Cultural hegemony

2010 might very well be seen in retrospect as the year when Peak Oil has become, if not exactly mainstream, at least something of a subject for the power that be. There has been, of course, the Joint Operating Environment for 2010 report, highlighting the risk of a major oil shortage for 2010, the paper in The Guardian referring to it and to the French blog which put the whole thing into light. More important perhaps six major British companies, among which Virgin, have created a special task force to study the effect of the impending decline of oil production upon the economy of the United Kingdom. Yet very little of it transpired into mainstream press and we can be quite sure, as Matthieu Auzanneau himself acknowledges, that a lot of water will run under the bridges of Paris before any kind of policy is implemented to address the problem.

And there are unfortunately very good reasons for that.

Le Monde is the French equivalent of the Times, a high status paper anyone who wants to be somebody in the political world must at least claim to read. Unlike Libération – considered left wing – and Le Figaro – right wing – it is seen as politically neutral and has a long tradition of editorial independence. It is not widely read in Brittany – people prefer local news papers – but it has a real influence upon decision makers. The problem is that Matthieu Auzanneau's paper was not published in the paper itself but in an associated blog, which does not carry the same weight, and the sad fact is that French media did not tell a a single word about the JOE report. This is, by the way, quite revealing, for the did talk about the Global Trend 2025 report. A local expert in geopolitics even authored a book about it.

When they wanted to solve a riddle tribal people – and we all have tribal ancestors – called the manes for help. In this particular case, the most appropriate one is Antonio Gramsci (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937). Like most left wing intellectuals of his time, Antonio Gramcsi was faced with a problem : why haven't the “inevitable” socialist revolution happened. Gramsci himself was a communist, which in the electric atmosphere of the early twenty century, when the supporters of democracy were an embattled minority among the intelligentsia, was understandable, if not totally acceptable. This does not make his views less interesting or less useful, however.

For Gramsci, the structure of society is not only defended through political or economic coercion but through an hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie – or of any ruling class – becomes a kind of generalized “common sense”, the end result being that even those sections of the population which have a vested interest into changing the statu quo actually actively help to maintain it.

To achieve any kind of change, you must first win the ideological war, slowly undermine the hegemonic culture – what Gramsci calls a “war of position” - then, and only then, seize the initiative.

Albeit Gramsci was a communist, his ideas were used by many other factions, from the far left to the far right. The most successful ones, to date, have been the neoliberals, mostly through the Chicago School and the Mont Pelerin Society, and, more recently the neoconservatives, even if the scope of their success has been rather limited. Some elements of the far right have also tried the same strategy – the evangelicals come to mind, of course, with their “culture war” as well Alain de Benoist's neopagan New Right with its metapolitique strategy.

Even a cursory look at recent history shows that the successes of the gramcsian strategy were few and far between. The dominant ideology, born from the Enlightenment ideas, is so pervasive, has so much resources at its disposal, that any attempt to challenge the statu quo has to be formulated within its framework, lest it be relegated on the fringe of the intellectual world. There, Gramsci's position war, becomes a guerrilla war, which can sometimes degenerate in a “siege without a besieger”, to paraphrase Jean Raspail, with small sects ranting uselessly at an enemy who doesn't even bother to fight them. That is, for instance, the situation of the French royalists or of the loyalists in the Republic of Ireland.

The problem of Peak Oil is that the narrative which underlies it runs contrary to everything Enlightenment and the ideology of progress stand for. Where progress is about conquest and mastery of nature, peak oil tells us of the absolute, unmovable limits this very nature assigns to our development and prosperity. There is no way to reconcile them, and those who attempt to do it – such as the “bright green” - choose a more convenient problem to solve, global warming for instance, or end up defending such oxymoronic cause as “green growth”.

To get out of our global predicament we must recognize that an unsustainable society simply cannot be sustained and reshape it for resilience and sobriety. This massive powerdown effort cannot be even begun, except at the local level, without first undermining, then overthrowing the culture of progress which rules our civilization since the end of the XVIIIth century.

Similar ideological warfare have been won in the past, and against adversaries every bit as hegemonic as the ideology of progress. Christianity, initially, a small Jewish cult, progressively spread in the Roman underground during the heyday of the Empire before becoming its official faith and utterly replacing the once hegemonic pagan civic religions. The Reformation imposed itself in the northern half of Europe – and goaded the once all-powerful Catholic Church into extensive reforms – after more than a century of confused intellectual (or not so intellectuals in the case of the Hussites, for instance) struggles. As for the Enlightenment itself, its victory was a slow and difficult one. The late Christopher Lasch pointed out that the ideology of progress met with considerable resistance in America, from the Knights of Labor to the Southern Agrarian. As late as the early twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church condemned popular sovereignty and religious pluralism and until 1967 all priests and teachers had to take an anti-modernist oath.

