Peak Everything (22 page)

Human nature does indeed contain the potential for demographic competition, even to the point of genocide. But it is important to remember that the real “cavemen” — our hunter-gatherer ancestors — lived by sharing and enjoyed a gift economy. Our modern “sentimentality,” in the form of concerns for equity and the welfare of those who would otherwise be left behind, is rooted in ancient sensibilities.

Yet while hunter-gatherers embodied the egalitarian ideal, we must remember that their ethic also included the imperative to hew to ecological limits. Infanticide was the last resort when contraception and the suppression of fertility through extended lactation and maintenance of low levels of body fat failed.

An ethic of human rights, of sharing, and of equity
without a practically expressed awareness of ecological limits
is a setup for disaster.
But demographic competition by way of fascism, as a response to population-resource crises, is an admission of failure; and it is less an expression of human nature than of the ugly habits formed through the past few thousand civilized years of extreme inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism.

The longer we wait, the fewer our options. Social liberals and progressives who fail to talk about population and resource issues and to propose workable solutions are merely helping to create their own worst nightmare.

T
HE HISTORIC, GLOBAL SHIFT from a regime of cheap fossil fuel energy sources to one of declining and expensive fossil fuels and scarce replacements will impact every living person, every community, and every nation. Global Climate Change will similarly affect every human being — and every ecosystem as well. Much of the human impact will be measurable in economic terms; however, individual and collective psychological effects will perhaps be of equal and often greater significance. Generations that have been trained to want or expect easy, quick, automated abundance will find themselves having to adapt instead to a regime in which everything takes longer and requires more effort; in which there will often not be enough fuel or food to go around. How will people respond? How can community leaders prepare to deal with adverse or even desperate psychological reactions?

Other questions raised by the energy transition that have psychological dimensions include: Why do some people seem immediately to understand the importance of over-arching systemic problems like oil depletion and Climate Change, while others react with indifference or denial? And, perhaps most importantly, could the scientific understanding of human psychology help change our collective thinking proactively so as to minimize the chaos and suffering and maximize positive adaptive behavior?

I will not attempt a systematic or exhaustive treatment of these questions; the topic is potentially vast. This essay is intended merely as a summary of what others have already written along these lines, an exploration of related materials that could be relevant, and a venue for floating a few speculative ideas.

Why are Peak Oil and Climate Change so hard for many people to understand? There are probably many reasons. One often cited (and discussed brilliantly and at length by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich in their 1989 book
New World New Mind
) is that humans are hard-wired via the reptilian brain for fight-or-flight responses to adversity or danger, but have an innate inability to respond effectively to slowly developing problems that are hard to personalize. Ornstein and Ehrlich suggest that our species, if it is to survive, must quickly improve its capacity to understand and deal with systemic crises.

Another possible reason why so many people can't “get” Peak Oil and Climate Change has to do with psychological maturity — which often does not correlate particularly well with chronological age. Psychological maturity might be defined as the ability or tendency to think of not just one's own welfare but that of larger groups — family, community, the world as a whole, and that of other species; and to think in terms of long time horizons in addition to short ones. This includes thinking about consequences of present behavior that will be felt only by future generations. People who are psychologically mature know — not just theoretically, but by experience — that youth and old age are on a continuum; that life consists also of death; and that personal sacrifice is sometimes required for the sake of family or community.

The late Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the pathbreaking book
On Death and Dying,
is famous for distinguishing five psychological stages of grief typically traversed by people who have recently been informed that they have a fatal illness — denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Knowledge of these stages has enabled counselors more effectively to help individuals deal psychologically with their impending demise. Several Peak Oil authors have suggested that Kübler-Ross's five-stage model could also help in describing and treating our collective distress over the impending loss of our comfortable, energy-guzzling way of life. (Could this be a form of
pre
-traumatic stress disorder?) Many people, upon first “getting” Peak Oil or Climate Change respond by exhibiting one or another of these predictable stages, and denial is most often the first.

If the model holds up, we might find that differing messages are effective for helping people reach the point of accepting our situation, depending on their current stage of adjustment. For example, we should expect people who have just heard about the problems for the first time to try out all of the time-worn denial ploys: “Oh, but technology will come to the rescue. Surely
they
will think of something. What if there's lots more oil out there that just hasn't been discovered? Maybe measured warming patterns are just due to natural climate variability. Perhaps a few degrees of warming will actually be good for us!” If people respond with anger, this may simply be symptomatic of an inner psychological process of adjustment that may require days, weeks, or months to work itself out. We may wish to gently persist in offering information, but in ways appropriate to the stage of adjustment being exhibited.

