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Posted on April 15, 2025 | 78 Comments
I recently read N.S. Lyons’ interesting essay ‘American Strong Gods: Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century’. Yeah, apologies – another Trump piece … though Lyons casts the net wider. Anyway, his essay is kind of apropos to stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately, so I’m going to air it here. I’ll refer also to this recent essay from Perry Anderson. To deal in old political money, Lyons is a writer of the new right, while Anderson is the doyen of a ‘new left’ that’s no longer all that new – but a testament at least to his personal staying power in knocking out elegant political essays as he approaches his 90th year.
Lyons’ thesis in essence is that Trump’s second term is an indicator of the end of a ‘long twentieth century’ that solidified after World War II in the form of the liberal-managerial state, the idea of the open society, globalisation, consumerism, the liberal depoliticization of the public sphere and other such ‘weak gods’ that replaced the ‘strong gods’ of communal identity, connection to place, past, family and faith that, in the eyes of the architects of liberal modernism, had caused such mayhem in the wars and genocides of the early twentieth century. With Trump and his ilk, according to Lyons, we’re back in the domain of the strong gods.
The first part of Lyons’ essay dissects the failure of the liberal-managerial state, the open society and their weak gods quite adroitly. He rightly links its rise to the ‘never again’ mentality of political elites in respect particularly of fascism after the mayhem of World War II. He doesn’t mention that it was also an attempt to rein in the mayhem caused by the unbridled, robber baron-style capitalism that climaxed disastrously in 1929 and also fed into fascism and global war.
It’s a significant omission, but still … although my political background is very much identified with the weak god politics of postwar liberal-modernism, I’ve come to reject that worldview and I found much to agree with in Lyons’ critique. I basically agree that “Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance … it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action”.
In my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future I likewise wrote about the way that people are animated by ‘mysteries and passions’ in ways that managerialist metrics like longevity, low price, high convenience and so on don’t comprehend. The fierce pushback I got on that point from some progressive quarters seems to me indicative of how off the pace that thinking is, and its electoral impotence in the face of figures like Trump.
So I’m not opposed in principle to the thumotic desire for action. But it does kinda depend on what form that desire takes, and whether populist alternatives to liberal-modernism are truly populist. Here, I found Anderson’s essay helpful. Populism in his view comes in left-wing and right-wing forms, and has three components in total: a critique of oligarchy and elites, a critique of economic inequality, and a critique of immigration. Right-wing populism, says Anderson, typically addresses itself to all three components, which is why it can often look quite radically left-wing on certain political and economic matters. Left-wing populism addresses itself to the first two, but not to the third, which is why – according to Anderson – it usually fares less well with electorates than the right-wing version. One point that Anderson makes, although he doesn’t develop it much, is that the global flow of people (immigration) results from the global flow of capital. A coherent critique of the flow of migrants is hard to do without a critique of the flow of money. More generally, Anderson says that a problem with populism – left and right – is that it knows what it’s against, but it’s not so clear about what it’s for.
Turning to Donald Trump, I’d question Lyons’ identification of him with populism. Trump definitely ticks the anti-immigration box of right-wing populism. But is he really a foe of oligarchy and economic inequality? He sometimes speaks that language, but I’m not convinced that’s really what he’s about.
I think what emerges from the second half of Lyons’ essay is that the direction of travel of Trump’s second administration isn’t a renewal of the old ‘strong gods’. It’s something older for sure, but not that old. Really, it’s a version of bureaucratic liberal-modernism in its most self-destructive form.
Not that Lyons says this directly. He’s far too enamoured of Trump to do that. But it’s present in his analysis clearly enough. In brief, I think there are three main aspects to this. First, nationalism. Lyons doesn’t offer any analysis of what nationalism is, but like many he seems to assume that it involves the survival into the disenchanted present of ancient tribal passions – ‘thumotic desire’ – rather than involving a carefully curated top-down bureaucratic-modernist project of contemporary centralized states, as brilliantly analysed long ago by Perry Anderson’s older brother. This is nationalism of the kind that’s likely to make, for example, someone from Southern California inclined to feel greater kinship with someone from Maine than with someone from Mexico (which their state used to be part of) for reasons that don’t have much to do with their own self-interest. Trump is an unabashed nationalist? I guess so, in that latter sense – using the passions generated by the nationalist project of the liberal-modernist state to push an agenda of centralized state interests.
Second, trade war. As rehearsed ad infinitum by mainstream economists, Trump’s ‘America first’ tariff policies aren’t going to benefit ordinary US citizens within the existing parameters of the global economy. On the contrary, it’s those ordinary citizens who’ll be picking up the tab. Perhaps Joeri Schasfoort’s explanation for the logic behind the tariffs in terms of US ambitions around economic imperialism makes sense. Economic imperialism aligns closely with political imperialism. Trade wars align closely with actual wars. That said, there’s a good case for keeping capital at home.
Third, personalist rule. Lyons writes, correctly I think, that Trump is “instinctual, not actuarial. He is relational, not rationalistic, valuing loyalty and possessing a prickly sense of honor” and that his administration is affirming “the elected Executive’s direct, personal control over the bureaucracy”. Lyons calls the bureaucracy that Trump’s administration is busy dismantling “sheltered” and “proceduralist (i.e. democratically uncontrollable and unaccountable)”. I think that’s fair enough up to a point – I’m with him on that populist critique. Still, the direct personal control over bureaucracy of an elected Executive is a very thin form of democracy, whereas proceduralism (for example, in the form of an independent judiciary, universities etc.) is thicker. Democracy involves a lot more than people just ticking a ballot form every few years, and those of us who rail at the dead hand of the proceduralist state should probably be careful what we wish for.
On this personalist front, Lyons cites Mary Harrington’s view that “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.” Well, are we? If George W. Bush and Tony Blair had agreed to that duel with Mullah Omar back in 2001, I’d have agreed that the politics of the hero, the king and the warrior were returning to the public sphere. But when was the last time a western leader had personalist warrior skin in the game? Here in Britain I’d propose the year 1485, when Richard III became the last British king to die on the battlefield. Maybe in the USA it was later – perhaps when George Washington and Thomas Hamilton rode in to quell the whiskey rebellion in 1794 and put down a tax revolt so they could further centralise state power.
If you want me to believe that the king, the warrior and the hero have really returned to the public sphere on the populist side, then I’d have to see Trump at the head of a militia supporting a tax strike by ordinary people, or something along those lines. Harrington’s notion that “Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” are battling against “the destruction of masculine heroism” doesn’t compute. I’d argue rather that the old archetypes of the king, the warrior and the hero are being pressed into service for a modern, centralised, bureaucratic-oligarchic regime that doesn’t care too much about economic inequality and is only opposed to certain elites, not to elites in general. It’s hard to fit this regime into the populist box.
The funny thing about Lyons’ essay is that even as it convinces me not to succumb to the left-wing kneejerk temptation I’ve fallen for in the past (I don’t like Trump, he’s really right-wing, he must be a fascist!) it also convinces me that the parallels with historical fascism at the level of the wider politics involved are stronger than I previously thought – viz. the hyper-nationalism of the bureaucratic centralised state, trade war as prelude to actual war, and personalism. Hence, as I said earlier, Trump’s administration looks like a version of early 20th century bureaucratic liberal-modernism in its most self-destructive form.
Fascism of the early 20th century variety failed for various reasons, not least that it couldn’t really resolve the contradiction between serving capital and serving the people. It strikes me that the politics of Trump’s present administration, whatever we choose to call it, will fail even more precipitously, in part because it lacks genuine commitment to serving any but a tiny minority of the people that, whatever else you say about them, 20th century fascisms did have. Musk as a restorer of masculine heroism? No, he’s just a contemporary version of the 19th and 20th century robber-baron capitalists, who stole the dignity of countless men (and women).
If Joeri Schasfoort is right that Trump’s tariff wars are about rebooting what remains of the Bretton Woods agreement into a 21st century version that tilts the odds more in favour of the USA, I think this too will fail. Bretton Woods was a sweet and self-interested deal for the US at a time when most other countries in the world had weak bargaining positions. Even so, it was actuated by a certain degree of internationalism and long-term ‘pay it forward’ thinking. Today, the US is weaker, other countries are stronger, and Trump’s version of ‘screw you’ nationalism will hole it below the waterline – except perhaps in the case of various economically small-time countries along with the odd larger player cursed with delusional politics, such as Britain. Possibly people in the US genuinely think their country has been hard done by through its international commitments. If so, I suspect they’re about to collide uncomfortably with reality.
But for all that, it’s not as if any other political doctrine across the spectrum of traditional politics, from communism to neoliberalism or conventional conservatism, has good answers for how to keep the global economic juggernaut on the road without its contradictions ultimately tearing it apart. One domain of those contradictions – mentioned neither by N.S. Lyons nor Perry Anderson – is the staple fare of this blog: energy futures, material futures, climate change, land and water security … and ultimately real human community, as opposed to the blandishments of central-state ideologies like nationalism.
When Anderson says populism is defined more by what it’s against than what it’s for, this isn’t really true of my favoured brand of populism – agrarian populism, which is for localism, local community and local agrarianism keyed to a sustainable ecological base. The problem with agrarian populism is that it has no mainstream political traction, because for so long now modernist culture has been lost in its dreamlands of economic ‘development’, urbanisation and high-energy techno-fixing.
Therefore, if our political future is an agrarian populist one, it’s hard to see how that can happen without a very nasty bump, at best.
Yet here is where I believe there’s scope for a new kind of hero to make their appearance in the public sphere. Not the king or the warrior, but the farmer or the householder – as I discussed in this post some time ago, and in my book A Small Farm Future (as well, in a different way, as in my forthcoming book Finding Light in a Dark Age).
I’ll expand on that point in a future post. For now, I’ll just say that people of all kinds – including those who are sympathetic to agrarian populism, localism, householding and small farming – are too easily dismissive of its capacities to humble the power of kings and warriors, especially ersatz modern ones. Let’s not take these self-proclaimed heroes and warriors too seriously. People who don’t know the first thing about how to take care of themselves materially and are dependent on others to provide for their needs aren’t heroes. They’re helpless children.
I’ll concede that the most obvious route for channelling the thumotic desire for long-delayed action and masculine heroism in the MAGA heartlands may not be learning how to grow a garden. Nevertheless, history teaches us that this is sometimes where grandiose dreams of imperial greatness fetch up. But I want to press the point more positively. There are plenty of historical models for the heroic householder, male as well as female. It’s just that we tend to forget or ignore them nowadays. I discuss this in my forthcoming book. Hopefully, I’ll discuss it in a forthcoming post here too.
Indigenous lifeways manifested in local ecological connection – for example, in gardening – often involve such models, and indigeneity figures in a lot of contemporary ‘progressive’ thinking about routes out of the present impasse. It was mentioned, for instance, in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent critique in The Guardian of what they call the ‘death drive’ of administrations like Trump’s. Unfortunately, when you try to articulate the idea of widespread modern local ecological connection, it tends to invite ridicule, or even comparisons with Nazism, from ‘progressives’ too – not least from other Guardian writers wedded to their own alienated techno-fixing death drives.
