Vision of the future : Dune

Science-fiction tells us more about the dreams, hopes, and fears of a age than about any actual form the future could take. It may, however, sometimes offer us a glimpse through a glass, darkly, of how this future might come to be. That is why Kunstler's The World Made by Hand and Greer’s Star's Reach are so interesting to read. They are not the only novels on this subject, however. Other science-fiction classics, not necessarily of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, may help us to grasp what the fundamentals of a post-peak society could be. Frank Herbert's Dune is one of those.

Even though spice is definitely a metaphor for oil and Arrakis definitely a metaphor for Arabia, the Dune universe has little to do with what a post-peak world is likely to look like. It has a Galactic Empire, spaceships, and an advanced, if somewhat vintage, technology – the book was written in 1965 after all. Yet, when you look beyond the Ixian machines and the Bene Gesserit's breeding program, the logic of the Dune society is not unlike what you could expect from a severely resource-constrained society.

We all know about the noble Atreides and the dastardly scheming Harkonnen, but few realize that, despite their differences, both were feudal overlords ruling over a host of local nobles and a far greater number of commoners, including in some places slaves. This is a remarkably common system in history, and even though most of us, myself included, would not like to live in it, it is a logical response to resource scarcity. Fossil fuels have enabled us, for two centuries, to create a huge economical surplus, which in turn has enabled us to bridge somewhat the gap between poor and rich people, at least in the developed countries.

This bridge is very partial, that's true, and it is slowly falling apart, but it does exist. Many people, at least in the de-growth scene, have pointed out that the average French worker has access to luxuries a medieval duke could not even dream of. Few have noted, however, that he has access to roughly the same kind of goods as the rich, the main differences being quality . I am far from being rich, but I do have a computer and a heated house. I can dine in a restaurant and travel by plane. What I lack is access to those goods and services specifically designed to be expensive; i.e., to act as a class-barrier.

Widespread access to luxury goods and services is only possible, however, because our economic system still creates enough surplus to distribute some of it among even the non-elite. During pre-industrial times, the difference between the haves and the have-nots was not one of degree but one of kind. A medieval peasant could not even dream of owning a stone house, for instance. Because the economy produced little surplus, it could support few rich people, and those few could accumulate riches only by reducing the rest of the population to permanent poverty, sometimes barely above survival level. The result was a considerable distance between the wealthy and the rest of the population, comparable not to the difference between a modern-day French worker and a millionaire, but to the one between the same French worker and a Malian subsistence farmer.

Access to technology was, however, rather evenly distributed. Things would be quite different in a high- or even not so high-technology ressource-poor world. The Atreides and the Harkonnen have access to what we would call high-technology (spaceships, powered vehicles and so on), but the universe of their subjects is definitely low-tech, and so is the economy. Caladan's main resource is paddy rice, and the Harkonnen rose to House Major status thanks to their manipulation of the whale fur market.

A resource-poor world could indeed enjoy a relatively high level of technology, even if there is no historical precedent. What it cannot do is mass-produce it. A car or even a computer could theoretically be built by a resource-constrained society with the necessary know-how. What such a society could not support, let alone build, is the necessary industrial infrastructure. The consequence is that those high-tech objects which could still be made in such a context will have to be hand-crafted in very much the same way that books, for instance, were produced in pre-industrial times. Their price would therefore be prohibitive. Surviving complex technologies would then be reserved to the elite, whatever this elite may be.

This may, ironically, encourage the survival or the resurrection of some technologies. During the long descent, society’s focus will be survival, and at some point research and even technology maintenance will cease to be priorities. Unless things become far worse than they need to be, the dark ages will pass and new elites will emerge from the ruins – if history is any guide, they will descend from successful warlords; even if they may have another origins, such as religion. Like all elites, they will want to display their status, and what better way to do it than by using prohibitively expensive technologies from the legendary time of computers and moon rockets. The resulting society could be more polarized than anything in history. After all, Louis XIV might have had chests of gold and tens of thousands of soldiers at his disposal, but he still had to rely on herbs when he was sick. His twenty-fourth-century counterparts may have competent doctors and antibiotics. It is their subjects who will have to be content with herbs.

