ecosophia | As the Price of Oil Creeps Up...

...a new edition of one of my classic peak oil books seems timely, and with the help of Founders House, it's now available for preorder.

I originally wrote The Ecotechnic Future in 2007, as oil prices worldwide moved toward their disastrous 2008-2009 spike and crash. It was my first attempt to look past the immediate issues of petroleum depletion and economic dysfunction toward the broader landscape of historical change in which the crises of our time take place. I approached the rise and fall of industrial civilization as an ecological process, and showed that it followed the same dynamics as other ecosystems in transition; I traced out the future trajectory and followed it out to the ecotechnic societies of the far future; and I talked about ways that people here and now can help lay the foundation for a better future.

One of the things that fascinated me on rereading the manuscript is that it needed very little revision. Some things have changed since 2007, to be sure, and some guesses I'd made about where the crisis of industrial society would lead us turned out to be wrong, but on the whole The Ecotechnic Future stands up remarkably well.

It will be released on June 30 of this year. Copies can be preordered here.

(One detail worth mentioning -- this edition is only available in print form, as the original publisher is keeping the older ebook edition in print. The new edition was not based on their version (which had some edits I don't like much) but from my original manuscript. Book contracts being what they are, however, the ebook rights remain theirs until they let their version go out of print.)

Current Mood: happy

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From:

brenainn

I just put in a preorder. I really enjoy your commentary on this stuff. I used to be a firm believer in the cult of progress, an avid Star Trek fan (which means I thought it more or less predicted the future), and generally misinformed about much. I'm thinking of diving in Oswald Spengler's work, too. It is kind of odd but the world has become a much more interesting and exciting place, now that I've thrown out the mass delusion of perpetual progress and also started learning more about the occult.

From:

ecosophia

The postprogress world really is more interesting! That's the ugly secret of progress -- what it means, ultimately, is "more of the same."

From: (Anonymous)

Just want to say your story mirrors mine in almost every way. At first, letting go of the religion of progress filled me with fear and I was "prepping" for hard times. Now, I find I simply enjoy life more with all the lower energy activities that keep me busy and content.

- Tim

From: (Anonymous)

"At first, letting go of the religion of progress filled me with fear and I was "prepping" for hard times. "

I find that I'm still partly in that phase, there's a lot of fear in me about the hard times, and worry about the decisions I've made. How did you move past that?

From:

brenainn

In my case, I merely recognized that if we follow the historical norm, which we seem to be so far, there won't be a sudden, catastrophic collapse. So, I simply realized that a major, world-ending disaster is almost certainly not going to happen. I keep an emergency supply that would last a few months if food shipments were to end (though I live in farm country; I doubt I'm going to starve). I mostly do that, though, because I fear another Great Depression is possible, not the End of the World.

The important thing is to learn skills that will help one eke by if really hard times come. Learning to garden, learning about herbs for medicinal purposes, manual alternatives for electrically powered tools and appliances, etc. I also remember that hard times also mean a certain kind of freedom. Instead of being a wage slave to support the managerial classes, I'll spend plenty of time in the fresh air and sunlight as I work my garden and perform the necessary tasks of daily living. The 9-5 routine ends and I work hard, surrounded by my family and friends who are all doing the same thing.

From:

brenainn

I was also heavy into prepping. I still keep an emergency supply of food and other essentials, in case of a major disaster or economic depression. I no longer participate in disaster prep groups, though. I realized that I had slipped into the "cult of the apocalypse" after I left the cult of progress. Now, I'm learning to garden, live with less material junk, and to just live simply.

From:

methylethyl

Possibly OT, but it seems like a related datapoint: yesterday, two of my siblings, who work in completely different industries in different parts of the country, received company-wide emails basically saying "Hey, that replacement laptop/computer/monitor we said you'd have by now? Sorry about that. There's a worldwide shortage, our already-late estimated order arrival date just got bumped back another three months, and at this point, we have no idea if that date means anything. Take better care of the one you've got and hope for the best."

It possibly has something to do with Japan swooping in and monopolizing a dwindling supply of silicon? I don't know enough to say whether that rumor is true or not. Oil's probably not the only critical resource that's peaked.

From:

ecosophia

Thanks for the heads up!

From:

michaeliangray

Oil definitely isn't the only resource that has peaked. A good example is Silver, production of it peaked in 2015 and considering it is a key component in solar panels - you can make your own conclusions on how that will pan out. It can be swapped out but at the cost of overall efficiency.

As for the chip shortage, it is a case of multiple problems all hitting at once. Some which were warned about years ago.