I discuss briefly in my forthcoming book some of the different modalities of bottom-up indigenous local ecological connection which – again, in old political money – has both left-wing and right-wing manifestations, and I talk about the ‘strong gods’ of those kinds of localism (although I don’t use that phrase specifically). I suspect these various strong god localisms will be humanity’s long-term destiny, but unfortunately it looks like we’re going to have to endure a lot of false strong god-mongering from the political right, but also the political left – both seemingly incapable of extricating themselves from the death throes of the centralised liberal-modernist state – before anybody gets to embrace them.
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“The problem with agrarian populism is that it has no mainstream political traction, because for so long now modernist culture has been lost in its dreamlands of economic ‘development’, urbanisation and high-energy techno-fixing”.
Yes, agrarian populism has no mainstream political traction, but it’s not because modernist culture is lost in the “dreamlands” you mention, it’s because modernist culture is a concrete reality constructed entirely out of urbanization and high energy technology, including industrial food production. It’s not as if the 4 billion people who live in modern cities can wake up from their ‘dream’ and decide to become small farmers, much less indigenous foragers.
This is why, as you say “when you try to articulate the idea of widespread modern local ecological connection, it tends to invite ridicule”. The ridicule comes from a well-founded sense that local ecological connection can’t possibly scale up to include but a tiny fraction of those 4 billion urbanites, no matter how enticing it might look and how obvious it is that modernity was a very wrong turn in human history, a literal dead end.
Modernity is the mother of all sunk costs. Thinking that modernity was just a bad dream and we can awaken to a new world of bucolic small farm households is ridiculous. We are stuck with this nightmare and most moderns are going to die in it. Modernity doesn’t get a do-over.
But, despite all my doom and gloom, you’re right that small farming and local ecological connection is the only way forward. It’s the bedrock of any truly sustainable culture. Just because it can never become more than a niche alternative in modern countries doesn’t mean it isn’t a good choice for those who have the means to escape urbanism. It really is the only way out, even if that way out will never have political traction. And as someone who has lived on a small rural homestead since 1975, I can attest that it’s a wonderful place (and way) to live.
I kinda think the rural city divide is manifest in much of this but weirdly the rural model of the Yeoman farmer and the dream it represents fades with any actual knowledge of or memories of grandparent who lived independent lives. In the US even the rural residents are more dependent on the machines and the responsibility to pay for them than any actual knowledge of how to live the independent Yeoman ideal . Sometimes I wonder if we know why we want to be free yet I maintain some actual experience with feeding your family from the garden , chickens and maybe a pig make all the difference in one’s confidence in whether anyone could pull it off these days. We can of course but convincing those who have never lived it or seen it in their childhood means fewer and fewer people still dream the dream. We kinda need common dreams to hold us together and otherwise we flounder for gods and demigods , snakedoctors, or anyone else offering guidance , however corrupt their intent.
People have resigned themselves to the security a paycheck gives them. It has been a good deal with fossil fuel slaves to do the work but those days of oil dependence have cost us more than our climate and the other life we share this planet with , it has cost us a shared dream . Now we get to negotiate a world where we pay the piper and those of us who still keep the small farms and gardens going are burning a candle so that the memory lives and with it the dream. People may soon find the economics beginning to favor independence and more rural dreams . Of course fear may drive them here too but the dream is what needs nurturing.
[…] it’s not as if any other political doctrine across the spectrum of traditional politics, from communism to neoliberalism or conventional conservatism, has good answers for how to keep the global economic juggernaut on the road without its contradictions ultimately tearing it apart.
I’m more interested in political doctrines that advocate for the option of not keeping the global economic juggernaut on the road. Better still if they have some ideas for how to do get it off the road in a way that doesn’t incite even more violence than the juggernaut already employs, and did for all of the 20th century (short or long).
I too long for agency, for efficacy and action, in response to finding out that those in the driver’s seat hold neither my best interests nor the common good in their consideration, but for me — and I suspect for many commenters here — the hope in all my experimental actions is to find a kinder and more ecologically integrated way to travel, even if it might be humbler and slower. I do think that is a different aspiration than that of many Trump-supporters, even if they are also seeking a sense of agency through action. In my own seeking I have found it important to be very clear about what I can and cannot control, and adjust my expectations accordingly. My sphere of influence is relatively small. I can choose, to some extent, my responses to situations, but I cannot choose how others will respond and I cannot choose the circumstances of physical reality in which I act. So I try to choose actions that I will feel okay about even if they “fail”: feed the hungry, tend the land, and so on.
As for strong gods….
I worship a God who loves us in all our struggles and fears, who was crucified at the behest of a populist mob by an occupying imperial power, who has harrowed hell so that the gates are broken open and nobody has to stay there unless they want to. I worship a God who is love that is stronger than death.
Can’t get stronger than that, but that kind of strength doesn’t seem to match the power that Trump supporters are after, either.
Joe writes “The ridicule comes from a well-founded sense that local ecological connection can’t possibly scale up to include but a tiny fraction of those 4 billion urbanites”. That hasn’t been my experience – I’ve very rarely heard that argument in critical responses to my case for agrarian localism, Joe’s excepted. Much more common have been the arguments that (1) high-energy, tech-revolutionary, ‘progress’-oriented capitalism is the correct path for modern societies to follow or (2) that the case for agrarian localism is romantic, nostalgic, reactionary etc.
If people were genuinely arguing that local ecological connection was a worthwhile value but were cavilling at the scale of the transition to it that’s involved then at least we’d be on the right track and would be seriously engaged with the right sorts of issues. But I don’t think that’s where we’re at, and the reason is because we’re lost in the dreamlands I mentioned – I stand by that comment.
I’m not sure I agree either with the claim that local ecological connection ‘can’t possibly scale up’. An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine that governments and citizenries worldwide suddenly decided en masse as of today that a low-energy agrarian localist future was urgently necessary, and then to discuss how they might practically go about re-engineering the (often literally) ‘concrete reality’ that Joe rightly points to. Generally, I don’t focus on those kinds of questions so much because it’s not where contemporary culture is at – before we get to ‘can’t possibly do it’ we confront ‘not interested in trying to do it’. Hence, as Bruce says, the importance of the stories or the dreams we hold in our heads – back to the question of dreamlands.
An interesting dimension of this in my recent writings has been my arguments with Monbiot about manufactured food. One take on his position is that he’s alarmed about climate change and other impending nasties and plausibly unconvinced about sufficiently rapid localist scale-up, so he’s casting around for quick tech solutions. However, he got his basic energy figures about manufactured food wrong – an already implausible techno-fix becomes utterly delusional as a mass food solution. Yet instead of recasting his position in the light of that revelation, he continues to trail bacterial food and other implausible techno-fixes. The simplest and most charitable phrase I can find for this is lost in the dreamlands.
Anyway, the experience of trying to have a rational debate about manufactured food has left me thinking there’s not much point confronting the dreamlands head-on in my writing anymore. I’m interested in finding something else more useful or effective to do (with my writing, that is). I’m hoping also to spend a bit more time on practical livelihood-making. I think future generations are going to have it hard, but perhaps they will face less in the way of bureaucratic and cultural obstacles to living on the land.
Re Kathryn’s response to my “good answers for how to keep the global economic juggernaut on the road without its contradictions ultimately tearing it apart” point, yes agreed. Possibly awkward phrasing on my part, but hopefully it’s clear I don’t want to keep the juggernaut on the road. Nor do I want it to disintegrate uncontrollably. Slowing it down, parking it up and thoughtfully dismantling it would be optimal … but I fear that’s another dreamland.
You may be right about the larger culture not even being aware of alternatives to modernity. In my life and in the internet circles I engage with, it’s been so obvious for so long that modernity is a dead end that I just assume that it’s obvious to everyone. Everyone has heard of “preppers”, for example. Perhaps they don’t understand what preppers are prepping for. Heck, the magazine Mother Earth News has been touting small homesteads since 1970, for mostly the same reasons you describe, Chris. I’ve been a subscriber off and on since the mid-70s. There’s got to be some general awareness, doesn’t there?
But maybe it’s only a tiny minority that have heard of peak oil, degrowth, the polycrisis, collapse of complex societies and bottlenecks. Monbiot’s in that minority because he’s desperate to find a way out. Ezra Klein of NYT fame is not, since he just published a book called “Abundance”. I have not read it and probably won’t, since the reviews (and the title) put me off.
But regardless of the actual ratio of dreamers to realists, I think there are still a lot of people that need to be awakened and your work certainly helps with that. It’s only going to be those people and others who have already figured it out who will trickle out of cities to small farms. Some of those farms will be newly created and some will be legacies of long-term preppers, like me, who are soon to die of old age.
There may even be some last ditch attempts by governments to get people out of cities and become small farmers, but it will only augment the trickle and do little to empty the cities and shelter their populations from disaster. The scale thing.
Despite the sisyphean task of being a global alarm clock, I think realists will always feel impelled to shout warnings to those still living in their dream world. We just can’t help it and there’s (probably) no harm done. But part of that realism should be an acceptance of the fact that the warnings are mostly futile.
Chris,
This was published right next to your post on the Resilience site. Very pertinent to the discussion here.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-04-16/why-well-off-brits-who-think-collapse-is-coming-still-stay-silent/
It’s abundantly clear that you are not in favour of keeping the juggernaut on the road, Chris, and also that you have no appetite for the suffering that will come as a result of an uncontrolled crash.
The Soup Garden rhubarb is flowering. I’ll leave it for the bees for another couple of days and then cut the flowering stalks and add them to our Easter decorations on Saturday night in hopes that the plant itself won’t be too stressed.
My thoughts are much like Joe Clarkson , the entire world is circling the drain , the USA with its blind panic to have enough energy to keep the status quo ,Europe’ s hope of status quo with less energy . The far east saying a plague on both your houses .
World politics is fractured and becoming nastier , Internal politics is becoming more entrenched and authoritarian , a considerable number on the US left think assassination is the way forward , Europe is trying to stifle any decent from the status quo , both are trying to use ” the law ” to get their way which is bringing the law into disrepute further undermining what ” democracy ” we have left . In my seventy of years I have never seen the world so fractured or run by such incompetent morons .
The decisions needed to go forward into a energy starved world is not going to come from politicians , their ivory towers are too high for them to notice what’s happening on the ground , their interest is only how to keep the status quo going , finding new forms of taxes , firing the bloated civil service and buying munitions to try to keep what is patently obvious a failed system going .
In this anyone who thinks has only one course , YO YO , You are on your own .
” . . . routes out of the present impasse. It was mentioned, for instance, in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent critique in The Guardian of what they call the ‘death drive’ of administrations like Trump’s.”
I have been pointing out that the US is a death culture since 1968. AND I am not the only one. If you can find an underground newspaper from 1968-1970, read it. You will see what I mean. Trump has not invented anything new. Klein and Taylor have just gotten around to noticing it. Why do you think so many of us jumped ship in the 1960s? Because the US was a death culture AND it actually functions better on negative energy – i.e. trying to destroy it or even bring it back around to a positive way of functioning. Musk and Trump have never been rebels. They just exploited a system already in place. Trump was born with a silver spoon and Musk was able to use his brains to exploit opportunities already there. It also helps to be ruthless and soulless.
