Like most of you perhaps, I have been watching the BP oil rig disaster and oil spill with growing horror. It appears unforgivable lapses in backup operating and safety procedures were committed by the rig operators including BP, Transocean and Haiburton staff in a challenging physical situation that is testing the limits of petroleum extraction technology. In addition, everyone involved from BP to the media to the Federal government has been lying to the public about the extent and quantity of oil being released into the Gulf.

Reports are now saying that outflow rates from the leaks were unreported by a factor of a magnitude, instead of the still terrible 5,000 bpd or 210,000 gallons, of basically toxic crude oil, the actual rates is probably more than 50,000 bpd or more than 2,000,000 gallons ever day. This poisonous flow is dumping itself into one of the richest biological ecosystems in the world, one that supports multi-billion fisheries that provide food for millions of people. Massive wildlife and environmental devastation is possible – uh, likely and is probably happening at this very moment.

Now it is almost impossible to write down the hyperbolic language equal to the ecological damages being wrought, so here are some web sites for further research:

Here what the Center for Biological Diversity is saying: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/energy/dirty_energy_development/oil_and_gas/gulf_oil_spill/index.html

Deepwater Horizon Response Team – Official Unified Command:

http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

British Petroleum efforts at stemming the leaks:

http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=40&contentId=7061813

It looks like this could be a disaster in which nobody wins and that the technological capabilities of British Petroleum, the Gulf of Mexico oil response industries, the US Coast Guard and all the departments of the Federal Government may be inadequate to deal with the problem. Surely some ideas like burning the oil on the water and spraying tons upon tons of a chemical dispersant seem to reflect a lack of intelligence and concern for the greater environment and perhaps more than a bit of desperation.

So what is a concerned citizen to do, what can be done for a crisis that threatens to leave a wondrously productive bioregion devastated? Fortunately the Southern working man, maligned as he is in stereotype and image, has come up with a solution.

See these web sites for demonstrations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SxX2EntEo

Now I was raised on a commercial dairy farm and grew up baling hay. The eldest son of an insanely hard working man, I spent my summers loading and unloading wagons and stuffing hay barns, moving at least 5,000 bales a year at least three times per bale.

As soon as I seen the video, I recognized that this was a practical idea, one not only likely to be effective in capturing oil residues, but also likely to be cheaper and easier to implement than most any other spill mitigation strategy. On our farm, we used straw for exactly this purpose, we would cover spills of diesel fuel, which happen occasionally when you use multiple tractors and other power equipment, with straw. Then we would trample over it, rake it back and forth over the spill, let it sit and remove the oil residue covered debris. This works.

This concept has already been submitted by me to the Deepwater Horizon Response Team through their web interface form, the following is a slightly edited version of that suggestion. Because of the importance and urgency of the GOM oil spill situation, you are getting this suggestion in rough form. I hope to add blog posts in the next week that will elaborate on how the US farming and fishing communities can come together to use hay and straw bales as an solve the GOM crisis themselves.

Hay/Straw bales as solution

Alfalfa hay and grain straw are an extremely abundant resource throughout the farming belt which includes all of the Southern states afflicted by this massive oil spill. There are many ways in which hay and straw bales can be deployed to protect beaches, reefs and marshes and to soak up the oil spill in the water. Bales of hay and/or straw can be used to soak up oil and tar balls floating on the water or stacked in a line onshore to protect beaches, marshes or wetlands.

Consider some of the methods – our overwhelmed – to say it mildly – authorities have or are using to combat the spreading oil spill. They skimmed a portion of it and lit that on fire, but weather conditions fought against this year. Presently they are doing massive aerial spraying of some type of detergent dispersant that regular news reports describe as toxic, with unknown effects to the food chain and web of life. So, our formal strategies to solve an almost unbelievably huge pollution crisis are to create more air and water pollution with possibly worse effects than the oil spill.

Now a positive solution is to soak up the oil as easily deployable and inexpensive as possible in a way that the oil residue is recoverable for its thermal (and/or chemical feedstock) value. Bales are compact and can be deployable in a multitude of ways according to the environmental conditions. The great things about using hay bales to collect oil are that they are organic, are simple and easy to apply, are relatively low cost and are regionally abundant.

This is a very simple concept, but it is one that may prove more cost-effective in soaking up the spill and capturing most of the oil for recovery as fuel than any other mitigation strategy available. Since the complex technological solutions hasn’t yet stopped the oil spill (nothing might until the relief wells are drilled and completed), our culture and country would be wise to apply simple solutions that offer possibilities of working well and that can/would involve large numbers of interested people in the mitigation and restoration processes.

Now let’s take the hay/straw bale solution one step further. After the bales are placed onshore or in the water where they have soaked up oil, we then pick them up to capture and utilize the petroleum. Processes can be set up to collect these bales of alfalfa hay or straw when saturated, replacing them with clean bales and transporting the oil soaked bales to either modified coal power plants for electrical generation or to biomass gasification units.

What’s Required

Standard hay/stack bales bought from regional farms, possibly floated down Mississippi on barges.

The equipment needed would just be that to find, buy and transport the hay or straw bales from the farmers and ranchers inland to the shorelines and water area afflicted by the oil spill. This would be existing and possibly underemployed barges, ships, fishing boats, trucks, wagons and possibly the rail infrastructure. Barges and truck to transport the bales to the sites they are needed at, barges are probably most cost-effective

Bale barriers along shoreline

Placing bales of alfalfa or straw on the beach can be done by anyone, property owners, community groups, National Guard and volunteers. There can be a concerted effort to enlist volunteers, community groups and paid workers to place bales in lines along beaches, marshes and the complete shoreline exposed to the growing oil spill.

Bales may be stacked in ways that protect shorelines from waves pushing the oil inside into the reefs and marshes. The bales may need to be strapped down onshore with wire or rebar metal poles to hold the bales onto the ground on the shorelines and wetlands.

People will protect what is theirs and what they love, in this case their homes, their land, their seashores. There are huge numbers of ready workers and volunteers to place and strap down the bales on the shorelines and wetlands.

It may take less than 2,000,000 bales to protect more than 1,000 miles of shoreline, beaches and marshes. Even if the bales were replaced when saturated with oil or damaged by the elements several times over the duration of this oil spill, this is doable and affordable.

Bale boons

Bales of hay and straw will float on the water to absorb the oil sheen of the spill. Using the bales as absorbent boons may be as simple as strapping them together with some non-corrosive wire. We can create floating absorbent boons by tying bales together as with corrosion resistant wires and dropping them off from ships-barges-fishing vessels on top of the oil spill in the water.