Political control of base resources, it takes 63 elements are required to make a single high end chip nowadays and there are no alternatives. Supply chain issues in general are also holding up the movement of these things even if they are technically available. Drought in Taiwan is keeping the only top end production facility running at a fraction of its peak. The fact that this is the only top of the line factory on the planet situated in a political hot spot region. The ever increasing costs of manufacturing development driving out competition due to the fight against physics becoming futile. Just to name a few issues.

It is all a case of multiple problems occurring simultaneously. Personally speaking, it is happening the same reason why a ship got stuck in the worlds most traveled canal - the universe has a great sense of humor. Don't take that too seriously. :)

The best analogy I have seen on the grand perspective of peak resources is from Stephen Harrod Buhner. Look at plants, they typically hit their peak of vibrancy right as they produce their seeds to spread. As you see plants seeding that is when you know they are about to fall into decline. In the late 60's/early 70's is when we started sending off space probes into intergalactic space as though we were trying to send the evidence of our existence. And that is about the tipping point of when the first signs of decline began. It is a fascinating perspective.

From:

ecosophia

Thank you for the plant metaphor. That image fascinates me. Of course it's spot on in terms of time, since 1972 -- right before the first oil crisis -- makes a good marker for the beginning of the end of the age of abundance. So that was when our civilization, in several senses, went ot seed...

From:

brenainn

I had a thought that is only very tangentially related to this but it occurred to me that future civilizations might make use of plastic quite a bit. Industrial civilizations have made loads of it but it isn't especially biodegradable. Recycling it seems to mostly consist of melting it and reshaping it. I could imagine it might be put to use for a long time to come. Of course, it might not have the prettiest color once it's been melted and reformed but functionally speaking, it could still be quite useful in many applications. Or so I would think.

From:

ecosophia

That might well be the case, though I recall reading that microbes have begun to evolve the ability to eat plastic...

From:

sothismedias

...This is already happening by garbage/plastic scavengers in Jakarta (and who knows where else)

https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/07/12/blitar-man-resolves-plastic-waste-problem-in-one-district-but-what-about-the-country.html

Of course this process off gases some nasty fumes, but I'm not going to judge people for doing this. It seems ingenious, really. I have the original, but am glad to see it back in print by Founders House. (I could see Shaun building up a nice line of non-fiction in this area -maybe with more of your second editions and some other authors to boot.)

BTW... The Ecotechnic Future is one my favorites of the many books you've written.

Here are some details from that story:

"Muryani, 60, a resident of Wlingi district who only attended formal education up to elementary school, has made a living for the past decade by collecting waste in the area and processing it into fuel, along with six other garbage pickers. “I recycle plastic waste into fuel using the device I designed in 2009,” Muryani said at the Wlingi waste landfill and processing site (TPST Wlingi). Thanks to the device, he said, he could reduce the volume of plastic waste in the district. Out of some 400 kilograms of waste produced in a day, he claimed that about half was recycled on the site. “The difficulty in recycling is separating the waste,” he said. Indonesia, along with other Southeast Asian countries, has experienced a garbage crisis after China, once the world’s largest recycler, stopped accepting waste imports from developed countries at the beginning of 2018. Containers filled with unsorted waste, declared as plastic scraps and used papers, started to arrive at the country’s ports. With a lack of good waste management, some of the waste has piled up in Bangun village in Mojokerto, another city in East Java. The government has begun to crack down on the imported waste containers at ports in Surabaya and Batam, and started re-exporting the containers to their countries of origin — mostly the United States. Muryani said his plastic cooker was modeled after a device created by his father and made of steel. He usually burns the waste once every two days. In the 10-kilogram unit, the plastic waste is dried and cleaned before being put into the distiller and burned for five hours in an LPG stove. The distiller can take almost every plastic material, except bottles and those containing aluminum foil. For the first hour, at a temperature of 75 degrees Celsius, the unit will release gasoline. The next hour, at a temperature of 100 degrees, it pours out kerosene, followed by diesel fuel. Ten kilograms of plastic bags, he said, could yield six liters of diesel fuel, 1.5 liters of kerosene, a liter of gasoline and 200 grams of ashes. Used plastic is sorted and cleaned before being burned at a recycling site in Wlingi district, Blitar, East Java. (JP/Aman Rochman) Each household in the district pays Rp 15,000 per month for Muryani and his friends to collect trash for processing. Gaining popularity in East Java, TPST Wlingi has also become a production workshop to create the pyrolysis devices. Muryani said he had sold at least 200 units with capacities ranging from 10 to 100 kilograms. Didik Hermansyah, a technician at the TPST Wlingi workshop, said that if each subdistrict in a city had a pyrolysis unit with a capacity of 10 kilograms, the impact on plastic waste management would be massive. “It can process 30 kilograms of plastic waste for 15 hours a day,” Didik said. Activists, however, criticized the use of the devices, saying that it might produce more pollution at district level..."