It was not until after World War Two that those ideas fell into growing irrelevancy. The ultimate fate of the ideology of progress will ultimately mirror theirs, even if we still don't know which paradigm will replace it. History is full of aborted world religions and hegemonic cultures. The rise of Christianity and the Reformation witnessed the birth, and death, of not a few “heretic” sects which could have become the new norm, had things turned out otherwise – who remembers the Marcionites, for instance, or Arianism, at a time the official religion of most of Western Europe, or the original Anabaptists cults which raised such an alarm in Renaissance Germany before being stomped out by both Catholics and Protestants. Others, which could also have become hegemonic have survived by insulating themselves and becoming closed, self-sufficient, communities. The Jews or the Parsi come to mind, but the Waldenses or the Mennonites are also good examples.

Another problem is that paradigm change takes time. We tend to see major historical events as nearly instantaneous, but this is almost never the case. Founded around 60 during the fierce intellectual controversies which followed the death of Jesus – whoever he really was – Christianity became legal in the Empire only in 311 and it took nearly seventy more years to become its sole official religion. The Reformation took even longer, when you consider it as an historical phenomenon rather than as a series of events. The first group to break with Rome on terms reasonably close to what we call “Reformation” - the Waldenses - did so around 1177, as for the first precursor of the English Reformation, John Wycliff, founder of the Lollard, he died in 1384, nearly a century before the birth of Luther.

Of course, time is exactly what we lack presently. We might have been able to restructure our infrastructure during the crisis of the seventies had we heeded the Meadows report and we might have been able to advance on the way to a true sustainability culture. The chance we manage to do either now on a sufficiently large scale are so slim as to be non-existent. Even if peak oil and resource constraints becomes mainstream, we can be sure that the responses will be within the framework of the ideology of progress and therefore ineffective. This does not mean, however, that our action will be so, only that we should not expect too much of it. As Richard Heinberg insightfully stated, our job is not to prevent the collapse from happening for it is now impossible. It is to prepare for the future and make sure that enough people adopt a sustainable vision of the world while preserving what is worth preserving of the heritage of the last two centuries, so that whatever emerges from the ruins is both viable and humane

The failure of republics

There were elections in Brittany yesterday. The result was, let's say, interesting for us, but that would be hard to understand for people not familiar with the French voting system and with the arcana of Breton politics. To make a long story short we ended up a left wing opposition to the left wing president of the regional council. This local oddity is not, however, the main lesson of yesterday's vote. The very low turnout is, and this tells a lot about the way our political system does and will react to the ongoing energy descent.

Yesterday, barely more than half the registered voters actually voted, and that was nearly 6% more than during the first round. While this may seem reasonable by US standards, for France, it is very low. There are objective reasons for that. Right wing electors are deeply dissatisfied with the government's policies as well as with local infighting, so they staid home to show it. There is, nevertheless, a pattern of decreasing turnout over the last decades, which tells of a deeper problem.

Republics are based upon the idea that citizens must only consent but participate to the government. Today, it is mostly done by voting, and by not doing so in increasing number they undermine the legitimacy of whoever rules the country. Of course, even an abysmally low turnout won't bring about the collapse of a government, but it will make it more brittle, more vulnerable to the actions of those who do not care whether the people consents, or not, to their rule.

One of the problem, as my girlfriend insightfully stated, that mainstream parties basically all tell the same things while demonizing each other over small policy differences. Even the green alliance, of which we are a part, remains within the “business as usual” paradigm. They don't question the unsustainable exuberance of industrial civilization. They just want to power it with renewable technology and, of course, preserve the equally unsustainable individualistic lifestyle of the urban upper middle class.

Needless to say, it is impossible. The coming peak energy means that the resources available to society to fulfill the need of the population are decreasing. Moreover, the fact that all governments on the planet are committed to growth means than none can willingly disengage from globalization. It would be tantamount to unilaterally disarming in the middle of a war : an economical and therefore political suicide. All the ruling elites can do is trying to stay afloat in more and more troubled water and delay the crisis while hoping that growth will somehow save them.

As for the sensible thing : planning for austerity and resilience... it is ideologically and politically impossible. Any politician putting forward such agenda would immediately relegate himself into the fringe. Besides, politicians are not different, ideologically speaking , from the population they represent. It is only in the mind of conspiracy theorists that senators and councilmen conspire to hide the true state of the world from the people and enslave it into some nightmarish New World Order. In the real world they are every bit as mired in the business as usual ideology as anybody else.