Boats, perhaps fishing boats that have wrenches and cranes to pull up trolley and drag lines. These boats can be employed to both drop bales and bale boons onto the oil spill and to retrieve the oil saturated bales.

There is also the possibility of stringing dozens of bales together and pulling them by boat through the oil spill, although this may be very consumptive of fuel for the boats.  Dragging the boons of hay/straw bales may not be much more effective than dumping the bale boons off the barge or ship and letting them passively drift with the oil spill absorbing what they can as waves push them toward shore.

Perhaps the most expensive part of the process will be retrieving the oil soaked bales, which may require much physical labor by workers in protective gear. However many fishing boats would have the cranes, wrenches and drag lines to retrieve the strings of bales simply.

Because the bales are so abundant and inexpensive, they can be replaced on a regular basis when they are saturated with oil. Mitigating the spill effectively with hay/straw bales will require monitoring their pick up of petroleum residues and hauling them onto collector ship when saturated.

Hay/straw info – some comments about supply

Standard bales of alfalfa hay or possibly the straw of grains like wheat, oats, barley, flax, etc. typically weigh 50 to 70 lbs. and are approximately 3′-4′ x 2′ x 12″-15.” They are a widely sold and traded agricultural product in the beef raising parts of the USA, which included much of the farming belt.

Hay bales are abundant and we are just beginning baling seasons with the grain harvest and straw baling about a month to two months away. The first cutting of alfalfa for the year is probably starting to happen now in the southern states most afflicted by the oil spill. Alfalfa hay bales or straw bales can be sourced from farmers and ranchers throughout Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and the Mississippi basin.

Hay bales are relatively cheap, less than $3 a bale for a 50 pound bale of alfalfa based upon current US prices: http://future.aae.wisc.edu/data/monthly_values/by_area/2053?tab=feed

Straw is probably less than 50% the cost of hay.

Possibly more than 50,000,000 bales could be bought off the agricultural market before the supply of livestock feed increases the price of beef.

Bales can be purchased from commercial hay brokers, loaded onto barges in quantities from 500 to 10,000 or more and floated down the Mississippi River to wherever they are needed in the GOM oil spill.

Biomass Gasification

The ideal goal is to recover the lost petroleum residue from the environment to save its remaining value as a thermal fuel source or chemical feedstock. With the hay and straw bales being plant material, they have the advantage of being burnt with the oily residues as power plant fuel or gasified into syn-gas feedstock. The chemical and thermal value of the oil residue, if recoverable by gasification, will help pay the cost, at least a portion, of retrieving the bales and the surrounding environmental restoration.

Oily bales may be a combustible hazard, so rapid transport to centralized collection points for biomass gasification or burning for power plant fuel will be necessary. So to reclaim the thermal or chemical values of the oil-soaked bales, centralized locations to collect the oil saturated bales will need to be set up, before shipment to power plants or biomass gasification units to gasify the oil hay into syn-gas for chemical processing or producer gas for clean up into natural gas usage-pipelines.

Major investment would be the biomass gasification units to harvest whatever value is in the recovered oil. These biomass gasification units can be built for not only this emergency, but as future power sources in gasifying biomass. Modular gasification units that can be build and deployed quickly are necessary. If the biomass recovery gasification units may prove more difficult to attain or build in time, the oil saturated bales may be used as fuel in coal generating plants.

Social and Political Considerations

There is another advantage to supporting a groundswell response from the grass root communities afflicted upon by this disaster. This is a public relation advantage to the government and oil industry in that thousands of farmers and small truckers could be contracted with to supply the bales. BP had suffered immense bad publicity from the job losses to the maritime community this oil spill causes. Contracting with farmer suppliers for the hay bales to soak up the oil would be putting money back into the working communities of the region.

This low tech spill control strategy has the potential to create many temporary labor jobs and involve whole communities in constructive responses to the calamity of the oil spill.  Placing and retrieving the bales could become temporary employment for men and women who have lost their jobs in the fishing and tourism industries. The putting back of restoration money into the communities and working people of the afflicted communities could help alleviate the bad publicity and public anger over the spill.

Call to Action

To those of us looking at resource depletion consequences it is becoming blatantly obvious how water and watershed issues will prove more critical and important than energy depletion for our long term survival. It is imperative that our society makes its long-term decisions regarding energy, land-use and industrial development based upon
how the extraction industries will affect the permanent sustainability, safety and security of our water sources, ground tables and regional watersheds.

The urgent, absolutely important demand is that we as individuals, communities, peoples, cultures need to think beyond just confronting the realities of resource depletions, climate change, and the predations of nation-states, military industrial complexes and armed thugs to about how we – as people, society, culture and bioregion can get from where we are to a sustainable future. Even though, we as a generation are facing perhaps the greatest challenges in human history.

We need to ask ourselves these questions and then to abide by the answers however harsh or frightening:

What would a perennial culture(s) that would last 100-200-500-5000 years look like and what can we as citizens alive in the richest and most prosperous era in history do to make this happen?”

What can we as a people and a culture do today to ensure that humans, animals, forests and ecosystems, salmon and orcas, rivers and fresh water, fertile soil, alive cities, machines and technology, literacy and scientific knowledge will still be here 50, 200, 500 and 5,000 years from now?

We need to understand that the real underlying shortages are fresh water, soil fertility and biological diversity. Recognize that certain energy and resource extraction industries are extremely environmentally destructive and leave devastated waste lands, poisoned soil, depleted aquifers and distorted, polluted watersheds in their wake. Among the villains are coal companies, tar sand mining/processing industries, ethanol fuels from corn production and possible deepwater offshore oil field development as witness by the magnitude of this oil spill.

Conclusion

Because of the flexibility of using bales of alfalfa or straw to soak up the oil spill, we should consider using them as one of our central and primary ways to mitigate the potential environmental consequences of this oil spill. Hay bales are readily available, are not a complex, unproven technology, require no hard to source material and are low cost. They should be in the front line of Deepwater Horizon’s spill mitigation strategy.

The Biochar Debate: Charcoal’s Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility
By James Bruges
120 pp. Chelsea Green Publishing – Jan. 2010. $14.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

It’s called biochar, and if you believe its most ardent supporters, then this unassuming, fine black powder is a vital tool in the solutions to some of humanity’s most urgent ecological threats, including climate change, peak oil, soil degradation and water pollution due to agrochemicals. However, if you side with biochar’s staunch opponents, then it seems like a fledgling, poorly understood technology with real risks, including the displacement of entire communities and the serious jeopardizing of world food security and biodiversity. Which view is correct? That’s the question that sustainability expert James Bruges, who is cautiously optimistic about biochar, investigates in his book The Biochar Debate.