Justin Patrick Moore

From: (Anonymous)

This is a brilliant use of pyrolysis. People keep proposing plants like this in the US but they're only cost effective when oil goes above $60/gallon or so (in 2007 dollars). Because it takes so long to raise capital, get permits, etc., the price usually drops before people get through all the red tape, and the project dies.

You can use almost any source of carbon in a pyrolysis device. I've even seen some forestry sawmills in Maine investigate producing fuel with their excess wood waste.

I suspect we'll have to move a little bit further down the slope of decline before this really takes off in the US, but I'm glad to see someone in Indonesia using it to deal with a large problem, err, resource!

-Ms. Krieger

From: (Anonymous)

I have encountered the same issue in one of the major crop protection companies. They have a regular lifecycle for their employee PCs but last year I have heard in a meeting that the regular lifecycle will be extended due to a shortage of PC production by the supplier. They only had a few used PCs left for emergency replacements. I know from quite a few of the employees that they struggle mightily with the performance of their PCs which makes the issue even worse.

Kind regards
Secretface2097

From: (Anonymous)

I bought the original edition back in 2011, and have re-read it since. It does hold up pretty well!

What did you change, if you don't mind my asking?

From:

ecosophia

Lots of little edits all through it, most dealing with events that were in process in 2007. I didn't keep an exact list, but none of it had to do with the central arguments.

From: (Anonymous)

I like the new cover design! To me the image of the seedling and shadow conveys modest, practical, and well-grounded hope.

-Dylan

From:

ecosophia

I'll pass that on. I thought the new cover was splendid.

From: (Anonymous)

Hi John! I own the first edition in paperback; I believe it was the first book of yours I bought. You mention that some forecasts didn't hold up - a lot of things have gone odd since 2007, so that is to be expected.

I imagine you edited out the old prognostications which didn't hold up?

Did you add any/enough significant new material which would strongly motivate a new copy?

From:

ecosophia

No, I just corrected a few errors and did a very little bit of updating.

From: (Anonymous)

The passages on science as a process, science as a profession, and science as a product seemed eerily prescient as I reread them earlier this year.

-Amber Radioactive Tick-

aka jon from virginia

From:

ecosophia

It had that effect on me, too, while I was reviewing the manuscript!

From: (Anonymous)

I loved this book!

From:

ecosophia

Thank you.

From:

ecosophian

Do you know there was a big Internet outage yesterday? I didn't notice but people say it was rather serious, probably caused by malicious actors.

In response to this the (former) president of the US Donald Trump called for a retrotopian solution: to go back to using paper records in an effort to stop the growing cybersecurity attacks, proving once again that he is a stable genius.

Now US presidents agree with JMG too, strange times.

From:

ecosophia

One of my core strategies is that of inserting unfashionable ideas into public discourse in roundabout ways. Sooner or later, when the fashionable ideas fall flat, the unfashionable ones get a hearing... ;-)

From:

methylethyl

We sure noticed it! Nothing could be purchased using a credit card terminal at our local shops and gas stations, and we could not get online access at our bank.

From: (Anonymous)

Yes! I went to reddit, it was down. I went to CNN, it was down. I went to ecosophia.net...it was still up.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/swaths-internet-outage-cloud-company-fastly-78146099

From: (Anonymous)

Fastly issued a statement that simply said, "we messed up, sorry, we'll make sure it doesn't happen again!"

That's fine, but the idiocy lies in how many other people made their websites dependent on it.

I use the 'NoScript' plug-in in my browser and routinely look at its dropdown list when I go to a website. It is mind-blowing to me on most sites, how much stuff they use from other web addresses than theirs. 'Google', such as 'GoogleAPIs', features prominently, as do Cloudfront, Amazon and others. It's as though people can't write their own websites anymore, or they are just lazy and pay some other web company to cross-link to their gadgets.

Of course, then when one of these major "providers" gets hacked, three quarters of the Web goes down.

Dreamwidth is refreshing and almost unicorn-rare in this regard. When I opened up 'NoScript' to look at this comment entry page, there was one entry: "Dreamwidth.org".

- Cicada Grove

From: (Anonymous)

Wow. 2007? It feels very timely right now...