The problem is that this quasi-systemic impotence becomes more and more obvious to the layman and that more and more people become convinced that no matter whom they vote into office, nothing will ever change, or only for the worse. This feeling is bound to become more and more widespread as the crisis deepens and the rift between the voluntarism of the speech and the impotence of action becomes more and more apparent.

This may fuel the growth of extremists groups, but also disillusionment and a slow retreat into private life which will progressively reduce republics to empty shells. Of course, this can happen only because those institutions which once participated to the formation of public opinion have either disappeared or degenerated into lobbies controlled by their own internal bureaucracy. Even here, in Brittany, where collective life has been better preserved than elsewhere, we are more and more bowling alone.

The results for our political systems is likely to be devastating. Of course, soldiers, policemen and civil servant won't cease obeying because the president has been elected by only 10% of the population, but it will be very easy for extremist or regional groups to contest the legitimacy of the state. Besides, as the effective support of the population becomes less and less obvious, the various factions vying for power within the framework of the institutions, will be more and more tempted to resort to violence, and more and more likely to succeed, should they do so.

Today, in nearly all democratic states, if a top elected official attempted to stay in office despite being voted out, he would be immediately arrested by his own police. Should state institutions become a mere arena for factional interests with the real people a mere observer, things could become very different.

Such things have happened in the past. In France for instance, as every leftist who has read the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte should know, the then president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup in 1852 to stay in office beyond his term and met with little resistance in a country tired from revolutions and radicalism. In Haiti, it was legally elected president François Duvalier, who, in 1964, sought a second term in blatant violation of the constitution without anyone in the country to resist.

France recovered and became a republic, whose policies, sometimes questionable, were rooted into a network of local clubs and organizations, which gave her the strength to resist the political upheavals caused by the Great Depression. The same was true of Britain where the monarchy combined with unions and fraternal organizations doomed Mosley's efforts from the very start.

What the yesterday's low turnout tells us, however, is that this network, is failing or is increasingly disconnected from the political world. In a world of decreasing resources, this not only ensures that somebody will, at some point, play the Duvalier or Napoleon the Third game, but also, that there will be little left to rebuild a new republic on after his inevitable downfall.

This make all the more urgent to build, locally and regionally, alternative networks, where republican traditions could be reborn and adapted to an age of hard ecological limits.

Rising tides

Most people across the pond probably haven't noticed but Western Europe was hit by a particularly murderous storm at the end of February. In the French department of Vendée, the waves, associated with high tide, broke through two centuries old sea walls and flooded residential districts, killing 35 and forcing hundreds to evacuate the area. Closer to home – at least mine – the sea overran the sea walls north of Saint-Nazaire, flooding many coastal villages and devastating the salt flats around the historical town of Guerande. Such storms are not uncommon in Western Europe. The last ones – Lothar in 1999 and the unnamed tempest which laid wast to Brittany in 1987 – were, if anything, more violent. What made Xinthia so efficient a killer was the combination of strong winds, high tide, badly kept sea walls and irresponsible mayors who allowed people to build one-story houses in areas below sea level. Sea level rise was also a factor, however, and that tells a lot about some of the challenges we will face as the age of exuberance ends.

Most of French sea walls were built during the reign of Napoleon, at a time when sea level was more than twenty centimeters lower than today. This is not, by the way an uncommon situation. The Galveston sea wall, for instance, was completed in 1903. The lands they protected were often coastal swamp or shoals, which, even at the time, were seriously threatened by erosion and storms. The sea level rise made them more vulnerable, and this vulnerability is bound to increase as the ongoing global warming – or weirding – slowly melts Greenland and Antarctic icecaps.

Of course, we won't see the tsunamis of Hollywood apocalyptic fantasies and we can be reasonably sure no dolphin will swim down the drowned streets of Paris or London any time soon. A sea level rise of two meters over the next 90 years is however clearly possible. James Hansen even suggests it could reach five meters. This doesn't sound a lot, but this would doom many coastal cities and force them to enclose themselves behind high walls.

Xinthia has made the French government, as well as local officials, to realize that something had to be done – or at least said – about the situation. The under-minister for Ecology, Chantal Jouanno, has announced a “sea wall plan”, the objective of which will be to repair all French sea walls within five years.

And that is where peak energy comes into play.

Sea walls are very expensive – from $4,000 to $7,000 a meter – and it is highly doubtful that the cash-starved French state will able to find this kind of money. The situation will only get worse as we move farther down the slope of Hubbert's curve. Indeed, as the amount of net energy available to the society decreases, so will the part of which any state will be able to mobilize for any large project, until all available resources are used up by – mostly inadequate – maintenance operations and the capacity of the society to react to a major crisis becomes essentially zero.

