhood, Albuquerque, July 3, 2015

Tonight's riot at the Albertsen's supermarket, and subsequent violence, comes amidst an acute worsening of the national economic crisis in recent weeks. Local food prices have spiked dramatically, as they have across the nation. Economists blame poor agricultural output in much of the world and the latest explosion in global oil prices. After declining to $110 per barrel late last year, oil closed today at an average price of $272 on global commodity exchanges. Gas at the pump in Albuquerque hit a new record this week, according to the American Automobile Association, averaging $9.61 per gallon.

A seemingly endless litany of national economic woes has worsened the picture. Relentlessly increasing unemployment has fueled an eruption of mass poverty unseen in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The nation's official unemployment rate stands at 19.7%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the New Mexico jobless rate reported at 22.3%. Meanwhile, draconian fiscal austerity at the local and national level has cut social services such as food stamps, Medicaid, and unemployment relief.

The crisis has exacted a grim toll in Albuquerque and around the state. Food shortages, once unthinkable, have become a fact of American life in the last year. Skyrocketing oil prices have driven up costs for fertilizers, pesticides, tractor fuel, and other petroleum-based essentials of industrial farming. Soaring transportation costs have bankrupted trucking companies and kept food from reaching supermarket shelves in sufficient quantity to keep up with demand.

Meanwhile, New Mexico's drought emergency enters its twenty fifth consecutive month. Governor Martinez has repeatedly urged voluntary residential and commercial water conservation measures, to little apparent affect. Today's high temperature of 111 degrees Fahrenheit marked the eleventh time in the last thirteen days that the temperature has broken the century mark.

So far, authorities in Washington have warned state governments to expect little in the way of federal assistance. President Mitch Daniels says other national needs must take priority, including the ongoing U.S. budget crisis and military operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Vice President Mike Huckabee, speaking at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque last week, promised that essential national security facilities in New Mexico would remain untouched by the nation's fiscal emergency.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has called on the Daniels administration to institute food rationing and subsidies for the middle and working classes. So far, White House officials remain cool to any such move toward what a National Economic Council staffer called "failed big government policies our nation can ill afford in the present situation."

Albuquerque citizens have reacted with growing anger and frustration to food shortages at local stores. Albertsen's, in particular, has faced accusations of favoritism. Community activists say the supermarket chain continues to sell food at bulk discounts, directly from wholesale distribution centers, to corporations, government officials, and wealthy individuals. "It's outrageous and it's immoral," said Miranda Begay, a neighborhood coordinator for the Albuquerque Transition Network. Referring to Albertsen's management, Begay declared, "We've got families on the verge of starvation everywhere in this city and they're selling food at cost to people who have everything they could ever want."

Albertsen's representatives have denied those charges. They say the ongoing shortage of food staples results purely from high fuel prices and global market conditions in recent months.

An investigation by Duke City Commonwealth.com, published in a series of reports in April and May this year, documented at least five apparent instances of bulk discount sales to corporate customers by Albertsen's employees.

Mayor Darren White's office has indicated that maintaining order will be his top priority in responding to the economic emergency. "People have to know that the government's going to keep the peace," he told worshipers last Sunday at New Hope Evangelical Church in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights. "Without law there can be no liberty," the mayor declared. "And liberty is one thing we're going to keep in this hour of our country's greatest peril."

Community activists have taken a different tack, emphasizing grassroots engagement for social justice as the key to a prosperous future. Environmental, labor, and religious groups have organized an array of grassroots, non-governmental efforts for economic relief over the last three years. Governments at the city, state, and national level face bankruptcy, but local initiatives have tried their best to fill what seems a growing gap between public resources and public needs.