From:

ecosophia

Mutter mutter history moves in circles mutter mutter... ;-)

From: (Anonymous)

I recently heard a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry on YouTube in which Fry stated that the Egyptians kept their society more or less the same for about 3000 years. That is, no 'progress'. Apparently the Greeks started the idea of progress, the idea that children should be better off than their parents.

Does anyone know more about this?

From:

ecosophia

To the Egyptians, there was no such thing as progress. The gods had taught people the right way to live at Zep tepi, the "First Time," and any change was therefore corruption and decline by definition. That was the standard view in most ancient societies.

The Greeks actually started off with a belief in inevitable regress -- Hesiod in Works and Days, one of the early masterpieces of Greek poetry, explained that there had been a golden age far in the past, things had gotten steadily worse since then, and things would continue to get worse until finally children would be born with their hair already gray, after which humanity would go extinct. That was the standard Greek view for many centuries.

Later on you had Greek and Roman thinkers who proposed progress of a sort, but it differed from our version in a very important way -- it was all in the past. Things had started out in chaos and confusion and very gradually sorted themselves out, but now that the world was settled it would stay the same forever. There was also a competing view, probably borrowed from India, that traced great cycles of time in which the universe was created and destroyed, human societies rose and fell, and so on.

All through the Middle Ages the idea of progress was nowhere to be found -- the idea then was that God had created the world as a place for human souls to be tempted by suffering and evil, and nothing would get better until after the Second Coming, when the elect would be in paradise and everyone else would get the divine boot in the face forever. It wasn't until the 17th century that the modern idea of progress began to emerge, and it wasn't until the 20th century that it took the form you describe, the belief that children ought to be better off than their parents. (Even in the 19th century most people knew better.)

From: (Anonymous)

In The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, Jan Assman says that the Egyptians didn't even have notions of past, present, and future like we do. Instead, they had two categories, which are difficult to translate into modern language, but they're something like "those things which are already finished and perfected, forever" and "those things which are in the process of reaching fulfillment."

-Cliff

From:

ecosophia

I'm not sure why Assman thought those were difficult to translate. It's the standard difference between perfect and imperfect verb tenses. Consider the difference between "I was washing" and "I washed." The Egyptians emphasized that distinction in place of the division into past, present, and future tenses -- if I recall correctly, Japanese does the same thing.

From: (Anonymous)

Ah, interesting. It makes me wonder - Assman links the two tenses to Osiris and Horus-Ra, giving time a sacred aspect. Is he off his rocker there?

Also, early on in the book, he says that he takes the view that Egyptian rituals were developed prior to spiritual experiences - to say otherwise is to imply the reality of gods and spirits. But then you're left with the buck wild claim that the Egyptians began to carve temples out of stone and make offerings for no reason at all. Did Assman actually believe this, I wonder, or was he toeing the party line?
-Cliff

From: (Anonymous)

I hadn't really encountered that in Japanese, at least not as strictly as you describe the Egyptians doing. They have words for 'yesterday', 'today', 'tomorrow', 'next week' and so forth. They do have perfected and imperfected phrases-- for example "tsukutta", 'I made it', versus "tsukutte imasu" 'I am making it".

There's also another construction which we don't have, which I find quite engaging.
"Such and such shimaimasu" (shee - my- moss- oo). "X Shimaimasu" means "sadly wind up doing X".

So for example you could say "Jersey City e itte shimaimasu" which means not just "I am going to Jersey City", but "I am going to Jersey City (and it is regrettable)".

This does have a past tense, "shimatta" (or more formally, "shimashita"). So then you have "Fastly wa kawashite shimatta" means "Fastly regrettably wound up breaking."

From: (Anonymous)

Oops, my bad, the formal past tense of "shimaimasu" is "shimaimashita". The word "shimashita" means "made" or "did", as in "are wa shimashita", 'he did that' or 'she made that'. (You can add a pronoun, "kare" or "kanojo" for 'he' or 'she' respectively, but it's not required).

From: (Anonymous)

Egyptian has many similarities (and probably a common root) with the Semitic languages, and in the Semitic languages I have any familiarity with (Hebrew and Arabic), you have only perfect and imperfect tense, period. Whenever, in the Old Testament, you read "He is doing", "He will do" or "He would do", those are interpretations by the translator - in Hebrew (just as in Egyptian, I understand), they are all simply imperfect tense.

As JMG said, that is common. Slavic languages also emphasize perfect vs. imperfect verbs, though in addition they have other time markers.

Matthias

From: (Anonymous)

OP here.

Thanks for the replies, very interesting indeed.

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