Such technology would be rather static, however, and there too the Dune universe offers us a good idea of what a post-peak society could look like. Research is a very resource-intensive activity, and it relies upon a network of equally very resource-intensive educational institutions. Both are subject to the law of diminishing returns. While a resource-poor society may do some research, it will have to be limited and very focused; as a result, its technology will look quite stagnant, with very few breakthroughs and those shall be very far between, and a lot of mature technologies used without much change for thousands of years. Technological innovations may still be game-changers in the realm of the economy or geopolitics – the synthetic spice, for instance – but they won't change the way ordinary people live, at least not the way the runaway technological progress of the last two centuries has done. That does not mean that ordinary people won't experience significant, even drastic, changes in their lives – wars, political and religious crises, and natural disasters will still be very much on the agenda – but we won't see anything like the rift between our grandparents' world and ours. In a way, it will be a return to the atemporal peasant world before the Industrial Revolution, a world subject to change but not to progress, where continuity is valued more than innovation.

Most peak oil activists would hate such a society, of course, even though some, of the conspiracy theorist kind, might see in my description of it a confirmation of their fears. They would be wrong, by the way. If a Dune-like society does emerge from the long descent, it will be after the demise of our world and of its elite. They are much too closely linked to mass production, to globalization, and to the monetary economy to thrive or even survive in a world where those will be mere memories. They will go the way of Mayan priests and Roman aristocrats. The post-peak aristocrats will be of another stock – they may even be the descendants of successful activists (there are, after all, historical precedents) – and their formation years will be long and troubled.

As I have said, I would greatly dislike living in such a society, but that does not change the fact that its emergence, or the emergence or something quite similar in its functioning if not in its external outlook, is a possible – even likely – consequence of the collapse of a technological society. That does not mean, of course, that we cannot prevent it from emerging. We cannot do anything about the limits to growth, and certainly cannot avert the coming collapse, but we are fully responsible for the way we react to it. Promoting personal and collective accountability and extending democracy, especially at the community level where the consequences of one's choices can be fully felt, might erect subtle but very effective barriers to the rise of “feudalism with hand-crafted tanks”. That means, however, tremendous effort both at the personal and the community level, and it is not certain that every individual and, more important, every community will be willing to make them.

I want to thank David Parkinson, who have copy-edited this post and corrected my rather clumsy English. Without his efforts, it would have been far less readable.

Retirement and entitlement

Last tuesday I participated to a demonstration against the projected reform of the French retirement system. It was nearly mandatory for me to be seen there, on strike (but still paid, that is one of the advantages of being a politician) and holding a party banner. Yet, all moderates present felt the whole thing was an act, a mere baroud d'honneur before an unavoidable defeat. Even the very peak energy unaware Socialist Party recognizes, privately, that the current French retirement system cannot stand unchanged and anybody even vaguely peak oil aware will agree that retirement itself is going to become a thing of the past. Yet, here we were, clamoring in the street in defense of a system we knew is unsustainable. The truth was simply unspeakable even for those few who could think it. Any left-winger audacious, or stupid, enough to question this “to the last ditch” attitude, would quickly be ostracized as an ally of the right and lose whatever position he had acquired inside his organization. As absurd as it sounds, it is the reality anybody willing to bring out a constructive response to our predicament must face. The main obstacle is not some elite plot but a far more diffuse, and formidable, obstacle : this feeling of entitlement so pervasive in developed societies.

The French retirement system is a complex hodgepodge of individual retirement plans or institutions, so complex in fact that a same individual may have to deal with several of them as he reaches retirement age – this will (or rather would have been) probably be my case as I worked a few month in the private sector before becoming a civil servant. All, or nearly all, work the same way, however. Every month a significant part of your wages go to a retirement fund (in my case the CNRACL) which uses said money to pay the pensions of the retirees affiliated to it.