The usual way out of this conundrum was for the state to borrow, but is is becoming more and more difficult as the burden of the debt becomes heavier and heavier. European regulations – and common sense - keep France from running too large a deficit, besides, France's public debt has reached 75% of Gross Domestic Product, a level even politicians deem unsustainable.

Another solution would be to give the job – or rather the responsibility not to do it – to local authorities. They are, however, as cash-starved as the state, as most of their resources come from it and are decreasing in real terms. Moreover, as most of them are small, they often lack the expertise to manage large projects and are more likely to yield to local lobbies.

A third option would be to trust corporations with the task of repairing and maintaining the seawalls, probably within the frame of some “partnership” or “public service delegation” contract of the same kind of those which are used for water distribution – at least in France. The chosen firm would keep the sea wall in working order and make the needed investment in exchange of the right to collect an often sizable fee from the protected population. Of course this will only work as long as the said population has enough resource for the firm to run a benefit. When it becomes too small or too poor, the corporation will be forced to curtail operations, investment will be stopped and maintenance reduced to a minimum until the inevitable happens. But of course, neither the state nor whatever local authority will be in charge of the work will be responsible.

The problem is that our societies is gradually losing the capacity to maintain the infrastructures fossil fuels enabled it to build, a situation which can only worsen with time. The sensible thing to do would be abandoning – gradually of course – non-crucial infrastructures and use resources thus spared to build simpler but more resilient systems, which could be managed by a poorer and more decentralized society. This is what suggested the President of the Vendée departmental council when he said the destroyed houses should not be rebuilt - which proves that even far right fundies can say intelligent things from time to time.

This is unlikely to happen, however, at least not in a concerted way. This is simply not compatible with the prevailing “progress ideology”. What will happen is that states will try to put the burden – and the blame for failure – on somebody else's shoulders. Infrastructures, including sea walls will continue to quietly decay. System failures such as the one we experienced last month will become more and more common The population will slowly settle into a new normal of unreliable grids, broken roads and flooded streets while resource starved authorities will make up for their growing impotence by making noisy speeches about “sea wall plans” and the obvious inability of such or such local official – usually from an opposing party – to assume his responsibilities.

And of course, they will divert a significant part of whatever resources they are left into pointless but spectacular projects such as nuclear plants

Eventually infrastructures will be abandoned. Coastal plains will turn into shoals, swamps or even shallow gulfs. Poor, then not so poor, households will drop off the grid. More and more people will rely on local resources for food, but also clothing and transportation, then will take maintenance of locally vital infrastructures into their own hands, making the state more and more irrelevant in the process, and at the end a new, relocalized, society will emerge.

The problem is that it won't be painless. The progress ideology is simply to strong for authorities – whether national, local, or international – to plan for decline. Instead, they will suffer it, squandering their resources into delaying the inevitable, and ensuring there will be many more Xinthias.

Requiem for a dying city

A few days ago, I attended a demonstration for the defense of my hometown's shipyard. For me, as for any politician, it was as much business as activism, a part of the electoral campaign I am involved in and an occasion to show my leadership I know the place and am reasonably well known in it. All the unions were there, as well as all the local leaders of the Socialist Party – for those not familiar with French politics, it is the rough equivalent of Labour – but what stroke me was the glaring out-of-touchness of the whole exercise at the beginning of the Age of Decline.

Saint-Nazaire is located at the mouth of the Loire river. It is your typical industrial town, born during of the nineteenth century around its shipyard and its deep water harbor. The local economy is heavily dependent upon the port – which includes a major refinery – the shipyard and the network of more or less independent contractors surrounding it. Needless to say, the city is greatly suffering from the ongoing crisis. The shipyard – owned by a Korean corporation – is literally begging the government for orders and has laid off most of its temporary workers. Small business are closing down in groves and the flow of money which had enabled the township to engage into a massive building program has suddenly dried up.

The chances of Saint-Nazaire recovering are slight, of course. The shipyard had specialized into ocean liners – the RMS Queen Mary 2 was built there – and there is little place for such monsters in a world of scarce resources. Moreover, as peak oil and peak energy force globalization into reverse, the demand for big ship is bound to decline. Most local businessmen are aware, if not of peak oil at least of the necessity to find another economic engine for the region. These days, they are betting on off-shore wind farm. It is doubtful, however, that the cash starved French economy will find the funds it necessary to build even the relatively modest amounts of investment needed for the – largely insufficient – existing project to go somewhere.

Add to this the fact that Saint-Nazaire is caught between the sea and a large coastal swamp, and it becomes obvious it is bound, on the long term, to become again the fishing village it was before the industrialization. In that perspective, the only decent policy is to cushion the decline by helping people to acquire new skills and by diversifying the economy to make it more resilient.