Biochar is essentially charcoal made through a process called pyrolysis (which involves burning organic material in the absence of oxygen), and then finely crushed and worked into the earth as a soil amendment.* The pyrolysis process has two byproducts, syngas and bio-oil, which can be used for generating heat and power, hence biochar’s appeal to alternative energy enthusiasts. And once the biochar is in the soil, it has an amazing ability to retain nutrients and moisture due to its unbelievably porous structure (a single gram can have twice the surface area of a tennis court). This enables it to dramatically boost crop yields and reduces the need for industrial fertilizers. Thus, biochar has the potential to simultaneously ensure our future food supply and wean croplands off of the poisons in which they must be doused in order for today’s mineral-depleted soils to sustain production. Another advantage of biochar is that it can be made from virtually any organic material (from manure to wood to switchgrass), meaning that there would be no shortage of suitable feedstocks, and biochar production could double as a waste recycling scheme.

Most important of all, however—assuming that climate scientists have called it correctly with their warnings of an imminent, irreversible climate tipping point—is biochar’s ability to pull substantial quantities of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and trap them underground effectively forever, in human terms. Biochar’s oft-repeated sales pitch is that it isn’t merely carbon-neutral, it’s “carbon-negative.” And this capacity for sequestering carbon could, conceivably, allow us to return atmospheric CO₂ to pre-industrial levels within our lifetimes.

The technology certainly has backing from serious heavyweights in the environmental community. One of these backers, Bill McKibben, founded the 350 campaign, which advocates reducing atmospheric CO₂ from its current concentration of nearly 390 parts per million (ppm) to its safe upper limit of 350 ppm. Also strongly in favor of biochar is James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory (which says that the Earth is one complex, self-regulating system—a single organism, if you like). Moreover, some of the main beneficial properties of biochar have been documented in a growing body of scientific literature. But biochar has also raised deep concern among many other environmentalists and environmental groups. These groups include the Climate Outreach and Information Network (U.K.), Biofuelwatch (U.K.), the Organic Consumers Association (U.S.), the Rainforest Action Network (U.S.) and, ironically, even the Gaia Foundation (U.K.)—the namesake of biochar-supporter Lovelock’s aforementioned theory—among nearly 150 other organizations in several dozen countries. These organizations have questioned many of the claims that have been made about biochar’s potential (including, most damningly, its very carbon sequestration benefit), and have branded it as “a new big threat to people, land, and ecosystems.“**

Bruges freely acknowledges the need for much additional research into the workings of biochar—as well as more conclusive proof of all the claims made on its behalf. He also acknowledges biochar’s potential risks, though he claims that they’re acceptable considering the urgent need to reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels. And he makes a compelling case that this could be done using biochar. He takes heart from the following two calculations by Craig Sams, a former chairman of the U.K.’s Soil Association: first, that devoting all of the world’s productive land to biochar production would return atmospheric CO₂ to pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) within just a year; and, second, that giving a mere 2.5 percent of the world’s productive land over to biochar production would bring CO₂ to pre-industrial levels by 2050. The first of these scenarios obviously isn’t a viable option, since it would leave us no land for growing our food. However, Bruges shows that the second scenario is easily doable, in light of a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showing that an additional 4 billion acres could be added to the world’s existing 3.5 billion acres of cropland.

Clearly geared toward a lay readership, The Biochar Debate begins by succinctly summing up climate change, peak oil, peak phosphorus and other important issues related to the Earth’s ecological limits. Then it gets into somewhat less familiar territory: biochar and its fascinating history. It is only within the past decade that biochar has really begun to show up on the radar screen, but its roots are ancient, going all the way back to fifth century B.C. South America. There, in the deep jungles of the Amazon Basin, one of the great, thriving agrarian societies in our planet’s history devised a sustainable agriculture involving the use of human-made charcoal to enrich the Basin’s naturally thin, infertile soils.

Today, locals refer to this ancient soil as terra preta, or “black earth.” We know that it’s human-made because it contains shards of ancient pottery, indicating a great deal of human handling during its formation. And even now, five centuries after the disappearance of that great Amazonian civilization, terra preta continues to retain its amazing fertility and carbon content, and in fact is commercially harvested and sold to local farmers. This has promising implications for modern-day biochar, which, once added to the soil, should continue to improve fertility and retain its sequestered carbon for hundreds or even thousands of years to come. (Lacking the original recipe, however, soil ecologists have thus far been unable to precisely replicate terra preta—and critics often point this out when calling biochar’s viability into question.)

Again, Bruges readily acknowledges biochar’s potential risks, in spite of how strongly he feels in favor of it. The main risks that he foresees have to do with letting market forces, rather than government oversight, regulate biochar’s production. Bruges believes that if regulation is left to the market, then companies may try to capitalize on the fuels that come as byproducts of biochar, rather than on the biochar itself, if these byproducts prove more profitable (with obvious implications for the climate). He also fears that crops for making biochar and its associated fuels could begin to supplant food crops, if corporate profits dictate this action. (This point seems frighteningly valid in light of the soaring food prices that went hand-in-hand with the height of the ethanol craze.) Further, Bruges warns that if policies are enacted that allow farmers to earn carbon credits for their biochar, then big agriculture, in its haste to cash in on the bonanza, may set up large-scale, environmentally destructive monocultures of grass and fast-growing trees to be used as biochar feedstocks.

In addition to orienting lay readers with regard to climate change, peak oil and other important background facts, describing biochar’s science and fascinating history, weighing its merits against its potential pitfalls and presenting a compelling case for its immediate, large-scale use, The Biochar Debate discusses at length the various pilot schemes that have been conducted with biochar to date. Some of these pilot schemes are inspiring success stories, while others serve as instructive examples of things that can go wrong. To take one example on the success story side, Bruges describes a banana plantation in India where, following the introduction of biochar, yields per tree have risen by 44 percent, the bananas keep longer and apparently taste better, the farmer is able to get a better price for them than before and the amount of time spent each day irrigating has been cut in half. And as an example of what not to do, Bruges takes us to a tiny village in Ghana where biochar is having a hard time taking off because the farmers lack secure rights to the land that they cultivate. Most of the farmers don’t own their farmland—instead they rent it, and then only for a year or two at a time—and thus they have little incentive to invest in the soil.