This system works fine as long as working people are significantly more numerous than the retirees they support, which is unfortunately less and less the case. As birth rate decreased during the seventies and high unemployment became a permanent feature of the economy (8% is an absolute minimum here), a growing number of retirees has to be supported by a stagnating or even decreasing number of workers. Moreover, those retirees began their careers during the years of rapid growth, when there still were still a lot of highly paid jobs up for the taking, so the standard of life of most of them is actually superior to the one of most of the workers supporting them.

This would not be an unsolvable problem, should the resources available to society continue to grow. We know, however, it won't be the case. Our civilization is reaching the limits pointed out by the Meadows Report thirty years ago where continued real growth is made more and more difficult due to the depletion of key resources. Add in the limits of social complexity as a problem-solving strategy pointed out by Tainter in his seminal work The Collapse of Complex Societies and it becomes obvious that there only two possible fates for the French retirement system, both equally unpleasant.

First we can choose to go the deflation way. As the economy contracts in real terms and less and less resource are available to society, unemployment will skyrocket and an increasing number of people will turn to the domestic or underground economy for survival. As a consequence, the amount of money retirement management agencies will be able to collect will decrease and it will be only a matter of time before one goes bankrupt. The most sensible solution would be to let it crash and burn, but the political cost would be staggering. What will happen instead is that the state will step in, assume the debts and impose lower benefits for higher payments. This is basically what happens today, except that the government does not seem too eager to assume any debt but its own (and even that...)

Since the available net energy is bound to decline to near pre-industrial levels, there are no reason for this process not to repeat itself again and again until the whole French retirement system is down to a purely symbolic level. Of course, by this point, something really nasty would surely have already happened, making the whole issue quite irrelevant anyway.

We could also choose the inflation way, create a lot of money to fuel a fake growth and pay our debt with it. Of course inflation will quickly rise its ugly head – not necessarily Zimbabwe level inflation, but high enough to make any rise in nominal pensions illusory. All we'll have to do then is let pensions – and wages – stagnate and inflation will quickly make retirement history. That is what happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when pensions kept their nominal value while the ruble plummeted.

Were I to say that in the speech I am commissioned to write for the forthcoming departmental rally of the left, I would probably have to find myself another job, and certainly not because I would have uncovered some sinister elite plot to deprive workers of their birthright. The problem is that pensions have been so thoroughly cut from work that most people – including politicians – have come to consider it not as the result of one's labor but as an inalienable right.

At the beginning, pensions were supposed to be socialized wages and a number of unions and political groups still cling to this idea and repeat it like a mantra. They may have been perceived as such during the early fifties, but now they are just subsidies raining down from distant bureaucracies. The result has been a contradictory feeling of helplessness and entitlement. Unless what might have happened within the local chapter of an old style fraternal order, the individual worker has no say in the pension policy. It is decided either directly by the government or by the unholy alliance of workers' and corporations' unions which manages most French retirement organisms. All citizens can do is accept or protest.

Even if the ideology of progress had not been so pervasive in our society, this disempowerment would have been sure to generate a deep sense of entitlement. Retirement is no longer something you work for but something you wait for and, as always, when your expectations are not met, the result is frustration and anger.

And it does not help that Frenchmen – like Americans – live in what would have seemed unimaginable luxury to a medieval baron.

Of course, it could be possible to imagine sustainable retirement solutions without reverting to pure family solidarity – which supposes you do have a family and it has the means to support you – or charity – which basically puts your survival in the hands of whatever church happens to rule the area. The Islamic zaqat system might be a way, provided it is organized at a community level and not taken over by the state or some large private organization, as it is too often the case in the Islamic world. The fraternal orders of the English and American nineteenth century might be another. Neither fits very well within the framework of today's French – or American for that matter – society and both would be stiffly resisted by Unions and political parties alike, as would be the suggestion that there are ideas to be found among the Amish, the Hutterites or the other groups born from the radical Reformation.