Of course, this is not a discourse locals are willing to hear. Most unions in their pre-demonstration speeches were clamoring for the nationalization of the shipyard. A few days before, a group of striking workers had prevented a just finished liner to leave the port, which jeopardized the signing of a vital contract. This kind of radicalization and scorched earth policy is becoming more and more common in France, and this bodes ill for the coming long descent.

The union men I demonstrated with were no radicals, and while there were a few leftist among us, they were far from being the majority. Most attending politicians belonged to the very tame Socialist Party or to the now quite fangless Communist Party. They had no intention to storm any Winter Palace.

The problem is that industrial workers were promised a future of continued betterment. During the growth years of the sixties and the seventies, when France changed from a predominantly rural nation to an industrial and urban one, they could expect their condition to get better and better with the years and their children to climb up the social ladder. This would not necessarily be easy – there were violent strikes in this time too – but at least, it was within the realm of the possible.

Unions, very much like the bulk of the population, are still trapped in this ideology of perpetual progress, yet cannot help noticing the continuous degradation of most people's living conditions. The result of this cognitive dissonance between the grandiose expectations of the ideology of progress and the bleak reality, is a curious combination of helplessness, despair and anger.

As the society more and more often fails to deliver the promises made during the growth years, the common people feels betrayed. Most often, this leads to cynicism and a steady retreat out of the public square toward family life – not necessarily a bad strategy, by the way. Among those involved in what one can call the “professional dissent” - in a country where unions are chronically short of activists (only 8% of French workers are unionized) - radicalization is pretty much inevitable.

While this anger is understandable, the result of this radicalization is likely to be more and more bitter and more and more violent labor conflict, which will hinder the transition toward some sustainability and make it far more costly than it ought to be.

At this point it is probably pretty much inevitable. There is no way to save large scale industries such as Saint-Nazaire's shipyard, and no way to prevent the loss of jobs. The only thing we can do is try to limit to consequences by developing self-reliance and increasing the domain of the domestic economy... without telling it, for it would mean admitting the inevitability of decline and the vacuity of the ideology of progress.

The fate of Saint-Nazaire will probably be the same as the one of many east-german towns. As the shipyard and the surrounding industries fail, the city will empty. Only old people and those who are too poor to leave will remain. Whole districts will have to be abandoned and when the sea will finally rush into the Briere swamp and turn the city into a near island most of its territory would have become fields and wood again, with the shipyard, the refinery and the German submarine base sunken ruins shrouded with mystery and legends.

The only question is : when will locals will accept, and begin to constructively adapt to the inevitable, instead clinging to a failing model, and sinking with it.

The return of war

Every so often a book or an article shows up in the peak oil or sustainability community claiming that if only we could be nicer toward each other all our problems would be solved. The last in date is Building Cultures of Peace by Riane Eisler. Riane Eisler is doubtlessly a very nice person, and, as a citizen of a city razed during World War II, I share her detestation of war, inequity and tyranny. It remains that her approach is typical of a mode of thinking which has consistently failed for more than three centuries and will almost certainly catastrophically fail as peak energy moves us into dangerous water and announces the great return of war.


Riane Eisler's article opposes domination based cultures, associated quite stereotypically to “masculine values” to partnership based societies, based on so-called “feminine values”. Typical domination cultures are, of course, the Nazis and the Taleban, which aren't, by the way, cultures but pathological political movements within the German and Pathan cultures respectively. The realty is, naturally, more complex. There have been – there are still – peaceful societies but those were – are – isolated cultures surviving in marginal areas nobody in his right mind would covet – the !kung comes to mind – or subject cultures who have basically surrendered their warring capacity to somebody else – that s also the case of the !kung who have been under the domination of neighboring bantu chiefdoms before being integrated into European colonial empires and their successor states. Autonomous hunter-gatherers, for instance the Sentinelese, are generally quite generous with their arrows. They just lack the means and the numbers to field large armies.


More troublesome, however, is the idea that war is first a moral problem, which can be solved by defeating the bad guys and helping other people to become nicer. This Manichean attitude, associated with an ill inspired pacifism in face of obviously dangerous and perverse governments or political movements, has caused more violence than anything else in history. No amount of wishful thinking will remove the fundamental cause of violence and strife in our species, that is competition for scarce resources, but it can, and do, divert activists' efforts from constructive actions and mess cleaning toward villain hunting and scapegoating. Even a cursory look at the history of the twentieth century will convince anyone that the only likely result is a very sizable body count.