All in all, The Biochar Debate is a spirited yet critical look at a controversial emerging technology that could potentially go a long way toward mitigating climate change, restoring depleted soils and maintaining our food security into the future. Besides being extremely knowledgeable about biochar, Bruges is also quite opinionated about it and has many thoughts on how its subsidization, oversight, certification and research and development might best be handled. And he backs up all of these opinions and recommendations with solid evidence and real-world examples from his many travels to places around the world where biochar is being used successfully. The book also does a good job of pointing readers toward resources for further reading, as well as describing small ways in which each of us can be contributing something to the cause. And Bruges’ conviction that successfully heading off a climate catastrophe is worth taking some calculated risks with biochar—or with any number of other climate change mitigation technologies that may yet emerge—is certainly well-taken.

_{* For an excellent, detailed description of the pyrolysis process, see the following Web page: Amelia Harnish, “Is Biochar a Quick Fix for Global Warming?,” iamgreen™, Aug. 12, 2009, http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/biochar-charcoal-global-warming-460709?click=main_sr. (accessed Apr. 29, 2010).
** Harnish, “Groups Against Biochar,” iamgreen™, Oct. 16, 2009, http://sayiamgreen.com/blog/2009/10/groups-against-biochar/ (accessed Apr. 29, 2010); “Declaration: ‘Biochar’, a new big threat to people, land, and ecosystems,” Rettet den Regenwald, Mar. 26, 2009, http://www.regenwald.org/international/englisch/news.php?id=1226 (accessed Apr. 29, 2010).}

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
By Robert Charles Wilson
413 pp., hardcover. Tor Books – Jun. 2009. $25.95.

Crossing the Blue: A Post-Petrol, Post-American Road Trip
By Holly Jean Buck
328 pp. – Aug. 2008. $17.00.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

This year promises to be a big one for novels set in a world beyond oil. Peak oil icon James Howard Kunstler comes out with The Witch of Hebron, a follow-up to his astonishing, critically acclaimed World Made by Hand, in September. And while the anticipation for Kunstler’s book is building, two more post-oil novels are due out next month, Afterlight by Alex Scarrow and Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Of these last two, the one that I’m really excited about is Ship Breaker. It’s the second novel of the accomplished, Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning young talent Paolo Bacigalupi, who is known for his evocative post-industrial dystopias.

The present year will also see the paperback release of last year’s post-oil-novel event, Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock. This paperback release provides a good opportunity to review Julian, along with Holly Jean Buck’s remarkable Crossing the Blue, another recent addition to the post-petroleum literary canon. Both are fine novels, though they seem to have been written with divergent purposes in mind. Buck clearly intended her book to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring peak oil. Wilson, on the other hand, appears content to have used his post-oil setting as merely an interesting backdrop against which to tell an entertaining story.

Wilson’s Julian opens in the winter of 2172, in what is today northern Alberta, Canada, but in this fictional future constitutes part of an expanded union with sixty states. America once again has the feel of a bustling nineteenth-century frontier as it muddles back toward prosperity following a series of devastating catastrophes brought on by the depletion of the world’s oil reserves. Our present-day automobile fleet, mass media, postal service, and modern science and medicine, among many other fixtures of early twenty-first century life, are things of the distant past. Illiteracy is commonplace, and paper currency unheard of in many parts. The detritus of the industrial age—crumbled roads, concrete foundations where homes once stood, desecrated human skeletons—lies strewn about everywhere. However, steam-powered train travel and transport have made a comeback, international trade is just beginning to pick up again, and there are plenty of places that still have (strictly rationed) access to lighting and electricity.

The Americans of the late twenty-second century harbor a deep-seated resentment toward their ancestors from the industrial era, whom they commonly refer to as the Secular Ancients. These ancients presided over a disastrous period in history now known as the Efflorescence of Oil, during which they squandered the earth’s once-immense store of fossilized sunlight, at the expense of future generations and all other life on the planet. People today have taken on religion in a big way—they’re ruled over by a religious authority known as the Dominion, and a new constitutional amendment grants one the right to worship at the Dominion-approved church of one’s choosing. In general, people fundamentally distrust the knowledge and beliefs of their hedonistic ancestors.

The nation’s capital is now Manhattan, New York, and the presidential “palace” is located in present-day Central Park. Elections are still held regularly, but they seem like little more than a sham, since a single family, the Comstocks, has ruled the nation for the past thirty years like some kind of dynasty. The current president, Deklan Comstock, is by all accounts a brooding, murderous dictator who had his own brother, the late, popular General Bryce Comstock, killed because he believed that he posed a threat to presidential power. And now Deklan has his sights set on his hapless nephew, and Bryce’s son, Julian Comstock.

Julian is presented to us as a memoir of “the life and adventures” of Julian Comstock, told in the first person by his closest friend, Adam Hazzard. Julian and Adam first meet at the age of seventeen, in Adam’s hometown of Williams Ford. Adam is an aspiring writer who learned the art of literacy from his seamstress mother (his father, a commoner, is illiterate). Julian, a newcomer to Williams Ford, is staying as a guest at a local country estate, where his mentor Sam Godwin seeks to shelter him from the malevolent intentions of Deklan. Recognizing that Julian needs to cultivate some friendships with people his own age, Mr. Godwin encourages the friendship between Julian and Adam, and he also persuades Adam’s parents to let him take Adam on as a second student.

Adam’s parents are reluctant at first, fearing that Julian, who is notorious for his heretical beliefs, may corrupt Adam. In so many ways, Julian is a man of our times, born a century and a half too late. He believes that humans once landed on the moon, and that the human race originated in Africa. He believes in evolution and the existence of DNA. He is either an atheist or an agnostic (the novel never works out which), at a time when churchgoing is the norm. He also has a flair for theater and loves to shock people with his blasphemies. And with his gentle, effeminate manner and the amount of time he spends with Adam, it is widely suspected that he is gay, and that Adam might be his lover—and indeed, Julian does remain a lifelong bachelor, while Adam gets married and starts a family. Eventually, however, Adam’s parents relent and Sam takes Adam under his tutelage.

The book chronicles the next few years in the lives of Julian, Adam, and numerous other people who have an influence on them during these formative young adult years. During this time, they bravely serve together in the Army (fighting the Dutch over possession of Labrador), become famous together (Adam as an author and Julian as a war hero-turned president), and even collaborate on the production of a motion picture about the life of Charles Darwin. (The primitive, soundless movies that play in theaters these days are reminiscent of the silent films of the nineteen twenties.)