Still think we need to be careful that everyone has the crib sheets to make sure everyone has the same understanding of the terms that get thrown around.
I’m not enough of a student of history to know for sure, but Lyon’s characterizations seemed awfully skewed and questionable to me. Using DOGE social media posts as references does not help his persuasiveness either. The essay is so riddled with mischaracterizations, false assumptions, and opinions stated as facts that if I annotated it, the result would be three times as long. Jeesh.
Just one example of a statement that is way too simplistic just to build his argument:
“the fall of Soviet communism (liberalism’s last real ideological competitor)”
I’m not buying that, there are all kinds of hodge podge hierarchies and mixed governments/ideologies still out there. They may not be global superpowers, but they still represent different ways for us zany primates to organize ourselves.
BTW- why did you read this essay and feel compelled to discuss it, with they myriad other opinions/essays/facts we are drowning in? I can see a bit of overlap between this guy’s hope for a manly, warlord future and a small farm future, but it’s minor and just coincidence.
thumotic- seriously?, be honest, everyone here had to look that up, right? Hell, spell check and wikipedia stumbled trying to define it.
To me, a simpler answer is that are just seeing complexity being shed as declining available energy can no longer support the “weak gods” of neoliberal-modernism. Nation states, bureaucracy, carefully managed economies all need a certain critical mass that can only be expressed and supported with lots of energy.
Liberals and progressives may have been ham fisted and distracted by side issues, but the goals were at least well intentioned.
The “strong gods” that are mentioned, to me just mean the the new interpersonal dynamics that can be ( and will have to be) bootstrapped locally anywhere and by anyone. They are still open to a wide spectrum of outcomes for good or ill. Power abhors a vacuum.
The current strains of populism might be reaction to elite betrayal and incompetence, but are I think more importantly, simple responses to the fact that we’ve filled the planet, the pie is getting smaller, and everyone’s slice is getting smaller. Responses will vary a bit around the world, but overall, they express unease and challenge to the status quo, no matter what form it has taken. did “the state” get too big, ambitious, sclerotic and lose touch? Yes. Thermodynamics will take of that.
There was a reason Rome moved to Caesars, and a reason it declined.
Our own self styled Caesar, Trump the false strong God, may have a skill in tapping into and leveraging cultural angst, but he is no person to rally the flag around, he is a selfish narcissist who is also intellectually lazy and will only make collapse worse than it had to be. A new era of “You can just do things” sounds great till the dark side gets unleashed.
This Lyons guy would be singing an altogether different tune if he did not live in a country with 4000 odd nuclear weapons and oceans on both sides.
Not impressed.
I might calm down and write something a bit more coherent later………..
“To me, a simpler answer is that are just seeing complexity being shed as declining available energy can no longer support the “weak gods” of neoliberal-modernism. Nation states, bureaucracy, carefully managed economies all need a certain critical mass that can only be expressed and supported with lots of energy.”
Ah-ha! Now that an astute person pointed out “complexity [is] being shed” and “need a certain critical mass,” let’s look at the logistics for a moment. A couple of points I like to hammer on over and over again:
1) As economies contract, whether because of poor management or declining energy, they will revert to less complex forms. Of course authoritarianism will be a main component. The rise of social organization is quasi-anarchic bands, then clan group decision-making in tribes as population numbers increase, then the rise of the “big man” in tribes and reaching its peak in chiefdoms/kingdoms, and finally the rise of institutionalized control of resources managed by bureaucracies in state-level societies. All driven by population increases and elite seizure of power. As this process breaks down, the underlying forms will become more powerful. So, of course authoritarianism will re-surface. This is not some mystical, ideological, religious trope. It is just social organization. As kings, then petty kings, then chiefs fail to provide adequate resources, one should expect more decisions made by the group. This is the realm of the clan. Some groups around the world are using this social dynamic to their advantage; and of course the state-level societies are fighting back. It is a process of scaling up and then scaling back.
2) While we are discussing all this stuff, it is nice to have some coffee and rhubarb crisp to nosh on. Or maybe a pork chop with fried potatoes and onions from the garden. As we go to our potlucks or advisory meetings or some such other gatherings, food will likely be served. My focus for years has been to provide a basic commodity – food – that is necessary BEFORE all the intellectualizing and strategizing can even take place. There was a very good reason the dropouts of the 1960s became the back-to-the-landers of the 1970s and the market gardeners of the 1980s and continuing to this day. Food is primal and the bedrock of social organization.
3) It takes a tremendous amount of energy to research problems and figure out solutions and adaptations. In the current situation, using that energy to try and reform a death culture is not only a waste of time, it is a huge opportunity cost. The current and very real dilemma is NOT about reforming the US or UK or French or German, etc. system. We are too far gone for that. 1970 would have been the year to work on reform. Now, it is about surviving collapse. Yes, organizing resistance now develops political and social skills that will be useful after this phoney-baloney world is mostly rubble and a few old stone walls. But you should strive for balance. I mostly concentrate on the solid physical stuff. And yes, I will be the first to admit I lack social skills. But I won’t mind sitting in the back staying silent and LISTENING most of the time. As long as I have a something to eat.
Well said!
I’d like to expand on your observation that “it is a process of scaling up and then scaling back”. The scaling up was fraught with plenty of chaos, glitches and violence over many centuries, but the scaling back is likely to be orders of magnitude faster and more chaotic.
This rapidity and chaos may suppress how much violence enters the scaling back process, which would be about the only positive thing about collapse. Economic, political and population collapse might happen so quickly that there would be no time for states to devolve into warring principalities, they would instead quickly collapse into localized ad hoc tribes and gangs. This would entail violence to be sure, but not on the scale of organized state(let) warfare.
Of course while states still exist, there will always be the risk of nuclear war. I wonder if anyone has seen any studies or considerations of what happens to nuclear weapons arsenals when military command and control of them disappears?
considerations of what happens to nuclear weapons arsenals when military command and control of them disappears?
I would have thought that, if left alone and unmaintained, they will become unusable as explosives because of nuclear decay of the key material. More nasty nuclear waste though.
The decay of the conventional explosives that create the implosion of the fissile materials to reach a density that a self sustaining nuclear chain reaction can occur, degrade quicker than the fissile material. This degradation is accelerated due to irradiation by the nearby fissile material. The radiation also degrades the controlling electronics and detonators.
Hence the need to regularly rebuild nuclear warheads. In other words you can’t leave a nuclear weapon on a shelf. It would be a pile of junk in twenty years. So the chances of future barbarian warlords nuking each other with existing weapons is remote. On the other hand an irrational man in charge of a current super powers nuclear arsenal is quite another matter!
@Joe Clarkson
Unless people know how to grow food (which most people don’t, including me) it could all collapse pretty quickly.
How long does it take for someone to starve to death?
If 50% of UK food is imported, if those supply chains abruptly stop (which is very possible), then that’s 50% of the population gone quick fast.
Recently read a convincing account of how things might unravel. Set in 2040s
The final chapter of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. (You don’t have to read the whole book. The final chapter reads as a stand alone text.
Hinckley Point gets a mention.)
Sobering stuff.
John
A good thing is that growing food is a relatively easy skill to learn. Access to land is probably a bigger barrier than lack of knowledge.
Still, it’s prudent to get started earlier rather than later, if you can.
How is your composting going?
Hi Kathryn.
The compost bin is chugging along OK. I’ve decided that it’s a bit small and the next one needs to be a bit bigger. 1.5m x 1.5m
Negotiations are ongoing as to where to put it 🙂
I’m back on the biochar at the moment. Spent days drilling 70 x 22mm holes in a stainless steel oil drum only to find a much simpler and better design on the internet.
It’s here if you are interested.
https://youtu.be/JIrgNosdRFE?si=3Kgufi2LCN9mG8W9
Luckily I had 2 stainless steel oil drums.
It works really well (very little smoke, so am happy to light it in my garden) and is all stainless steel. So should last a long time.
Decided that the biochar works well as a cover material for a composting toilet. Happy with the experiments. Completely removes the smell and composts ok.
I’m interested to see if the biochar works as a cover material on a veggie patch to keep the slugs at bay.
Haven’t got any veggies on the go myself, so have been giving it to friends who have, to conduct “field trials”. Will keep you posted on results.
Only used biochar on my carnivorous plants. It’s been amazing. They like it soggy and the biochar holds the water well. The plants have gone crazy!!! The Venus fly trap has sent up shoots that are now flowering!!!!. I guess the plants get their nutrients from the insects. The roots are just to anchor the plant and to draw up water.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/04/16/who-will-be-our-mussolini/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJs761leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHsens4qyDbMWW74JmtJQfWXWg_bhx6h6CXWtMsSr_xkofphikVs5x-3MKN6M_aem_HoTiIRDN85PFPFiHdrt8Sg
I dearly hope this is not in your future Chris …
Reading all of the above from the (relative) safety of the bottom of the world (where an ex-tropical cyclone is currently battering the top of the country – they are getting more frequent and worse) I can at least smile at Steve’s comment on ‘thumotic’ (yes, I had to look it up too – it is now added to my meaningless words list) and agree with Walter about the death culture in the US. How could it be otherwise, given the history of colonisation, slavery, and industrial capitalism? Yet so many good things as well – a mass (mess?) of contradictions?
I can also agree with those commenting that as things are ecologically and socially bad and getting worse, and none of us possess the individual or collective agency to make them better in the time frame needed, it is more productive to focus on what we can do, NOW, both individually and collectively, i.e. the best way to live now as well in any future that arrives. I feel grateful that I have the option of being able to do this, and my heart goes out to those who do not.
Thanks Chris.
“…far too enamoured of Trump…” This is all I need to know about someone who styles themselves a political thinker. It tells me to ignore them. Trump cannot be relied upon to reciprocate any enamourement. Anyone who truly loves Trump is either confused, or thinks random wreckage of public goods for private gain is a good idea. Stupid or Evil? Why not both?
Similarly, why are we trying to figure out the rationale behind Trump’s ‘America first’ tariff policies? Who says there needs to be a rationale? Why can’t they be totally random? Designed by a chatbot? Clearly Trump does what he does because he can. I’m not convinced that he necessarily even cares whether these policies are a good idea.
What has been demonstrated clearly in the last few days is that if you and your friends have inside knowledge of a market-moving action, you can make lots of money no matter which direction the market moves.
On what basis could we argue that Trump is following an agenda of centralized state interests?
So far, his greatest successes have been at dismantling the apparatus of the centralized state, and to the extent that this dismantlement benefits anyone at all, it is certainly not the centralized state. More likely it benefits Trump and his friends. What we are seeing is wreckage with an eye to privatization.
There is nothing ‘patriotic’ about this, no matter how many flags they display. It is simple greed.
“…resolve the contradiction between serving capital and serving the people.” Well, the Trump people have done it, and in the most perfectly American manner. They serve capital, and then lie and say they are serving the people.
And a large percentage of the people still believe them. Do the elites believe this? Who knows, but they’ll act like they believe it if it pays well enough.
The mention of “masculinity” in articles like this is always a tell, in my opinion. All these overgrown boys have been watching too many John Wayne movies. The “masculine” archetype in this context is a selfish jerk who thinks he is entitled to get the girls without learning any basic human skills, and to get rich without too much work. All because he is blessed with certain anatomy.