Albuquerque Transition Network's Melissa Begay tried to sound a note of hope about the future. "There's so much good that we could do," she said, as television coverage of this evening's violence unfolded in her Barelas area home. At an an impromptu meeting with fellow activists in her living room, Begay said, "Neighborhoods are starting to come together, to help each other. We've got teams of master gardeners teaching the basics of urban farming. We've got teachers passing on real trades and real skills that people are going to need to take care of their families. Carpentry, mechanics, you name it. We can do so much. The city could help, if they wanted to. They should be helping us instead of killing us."

Others in the community reacted to tonight's events with disbelief and despair. Only blocks away from the meeting of activists at the home of Melissa Begay, a bleeding man comforted his two children while their family-owned hardware store burned nearby. The man, who asked not to be named, said he'd been wounded by gunfire from Albuquerque police. A bloody wound to his shoulder had been patched with a makeshift bandage.

"I never seen the like," he said. "Never here, anything like this. I fought in Waziristan for this country," he said, referring to service in the Pakistan war with the United States Army. "I thought this kind of stuff only happened in other places."

Where does he think we go from here?

The man paused, watching the fire burning across the street. "They say this is the end times, you know? That maybe this is it. They say Albuquerque is dying. And the world too, you know? But if this is the way it's going to be, then maybe I don't want it all to go on, right? Maybe it's all better to just let it go."

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Public domain photos from Wikimedia Commons:

1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:School_burn.JPG

2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Riots_Paris_2007.jpg

Local heroes of history, future and gone

On the day after the Fourth of July I went looking for a grave. 

I had the day off, and I'd been reading about the history of Albuquerque, the place in which I live. As I mentioned toward the end of my last post, I have this notion that a crucial guide for our de-industrial future, in the age of declining fossil fuels, can be found in our past. In the days when fossil fuels were unknown, or their levels of usage much lower than today.

Whether we like it or not, we are headed back to those levels of energy use. There is nothing that can replace the fossil fuels, pumped up as they are with hydrocarbons that give more bang for the buck, with easier infrastructure requirements, than any other energy source. All the alternatives produce too little energy in return, like wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal. Or, getting a particular alternative up and running would require vast amounts of fossil fuels already running short, and acidifying the oceans, and super-heating the atmosphere. Fission or fusion power plants, for example, have to be built by petroleum powered vehicles, themselves made in factories electrified and heated mostly by coal and natural gas. The literature making the case for the inadequacy of alternative energy sources is quite large. For an introduction, I recommend the book The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg.

The point is that the days of low-energy society are coming back. It behooves us to look back at what such societies were like before. We will find examples of things to relearn (local, sustainable agrictuture) and things to avoid (rampant racism and sexism). I've been curious as to what lessons might be learned from the history of the place I live now. What was Albuquerque, New Mexico like in the days before super-abundant fossil hydrocarbons bloated the city to its currently enormous size? Albuquerque today has 520,000 people in the city itself, and 850,000 in the greater metropolitan area.

In 1880, the year the transcontinental railroad arrived, the little town's population was 2,315. Over the next sixty years, the population grew steadily, as first the railroad, then automobiles and early civil aviation, brought raw materials and manufactured goods to the Southwest. After 1900, oil became increasingly abundant, driving explosive growth in the national transportation network. Railroads carrying diesel locomotives crisscrossed the United States. Armadas of cars zoomed along an expanding road net. Air fields sprang up in meadows across North America, allowing freight to hop its weigh across the continent. All of this brought new citizens, and their money, to set up businesses in the expanding desert community along the Rio Grande. The population growth of Albuquerque during the rise of fossil fueled transport looked like this:

1880: 2,315

1890: 3,785

1900: 6,338

1910: 23,606

1920: 29,853

1930: 45,430

1940: 69,631

(Population history is from Albuquerque/Bernalillo Country Comprehensive Plan 2002, available online at http://www.cabq.gov/planning/publications/abq_comp_plan.pdf, accessed July 10, 2010.)

During that period, U.S. fossil fuel consumption rose as follows:

1880: 2.15 quadrillion BTU

1940: 22.96 quadrillion BTU

(see "Estimated Primary Energy Consumption in the United States, Selected Years, 1635-1945", in U.S. Energy Information Agency, Annual Energy Review, available at http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb1701.html, accessed July 10, 2010). 