Julian‘s story is absolutely absorbing; its fictional world is richly, vividly realized; and its depiction of Julian, truly one of the great, arresting historical figures of this post-oil era, is fascinating and unsentimental, though ultimately tragic. The writing has an ingratiating charm to it, born of Adam’s youthful innocence and inspired by the work of a now-obscure mid-nineteenth-century author named William Taylor Adams, who wrote many popular Civil War novels for boys under the pseudonym Oliver Optic. Wilson has long admired Optic’s work, and he modeled Adam Hazzard after him. (The inspiration for Julian’s character came from historian Edward Gibbon’s account of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate.) And in crafting the book’s post-oil milieu, Wilson borrowed from one of the best peak oil thinkers out there, James Howard Kunstler. He says that he “freely borrowed much of the worst-case scenario” that Kunstler presents in The Long Emergency.¹

The one caveat that should be made regarding Julian is that it might not be the best novel to use for introducing someone to peak oil for the first time. Above all a first-rate storyteller, Wilson never resorts to blatantly spelling out the book’s themes—and while this may be good storytelling technique, it also means that many of these themes will be lost on readers who aren’t already familiar with peak oil. For Wilson, peak oil seems to have been merely an intriguing setting for a novel; and writing Julian, a purely intellectual exercise rather than an attempt at environmental activism. That isn’t to say, however, that Wilson isn’t concerned about peak oil, because judging from interviews, he clearly is.
 
Wilson is one of the most distinguished science fiction authors now working, having received numerous prestigious awards within the field. He won the venerable Hugo Award for Spin, a brilliant, genre-bending, epic rhapsody on time, the meaning of human existence, and the ultimate purposes of whatever alien beings may inhabit the universe along with us. Julian, while ironically set in a degenerative future and eschewing the very science that informs science fiction, is nonetheless a welcome addition to this impressive oeuvre.

Holly Jean Buck, unlike Wilson, did write her post-oil novel in an effort to raise awareness about peak oil. “I wrote this book,” she says, “to help Americans imagine what the future might look like if we continue to be carefree or careless about it.”² The self-published novel, titled Crossing the Blue, follows the adventures of a young man named Blake as he shakes the proverbial dust off his feet and sees the world. A lifelong resident of Coral Heights, a small town in what used to be Florida, Blake has never traveled outside of the “Florida islands” up to this point in his life. (The United States no longer exists in this unspecified future era.) Buck uses Blake’s naïveté as a device for introducing general readers to peak oil.

Blake’s journey begins one night with the discovery of a mysterious young woman sneaking around the house that he and his family share with two other families. He is uncommonly struck by her, for one almost never comes upon a stranger within the fenced community of Coral Heights. The town is presided over by an authoritarian, gun-running general, referred to simply as “the General,” who keeps everyone in line and supplied with basic necessities. No one dares cross the fence around Coral Heights; but this fierce, agile, dangerous-looking woman has done it anyway, and now she’s demanding that Blake help get her away as quickly as possible. She is obviously being hotly pursued, and Blake gathers, is in mortal danger. And so Blake, scared but also thinking that he’s being a good Samaritan, helps her slip out of his family’s subdivision and then gets her to a safe remove from the island on his boat.

It isn’t until after they’ve set off on the water together that Blake learns why she was in such a hurry to leave: it’s because she has just assassinated the General. She tells him that she’s an emissary from someplace in the Pacific Northwest known as Cascadia. She has spent more than the past year traveling to the Florida islands from there, and she killed the General as a favor for some people nearby who needed him eliminated. “It was a matter of survival,” she explains. The woman has an exotic, “mestiza” look about her and an accent that Blake has never heard before, and she introduces herself as Juliet.

Blake and Juliet stay on the run together, initially out of fear that Blake could be incriminated in the General’s assassination—and also because Juliet could use someone to sail the boat while she sleeps—but before long they drop these pretenses and stay together out of a mutual fondness for each other’s company. Blake has issues in his home life, and little attachment to Coral Heights, and so it’s easy for him to make an impulse decision to follow his heart and go with Juliet back to Cascadia.

Blake and Juliet sail across the now-underwater Florida Panhandle, veering off-course into the dreaded and reputedly haunted Submerged City. They also hitch a ride on a garish gaming ship left over from the days of vice and excess, trek alongside the Mississippi River, survey the desolation of Louisiana, and cross over the Great Plains and the Rockies. They live off the land and obtain bed and board from a couple of farming families in exchange for their labor.

Blake knows little of the outside world or the history that led up to the deindustrial present, and so Juliet keeps having to stop and provide involved explanations of peak energy, climate change, corporate personhood, and other menaces that contributed to the collapse of the old order. Through these exchanges between Blake and Juliet, Buck is also educating the uninitiated reader about these concepts.

What I like most about Crossing the Blue is its astute, droll contemplation of the ordinary details of our modern-day lives, which seem startlingly out of place when carried over into this post-oil future. Some examples include spray painted graffiti, bullet holes in signs, and signs that read “Colorado Welcomes You” and “FREE WIRELESS ACCESS POINT,” no matter that neither Colorado nor the Internet still exists in this post-oil future. The novel also makes great use of unexpected juxtapositions. For example, Blake and Juliet stop at a market that sells organic fruits and vegetables alongside electrical wires scavenged from a long-retired streetlight, and they also meet a young man who insists on playing the video game Space Invaders during his share of the meager electricity quota allotted each person per day in his community.

My only beefs are that Blake’s ignorance of the outside world seems contrived at times (I couldn’t quite swallow a scene in which he has to ask Juliet what it means to go “from here to there”), and many of the supporting characters are a bit thinly developed. But perhaps a certain lack of character development is inevitable in a road trip story in which so many people are coming and going. And anyway, these are minor gripes with what, overall, is an admirable and largely successful attempt to spread the word about peak oil through a work of fiction.

Holly Jean Buck is one interesting lady. She has traveled through forty-eight of the United States and has lived overseas for a great part of her twenty-nine years. Following postgraduate studies at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she spent time in many countries around the world, including Wales, England, Ireland, Greece, Kosovo, Columbia, and Japan. She has been a correspondent on international affairs related to the environment and green living—as an intern for Toronto’s Walrus magazine—and also has experience in mapmaking, permaculture, managing invasive forest species, and cataloguing antiquities. Crossing the Blue is her first novel³; and, on the strength of it, I am eagerly awaiting her second.