Helpless children, exactly.
Re: Nationalism involves “a carefully curated top-down bureaucratic-modernist project of contemporary centralized states, as brilliantly analysed long ago by Perry Anderson’s older brother.”
That linked article about Benedict Anderson’s book “Imagined Communities” includes these quotes:
~~~~~~~~~~
“According to Anderson, nations are socially constructed… He defined a nation as an imagined political community… Members hold, in their minds, a mental image of their affinity: the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your “imagined community” is in conflict with neighboring nations or when participating in an international event such as the Olympic Games..”
“Even though we may never see anyone in our imagined community, we still know they are there through communication means, such as newspapers. He describes the act of reading a daily paper as a “mass ceremony:”
“It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”
“…regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.[6]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities
~~~~~~~~~~
I think “Imagined Communities” is an apt descriptor. It seems like people crave the psychological benefits of community, and imagined communities can be convenient (yet diminished) substitutes for face-to-face group interactions.
In today’s messed-up and hyper-divided political situations, imagined communities (or imagined teams) within the same nation are pitted against each other, with the self-identified members of each team partaking in the daily “mass ceremony” of reading (or watching) the latest talking points, and usually ranting about them later, always critical of the other team while tending to overlook or downplay their own team’s transgressions.
If only the people would realize, en masse, that the billionaires and elites (of any team) are not their friends or saviours, I think that would be a step in the right direction.
Thanks as usual for an interesting set of comments. A few responses:
Yes, pretty much agree with Joe’s follow up comments & thanks for the interesting link. My sense is that a lot of people are a bit worried about climate change, but typically see it as a future issue that will mostly affect poor people somewhere else and will hopefully be fixed by technology. Same but to a lesser extent with nature/biodiversity loss. Energy, materials, water, soils and political-economic degradation barely figure. I mentioned my tangles with Monbiot because I’ve found it informative, and revealing/disillusioning. More than anyone else I know of with a significant public platform, he’s raised these issues over the years, but when it comes down to it he just treats it as a game like all the other media influencers. And that is a big part of the problem.
Various people raised these kind of questions in different forms – why write about Lyons? why expend energy on futile political wrangling? why look for any logic in Trump’s actions? All good questions. Some brief comments on how I’m thinking about this:
– Agreed it’s at best futile and possibly counterproductive (Walter’s ‘negative energy’) to engage with sovereign politics on its own terms. Still, I believe it’s necessary actively to find ways of limiting it and containing its reach, rather than just ignoring it. I discuss this in my forthcoming book. Laughing at it can be a good approach, but it has to be done in the right way, which is challenging.
– Lyons and others like him are doing the opposite – trying to give a shape and coherence to present sovereign politics. I believe this kind of secondary intellectual exercise is what can really give it power, so I think devoting an hour or two of my time to questioning it is the least I can do, despite the probable futility of it.
– Regarding the coherence or otherwise of policies like Trump’s tariffs, I found the Joeri Schasfoort piece interesting in two ways. First, it’s less about Trump than about who he’s listening to – in this case, Scott Bessent and Steven Miran – and what their agenda is. It doesn’t mean there’s necessarily some overall coherence or grand plan, but then politics is always about multiple and often clashing agendas. However, I think it can be informative to attend to what the whispers behind the throne might be saying. Second, relating to the whole ‘fascism’ thing, what I’ve found interesting about this is that some of the same basic building blocks of the political problems that fascism arose in response to before are now in place again. So debating the fascism or otherwise of Trump himself or his administration is less to the point than the extent to which he continues to amplify or walk into those problems. That was a bit of an epiphany for me.
– ‘Thumotic’. Ha ha – yes, I had to look it up too. Still, the ‘mysteries and passions’ are important and we need to attend to them – something that ‘progressive’ politics is very bad at, because it buys into a particular version of modernism that I think Lyons, among others, is right to criticise. But as I said in the OP – and as Lyons himself recognises – ‘thumotic’ isn’t just good in itself. It needs to be shaped and contained. Hence, back to my previous point about containing sovereignty.
– I don’t entirely go along with Steve C that liberals and progressives were well intentioned in their goals. Yes and no. It was always a lot more authoritarian and self-interested than its self-representation. I think those who want to return liberal/progressive politics to power would benefit from a long hard look at why people like Lyons are now getting kudos from writing their epitaphs.
On the matter of complexity being shed, yes I agree that’s an important contemporary reality. However, I don’t think the political shape of the societies emerging in that less ‘complex’ (a word that needs a lot of unpacking) world are all that predictable or determined – indeed, probably less so than in our complex capitalist present.
I agree on the need for keeping it real. Grow food, build local community. But that’s not necessarily going to save any of us from the wider destructive forces now abroad.
Yes, complexity needs to be unpacked. I have been researching this and dialoguing about this for quite come time. I come down on the culture vs. society bifurcation. In my first anthropology class in 1968 (500 students, lectures on film) the prof started with probably the most important insight in anthropology, “Every culture is complex.” This usually comes down to throwing out loaded words like “primitive” and “savage,” but there is a deeper meaning. The complexities of sets of behavior that are transmitted between generations means we have a huge number of interactive variables. Of course even the earliest hunter/gatherers were complex! We just got back last night from a short trip to Grotte Peche Merle, near Cahors, France, where we viewed 29,000 year-old cave paintings. There are mammoths and horses that are done with just 3-4 strokes and they are just as complex as any of Picasso’s works. There is even pointillist technique! As Picasso himself said after viewing Altamira in 1939, “Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.” He was spot on. So complex culture has been with us for a long, long time; probably back to Australopithecus afarensis.
Complex society is different. It is a complexity of social links rather than individualistic behaviors. The more population, the more links. The more energy captured from the environment, the more links. So I am quite happy talking about a collapse of complex society which still has a high degree of complexity in the underlying culture. The most important aspect of this is the “underlayment” concept, which also ties into the underlayment of kith and kin in our modern societies. In the real world of houses and floors, you need underlayment before you put in that nice maple floor you have been wanting for years. I know this from the four rooms I did fifteen years ago.
So yes, I would appreciate some unpacking of complexity in future articles.
Bit of a side-point, but –
I don’t entirely go along with Steve C that liberals and progressives were well intentioned in their goals. Yes and no. It was always a lot more authoritarian and self-interested than its self-representation.
People almost always act from a mixture of motives. In this kind of case the genuine good intentions exist alongside the way people see themselves as “good people” – it’s that wretched business of “identity”. It’s a real force in behaviour, and “identity” has to be has to be taken into account when seeking explanations – gah, but it’s a snare and a delusion once you let it into your life and start encouraging it.
(“I identify as a …” or “my identity as a …” are phrases I never use – they create a vulnerabilty, something that has to be defended. Substituting “I describe myself as a …” gives it a quite different flavour)
“Yes and no. It was always a lot more authoritarian and self-interested”
Could you help me understand better the flaws you are seeing in liberal/progressive ideology? Not just as practiced, as that gets complicated, but stated/implicit goals.
Maybe I’m still just not fully up to speed on what the labels and terms mean, both in the headlines and as formally understood. As I mentioned, I’m not a historian, worse than that, I’m a retired engineer, so weak background in the humanities in general.
Around about 1973, so-called “progressives” switched from issue politics to identity politics. This was a significant blunder.
I agree on the need for keeping it real. Grow food, build local community. But that’s not necessarily going to save any of us from the wider destructive forces now abroad.
There are no guarantees of safety. Death, on the other hand, will come for us all, eventually, guaranteed.
I don’t grow food and build community because I believe it will keep me safe from wider destructive forces — though I think it does have a better chance of that, at least in the short term, than some other strategies. I do these things because I am profoundly grateful to be alive (even in times such as these) and because I believe that these are (some of the) right things to do, both in terms of good strategy and in terms of my obligations to Creation.
“none of us possess the individual or collective agency to make them better in the time frame needed, it is more productive to focus on what we can do”
Just this! Sometimes my partner or I come across some political or ecological news that spins us out into a depressing conversation about the state of the world and the future our children will face. These discussions increasingly end with us deciding the best response is to go plant some trees or potatoes or to go and sort the bees out. I think this is the beginning of the supersedure state that Chris has talked about. And I think as the strong gods fail as miserably as the weak gods to deal with reducing net energy and ecological collapse more people will begin to focus on what they can do. For some that might be planting spuds and for some that might be gangsterism (warlordism on a smaller scale?). It’s going to messy.
When I think about all this in terms of what my kids might need to navigate such a future, what wealth might look like is such a future the only sensible answer I come up with is land and community. But I have to allow that such an answer may not be universally applicable – that’s the whole point – there are no longer any all encompassing answers – that was modernity and that’s unwinding.
“the only sensible answer I come up with is land and community”.
Exactly. People who live in cities may have or develop community, but (by definition) they will never have the land. People in rural areas have the land, the question for them is how to ensure that they have community?
My speculation about that question is based on the assumption that community can only thrive in an atmosphere of interpersonal trust. People who don’t trust their neighbors can never create community.
This means that the first job of existing small farmers and other rural people is to promote trust. To do this, be the best neighbor one can be, volunteer for pro bono projects that benefit area residents and establish lines of communication that are trusted and beneficial to everyone.
The example of natural disasters is instructive; they often bring out the best in people. Somehow the common suffering at the hands of an impersonal calamity makes people more empathetic, generous and willing to put in heroic amounts of effort for the common good. They know that the disaster was nobody’s fault, so there is no one to distrust.
Economic and political collapse won’t be the same as a natural disaster because there will be a temptation to blame other people for the damage, but in a place where people trust one another, that blame can get short-circuited, preventing it from dominating relations and allowing community solidarity to take root. At least that is my hope for my rural community.
In the longer term, civic organization and the rules that govern local collective action codifies the barriers against mistrust. There still has to be enough trust to get people to follow the rules, but not nearly as much as is needed for cooperation without formal politics.
PS This is the danger exemplified by Trumpism. When raw power displaces law, the barriers against mistrust come tumbling down at all levels of society and even between countries. This is very, very dangerous, as we are now about to find out.
Another great post – I think Trump has become a cipher and interrogating this is productive. It is nothing to do with the man, or his so called government but as you show, a barometer of our present position. To me the phenomenon of Trump is less to do with some ‘thumotic’ impulse(I didn’t look it up but thought about something like chthonic, somewhere primal and animalistic), but more to do with the making of the world into a bad reality TV show, of which Trump is an impresario (hero boss man warrior film star property king). Trump is a Wizard of the concrete world that Joe speaks of but we’ve all seen behind the curtain, and we are seeing the collapse of this facade.
I think the primal needs of us all are constantly in play and are randomly engaged through any number of mediums, untethered as we are from any conscious culture of ritual or training, or craft.
The bad reality TV show that is the American western empire is literally the dream maker Hollywood studio that reduces the world to an enervating story where a bad morally corrupt actor can seem like a hero to a lost intellectual elite (and a bereft people).