Even those who have reached the acceptance stage of the process seem to cycle back through previous reactions (I still find myself experiencing denial, anger, bargaining, and depression after years of studying the problem of oil depletion).

For over 30 years eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy has led “despair and empowerment” workshops (they are now also called “the work that reconnects”) with thousands of veteran environmental and peace activists, as well as Israelis and Palestinians and other groups suffering from long-standing enmity. Her workshops are designed to help participants process more thoroughly, quickly, and effectively the grief they feel over the destruction of people and planet, and to overcome the psychology of
denial and helplessness that keeps them mired in the status quo. Workshop tools include ritualistic exercises and guided creative processes. In the past few years Joanna has been supportive of Peak Oil education and I've been delighted to offer public presentations with her on a couple of occasions. Some Peak Oil groups in North America and Australia have offered workshops based on her work, including one called “The Heart of Peak Oil” held in Melbourne in 2006.

More than once I've heard the comment that at least some Peak Oil and Climate Change activists seem strangely happy despite the dire nature of their message. Perhaps the Kübler-Ross formula, though useful, is insufficient for the purpose of describing the full cycle of psychological reactions among environmental activists. Beyond acceptance must come a further stage —
action.
Those who simply spend their time learning about oil depletion and the melting of glaciers are often glum plums, the death of a party. However, those who spend hours a week organizing local food systems, car co-ops, and economic localization forums seem to flip over into an infectious cheeriness. This observation, if widely confirmed, could have wider significance: we may have hit upon one of the main potential motivators for broad social change. Knowing the world is unraveling while assuming there's nothing you can do about it is a recipe for desolation. Being involved in heroic work to save the world is empowering and exciting. Once one acknowledges the dilemma we're in, these seem to be the only two options.

The next few decades will be traumatic. The slow squeeze of economic contraction will probably be punctuated by dramatic weather-related catastrophes, resource wars, and regional instances of social collapse. As a result, we are likely to see widespread symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — a condition first widely recognized among combat soldiers returning from the Vietnam War but now regarded as a generic category of psychological responses to disturbing events ranging from incest to natural disasters. In individuals, the typical symptoms include:

In recent years several sociologists and psychologists have investigated collective PTSD — the consequence of an entire society suffering trauma. One of the most extensive surveys of the psychological effects of mass trauma yet published is Lewis Aptekar's
Environmental Disasters in Global Perspective.
Aptekar compared studies from traditional, “developing,” and “developed” cultures; he also explored the aftermaths of many kinds of disasters — including chronic disasters (droughts, famines), quick onset disasters (floods, fires, storms, earthquakes), and human-induced disasters (wars, toxic chemical spills, nuclear plant meltdowns). The findings he reviewed are complex and varied, and researchers whose work he cited came to differing conclusions. There is some controversy, for example, on whether the psychological effects of disasters persist for years, perhaps generations, or are only transitory. After a thorough study of researchers' conflicting views, Aptekar concluded that discrepancies in observations probably arise from differences in the nature and severity of the disasters, the presence (or lack) of a social support system, the degree to which the environment returns to its pre-disaster state, as well as from differences in research methods (different studies of the same disaster sometimes produced different results).

Aptekar first dispelled misconceptions about people's immediate responses to disasters. Looting and panic are rare; instead, people more frequently display behavior that has a clear sense of purpose and is directed toward the common good. Tragically, officials who believe that social chaos inevitably follows disasters often delay warning communities of impending crises because they wish to avoid a panic. Nor do people flee from disaster sites; rather, they tend to remain. In addition, outsiders usually enter the area in order to help survivors or to search for family members, producing what has come to be known as the “convergence phenomenon.”

Aptekar described post-traumatic stress disorder in some detail and cited the work of researchers who studied its impacts in different kinds of natural and human-induced disasters. Symptoms seem to appear only after the severest disasters, and in cases where victims are directly and personally affected: “The victims who show the greatest psychopathology are those who lose close friends and relatives.”
¹
Not all of the symptoms occur immediately, and reactions may appear years afterward, especially on anniversaries of the disaster. Gradually, people tend to distort their memory of the event, forgetting parts of what happened and minimizing its impact and their reactions to it. Children appear to be particularly vulnerable after a disaster. Meanwhile, adverse reactions in adults can be so severe that disaster victims “pass fear and insecurity onto their children — even those yet to be born — by replacing in their child-rearing a sense of a secure world with a fearful worldview.”