Notes

_{1 Midge Bork, “An interview with Robert Charles Wilson: Axis,” Curled Up With a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/intrcwil.htm (accessed Mar. 19, 2010).
2 “An Interview With Holly Jean Buck,” create. destroy. enjoy, www.createdestroyenjoy.net/crossingtheblue/abouttheauthor.html (accessed Mar. 19, 2010).
3 “about the author,” charting sustainability, www.charting-sustainability.org/writings/author.html (accessed Mar. 19, 2010; site last updated Jan. 14, 2010); “Holly Jean Buck: Shades of Green,” Walrus, Sept. 14, 2008, www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/category/green/ (accessed Mar. 19, 2010); Holly Jean Buck, “download my C.V.,” charting sustainability, http://www.charting-sustainability.org/writings/CV_Holly_Buck_2009_general.pdf (accessed Mar. 19, 2010; site last updated Jan. 14, 2010); Buck, “Can Bacteria Juice Save the World?,” Walrus, Oct. 24, 2008, http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/10/24/can-bacteria-juice-save-the-world/ (accessed Mar. 19, 2010); Buck, “about the author,” in Crossing the Blue: A Post-Petrol, Post-American Road Trip (© Holly Jean Buck, 2008), 327.}

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
By Jeff Rubin
286 pp., hardcover. Random House – May 2009. $26.00.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

It is a well-known tenet of the peak oil discourse that economists, at large, just don’t get peak oil. According to classical economic theory, oil scarcity should cause prices to increase, thus stimulating exploration, replenishing reserves and bringing prices back down. The reason why this cycle hasn’t played itself out fully in recent years, of course, is that we’ve passed the all-time peak in world oil production. After this, production can no longer grow, period, regardless of how high prices go or how earnest oil companies are in their intentions of finding more oil. In short, it seems that classical economic theory no longer applies in a world of hard ecological limits, no matter how tightly economists may cling to their antiquated notions.

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil. As far back as 2000, when public awareness of the issue was essentially nil, he was among the first economists to accurately predict the surge in crude prices that would ensue several years later. And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one. Rubin believes that peak oil, not subprime mortgages, caused the current economic slump. And he forecasts that crude oil will reach $200 per barrel, and gasoline $7 per gallon, within the next few years, spelling death for the global economy and forcing people across the developed world to dramatically reengineer their lives in adjusting to the new reality of scarce energy. Views like these are common among peak oil advocates, but a refreshing departure for an economist.

It may come as a surprise, then, that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Rubin’s book. I wish I could. But the truth is that it contains little in the way of new information for peak oil followers—and for those uninitiated into peak oil, it hardly provides the best primer on the subject. Rubin spends in excess of the book’s first half explaining why oil is peaking, why industrial economies require an ever-increasing supply of it in order to keep growing, why oil shocks have always caused recessions, how oil underlies every aspect of our modern lives and why alternatives won’t save us. The trouble is, a who’s who of peak oil thinkers and writers (including Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dale Allen Pfeiffer and others) has done a better job of this already; and those new to peak oil would be better off reading one of their books.

Rubin’s writing is filled with trite statements like “you will soon be spending much more time talking to your neighbor and much less time flying around the world” and “[m]any of us may finally come to understand how a toaster works” (both with regard to what he thinks daily life will resemble in our oil-scarce future). He also steps on the toes of peak oil icons by paraphrasing their words without attribution. For example, he superficially changes Matt Simmons’ catchphrase “super straws” to “one big straw” (in reference to technological advancements that only deplete wells more quickly) without crediting Simmons at all. And he goes off on long-winded tangents (nearly five pages on the increasing frequency of severe storms in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of our oil infrastructure is precariously located) as though looking for enough fill to stretch the book out to 300 pages.

The one edge that Rubin’s account has over his predecessors’ is that it was written with the benefit of more up-to-date information. Rubin explores a number of emerging trends on the oil scene that were not yet readily apparent at the time that those earlier books were written. For example, he explains how oil exports from OPEC nations are declining not just because of depletion, but also as a result soaring domestic consumption within those countries, as their citizens take advantage of cheap, government-subsidized gasoline in trying to emulate Western lifestyles. He also reports that world oil production—as of the book’s writing, last year—was declining at a rate of 6.7 percent annually. He obtained this information from the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s 2008 World Energy Outlook, a document that obviously wasn’t available to authors who were writing about oil depletion four or five years ago, when the several-year peak oil “plateau” was just beginning.

For serious peak oil followers, the book begins to get interesting only after around page 160, where Rubin starts to describe what he believes the new economic landscape will look like in the wake of peak oil, and to propose some economic policies that he believes would help humanity to curtail both its fossil fuel usage and its greenhouse gas emissions. Chief among these economic policies would be a tariff on carbon emissions. Rubin points out that the world’s developing nations, which have been responsible for the lion’s share of total increases in carbon emissions over the past decade, are exempted under Kyoto from paying any economic price for their carbon emissions. And as long as oil has remained cheap and carbon emissions free, the only variable dictating where to move manufacturing jobs has been the cost of labor—hence the exodus of manufacturing from advanced nations to China, India and other low-wage countries. But if the developed nations charged carbon tariffs on goods that they imported from these developing countries, they would regain comparative economic advantage, and emissions would also increasingly shift from countries that are inefficient at managing them to those that can manage them the most efficiently. In short, the dirty emissions from factories in the developing world would be so expensive that it would no longer be profitable to have manufacturing jobs in those countries.

Rubin argues that the implementation of a carbon tariff, together with the inevitable rise in the cost of bunker fuel needed to transport goods across the globe—which in itself would effectively constitute a tariff on transport fuel, or a “bunker tariff”—could revive the manufacturing industries that were once so important to the economies of America and other industrialized nations. “Who would have dreamt,” he beams, “that triple-digit oil prices would breathe new life into America’s rust belt or the British steel industry?”

The book unfortunately slips right back into the realm of cliché following this seemingly promising discussion of tariffs and the return of long-lost manufacturing jobs. Like every other peak oiler, Rubin predicts that industrialized nations will of necessity start to “downsize the role of oil” in their economies, so that economic growth is no longer dependent on ever-increasing levels of oil consumption. Also in keeping with conventional peak oil wisdom, he believes that this process will be achieved by way of “micro” decisions made daily by ordinary people and households, rather than by way of “macro” monetary or fiscal policy decisions. Our lives, Rubin says, will become profoundly local, meaning that our food and goods will come from close to where we live; farming will replace the service sector as the dominant part of the economy, and will supplant the crass suburban developments that were built en masse under the illusion of a perpetual supply of cheap oil; and overall there will be a lot fewer people on the roads and more people passing their days with honest, hard physical labor—there’s not one original prediction in the list.

In sum, this book consists mostly of an up-to-date, but ponderous and thoroughly shopworn, outline of the peak oil predicament. The brief section detailing Rubin’s notion of a carbon tariff and what the economic climate of a de-globalizing world will look like could doubtless generate some productive discussions about the future shape of economics in a post-peak-oil age, but aside from that the book has little new to contribute to the peak oil debate. Nevertheless, one surely must take heart whenever any book carries the peak oil message onto bookstores’ bestseller shelves, where it at least has some chance of swaying public opinion.