And so the story goes, the future pans out before us along the lines of a John Wayne western, with elements of Braveheart, Gladiator and James Bond cyber villains and triad gangs. But this is the problem, that this narrative is a crock, no matter how many people sign up to it. Like Ziegler from Living Energy Farm says, 90 percent of people don’t own a car – they are not living the American western empire cool aid trip – and it don’t matter how much Internet interrogation we can do – we don’t, not one of us, have an idea how this going down. Like McLuhan says, we’re driving into the future looking in the rear view mirror.
He had another little saying, that the medium is the message, (and the massage), and maybe this is why we will not hear the about the organisation of local agrarianism through centralised broadcast media, national corporate governance and their intellectual aparatchiks. It has found space on the right. We will, with you, just keep on making the case for a particapatory commons practice, direct democracy, local agrarianism.
I have a healthy regard for my fellow folk, and they will rise to the occasion. The image of a market garden back dropped by the ruins of the Berlin Parliament is closer to the life that will emerge from the bad dream reality TV land. I laughed with joy at Kathryn’s description of her strong god, I see that possibility in all of us, to deny the propaganda of our age and hold the line.
Turnips on the lawn of the Whitehouse
http://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/the-coming-british-civil-war-david.
Ya might like to listen to this Its from a UK government advisor from kings college London .
I probably don’t need to say this, but just to note that nobody needs to justify the value of just getting on with growing food or building local community to me as worthwhile ends in themselves! None of us can do much to change the wider drift of politics. Nevertheless, I think there’s still a value in addressing ourselves to it, with a view to doing our best to contain it – a point I pursue in Chapter 11 of my forthcoming book.
On John’s point about UK food imports, there’s no question that we’re in a bad position here to deal with food system shocks, but it’s not quite as simple as 50% imports = 50% of people dying. That’s kind of the inverse of the tech-fix argument that because 50% of the nitrogen in people’s bodies comes from Haber-Bosch, then 50% of the global population would die without it. Ain’t necessarily so…
Nitrogen is a real concern, but an even bigger concern is a dependence on mechanization for growing, transporting and processing food.
I wonder how many people would die without diesel, the primary energy supply for the machines doing the growing and transporting? 80-95% of people in the rich world perhaps?
And even if a transition to pre-diesel technologies could be made easily, switching to draft animals, steam trains and sailing ships, for example, what would be the hit to total calories landing at loading docks in cities? I think it would be enormous and will likely be much worse because a switch like that cannot be made easily. Indeed, it hasn’t even been attempted.
The benefit of a small farm future is that it involves moving people to low-energy food production, basically moving people to the food. But if that moving process is limited to relatively small numbers, the vast majority who can’t move are totally dependent on machines moving food to people. Any glitch in that process means people start to die in large numbers.
The logic is simple. To save the greatest number of people, move them to where they can provide their own food with low-energy methods. This movement should be the overriding priority of governments everywhere, as you have declared many times (and I agree). It could be the difference between saving only 5% or saving, say, 20% of present urban populations.
I don’t know what those two numbers actually are, except that good policy is the difference between a very small number and a somewhat bigger number. Even though the best that can be done will save only a small minority, reruralization will be a policy worth following right up until the time modern cities are empty of life.
@Joe Clarkson.
Yes, I gree with all of that.
And to add….. I wonder if our individual calorie intakes will need to go up if fossil fuels are no longer doing the “heavy lifting”?
Transitioning to all those changes will take time. How many people know how to make an ocean going ship out of wood these days?
Governments could quickly dissolve if 20% of the population is starving.
The “shock” might come quick and sharp.
Global finance will be the first casualty of degrowth. The food and transport might still be out there in the world but we won’t have the finance to purchase it.
I’m not well read on the Irish potato famine. How long did it take for starvation to kick in after the crops failed?
Emigration won’t be an option this time around.
“Global finance will be the first casualty of degrowth. The food and transport might still be out there in the world but we won’t have the finance to purchase it.”
This is one of the most under-appreciated risks of all and the disintegration of global finance could happen virtually overnight. What happens if we wake up one morning to find that global finance is gone, letters of credit don’t work and goods supply chains just stop moving. Store shelfs would rapidly empty and everyone would be helpless to get them restocked.
Exchanging money for products is the way that modern economies self-organize. Unless there is a detailed government plan in place to use a command and control system to direct economic activity without the use of money, when finance breaks down, everything stops.
I doubt that such a plan exists within national governments and I don’t think such a plan is possible in an international context. Maybe barter could keep a few commodities moving, between two nations, but it would be very difficult to organize anything involving multiple nations.
Modern economies and the people they support are hostage to the arcane intricacies of global finance. If there is any significant glitch, people will soon begin to starve.
@Joe Clarkson
And it is unlikely that the world will show us Brits (or any Europeans) any sympathy.
After inflicting slavery, genocide, dispossession, forced removal, opium addiction, theft and extortion on much of the world, they aren’t going to do us any favours.
No doubt the response will be seat of the pants, too late, and ineffective. However, I bet there exists a plan, but it’s gathering dust in some bureaucrat’s file cabinet. There are people that get paid to think of these things, they just don’t get listened to, as the chance of occurrence is considered small, and the cost to truly prepare would be large.
Here is what was ready to roll out back in the oil embargo days:
https://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-spotlight/gasoline-rationing-coupons
Caloric intake will not need to change just because of collapse. The size of the human stomach stays the same. This is the reason food prices are “inelastic” in the economics textbooks. (Food prices don’t follow a normal supply/demand curve.) What will change is a reversion to a more peasant-like diet based on more carbohydrates and less meat. And carbohydrates can come from vegetable sources rather than grain. Beans, squash, corn, leeks, etc. are all good sources of carbohydrates and can be combined to maximize protein uptake.
True but I’m guessing, watching Netflix burns less calories than digging a ditch?
“Caloric intake will not need to change just because of collapse”.
Really? It seems pretty obvious to me that collapse will greatly reduce the number of machines doing work for us. This will mean a lot more human labor, especially in food production.
Even with the machines available today, farming is an activity which consumes a higher than average number of calories per day. Without the machines, human muscles will have to work harder, burning more calories.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6546587/
From the abstract:
“Agriculture includes the most energy-demanding jobs (males: 6.0 ± 2.5 kcal/min; females: 2.9 ± 1.0 kcal/min).”
Replying to John Adams and Joe Clarkson:
I have written three books on these kinds of topics, so I won’t go into the full breakdown on calculating kilocalorie input. Basically, it is an overall calculation with 2500 kilocalories/day as a consensus figure from nutritional science and biological anthropology. 500 kilocalories in 8 hours sleep, so 2000 kilocalories in 16 hours for the rest of the day. That’s 125 kilocalories per hour. Of course watching Netflix or doing spreadsheets or working your booth at the farmers market does not burn as many kilocalories as weeding carrots or threshing wheat with a flail or spreading straw for the cows! But that is NOT the point I made. The overall time spent in growing food and a metric for that time is my concern. A farmer typically spends about 3000 hours a year growing food – 4000 hours if you are milking cows. This includes time spent at the computer checking on prices, doing spreadsheets (and taxes!), transporting food to market and time spent at the market if you have a booth, repair on machinery, cooking lunch on the fly, sorting out seed packets, putting together your fertilizer, etc., etc., etc. It is NOT grueling work all day long under the hot sun. It is about doing tasks and being efficient in your work so you can get more done. Twelve years ago, when I wrote my first book, I checked my 125 kcal/hr figure by wearing a heart monitor with a kilocalorie function. Over a 12-hour workday I burned up ~1500 kilocalories, or 125 kcal/hour.
Joe, the paper you cite is not believable in real world conditions. I have many years of farming experience, including 8 years as a migrant worker. Those years were more athletic than growing a market garden or feeding cattle and pigs for sure. But the key is to become more efficient and get into a rhythm. There were probably times when I burned up 360 kilocalories per hour (6 kcal/min) but it is not a standard for ALL farm work. Also look at the confidence interval. +/ 2.5 on a base of 6 kcal/min smells funny – and not in a good way. I also did construction at various times and 4.9 kcal/min is way too high. My machine shop experience also belies the 3.8 kcal/min figure. I worked with an awful lot of fat guys who breezed their way through their jobs without cracking a sweat. They spent more energy on the weekends than at their jobs – just like office workers. So the NIH metastudy based on 61 other studies does not pass the sniff test. And 1667 subjects in 61 studies? That is only 27.3 subjects per study. Something is wrong there.
Yes, the end of machine agriculture WILL mean a LOT more manual labor. But not under chain gang conditions. Joe, you are a farmer yourself. Do you really spend 4320 kilocalories in a 12-hour day? I doubt it. I don’t. And I probably never did when I was a migrant worker either.
@Walter Haugen.
Interesting points.
Yes, I guess it isn’t all hands to the pump 24/7.
There might be a good test this summer, especially in tomato harvest season. Trump’s heavy-handed policies are reducing the number of immigrant workers entering the US. This reduces the number of farm workers who actually do the grunt work in the fields. This will have a significant effect on the ability to actually get food out of the field and into the stores, as well as in the slaughterhouses. Most Americans will not do this work. I used to be a migrant worker, but I have always been willing to do any grunt work necessary. Most people won’t do it. Nor can the farmers in California, Arizona, Florida, etc. be able to offer higher wages to entice people into the fields. I suspect the result will be much higher prices for produce, as well as reduced availability. Oops.
True. My comment wasn’t meant to be taken as a 50%=50% scenario. We all probably eat more than we need and throw away lots of food. Our need for imports could probably be reduced somewhat.
I was just highlighting the point that the vast majority of us don’t have the skills to grow food (never mind the access to land) and especially without fossil fuels.
A import supply shock would be fatal to a lot of people. The skills would not be learnt in time to fill the gap.
A supply shock like an Iran/Israel/USA conflict could quickly escalate to the destruction of middle eastern oil production. Supply chains would quickly grind to a halt.
Energy (or the lack of) is Modernity’s Achilles Heel.
Just to add to that………
To understand Trump, tarrifs, Greenland, Canada, Ukraine, Gaza, Panama etc etc……..energy is at the base of it all.
As for calorie intake , a long time ago I worked laying the north sea gas pipelines across the UK , living on the job, six days a week , twelve hour shifts , they fed us , I was burning between four and six thousand calories a day and my weight fell slightly , this was work , freaking hard work in all weather’s , many could not manage that work and quit , homesteading probably would not be as bad but I think average calorie intake would have to double from today’s numbers .
I used to think that the future would be a form of Neo-Feudalism. An Elite extracting from the labour of the masses, like in the pre-industrial age. But now, I’m not so sure.
Any elites that emerge after the end of modernity, will be ruling over a population of pretty useless/unskilled “peasants” who haven’t got the first clew about growing food.
It will be difficult to maintain any kind of societal structure if food production is virtually non existent.
Anyone out there fancy reading the last chapter of
The Bone Clocks
By David Mitchell
and then commenting your thoughts on it????????
(It’s a short chapter. Can be read in one sitting)
Thanks for the further comments. Only time for some very brief remarks:
– I agree that financial collapse is looming and may be the first shock to hit. In some ways that could prove one of the better ways for collapse to unfold, with the countries most vulnerable to it best able to cope with it. Not saying it’d be easy though.