Contrary to what neo-primitivists would like us to believe, war is an almost universal fact of life among humans. In his study, War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence H. Keeley found that about 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. Beside, the mortality in tribal warfare was horrendous. In the Arnhem Land in northern Australia, 25% of adult males died in violent conflicts in the late nineteenth century and both archeology and oral history show that massacres and outright genocides were common places before the advent of organized armies removed the common man from the fighting.


Historically, war has been a conflict resolution method and a way for some societies to get scarce but much needed resources – not necessarily the most efficient one in every circumstances, mind you, but still an useful one in a world of hard limits. The same way all successful societies have learned to control suppress and divert violent instincts, all reasonably successful and healthy societies have learned to control warfare. This control could range from ritualized warfare waged by a small cadre of elite warriors to the modern “laws of war”. Contrary to the common wisdom, those rules were more often respected than not, even if for very pragmatic reasons. Thus, the very warlike Yanomamo of Brazil have a complex escalation system going from noisy chest pounding to Nomohoni, an all-out massacre brought about by treachery. Other groups conduct regular ritual fights – such as the Andean Tinku or the modern sport competitions – which alleviate communal tensions with little bloodshed.


Of course, at some point, somebody, whether he be called Napoleon or Shaka, will break the rule, generally at his great temporary advantage. This is, however, the exception rather than the rule and will quickly lead to the establishment of new rules.


The advent of industrialization and fossil fuels changed the face of war in two ways.


First, they enabled states to field – and feed – far larger armies without crippling their economy. Previously the size of armies had been limited by two factors : the necessity to keep enough men at home to tend the fields and the necessity to keep the warring men supplied. Various solutions were tried from seasonal warfare to corps of peasant soldiers, but modern mass armies were out of reach as long as the only available energy sources were the sun and the wind.


Second, they enabled polities to assert themselves without resorting to war. As long as the available resources were essentially fixed, the only way to better one's position was to lower one's neighbor's. There were exceptions – you could for instance divert trade in your direction or improve your infrastructure – but they were limited and at some point you were forced to expand or at least raid around.


This changed with industrialization as a seemingly unlimited internal growth became possible. The sharing of the fruits of growth were as unequal as ever but nearly everybody could at least get a bit of them. Besides, war became more and more uneconomical. What made the power and wealth of nations was less and less their natural resources – even if they were still important – but man made infrastructures, industries and skilled workers. All of these are far more easily destroyed by warfare. Besides, the better integration of state and society – what most people call patriotism – and the development of such social technologies as nationalism, guerrilla warfare and underground party made controlling an unwilling population more and more difficult and costly.


This, and the development of atomic weapons made war rarer and rarer in the core nations of the developed war. The last significant battle fought on American soil – a raid by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa - happened in 1916. Mainland France has been untouched by war since 1945 – there have been fightingsof various intensity in overseas territories up to 1998 and a low level insurgency in Corsica since the seventies but for the average French citizen, these are distant event without any effect upon his everyday life.


Wars still raged on the edge of the developed world but except when it made the price of such or such commodity skyrocket, it had less and less relevance for the average western citizen. They were often fought by professional soldiers in far away countries and at a very small cost. Few are aware, for instance, that France fought an undeclared war with Lybia in Chad during the eighties.


For modern westerners, war is something which is done abroad.


This is going to change with the advent of peak energy. Indeed, as internal growth becomes more and more difficult and political control of key resources more and more critical to the continued existence of an industrialized economy, the economics of war will change. With international politics becoming a zero sum game again – and even possibly a negative sum game – the only way to maintain one's standing will be by taking over other people's riches. At some point, trade will stop being a viable source of key materials and a country like France will have the choice between seizing them by force and watching its economy starve to death. We can be quite sure it will at least try to choose the former.


Moreover, resource depletion will blunt the edge of modern high-tech armies. The efficiency of these energy and resource hungry forces has been, in fact, declining for decades. They are very good at defeating conventional third world forces, but not so good at effectively control territories. In 1941, an embattled Britain conquered Iraq with a mere infantry division and held the country for six years without major problems. In 2003, a far richer America needed more than 300.000 soldiers and was far less successful at imposing a political solution.


This chronic inability to effectively control the territory will become steadily worse as the resources needed to make a high tech army becomes scarcer and scarcer. A Somali warband can work without oil or electronic support, an American division cut off from its bases is a sitting duck, a very costly sitting duck. Of course, this gradual irrelevance of high tech military is very unlikely to translate into outright defeat at the hand of “barbarian invaders”. Even resource starved, rich countries will long still be able to mobilize enough reserve to crush any kind of low tech opposition. What will happen will be that as their ability to control territory fades away, local warlords and gangs will grow in the interstices left by the retreat of official forces then replace them. It will be, by the way, a long process and even in countries where it is quite advanced – as in Mexico – state forces will happily destroy any warlord stupid enough to fight them in the open.