The American West at Risk: Science, Myths and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery
By Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson and Richard W. Hazlett
619 pp., hardcover. Oxford University Press – Jun. 2008. $35.00.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Several weeks back, while reading this important, prodigiously researched book from Oxford University Press on America’s endangered Western lands, I caught part of an interview on NPR that caused me to shake my head with chagrin. The interviewee was one of those “transhumanist” apostles; and, without a trace of irony, he described future technologies that he believes will allow us to save our minds like computer files and download them into new bodies—thus making ourselves exempt from mortality, the indignity of aging and other pesky earthly inconveniences. This unapologetic über-techno-optimism couldn’t possibly have been more at odds with the sober, sensible views expressed in The American West at Risk.

West at Risk‘s authors, three trained geologists who also happen to be profoundly lettered and skilled in the methods of investigative journalism, would no doubt call this exuberant futurist a “Crazy Eddie”—a term that they borrow from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s classic novel The Mote in God’s Eye. That novel’s main characters, the Moties, are an alien race that has become resigned to its recurrent cycles of resource exploitation/population boom, followed by overshoot and societal collapse. Any Motie who suggests a scheme for resisting this inevitable state of affairs, or who embraces human optimism in any way, is dismissed as a Crazy Eddie. Given the critical environmental state of America’s Western lands—which West at Risk‘s authors unassailably show to be in danger of losing their very capacity as a life support system—we would do well to heed these scientists’ wise Motie sensibility, rather than the rarefied transhumanist claims recently aired by NPR.

This book’s 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states. The first chapter focuses on Western woodlands and their steady decline due to logging, agricultural clearing and shifts in our approach to fighting forest fires. Another chapter describes the immense harm that modern agriculture, with its profligate use of harmful industrial chemicals, causes to croplands, groundwater and the health of those who eat the crops. Topics covered in other chapters include livestock grazing, metals mining, road-building, off-road recreational vehicle (ORV) use, toxic landfill waste, water depletion, nuclear bomb testing and military training activities. The authors also wrote chapters on genetically modified (GM) crops and the destruction of sand dunes at the hands of ORV recreation (admittedly a bit of a redundancy of the existing ORV chapter), but these were omitted from the final draft and now appear only on the book’s Web site, http://www.theamericanwestatrisk.com/.

A good many readers will already be familiar with most of these human-caused environmental problems. However, until they’ve read the book, few will have come to fully appreciate just how serious and pervasive they are, or how they’ve all been directly subsidized by our tax dollars. The authors have said, in interviews since, that they were themselves surprised by these things during their research. What especially surprised Nielson, for one, is the way in which our own government has deliberately jeopardized its citizens’ and service members’ lives by exposing them to nuclear/biological substances, as part of tests intended to learn about these chemicals’ health effects.* With regard to the atomic bomb tests of several decades ago, the authors’ continual refrain is that they “ma[de] downwinders of all Americans.” And natural processes have spread the radiation across and beyond our nation—with the result that land and marine sediments the world over have now been found to contain atomic radiation that is destined to creep into drinking water, soils and food for many thousands of years to come.

The way that natural forces, such as erosion and groundwater infiltration, have of dramatically worsening the initial harm caused by human activities is one of the book’s most terrifying themes. For example, the natural process of “biomagnification,” by which toxic chemicals reach greater and greater concentrations the higher they move up the food chain, explains why the insecticide DDT poisoned bird populations as well as the insect pests at which it was targeted. Also, natural erosional processes continue to spread the damage that 1940s tank maneuvers and present-day motorized recreation have done to desert wildlife habitat and biodiversity—and while nobody knows how one might go about reversing this desolation, the evidence suggests that full recovery may well take millennia.

West at Risk has every claim for credibility. The authors cite trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of their arguments, and they have long been themselves directly involved in a good deal of the research. Howard G. Wilshire and Jane E. Nielson are former U.S. Geological Survey research geologists, and Richard W. Hazlett is a professor of geology at Pomona College. Wilshire has done many previous studies on the environmental impacts of military training exercises and ORVs on arid Western lands, and his research forms the backbone of many of the book’s discussions. And the book is also important for bringing light to appalling instances of government cover-ups, suppression, hypocrisy and lies.

Peak oil advocates will be pleased to learn that the book’s authors are fellow believers. Like most peak oilers, they realize that fossil fuel depletion is going to severely limit our ability to mitigate a whole host of problems that our society has created for itself, including the environmental woes of the West. They also concur with the conventional peak oil wisdom that our inability to access ever-increasing quantities of energy will prevent much additional damage from taking place, by forcing us to curtail our current lifestyles of consumption and excess. Indeed, one of their parting thoughts on the hideous “Tragedy of the Playground” represented by ORV recreation is, “The question is—how much more damage will the environment sustain before petroleum becomes too expensive for towing several ATVs or motorcycles out to the country and back behind a huge mobile home?”

One of the authors’ aims in writing this book was to dispel some of the popular myths that surround the American West mystique. For example, the modern-day cattle ranchers who are complicit in the destruction of millions of acres of U.S. public lands often identify with the “cowboy” myth, no matter that true cowboys (or vaqueros) existed for only about 20 years of U.S. history. The authors show how the cowboy myth was “born from sensational nineteenth-century journalism, nurtured in Zane Grey novels and distorted by Hollywood movies”—and persists today because of “[a] strong alliance of graziers and western congressional representatives.” Another prevalent myth is that the West was “won” by rugged individualists operating on their own gumption and grit. In truth, the West was won at the public trough, and “never has left it.” From the beginning, the federal government has footed massive subsidies for homesteading lands, road and railroad routes, military forts, interstate highways and colleges and universities. The authors contend that in order to face up to the grave human-caused environmental problems currently threatening the West, it is critical to understand these myths and how they drive the land abuses of the present.

This book is the result of 10 years of collaborative effort, and it is so encyclopedic and comprehensive that no one review could possibly do more than highlight a few of its more penetrating points and passages. In many places, it resembles an environmental science textbook, defining key terms and illustrating concepts with figures and graphs (and the companion Web site directs readers to yet more resources that couldn’t be incorporated into the book itself). In addition to its obvious utility as a textbook, it will also doubtless be an invaluable resource for fellow researchers, journalists, decision-makers, environmental lawyers and ordinary citizens with environmental problems in their neighborhoods—as was the authors’ intent. But the book’s appeal is not limited to these groups; it is an enlightening and gripping read for anyone. Regardless of readership, one of the most important points that the authors want the book to convey is that protecting the environment is not merely a moral cause, but also one that is backed by hard science. The scientific data show that the “natural capital” contained in our Western lands is essential for our economic well-being.