– On the matter of collapse, I guess it’s the pace of it and the fact that our societies are not preparing for it in almost any way at all that, for me, are the major problems. I’m less concerned about the longer-term challenge of lower-energy, less material and mediated localism. Though, to repeat myself, not saying it’d be easy.
– On Steve C’s question about the problems with liberalism – a big topic! I touch on it in my forthcoming book and so perhaps will write more about it here in parallel with the book. Super briefly, I’d say the main problems are its ultra-individualism and related ultra-statism, its counter-productive attempt to expel values from political deliberation, its over-emphasis on progress, improvement, technique and expertise, and its inability to deal with what, in an earlier book and above, I called ‘mysteries and passions’ (Joel’s contributions often touch on this too). I do share much with Lyons in his critique of it – but I’m not persuaded Trump is its vanquisher!
– On the interesting debate about physical exertion and food energy intake, I’d read some stuff a while back suggesting that degree of exertion doesn’t greatly affect energy intake. Can’t remember where I read it – maybe it’s wrong. Still, something like 20% of our energy intake goes to our brains, and then some more to our livers and other organs, and presumably quite a bit to keep our bodies warm, plus the energy required to raise and lower heavy legs thousands of times a day. Hence, additional muscle exertion may not be such a big deal. Joe’s figures seem to suggest otherwise … so I’m not sure. Are those figures including the full inherent metabolic energy costs? Maybe another way of thinking about it is that while we’re accustomed to talking about fossil energy slaves that do vast amounts of energetic work for us, an awful lot of that work is unnecessary. Same goes for actual slaves. The difference between what people want and what they need?
The inevitable financial collapse may well lead to the UK’s inability to purchase oil on the international markets.
(What have we go to offer in exchange????)
No oil and things can/will unravel very fast.
My understanding is that, roughly, larger bodies do need more calories, and if you want to grow muscle to be able to do more work you need more calories temporarily (and probably more protein too), but the actual range is fairly small, with highly active individuals only expending something like 2 to 2.5 times their basal metabolic rate. Extreme cold or heat can increase this a bit more but not a huge amount. So if your basal metabolic rate is something like 1500kcal/day, and you’re extremely active, you might need as much as 4000kcal/day to maintain that activity level, but you might be fine on 2500 or 3000kcal/day. If you want to go digging on how much energy is actually used in various contexts you probably want the studies using doubly labelled water.
Further: if you’re dealing with temporary periods of extremely high activity (maybe around harvest or lambing season or something, or maybe you’re in some military campaign) you don’t just keel over if you don’t eat enough, you use glycogen stores (in your liver and muscles) and then body fat, instead. Similarly, if you go through a period of a couple of months of rather low calorie intake, you tend to reduce your activity levels (or rebel against your generals) rather than just dying. If you are an otherwise healthy adult and you aren’t thin enough to have a visible six-pack you can almost certainly survive fasting from all energy intake for a month or longer as long as you have enough water, though a few vitamins and minerals are also super helpful (and widely available in foraged greens in many places in the world). You might not enjoy it but you’ll probably live. Humans are pretty resilient to seasonal variations in food availability.
What will happen in periods of significant lack is that it will be harder to conceive children, and it’s more likely that any babies who are born will be smaller. They may also fail to do well if food shortages affect breast milk supply (though usually what happens is that fat stores and bones get raided for energy and calcium in milk instead). And people who aren’t getting enough to eat on a longer-term basis tend to suffer from multiple nutrient deficiencies, reduced immune function, and so on; children in particular can end up with serious health problems, or might just not grow as tall as they otherwise would.
While subsistence gardening and running a small farm is a lot of physical labour compared to sitting at a desk, I would probably count it as moderate activity rather than extremely high activity. After a point, you just don’t get any extra energy return for doing more work. I’ve got my growing scheme at the Far Allotment down to six one-day visits per year, and it produces winter squash, potatoes, dried beans and root vegetables — all respectable calorie crops. If I had more space I’d need to spend more time, of course, but… just the potato yield by itself easily covers my basal metabolic rate for those six days, and I suspect the winter squash takes the yield up far enough to cover my activity while there, too, and that’s before we get into the beans and roots. So if I did have enough land there’s no reason I couldn’t grow enough to feed myself, and probably a few others besides; being able to trade, say, herbs for honey would be handy.
The vast majority of my gardening time and energy is actually taken up by things like fresh beans, tomatoes, peppers, leaves, soft fruit, herbs… all lovely, and all part of a diverse and resilient locally-oriented food practice, but not going to move the needle on energy. But if you think a diet of spuds, squash, roots and beans is too samey, top fruit like apples, pears and plums, and nuts like walnuts, hazels, chestnuts and acorns (hi, Bruce!), can provide significant calories with relatively little labour. Lower-calprie tubers like Jerusalem artichokes and oca are handy insofar as they just grow back every year requiring no work but harvesting, so can be a useful calorie buffer against other harvests being poor (my Jerusalem artichokes are very drought tolerant compared to my spuds, for example). Cereals are staples for a reason, too, though personally I have only grown them on a micro scale.
All that said, famine is a real concern! But famine is mostly due to failed harvests from bad weather, or from lack of access to land, or from having to devote so much of the land to which you do have access towards growing cash crops to pay rent or taxes that you don’t have enough space for a diverse subsistence garden. It isn’t generally a result of not being able to do enough work to grow enough food to do that much work. That might still be the case for some individuals, of course, and those individuals likely have other valuable contributions to make to a household or a village. But on average it works out.
People have been growing enough food to feed themselves using mostly manual labour for thousands of years. If it weren’t possible to make the calorie balance work at least some of the time, none of us would be here.
As with any scientific calculation, it is good to use the same source for every category. Here is the source I use for kilocalorie values:
https://caloriecontrol.org/healthy-weight-tool-kit/food-calorie-calculator/
By “Calories” in the column headings, they mean kilocalories. Scientists used to use large C for kilogram “Calories” and small c for gram “calories,” but there is so much inconsistency it is best to just use kilocalories. So, for example POTATOES,RAW,SKIN have 58 kilocalories per 100 grams, while POTATOES,FLESH & SKIN,RAW have 77 kilocalories per 100 grams. The kcal/100g numbers are rounded of course. These are all real values and can be used to compare heat values to fossil fuels. The values for food were calculated in a bomb calorimeter by burning up the substance, but as a shortcut, nutritionists now just calculate the value based on the percentages of protein, fats and carbohydrates in the food; according to known values of protein, fats and carbohydrates measured in the bomb calorimeter. (A Google search for bomb calorimeter provides fascinating reading, by the way.)
The calorie was invented by Nicolas Clément in 1824 for a chemistry class he was teaching in Paris and was the heat required to raise one gram of water from 14.5 degrees Celsius to 15.5 degrees. The standard Calorie was introduced to America by Atwater in 1887 and he used the standard for a kilogram of water because the numbers were more manageable. (350 kilocalories/lb for potatoes instead of 350,000 calories.) There is still plenty of confusion engendered by modern-day nerds, with some rejecting the standard conversion of 4.184 kilojoules/kilocalories in favor of 4.186 because they use a different degree setting of 16.5-17.5 Celsius. I forget if the UK lists kJ/100 g as well as kcal/100 g on food packets, but they do in France, where I live, and it is usually just rounded to 4 times the kcal value.
Another rabbit hole on this issue is if you are a Howard Odum aficionado, who reckoned that fossil fuels have more heat value than human or animal labor or food value. This was the source of his whole concept of “emergy,” which he spun out as an exercise. He was wrong, of course. Heat is heat and the food values in kilocalories or kilojoules were measured by burning them up. They generate the same kind of heat you get from burning a fossil fuel or a piece of wood.
Why bother with all this? Simply put, you don’t have to rely on mucky-mucks in academia and expensive labs with lots of supercomputers for alternatives to fossil fuel agriculture. You can take a few simple and accepted values and figure out what you are doing in terms of energy used to grow food. Once you actually do this, it quickly becomes apparent that the human body is the most efficient engine on the planet and is the sanest alternative to growing food. Of course we are in a transition phase now, so some gasoline or diesel comes in handy. I used 37.5 liters of gas (essence in French) last year and 600 hours of labor to grow 3000+ pounds of food. My EROI was 2.03:1, which is not bad considering I am retired. When I was a market gardener it was 2..50-3.50. With fossil fuel agriculture requiring 10 kilocalories (or kilojoules) to grow 1 kilocalorie (or kilojoule) of food, my small-scale methods wer 25-35 TIMES more efficient than fossil fuel agriculture. This is the nuts and bolts of a Small Farm Future.
“it quickly becomes apparent that the human body is the most efficient engine on the planet and is the sanest alternative to growing food”.
True, but energy efficiency is not the primary objective in commercial food production, it’s output per human hour worked (productivity). For grain harvesting, this means that one hour driving a combine is far more productive than one hour wielding a scythe even though the energy expenditure by the scythe operator per unit harvested is far less than the energy used by the combine (embodied and operational) for the same amount.
The same reasoning applies to comparisons across the board, petrol tiller to broadfork, digger to shovel, tractor bucket to wheelbarrow, chainsaw to crosscut saw, all of which I have available on my farm. And I can assure you that I will personally have to expend far more food calories if fuel is unavailable and I substitute human powered tools for petrol powered tools. This doesn’t mean that people can’t grow plenty of food with muscle powered tools, but it does mean that they will have to work those muscles harder when using a crosscut saw, for example, than a chainsaw. Probably the last drop of fuel I will every use will be in a chainsaw (I still don’t have an electric chainsaw, but that might be coming soon).
Harvesting that can only be done by hand is the one situation where machines do little or nothing to increase productivity. This is the long-term advantage of tree crops, and permaculture in general, for efficiency and sustainablity of production.
Pastoral “crops” are similar to tree crops, at least on a small farm. Isolating, slaughtering and butchering an animal are mostly manual tasks except for moving the carcass around.
This is why, as I grow older and more feeble, I have gravitated toward sheep, nuts, and fruits (including avocados and bananas) and away from arable row crops. I still grow the most productive root crops, like sweet potatoes and taro, in an outdoor garden, but not much else. I grow some highly desired specialty vegetables in a couple of small greenhouses.
I can get away with this strategy because I live in a subtropical climate where food can be harvested throughout the year and pastures are green all year. Grain agriculture and putting up hay in a temperate climate would be much harder to pull off with manual methods.
In sum, I think “it is a truth universally acknowledged” that food forests and small livestock rule.
“Probably the last drop of fuel I will every use will be in a chainsaw”.
I said this exact thing at another blog I follow. We heat with wood (In Wisconsin) so firewood is a significant annual chore.
I have a crosscut saw, and have used it, but that is a whole other discussion. (I’m 68)
We use a Russian furnace, and try to be as efficient as possible, but life is all tradeoffs.
We do a lot of “calorie gardening”; potatoes and dry beans. The other vegetables we do are then canned or frozen if not eaten in season.