Nominal U.S. Gross Domestic Product (i.e. not adjusted to be shown in constant dollars) swelled:

1880: $10.4 billion 

1940: 101.4 billion

(GDP figures available from Measuring Worth, at http://www.measuringworth.org/usgdp/, accessed July 10, 2010).


So energy use climbed steeply, driving rapid growth in the U.S. economy and Albuquerque's, despite a depression in the 1890s and again in the 1930s. Still, while growth was rapid, the overall use of fossil energy during the period was much lower than today. The U.S. Energy Information Agency reports that U.S. fossil fuel consumption in 2008 was 83.436 quadrillion BTU. The EIA has an extremely comprehensive data set of U.S. energy production and consumption on its website.

By learning what Albuquerque's economy and society were like in the low-energy years of 1880 to 1940, I hope to get a useful starting point for an important exercise: anticipating what my city will look like at similar energy levels in the future, on the down-slope as fossil fuel supplies decline. Assuming that world oil production will peak sometime in this decade, with natural gas soon to follow and coal sometime this century, Albuquerque's energy levels will return to their 1880-1940 levels not too long after 2100, give or take. This projection, which is really just an educated guess, comes from looking at forecasts of likely future oil production compared to levels in the past. Here's just one example:

 [from lifeaftertheoilcrash.net]

This graph comes from an especially doom-laden web site. This is not intentional. I use this particular graph, from a coincidentally grim and depressing web site, not to endorse doom and gloom, but because I find the graph nice, clean, and and handy. It illustrates how we can get a get a realistic handle on the future. It shows how global oil production in the early 22nd century will approximate that of Albuquerque's early fossil energy boom, circa 1900. The two eras lie at different ends of the bell curve; because of that separation in time, they will differ in other critical ways as well. Albuquerqueans of AD 2120 will have knowledge (I hope) of penicillin, radio, and many other nice things that their forefathers didn't know about in the late Victorian age of 1900. But the energy supplies available to Albuquerque a hundred years or so from today will still be Victorian in scale. My city will be limited, by hard physical realities, in what it can do to employ, house, feed, transport, and educate its citizens.

What future Albuquerque will see as limits, their ancestors of 1880 to 1940 experienced as buoyant, exuberant growth. They didn't have much energy to throw around by our standards, but they had more than their grandparents ever imagined. Reading popular histories about the early boom years of Albuquerque yields heroic, worshipful stories of the exalted leaders who built a modern city. These objects of hero worship were businessmen and politicians, for the most part, along with the stolid professionals of the solid middle class (doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects, and so on). In the conventional accounts, these men (and they were mostly men) turned the tiny 1880 cluster of adobe ranch houses into the sprawling modernist megascape of 1940's skyscrapers, railroads, airplanes, and asphalt. The heroes of Albuquerque's expansion era, according to conventional stories, were the men who helped the city grow.

What lessons do the stories of those men offer for the coming age? What can the heroes celebrated by a past age of energy ascension say to a future of energy descent?

* * * * *

In reading about New Mexico's early industrial, low-energy past -- and its heroes -- one name struck me in particular. Edmund G. Ross, governor of the New Mexico territory from 1885 to 1889. I had encountered that name years ago, during a hero-worship phase I went through in my youth. One of my heroes then was John F. Kennedy, thirty fifth President of the United States. In his book Profiles in Courage, Kennedy wrote about a Senator from Kansas named Edmund G. Ross. This Senator cast the deciding vote in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Ross' vote saved Johnson from being removed from office on trumped up charges with purely partisan motives. Such a development might have crippled Constitutional government in the United States.