Given the tenor of this review so far, it may come as a surprise that the authors do hold out hope for the future. “There is still a lot to save,” they write, “and much of the damage can be reversed.” To this end, they offer numerous practical suggestions for addressing this damage while at the same time adapting to the resource limitations now closing in around us. Let’s fervently hope that their prescience is as reliable as their expertise in environmental matters past and present.

_{* Samantha Campos, “Going Green: How the West could be lost: Sonoma geologists spent a decade examining the effects of 20th-century American land abuse,” Pacific Sun, June 6, 2008, www.pacificsun.com/story.php?story_id=2057 (accessed Dec. 30, 2009).}

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
By John Michael Greer
271 pp. New Society Publishers – Oct. 2009. $18.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.

Greer is also perhaps peak oil’s most cherishable contrarian, always pointing out the various ways in which people on all sides of the debate are woefully off-base. For example, his previous book on peak oil, The Long Descent, showed how believers in perpetual progress and prophets of imminent doom alike are sadly off the mark in their notions about the future. That book’s central thesis is that while our modern “developed” world can’t possibly be sustained into the indefinite future, we’re hardly in for the sort of sudden, utter collapse of civilization that typically forms the basis of a Roland Emmerich movie. Instead, our society will likely decline slowly and unevenly over many decades, the way that the Maya, the Roman Empire and other past civilizations have done before ours. The take-home point is that it’s a waste of time to start preparing now for either a survivalist future of mass death and marauding hordes, or whatever sustainable utopia happens to be your particular ideal, because neither one of these reflects the future that we’re actually liable to end up with—and, in any case, no one living today will still be around to see what that future might resemble.

Greer’s newest book, The Ecotechnic Future, builds on The Long Descent by sketching out some of the likely dimensions of the future that Greer believes lies on the other side of our descent. It doesn’t devote much space to explaining why our civilization is headed for collapse, or describing how people can prepare on the individual and community levels, since these were covered in his earlier book. Instead, in a series of chapters with straightforward titles like “Food,” “Home,” “Community” and “Culture,” it takes an in-depth look at the kinds of changes that we can expect in these and other aspects of our lives as industrial civilization winds down.

What, exactly, is the “ecotechnic future” to which the title refers? Well, to begin with, it’s a play on the phrase “technic society,” a term coined to describe the modern world that came into being following the Industrial Revolution. Greer’s conception of the technic society is that it’s the first human society powered primarily by nonfood energy, rather than by the food energy that has sustained, for example, the far-more-stable hunter-gatherer societies that have existed throughout history. The phase of the technic society coming to an end with the advent of peak oil is one that Greer refers to as “abundance industrialism,” in which humanity has used the immense energy contained in cheap, abundant fossil fuels to maximize the production of goods and services at the expense of gross inefficiency. In contrast, the ecotechnic society that Greer sees as the inevitable successor to abundance industrialism is one that relies wholly on renewable energy resources, and that places a premium on using them as efficiently as possible at the expense of reduced access to goods and services.

A transition away from our current economy of plunder and waste to a sustainable ecotechnic society is necessary and will happen eventually, since the resources that we’re plundering are finite, as is our planet’s ability to absorb the waste products. But Greer regards efforts to establish an ecotechnic society right in the here and now as misguided. In his view, such efforts are doomed to failure because the conditions that would allow an ecotechnic society to flourish aren’t yet in place, and we don’t have even the faintest clue what such a society would resemble.

Before we can set about creating an ecotechnic society, we must first spend several decades muddling through what Greer terms “scarcity industrialism,” in which we liquidate the second half of the planet’s oil endowment, the other remaining fossil fuels and other essential nonrenewable resources. This, in turn, will give way to a one-to-three-century “salvage society” phase, in which, having depleted these non-renewables, we scavenge the ruins of long-abandoned man-made structures for their iron, steel and other raw materials. Then, once scarcity industrialism and the salvage society have played themselves out, an ecotechnic society can slowly begin to take root. In short, to quote Greer, “[t]hose who try to plan an ecotechnic society today are in the position of a hapless engineer tasked in 1947 with drafting a plan to produce software for computers that did not exist yet.” One of the many things that you come to admire about Greer is his knack for drawing apt analogies.

In The Ecotechnic Future, Greer appropriates terminology from a variety of disciplines, including ecology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, the history of ideas and the 1970s appropriate technology movement. He persuasively argues for the need to respond adaptively to the changes ahead, and to encourage people to pursue as many different ideas as possible, rather than formulating a detailed plan of action on which everyone can agree. He reasons that the greater the number of possibilities being investigated at any one time, the more likely someone is to stumble upon something that works. He borrows the postmodern term “dissensus”—meaning “a deliberate avoidance of consensus”—in describing this adaptive approach. And he humbly admits that no plans (including his own) are infallible, and invites readers to dissent from his ideas in favor of pursuing some of their own.

Like The Long Descent, Greer’s new book incorporates a series of shorter writings that he originally published online—and, once again, their arrival in print is a happy occasion. The typical Greer essay is thoughtful, profoundly insightful, well-supported and impeccably argued; and Greer’s prose style is nothing if not elegant. His new book delivers on all of these levels in spades, the various shorter writings having simmered to great effect by the time they’re reaching us in book form. The only faint complaint I have is that I feel that the book could have been a tad longer, with the extra length being added to the chapters on various aspects of our ecotechnic future. Not that there’s anything obviously missing on which I can easily place my finger. It’s just that, at barely 20 pages, and some of them not even that long, the chapters do seem a bit skimpy. And Greer is such an engaging writer with so much to say that one looks forward to each new entry with the excitement of the proverbial giddy schoolboy (or schoolgirl, as the case may be). One can never have too much Greer, I say.

Those who are already aware of the long, bumpy decline ahead for our civilization, and who want a clearer picture of what to expect, as well as some real, practical responses, will be well-served by reading both The Ecotechnic Future and The Long Descent. But I’m happy to believe that a significant number of casual bookstore browsers who are environmentally conscious, but not yet fully in the know, also will pick up these books, will be captivated by them and will join the ranks of the converted.

Sadly, however (and as Greer would be the first to admit), these books’ ideas are doomed to be dismissed as kooky and offensive by the public at large for a long time to come. Still, Greer gets credit for being one of the precious few writers today to have undertaken the task of putting modern industrial civilization in its proper historical context—and to truly be gifted enough to do the task justice.