I do small patches of wheat or oats, as they are good combo of long term storage and calorie density. Here is a post from my very occasional blog giving a glimpse at the learning journey:
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2020/07/
When fossil fuels are no longer economical, the focus will shift from productivity, as you define it, to actual energy cost. The mitigating factor will be what is left of the infrastructure. In other words, the frozen kilocalories (or kilojoules) lying about in steel and other hard goods that can be repurposed. Since humans are efficient, but not productive in growing food, to use your phraseology, the social system will have to adjust when the oil supply declines below critical levels. People will be willing to work for food and a little bit of cash or silver or scrip or barter goods. This will mean fewer onerous rules in setting up small local markets, for example. [I have lots of stories about the useless bureaucratic tangle of setting up farmers markets.] Most people who cannot adjust to a new social order will die. Those of us who have been working with the efficient human organism will have an edge. It is to my advantage to persuade and train as many people as I can in sustainable small-scale farming/gardening before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
By the way, Gail Tverberg (Our Finite World blog) takes the lead in pointing out that oil supply will decline because of the oil companies not getting a price that provides an adequate profit – not because of declining supply. This puts a whole new spin on oil subsidies, BTW. It may be that the oil subsidies are actually necessary to keep our phoney-baloney affluent lifestyles going a little bit longer. Oops.
Walter, you said, “Since humans are efficient, but not productive in growing food, … the social system will have to adjust when the oil supply declines below critical levels. People will be willing to work for food and a little bit of cash or silver or scrip or barter goods”.
I agree and believe that this “adjustment” will be pervasive. It means that everyone who is already a small farmer will be inundated with people wanting to work on their farm. The trickle of people out of cities will never become a flood, but it won’t take many urban refugees to change the labor landscape of small farming communities.
My wife and I live by ourselves on a little over 6 hectares, most of which is pasture. If all of that pasture were converted to hoe crops, at least 10-20 people could make a living here, perhaps more. The would have to be willing to sleep in greenhouses and outbuildings, but they would stay dry and warm.
While industrial supply chains still exist, people who are already small farmers might be wise to purchase some extra tools and bedding to make it easier on their new workers. And refugees who bring their own tools and skills will be especially welcome.
Thanks for the calorie discussion.
Meant to say to John that I will try to read the Bone Clocks.
Also re John’s point on fossil fuel collapse – I’m interested in people’s views on this. Not many countries have their own oil or gas reserves, many more have coal – I expect there’ll be a future return to coal to stave off energy crisis. We’re beginning to see it already. A shame, in view of its carbon intensity.
Britain in fact has reserves of all three, but not nearly enough to maintain us in our present lifestyle. We could have used our reserves to ease our way into a more sustainable one, but we didn’t. Another shame.
Nevertheless, we’re in a better position than many other countries – there are numerous populous Global South countries with little in the way of their own fossil fuel reserves, an energy supply heavily dependent on them and relatively weak economies and currencies. The South Asian electricity crisis of 2022 was driven to a considerable extent by the ability of richer European countries to buy gas at prices South Asian countries couldn’t afford. Our purchasing power may nosedive when economic crisis hits, but so will that of poorer countries. The silver lining for them may be that their populations overall are less dependent upon a high energy way of life. This, however, is not the message or the trajectory that their governments have pressed in recent times.
To take a self-interested perspective on this, there are a lot worse places to be in terms of bad future energy prospects than Britain – and the reason for that is partly because wealthy countries like Britain take a self-interested perspective on energy futures.
Chris – On the coal issue, I keep coming back to the high EROI on coal. About 50:1 worldwide, with 80:1 in the Wyoming and Pennsylvania coal fields. I don’t know the figure for Australia, but China has been buying all the coal they could get from Australia for years. It used to be better for China to import to the electricity-generating plants on the coast because they did not have the infrastructure to get the coal to the coast from their interior. Now they have developed a better grid with ultra high voltage (UHV) lines, which now allows them to generate electricity close to their own coal mines in the interior and then transport the electricity over a grid that does not lose as much energy as the old grid system. France has this system too for nuclear power, but China is rapidly outpacing France. This is a key factor in electrifying China’s transportation system. In the US for instance, electricity could be generated in Wyoming and then shipped all over the country via a UHV grid system. Even if UHV only loses 50% of its electric energy in transmission, the scale of it may be a big win versus the current systems which routinely lose 67% of electric energy from the generating plant to the end user. This fits in with my overall view of increasing coal use worldwide. It would be nice if people just showed some restraint and used less of the coal energy, but that is unlikely.
“The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022”.
Shipping coal by rail for 1500 miles has an energy cost of about 8% of the energy value of the coal. Sea freight would be far less.
China’s use of HVDC transmission from interior coal plants is probably due to energy security considerations or relative market value of coal than the energy cost of importing coal by ship.
Here’s a paper discussing the costs of long distance transmission of energy:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668
I misspoke about the loss of energy in generating electricity and getting it to the end user. Instead of saying, ” . . . routinely lose 67% of electric energy from the generating plant to the end user,” I should have said, ” . . . routinely lose 67% of electric energy from primary source fuel to the end user.” As you point out, the Science Direct article uses a 5% number for transmission and distribution loss, which they got from EIA FAQs, (cited in the article). Elsewhere the EIA says, “More than 60% of energy used for electricity generation is lost in conversion.” Here is that article:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44436
As usual, the energy auditing is incomplete and numbers are massaged so they don’t tell the whole story. Here is a very nice article which uses Lawrence Livermore Lab data to break it down further. Their numbers are 67.8% wasted and lost, with 6% lost through the grid. This article breaks it down further between waste and loss and between recoverable and non-recoverable. (By the way, perhaps Lawrence Livermore Labs are not such a good reference anymore, after the cold fusion public relations fiasco in 2022. Ha, ha! That was another case of massaging data and giving a false impression.)
https://3dfs.com/articles/wasted-electricity-vs-lost-electricity-in-the-u-s-electrical-grid/12/2015
The whole idea of UHV is based on systemic changes. This includes changes in infrastructure at the power plant, not just in the transmission lines. China is also using UHV for their renewable sources of energy for electricity. There are plenty of YouTube videos on this. I particularly like Kevin Walmsley’s take on this. His Substack site and YouTube channel is Inside China Business.
Even though I misspoke, my argument still stands. The higher EROI of coal is the reason coal use is on the rise worldwide. Even though natural gas through pipelines can still compete, LNG loses by comparison to coal, not only because of price, but because of lower EROI to the end user (in this case electricity generating plants). If Germany can resume getting gas from Russia, they won’t need to go back to coal. Germany already restarted some lignite-fueled plants temporarily in 2022 and 2023. The UK has approved a new coal mine, but this will be for coking coal, used in steel manufacture. By the way, the coal trains we got stopped back in Whatcom County, Washington a few years ago (credit goes mostly to the Lummi Tribe, of course) were for coking coal. This is another whole aspect of coal that few people recognize. If Trump actually gets more steel mills going in the US, the need for coking coal will rise significantly. Koch Industries is salivating.
Yes, coal is a dirty business. But King Coal is back!
@chris smaje.
I read somewhere that there is 200 years worth of coal still in the ground in the UK.
The problem is getting to it. It costs increasing amounts of energy to extract it.
If it takes 1 tonne of coal equivalent energy to extract 1 tonne of coal, then it gets kinda pointless.
This, the Energy Costs of Energy, is happening with all fossil fuels. The low hanging fruits have already been had.
I’m less optimistic than you on the UK’s ability to afford oil in the future. If the financial system crashes, the UK will be hit hard. The City of London is the big player in the UK economy.
Without financial service (money laundering), what have we got to offer the world?
University education?
Manufacturing?
Selling off Piblic utilities/ infrastructure?
I think our “wealth” is cosmetic and could disappear in a puff of smoke.
I can’t see Russia giving us (or the rest of Europe) favourable terms for their hydrocarbons any time soon.
Or Iranian oil.
The BRICS countries are moving away from the petrodollar and if Saudi does………..
Interesting times ahead.
John, we probably don’t disagree much on the general shape of things. I repeatedly emphasize in my writing that the global economy is a house of cards built on a base of unsustainable dirty energy … I’m certainly not ‘optimistic’ that the UK can or should keep buying oil. Where we may differ somewhat is on the significance of historic political power in the short to medium term, independently of resource richness. For example, Zambia and DR Congo are countries with considerable resource richness but seem to me unlikely to become powerful global political players as a result of that in the event of global economic crisis.
@Chris
Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat is a “great” film on the DR Congo, resource extraction and global politics. Well worth a watch.
I agree that Zambia and DR Congo aren’t going to prosper from all those mineral deposits.
As the available fossil fuels starts to decline, it’s going to get harder and harder to extract the ores.
Walter, One farmer/gardener with simple tools can grow an amazing amount of food. Modern wheat has improved disease resistance and improved yields that further caloric returns. We have at our fingertips access to a huge variety of seed and knowledge about mineral requirements for healthy soil and access to soil labs as well as access to minerals to amend deficiencies. We have the potential to grow more than our ancestors even if we had to resort to 100% manual techniques. But for some reason the study of efficiency in human powered food systems is wanting. I have tried to get academia or USDA to do an energy survey on my farm but there are no auditors available especially to audit manual productivity.
Solar / battery electrics can also be utilized to improve production for small scale food production and processing. Again you’d think someone might be interested in which tools added the most food calories for the least embodied costs?
Maybe government is least interested in how to incentivize independence because it craters their tax base. They hated tune in, turn on, and drop out. If everything about our capital system is designed to shunt money up from workers to the renters it may be that actual solutions will never be studied or communicated . Only in small groups we will flourish because any large movement to simplification will be actively repressed .
You are spot on Bruce. Yeah, sometimes it gets depressing being a Cassandra. But I just had burritos for supper made with some of my landrace beans and frozen peas from the garden on the side. The burritos featured homegrown bean sprouts and salsa verde from my own tomatillos too. So it’s not all bad.
I agree Bruce, I’ve been loving this workshop https://www.mortiseandtenonmag.com/blogs/blog/the-human-powered-bandsaw?srsltid=AfmBOoqVKhXTo1rRB4DIHPLWCTkM0bc54qT2uOTCugoiwS-Ig_pfgc5l
It’s by Harry Bryant, a boat builder in Canada, he’s got some great essays on intermediate technology here; https://www.harrybryan.com/pages/philosophy
There is a whole suite of tools for community provisioning that is waiting to be (re) discovered, there is a website devoted to the beautiful pedal and treadle powered machinery that flourished from the 1850s to the 1920s that was destroyed (melted down) for the wars.
Joel, I like Bryant’s measure of utility for power equipment “ can it do twice the work in the same amount of time “
I am interested in simple farm tools although I use solar/ batteries .. intended to augment rather than replace my labor.
I do lots of work with a hoe and unless you use plastic mulch( I don’t ) you need to clean up weed growth near your new seedlings even if you do have a tractor and cultivating blades. As spring starts and planting commences you try to keep your plantings clean and because things grow slow in early spring you can keep everything tidy. But as summer arrives and your planting area has grown you get to a place where controlling weeds gets really time consuming . So without using a tractor or cultivating blades I wanted some intermediate technology. This rig can easily cultivate between rows far better than “twice as fast.” I still need to use a hoe for cleaning near new seedlings https://steeleb.substack.com/p/mini-bike-cultivator . Hence augment rather than replace.
https://www.facebook.com/winfield.farm.5/posts/pfbid0snNzyoRMXNF26LeebeL71gVQt2f74fGbsZb3bZNJisA1FfdpVvif8AX9QwAwvotRl
Bruce, it occurs to me that you missed my meaning. I was misquoted. Here is what I said. “Since humans are efficient, but not productive in growing food, to use your phraseology, the social system will have to adjust when the oil supply declines below critical levels.” Joe Clarkson was very clever in his use of ellipses.