The necessary shift from bureaucracy and entitlement toward community empowerment, local resilience and personal responsibility will have to grow locally, through our own efforts, and that may mean accepting the hardships which come with it. That is exactly what most people – and the political elite represents them well in that matter – don't want to hear. That is exactly why they will cling to unsustainable structures until they collapse... while we'll grow alternatives in the cracks

Barbarian invasions

World media did not talk about it, but France was recently shaken by another polemic about the Islamic veil. A woman was caught driving while wearing a veil almost completely hiding her face and fined – rightly so, in my opinion – for dangerous driving. The government, who had just lost the regional elections by the largest margin ever, escalated, threatened to revoke the woman's husband's citizenship because because he had several wives, then, discovering it was not legally possible announced it would vote a law to make it so, retroactively. The whole thing degenerated into political bickering out of which, we can be pretty sure, nothing will come out. This polemic may sound quite absurd, especially in a time when most governments in Europe are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. In many way it is. It highlights, however, an important aspect of the energy descent : migration, culture shift, and the reaction of locals to both.

Many authors have predicted the energy descent will result in mass migrations, leading to large scale population replacement. John Michael Greer has thus stated he considered an Arab conquest of Europe a distinct possibility, and his e-novel Star' Reach describes the Old World as the place “where the Arabs live now”. There is certainly an American bias here. America experienced a large scale population replacement in the last three centuries, with natives being progressively swamped out by immigrants from the other side of the sea. This hasn't happened in Europe for five millenniums.

Of course, there have been a lot of invasions and culture shifts, but the population has remained the same as it was during the neolithic. In the area I live, people first spoke some kind of pre-indoeuropean language, then shifted to Celtic, then to Latin, then to another brand of Celtic, then to a romance local dialect, then to standard French. They will probably shift to something else at some point of the future. Most of them, however, directly descend from the mesolithic hunter-gatherers who claimed this land after the end of the last ice age.

The invasions which marked the end of the Western Roman Empire have had a surprisingly small impact. Germanic warlords seized political power and set up often short-lived kingdoms but they and their men were too few in number to really influence the genetic make up of the population or do more than introduce a few specialized loanwords in their language. As a rule, immigrants, even high-status sword wielding immigrants, quickly assimilate, not because they have a moral obligation to do so but because it is the best way to advance in society. Of course, in the long run, it means forsaking the web of ethnic solidarity which helped them to survive when they first arrived, but most of the time it is a price worth paying.

There are exceptions, however. Transplanted peasant communities, settling en masse on a relatively virgin land can resist assimilation a very long time, even if they are completely surrounded by natives. This is what happened to the Arvanites of Greece or to the, now gone, German speaking populations of Russia or Romania. This has, of course, little relevance for the energy descent age.

The second exception – the English – is, however, far more interesting. Far right ideologues and anti-immigrations activists don't like to talk about it, but the English are the one example in reasonably recent history of an immigrant – not conqueror – group who managed to take over their host country. Indeed, when the Roman Empire left – or was expelled from – Britain in 410, the bulk of the population was Christian and spoke Latin or what would become Welsh, Cornish or Breton. Two centuries later Latin was gone as a spoken language, Celtic tongues and Christianity were restricted to the western highlands while the remainder of the country was held by pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a rather unusual fate, one must say, for a former Roman land.

The traditional interpretation of this rather troublesome turn of event, based upon the contemporary but biased account of Gildas, holds that the soft and decadent Britons were obliged to hire Saxon mercenaries to defend themselves. Those mercenaries revolted, slaughtered the natives and seized their lands. This is a very compelling story, one which fits very well the apocalyptic mindset so common in some sections of the Peak Oil movement. The only problem is that it doesn't fit the facts.

To begin with, many early “Anglo-Saxon” rulers wore unmistakably Celtic names. Most of the battles they fought took place, not on the shores, as would have been expected but on the old tribal borders. It was on these very same tribal borders or around major cities that their earliest settlement were first located. Moreover both British and old English borrowed very little from each other which suggests they had, at least at first, a reasonably equivalent status. Sub-Roman Britons doesn't not seem to have been weak and decadent either : the picture modern archeology reveals is one of powerful tribal militias, fortified hilltops and hundreds of kilometers long defense dikes.