In my memories of JFK's account, Ross' vote to save the President defied immense pressure from his Republican party colleagues and his constituents, who wanted Johnson's head. For casting his decisive vote for Presidential acquital, Ross suffered political and personal destruction. He was ostracized and vilified by nearly everyone he knew. He suffered evil stares, shoulders turned in silence, and strangers spitting at his approach. He lost his fight for re-election. And then, from what I remember of Kennedy's book, the Senator from Kansas faded into obscurity. I had images of him dying in a gutter sometime later.

In reading about New Mexico history recently, I wondered if this same man had become the territorial governor of New Mexico in the 1880s. Turns out that he did. Like so many others, including me, he went west in search of a new life.

After suffering political immolation over the Johnson impeachment, Ross went back to the Kansas newspaper business that had been his trade before entering politics. Then he went to points west. In 1880, the same year the railroad came to Albuquerque, so did Edmund G. Ross and his wife. He got a job working for the Albuquerque Journal newspaper, itself started in the same year by two of the men who brought the railroad to town. They were agents of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, Franz Huning and William Hazeldine. Huning and Hazeldine, along with their friend Elias H. Stover, had bought the land and swung the deals necessary to bring the railroad through Albuquerque. The rail and its iron horse behemoths were on the way to connecting sea to shining sea. Railroad promoters were, I imagine, good contacts for a newcomer like Edmund G. Ross. The three railroad operatives, Huning, Hazeldine, and Stover, dominated the politics and business and ballrooms of Albuquerque for the rest of the century.

I don't know how much they helped Mr. Ross, but it's clear that he made good. He got a new start in politics in his new home. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland appointed Ross governor of the New Mexico territory. From what I can gather in a not necessarily complete search of historical accounts, Ross' term was undistinguished. Mainly, he fought with the state legislature in Santa Fe. It was controlled by a nefarious ring of political tycoons known as "the Santa Fe ring." They were Hispanic ranchers and businessmen who envied and hated the rising Anglo business class of Albuquerque. Upstart easterners like Albuquerque's Huning-Hazeldine-Stover triumvirate threatened the interests that had dominated New Mexico since the days of Spanish rule. Led by the enterprising interlopers from the east, Albuquerque was spreading across the desert along the Rio Grande, as the railroad brought daily mountains of raw materials and trade goods, with thousands of new settlers every year. This wouldn't do. I gather that the men in Sante Fe tried to stop it, or at least harass it, and they held a stranglehold on the legislature.

Ross tried to break them, campaigning for laws that would bring homesteaders to the state, taking over the land grants held by New Mexico's old families. He also tried to get legislation to promote mining, farming, and public schools, and give further favors to the railroads. All of that would have fueled the burgeoning growth of Albuquerque and the influx of eastern newcomers to New Mexico as a whole. Ross, like the Albuquerque business barons who supported him, fought for growth. That's what made them heroes to the boosters of business expansion, then and now. They were emblems of the age, when rising fossil energy supplies fueled relentless economic and industrial Progress. Modern Albquerque, which would later grow to 225 times its 1880 population, got its start in the days of Edmund G. Ross. It was a process he tried mightily to help.

Mostly, he failed. Ross lost to the Santa Fe ring at every turn. I don't know much about the details, but it appears that Ross' adversaries surpassed him in parliamentary skill and political savvy. They beat down his attempts to promote new settlement and economic growth. But the growth came anyway. Railroad-driven Albuquerque continued to swell. Ross failed, but the future he fought for still came.

He did have one important victory. Ross supported a bill in the legislature to establish a state university in Albuquerque. And it passed. He signed the bill on February 28, 1889. The University of New Mexico was born. In a way, I owe Governor Ross my job. I work at UNM today. I'm not sure how Ross managed to get this bill through, but evidently it was part of a deal that appealed to the Santa Fe ring. In return for Albuquerque becoming the site of the new university in the bill, Santa Fe would get the new state prison and Las Vegas, New Mexico, would get the insane asylum. Somehow the Santa Fe ring saw that as a victory. I imagine Ross telling his aides, hurry, let's sign it before they change their goddamn minds!

When Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, took office as President in 1889, he removed Ross as governor of New Mexico. Territorial governors held their position at the pleasure of the President, and Ross was a Democrat, having abandoned Lincoln's party after the trauma of the Johnson trial. Ross went back to the newspaper business. He led a quiet life. As time passed, more and more people admired him for his vote to save the President in the crisis of 1868. He came to be regarded, by the turn of the century, as a hero. Not for having promoted economic growth, but for having saved the Republic by an act of conscience. Later historians would question whether that's what his act was. I'm
reminded of words that appear on the screen during the opening moments of the movie The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. "Maybe this isn't the way it was. It's the way it should have been."

In 1907, an old abolitionist agitator from Kansas, one Hugh Cameron, visited Ross in Albuquerque. He came bearing written testimonials to the former Senator from Kansas citizens, thanking him for his vote in the trial of the President. Ross died not long after, on May 8, 1907.

* * * * * 

Governor Ross was buried in Fairview Cemetery, in Albuquerque. In my reading about him, I realized that his tombstone in that graveyard stood only a couple of miles from my house. So I set out to find it, and pay a visit. For no other reason than to do it and later be able to say that I had. And, also, because it seemed worth doing, somehow. Hard to say why. Though I revel in the use of words, for this I couldn't find any that would do.

I walked with a friend along busy streets near the University of New Mexico in the early evening of July 5, 2010. We came to Fairview Cemetery, which contains around 16,000 graves. We set out surveying the older portion of the grounds, in search of the resting place of Edmund G. Ross.

We found it, in a little enclosure, buried next to other members of his family. His tombstone on that day looked like this:

It felt like a bit of a triumph, finding the grave among all those thousands. It's a humble little block of stone. Not some ornate monument like others in the cemetery. There's no imposing, macabre mausoleum, like the ones that lurk under the pine trees here and there across the Fairview grounds.

Seeing the grave wasn't a profound experience. I didn't come to any great revelation or catharsis or moment of transcendence. I just kind of smiled and took pictures in the light of the descending sun. And thought of the mortal man come to rest in that spot after the body's life was ended.

Edmund Ross is a footnote in the history of the American Republic. He played a crucial part at a crucial moment. Without Ross' vote, or so the heroic version of the tale goes, a government with power over millions might have changed for the worse. There would have been consequences, either way.

The American government's power would only grow. So would the industrial plant it oversaw, the engines and factories of capitalism, which were the lifeblood of one of the greatest empires the world would ever know. Ross, like others of his generation, dreamed of making that empire great, by stoking the growth and settlement of his little corner of it. Along the banks of the Great River, in the valley once ruled by the empire of Spain and the grace of God, who took it from the Indians who came there first, a long time ago.

Ross had a measure of fame. In some ways, he lived a typical hero's story, like those of literature and film and ancient story. A crucial choice at a defining moment, and a fall from grace. And redemption. A subsequent return to the simplicities of home and a quiet retirement, in the years of twilight, with his memories and the knowledge of the approaching end.

I read a story once, about a man born in the age of woolly mammoths who did not age. He lived for 15,000 years, eventually becoming an accountant in New York City. One day, walking to work in the 1990s, he passed a construction site. A wall fell over on top of him. End of the line. He stood looking down at his body, crushed under the rubble, with the angel of death next to him. He said to her (the angel appeared as a she): I had a pretty good run, right? I mean, 15,000 years, that's pretty good, isn't it? 

And she replied. You got what everyone gets. A lifetime. No more, no less.

* * * * *

What can Edmund G. Ross and the other heroes of his age offer to us, and those who will come after?