For the average westerner, however, this will make little difference. He will have to support – and even, in some cases, participate to – more and more foreign wars or surrender his prosperity. In the same time, he will be faced by a steady degradation of internal order. This process is less advanced in Europe than in America, but the general direction is the same, and those who see in our countries havens of peace and security should remember than in 2005 the French government was obliged to declare a state of emergency due to massive riots in urban ghettos.


What will become of “cultures of peace” in such an environment ? The answer is quite easy. With the possible exception of isolated enclaves, they will be gladly preyed upon by anybody bold or desperate enough to use force to ensure his survival. They will be forced into marginal territories, then will ultimately disappear, replaced by more competitive societies. This does not mean, of course, that predation is a better solution : it ultimately leads to the hollowed out society of today's American Empire. What this means is that democracy and freedom are worth nothing without the means and the will to defend them. The collapse of a civilization is always a troubled time, full of conflicts and invasions. Successful communities will also be those able to defend themselves. In such a violent world, Riane Eisler's irenic dream will have little place.

Family values

Every debate has its blind spots and the one about community in peak oil circles is no exception. It is fascinating to see how little discussion there is about what is, after all, the most basic community in all human society : family. There are, of course, good reasons for that. Few among us have any sympathy for the family values crowd, a species unfortunately every bit as widespread and nefarious on this side of the Atlantic as on the other one and we certainly don't want to be put in the same basket as they. This is, however, unfortunate, for, no matter how polluted it is by religious non-issues, the family question and its evolution is of the foremost importance if we want to make sense of the post-peak world.

Contrary to what common wisdom says, traditional families are quite diversified. In fact, aside from the fact children are reared by at least one of their biological parents and that normal people are not supposed to sleep with their sisters or mothers – the key word being “normal”, something Pharaos and Incas obviously were not - there is, in that matter as in many other, no universal model. In many cultures, the main masculine figure in the family is not the father but the maternal uncle, for instance. One – the Mosuo of south China – does not have any concept of marriage. As she comes of age, a girl is given a private room were she can invite “partners”. While most women have only one at any given time, they can change partner as often as they want without any further formality and nothing prevents them from having several lovers at the same time.

The Mosuo live in extended families, but those only include the maternal line. Biological fathers, even though they are generally known, are not members of the family and play little part in the education of their children. Those are reared by their mother, their aunts, their uncles and, of course by the matriarch, who is the real head of any Mosuo family. This system is quite recent, and was created and ruthlessly enforced by a now gone nobility which wanted to make sure commoners could not marry up. This however does not keep to be every bit as functional as the western nuclear family – itself a recent phenomenon – fundamentalists and lacanian psychoanalysts are so fond of.

What is almost universal, however, is the public, socially integrated nature of the family. No matter how weird its form, the family is almost everywhere an economic and political unit. As Cristopher Lasch pointed out, the idea of the family being a private place removed from the economic world is a fairly recent innovation. It appeared in Victorian England, among the upper class, and slowly spread outward and downward during the last two centuries until it became the norm at least in the developed world.

It is no coincidence that this idea appeared in the cradle of the industrial revolution. In the preindustrial world, families could hardly afford to keep one of their members idle. It was only after industrialization has created enough surplus that families were progressively removed from the economic sphere. It was a long process, marked by the generalization of mandatory schooling, the gradual emergence of childhood as a distinct part of life or the replacement of family workshops by factories. It was completed only after WWII when domestic economy became marginalized. It was not always a bad thing – generalized education certainly wasn't – but it certainly did not lead to an improved self-reliance.

This retreat from the productive world showed, of course, in the law, as family became, legally speaking less and less a social and economic institution and more and more a private association of private individuals. The last step in France was the creation of the PACS, a kind of civil union, aimed at homosexuals, but open to heterosexuals. It is steadily gaining ground in the general population and is probably bound to replace marriage at some point of the future. Unlike marriage, however, the PACS is a contract. It is far less protective and can be dissolved far more easily. The financial solidarity between the partners is limited to the goods they have specifically bought together and of course, there is no alimony.

This evolution has been made possible, however, only by industrialization and the ready availability of highly concentrated energy sources. They have enabled our society to build the layers of social complexity – corporations, state bureaucracies, logistic and education networks – the economic and social functions of family were basically outsourced to. As fossil fuels dwindle away, there will be less and less resource to support this complexity and it will progressively fade away.

Families will then be bound to assume again the social and economic role which was theirs in preindustrial times. In a way, this has already begun, as relatively well-off parents often helps, at least here, their struggling children, and this very effective solidarity has been a major factor in cushioning the effects of the crisis. As an ever greater part of the population slides into poverty and state and corporate services shrink the role of families in keeping the society together, materially as well as morally, will increase correspondingly.