This has led a new generation of searchers, such as Stuart Laycock, to suggest another scenario : after the Romans left, the old British tribes recovered their freedom and fought among themselves. Following late Roman practice they imported Germanic mercenaries they settled in strategic locations, not necessarily because they lacked trained manpower, but because hired swords, not being embroiled in local politics are generally more reliable in the short term.

The end result was that the culture and language of the newcomers prevailed, albeit not necessarily their dynasties. After all, the kings of Wessex, who ultimately unified England had an obvious, even if not very much publicized, Celtic ancestry.

What is particularly interesting for the fate of our own society during the energy descent is that the immigrants, despite being relatively few in numbers, assimilated the natives rather than the other way around. Outright military conquest certainly played a role in this process but certainly not everywhere and certainly not in the West Country. My own guess is that mercenaries Germanic war bands were more open that the British aristocracy. Ambitious but low status youths, such as perhaps Cerdic of Wessex, had therefore every reason to join them, learn their language and worship their gods – after all, if Paris has been worth a mass, Venta Belgarum and Old Sarum may very well have been worth a sacrifice to Woden.

The result was that when rubble stopped bouncing and warlordships coalesced into reasonably sized kingdoms, the ruling elite of what had been the core of Roman Britain had become pagan and Anglo-Saxon speaking, even though a significant part of it was probably of British ancestry.

Could such a thing happen in today's Europe ? If present conditions continue to prevail, certainly not. There is absolutely no way an immigrant culture, associated with poverty and marginality can win over the elite or even the middle class. In fact, immigrants have every incentive to abandon it, with the possible exception of religion, provided it is practiced the European way, that is privately.

Peak energy makes things more complex, however. As the net energy available to society decreases, so will its capacity to support complex hierarchies. We can count on the ruling elites to pressure everyone and his dog to stay at the top, but ultimately they will fall. In the meantime, however, it will be the lower and middle classes which will be hit the hardest. What that means for immigrants is that they will no longer be able, except for a few lucky individuals, to advance in society and will be permanently locked in underclass status. They will then have no reason to abandon the very real advantages of community solidarity for a more and more empty promise of integration.

Impoverished natives may and will then join immigrant culture – or rather what it will have become since it will quickly grow quite different of what it was at home – for protection and some form of advancement. This process is clearly at work in French society, even if it is marginal – racism and scapegoating is still the most common reaction.

As the crisis deepens and the middle class slips into permanent poverty, we may have a rather interesting “culture war” between whatever emerges from urban ghettos and a racism which in France may put on the mask of secularism – those who read French and will have look at this supposedly left wing blog will understand what I mean.

At some point in the process of decline, this is bound to generate a deep fracture in European societies, fracture which may take a territorial form, as it did in Britain, with an immigrant-based cultures prevailing in some areas and more native ones holding on in some others. Islamic polities may very well emerge in some French regions and large parts of Germany may very well become Turkish-speaking after the ultimate collapse of today's European states and of the elites which draw their power from them.

This is not necessarily a bad outcome. These futures societies and polities can become as rich and cultured as England did despite its rather troubled origin. The problem is that this process, probably inevitable at this point, will meet with a lot of resistance from natives, and more specifically from those authorities who will draw their legitimacy from today's polities. Racism and ethnic cleansing are bound to show their ugly head and make the unraveling of our civilization far messier and bloodier than it needs to be.

Ironically, it is the very refusal of the native majority to make place to immigrants and to integrate a part of their culture into their own which make this outcome all the more likely. This means, of course that ethnic regions – the Celtic Fringe for instance, but that is only an example – may be less vulnerable. Whatever polity emerge from them will likely draw its legitimacy from a supposed – even if often more fantasized than real – resistance to the state it is a part today. This may enable them to integrate large section of immigrant culture, as a part of a necessary culture change, without endangering themselves. An emirate of Britanny may exist in the future and, even if I'd prefer a Wiccan democracy, it would be as Breton as today's French region.

Even here, however, it is far from a forgone conclusion. In an atmosphere of nationalist ranting and stigmatization, it seems that the likes of Gildas will have a field day, paving the way for those of Cerdic and Creoda.

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.