As you know, my whole program focuses on using fewer energy inputs. This means more people growing food. The productivity issue is a red herring. But IF productivity IS the metric, the mainstream food production system will still have to adjust. Declining oil supply will force the system to adjust. This is an opportunity for Chris Smaje’s writing to have more impact and for your sophisticated methods and gadgets to become more useful.
Very interesting lines of discussion above – thanks everyone.
This comment of Joe Clarkson’s interests me: https://chrissmaje.com/2025/04/no-more-heroes-or-seeking-strong-gods/#comment-266428
There’s some discussion in my forthcoming book on this question of the re-peopling of agrarian landscapes. It’s something I’d like to explore/discuss further.
I mean, I’ve certainly purchased spare tools, simply because I know that sometimes they break, but also because I garden in enough different locations that carrying a compost fork (or whatever) from one place to another gets silly. I make a policy of having at least two bicycles in working order at any given time, and I try to make sure at least some of the parts are trivially interchangeable. This is just as normal to me as keeping a pantry with a wide selection of non-perishable food. I am wealthy enough to keep two bicycles, but not always wealthy enough to be able to fix one in a hurry if I only have one.
In terms of bedding… meh. I can cut up old clothing and fashion it into a heavy blanket quite adequately. I haven’t much space for things like spare mattresses (rather harder to store outdoors than bicycles are), though I do own a hammock. I think there is quite a lot of textile waste around already with fast fashion, and I prefer to learn mending skills and keep some good mending materials in stock rather than attempt to stockpile bedding.
I do get through work gloves fairly quickly, and they are a huge pain to make and non-trivial to repair. Sturdy boots are also a very good idea in a world with potential reduced access to industrially-produced antibiotics (though in fairness, I have also treated minor bacterial infections with plants).
I do get frustrated at times by the “when there’s no more work or food to be had in the cities people will go to the countryside to try and find a way to live off the land” narrative. I already know people who have spent substantial periods of time sleeping in churchyards (with or without tents), people for whom sheds to sleep in are really a luxury. I already know people who don’t get enough to eat. So far as I can tell, they are largely staying in the cities, where there are other people around who can help them and where they might eventually be able to get a job (or a better job). I suppose I could ask some of them what it would take for them to turn up at random small farms looking for work and food! Or perhaps some of the rural dwellers who comment here could offer feedback on what rural poverty looks like and whether the urban poor are heading to the countryside yet — by definition, I only know the urban ones. What are the early signals we should be paying attention to, here?
I’m not trying to claim here that cities as we currently know them can continue to exist in their current form after a massive drop in the availability of fossil energy; I don’t think we really know what that might look like, but “more of the same” seems unlikely. But there is certainly a tension between “there’s no work or food here, let’s head for the sticks and see if we can exchange some labour for a meal and a place to sleep” and “I don’t have a job and can’t buy food, better stick around in the city where at least there are food banks and night shelters and I know who to avoid and who might help me”.
The food we feed our soup kitchen guests, or provide to food bank users, falls into a few categories:
1) industrially produced shelf-stable crops: cereals, grain pulses, sugar products, and by-products of industrial overproduction (e.g. tinned meat, longlife UHT milk).
2) semi-fresh fruit and veg that comes from restaurants, catering departments etc and is surplus to requirements. Sometimes this includes products from the first category. On one memorable occasion we received 10kg of high quality white chocolate blobs for baking with. Sometimes it’s sixty kilos of turnips. More often it’s a few trays of veg: one week will be tomatoes, peppers, lemons and celery; another will be carrots, parsnips, pears and mushrooms.
3) herbs and spices to make the above more palatable: catering-sized cartons of curry powder are involved
4) food I grow in the churchyard, food I forage on my way to church, or excess produce from my allotment(s) that I don’t have time to process or space to store. Most of this is not calorie crops (though I do grow spuds, in order to help mitigate against occasional variability in supply), but it is absolutely the freshest produce that most of our guests get to eat.
I suspect it would take the supply of 1) drying up entirely (rather than merely getting more expensive) to prompt closing the soup kitchen and food bank while there are still hungry people to feed. I could be wrong about that, of course. But the scale of that kind of economic collapse makes it incredibly difficult to predict, both in terms of timing and effects.
The current predicament of some people not getting enough to eat is not because we are, as a society, not producing sufficient food. It is because global markets and rent-seeking are a stupid and iniquitous way to allocate and distribute food. Those global markets (and associated famines) pre-date the widespread use of fossil fuels for both transport and mechanised agriculture. Increased urbanisation during and after the Industrial Revolution was a response to enclosure and rent-seeking.
Fossil fuels for mechanised agriculture and transport are part of enclosure and rent-seeking, but enclosure and rent-seeking are likely to continue after fossil fuels are no longer economical to extract. Enclosure and rent-seeking are part of what will collapse the current economic situation. There are people making unconscionable amounts of money from current energy price volatility.
Previous, recent attempts to move people out of London in an orderly way are worth study; the New Towns had lofty aims in terms of slum clearances, but things went very differently in Milton Keynes than in, say, Harlow. Of course, these were done with the aid of fossil fuels in a rapidly growing economy; that is not where we are now.
It’s also worth looking at 20th century economic shocks and whether they led to a decrease in urbanisation or increase in rural labour availability. I’m not aware of that happening in any enduring way during the 1930s; in the early 1970s the oil price shocks in the UK and the three-day week didn’t prompt people to look for manual agricultural labour to make ends meet; nor did it happen in the late 1970s and early 1980s as mass unemployment became an entrenched structural social problem. Those examples are all before my time but I’m not aware of it happening in the 2008 crash either. Economic collapse in Iceland and Greece resulted in mass migration to cities in less damaged economies. You could argue that we merely kicked the can down the road every time using fossil fuels; I might counter that we propped the economy up each time with further enclosure of formerly public resources.
Thinking about a collapse in availability of fossil fuels is important, but I wonder what happens when everything that can be enclosed has been enclosed.
I am just a city kid, but my understanding is that there are parts of rural England where the ability to move around and find employment in manual labour (such as cleaning and agriculture) has itself been enclosed by rent-seekers, usually called “employment agencies”, who have access to minibuses, work visas, security guards and overcrowded accommodation. These are not located in the large cities like London, but smaller ones like Bridgewater. I wonder whether a steep contraction in the fossil economy would prompt a rapid intensification of that kind of enclosure, which has already undercut the informal local employment networks of parts of rural England.
The food pantry I volunteer at is in a small town, ~700 population, and all the guests drive there. They pretty much all live in or near the town. The main difference with rural collapse is the spatial dispersion. If you don’t have a car, any access to help is pretty much nil.
There is a bit of public land, but nearly all land is privately owned. Someone drifting in to the area to find work/shelter would be more like joining a family, so not so easy to do.
Another point is that at least in this area, there are few large farms, mostly small, but the great majority of farmers work outside the farm just to get by. No one is getting rich. One of many articles I could share:
https://www.agdaily.com/news/off-farm-income-keeps-farmers-farming/
There are a lot of reasons for why this is the case, but really, it all comes down to the slow inevitable collapse that is happening.
In the past few months, with all the Trumpian chaos and disruption, our food pantry has seen a lot of uncertainty on whether the USDA programs will continue smoothly, or at all.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/31/funding-cuts-food-banks-farmers/82705776007/
Delivery schedules have been unpredictable, and available items has had much more fluctuation. As you, we gather from a variety of sources, sometimes odd offerings result. So far, we are adequately stocked, but I worry.
Thanks for those comments. If we’re agreed that the long-term picture is a less urbanized world, it’s interesting – if uncomfortable – to think about how that could emerge. I doubt that present urban poor people are going to be the drivers of it, which unfortunately may not be good news for them. Maybe New Orleans after Katrina is another relevant example?
Another dimension is the point you’ve raised about enclosed land – enclosed by who, with what means and for what purpose? What are its chances of staying enclosed in that way in the future?
Lots of food for thought in these comments. I discuss these issues a bit in the new book. I’ll come back to it here in due course.
I think about this both from the urban poor side as well as the farmer side, having been and in some ways being both.
If we assume central states won’t be defending absentee landlords, that still leaves local sheriffs and police in that role for starters. Being in a rural state there’s a lot of land in some ways, but not a lot of people and I’m still not sure how it would play out. In my area there’s a lot of “small” farms in the hundreds, but not thousands of acres too big for even a well armed family to defend (or work without fossil fuels) but not large enough to hide a village. Many of the places you would want to roll up and start farming, floodplains, creeks, ponds, are well peopled already, which in a way is good, there’s some infrastructure there to work with, but also not ready for an influx of unskilled urbanites. There is some opportunity for sure in in just going on lam with some livestock into the flint hills, the largest intact tall-grass prairie in the world, you could maybe hide out there but not farm. There’s also the matter of shelter, you can survive outside APR-NOV, and some homeless do stay outside through the winter, but at minimum you’ll need a shelter to windbreak and preferably some fire.
From the farmer side it really depends when people show up ready to work for food, I hope it’s in late spring, and it will take time to turn pasture over to row crop if we’re really up against it. And it takes even longer to setup trees, hedges, shrubs, ponds, and all the thousand other things that turn a vast mechanized farmland into a complex dense food web for feeding people. Rangeland would need less conversion but has even greater need to setup shelter and water sources.
So I guess the question is, assuming everyone understands the need for a small farm future tomorrow, what would the ideal plan look like to get us there?
And I’ll add
If the farmer is the new hero, should we keep the farmer label? Should it be husbander, steward, landsman/woman, earth protector, or something else? Or is farmer good and sensible enough?
I think this article is worth a look if you haven’t seen it. Kind the big picture view on why go rural.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-04-15/urban-legend-the-harebrained-myth-of-urban-sustainability-and-why-you-should-bet-on-the-country-tortoise/
Has a link to Chris’ last post, and comments are good too. Tom Murphy, Alice Friedemann stopped by, and even Joe C.!
Thanks Steve – good article.
I would also expect more coal use in the future. It has by far the largest remaining reserves of any of the fossil fuels. Some of that may not currently be economical to extract but rising prices or desperation could change that. There’s also a long tradition of forcing men into holes into the ground which could shift the EROEI. The closest coal to me has a stripable overburden of 35:1, that’s not worth it for the giant machines to move the face of the earth, but doesn’t seem completely out of reach mineshafts, of course the best locations are already dug out.
As an athlete (of sorts) I can have eaten about 3,000kcal a day without gaining weight. Farming which I do all by hand is less intensive but occupies more time than training and I would think would fall in around the same amount if I was doing it all day. It’s not a huge increase and you don’t farm all year in the temperate world but it is an increase. It could probably be largely offset though by just having more people living close to the food source instead of at the end of the chain.
Commentators are right of course, no one of us can fend off larger threats, so maybe I’m still too naive but if there’s a chance for better politics at the center that is at least is more likely to leave space for the local agrarian it might be worth throwing a little effort in that direction.