Ross and his generation enjoyed energy supplies similar to what the American Southwest will have in the early twenty second century. But that post-oil future, I think, will still be very different from the world of Edmund Ross. He lived with the knowledge that American industry would continue to expand, that thousands of new settlers would roll west every year, that this growth would continue, on into the bright and shining future celebrated at the gaudy, Utopian World Fairs of Ross' day. For him, a citizen of expanding Albuquerque, the future was a city that sprawled as far as the eye could see, conquering the desert as no earlier people had managed to do. The heroes of his age were the people who brought that future closer to becoming real.

If those heroes offer a lesson for the post-petroleum future, it lies in the differences between their world and the one our great-grandchildren will know. Heroes of the former time fought for a future of growth. Those of future America will fight for a decent life after growth is over, as energy supplies contract and the era of industrial abundance becomes a fading memory. Building a decent life in that future will be an even more vital task than paving the way to industrial expansion was in its day. Because creating a humane de-industrial society will be infinitely harder, and the stakes infinitely higher. People will have to learn to live on what their ancestors did: less energy, less material, less resources; humbler technology and settlements living within the landscape, instead of trying to subdue it. Right now, Americans don't know how to do those things. They can't even imagine them.

And they can't imagine the massive industrial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth century shifting into reverse. Americans can't imagine a twenty first and twenty second century where the sprawling continental mass of skyscrapers, strip malls, airports, superhighways, and industrial farms has to be gradually converted and substantially dismantled, to make way for something else. The mega-machinery left by fossil fueled growth will have to be altered for an age with much lower energy supplies and a wildly shifting climate and biosphere. Multitudes of the buildings will have to be retrofitted, jury rigged, subdivided, and otherwise tinkered with. Many of them, along with vehicles and machinery of every kind, will have to be stripped for raw materials and parts. Abandoned housing tracts, industrial parks, and suburban shopping centers will have to be torn down, to make way for marketplaces, gardens, farmland, and other uses more suited to the realities of energy descent.

Undoing two hundred years of industrialism will consume the next two hundred years or more of our country. Or whatever succeeds it. We don't know what sort of political and cultural events will face our descendants. We don't know exactly how cities and communities in America will change. But we know they will be as radically different from ours as today's Albuquerque, a vast desert sprawl, is from the tiny railroad town by the Rio Grande in the year of our Lord 1880.

To build the industrial world, Americans looked to leaders who might show them the way. That's how human communities work. We're a hierarchical species, in many ways. We need leaders. The mechanisms for selecting them are different in a country like the United States which, at least in principle, is a constitutional, democratic republic. Still, even in a democracy, people choose someone with the power to make decisions. But hierarchy remains. Some have more power than others, democratically chosen or not.

In the industrializing society of late Victorian America, power wasn't necessarily democratic. Nobody elected John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan. Nobody elected the railroad company officials who turned Albuquerque into an outpost of America's expanding industrial might. The company men and their successors made their city a flourishing metropolis in the desert. The industrial Republic of which it was part rose to dominate the planet and determine much of what the human future would be like. That process of American ascent, its guardians believed, needed heroes. Ordinary citizens of humbler means concurred.

America of the twenty second century and beyond will need heroes no less, but of a different kind. Leaders who will show people how to make a new world out of the old. Who won't see the end of growth as the end of the pursuit of happiness. Who will believe, and help others believe, that we still have it in our power to make the world over again. Not for Utopia, because that isn't possible. But for the better. A low-energy life where people are fed, and clothed, and housed, and protected from storms; where knowledge and freedom and equality are celebrated as the reigning ideals; where people are citizens instead of consumers; where they have livelihoods that allow them to provide for those they love and pursue a meaningful existence in their days on the Earth.

It's doable. It has to be. And we have to try. There is no other choice, unless we stupidly make no choice at all. Someone will have to lead the way. That's what a vanished world and its heroes can teach to ours, and to the one that's coming. Now the old heroes are ghosts, as we will be, too. But ghosts still have stories to tell.

On the fifth of July I went looking for a grave in a garden of sixteen thousand ghosts, for reasons hard to name. Maybe I came to hear a story. I would want that, if I were a ghost. Someone to listen to mine.