This will be a slow process, of course, and it is likely to be restricted to the struggling middle classes at first, the rich clinging to the private haven model almost to the bitter end. There is no reason why the end result should be identical to the preindustrial extended family and gay marriage – or some variation of the PACS – and divorce could – and should – definitely be a part of the equation. Those existed in the past even if they were not common. Divorce was a recognized – and effective – right for women in early Islam and there definitely were same-sex unions in China and Rome, not to speak of the long established “third sex” tradition in the Pacific.

What definitely won't be a part of the equation is the Victorian idea of the family as a private place, only dedicated to marital – and sometimes parental – love, and without any responsibility toward the community. As one of the building blocks of any community, it will have to become fully integrated into it, with all the limitations this implies. This means, for instance, that its dissolution, even though it must remain possible, will have to be more carefully considered than in today's society, not because divorce is wrong, but because the break up of an household will have far reaching consequences for the community it is a part of.

But now, being an ecologist is about understanding limitations.

Farewell to the moon

It is a strange moment when you see an once cutting edge technology die. Of course, the common wisdom of our age – the so-called myth of progress – claims it cannot happen. Technologies may be made obsolete, they can turn out to be dead ends, but it is unthinkable for a whole avenue of progress to simply close down. That is exactly what has happened, however, when President Obama canceled the Constellation Program, and that tells a lot about the fate of technology in a energy poor future.

It took only nine years to the United States to land a man on the Moon, yet its technology was rudimentary by today's standards. Computers were slow and bulky and the Apollo spacecraft itself was launched by primitive rockets using a kind of kerosene as fuel. At the time, what has come to be considered as a mere prestige project was widely seen as a stepping stone. During my teen years – some twenty years ago – it was still widely expected that by the beginning of the twenty first century we would have some kind of moon base and that Mars would soon follow.

Science-Fiction, which never intended to predict the future but is a good indicator of a society's expectations, was more or less on the same line. All movies or TV series of the time, from the genial 2001 to the abysmally bad Space 1999 expected moon bases to be fully established and maned expeditions to be launched toward the outer solar system.

Needless to say, we are a far cry from it. The satellite market is thriving, but space exploration and colonization is at standstill, if not declining. Space shuttles – a technology nearly thirty years old – are no longer being replaced and their Russian and European counterparts have long been canceled. The International Space Station, supplied today by Russian rockets, has disappeared from the news and aside from a few specialists and enthusiasts most people don't even know it exists.

There is little doubt than both the shuttles and the ISS won't be replaced when they will go out of service. The expertise which made them possible will be lost as skilled personnel retires and dies, and the Moon will forever drift out of reach, no matter what space cadets dream of and politician say.

This is not the first technology to fall out of use. During the late sixties, supersonic planes were the wave of the future and the British and French governments cooperated to design and build a cutting edge airliner called Concorde. The project disastrously collided with the first oil shock and never recovered. Few planes were build. Lines were progressively discontinued until only one remained, between London, Paris and New York. The Paris 2000 crash put an end to it, and while commercial operations resumed a year later, they were quickly and quietly discontinued.

This pattern is likely to repeat itself as the decline in net energy available to our society makes keeping an advanced technology more and more difficult. There won't be any technological cliff, no abrupt return to the Middle-Age. Technologies will just loose momentum as the resources needed to advance them become scarcer and scarcer. They will become more and more restricted socially and geographically even as they become more and more advanced until they are reserved to a tiny elite. They then will fade out of public perception. Manufacturing will cease, for lack of a market, even though the technology itself will continue to be used, as it is the case today for the shuttle.

It is only when the lasts computers or the last cars are scrapped that the technology will have been truly abandoned, but that will happen long after the closure of the last factory and the death of the last engineer. We can be pretty sure, for instance, that the warlords of the late twenty first century will use armored vehicles, even though they will be thoroughly unable to build them. Such heirlooms may even prove very valuable strategic assets.

Of course the process will vary for every individual technology. Some, such as the car or the plane, may be 'phased out' in favor of 'greener', more 'advanced' alternatives, which will just happen to be available only to the wealthy. Others will continue to improve, but these improvement will be restricted to narrower and narrower sections of the population while the rest of us do in increasingly large numbers with older models. In the end the result will be the same : stagnation, end of manufacturing, then slow and quiet abandonment.

The cancellation of the Constellation Program is only another step on the way to the abandonment of an unsustainable technology. It shows, however,the way our whole technological civilization will go as the resource needed to maintain our industrial and social infrastructure grow short. A slow slide into stagnation followed by a long descent into irrelevance.