Robert Jensen argues that ‘fewer and less’ is unavoidable. But the future is not fixed

In a recently published article, Robert Jensen argues that we are headed for “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and fewer materials. ‘Fewer and less’ sounds like honest, hardheaded realism about our predicament.

He illustrates it with a trench. A water line has to run more than three hundred feet from a well to his house in northern New Mexico, four feet down to clear the frost line, carrying the electricity for the pump. The distance is set by the setback from the septic leach field, which is there because an indoor toilet beats an outhouse in winter. He can dig it by hand, which would take one person weeks, or fire up a backhoe and be done in a day. Anyone fires up the backhoe.

Fewer and less is a story, and I do not mean that dismissively. We are an animal that makes meaning. Property, money, nations, marriage, nature, human: we live inside shared narratives. We shape stories, and our stories shape us. It is a moralized story, which is not a slight. Every human story carries moral judgment, and the parable of the trench is no exception. Whether our man is down in the trench looking up or on high ground looking into the abyss, and whether or not he has fossil energy to help him, a story is being enacted. A story is being written into the world.

The moral judgment is carried by nature, the measure of action: the limits of what the ecosphere can bear set the standard against which human conduct is judged. I am sympathetic to the story.

But it is a particular kind of story. Replace nature with the Christian God, and you have a version of the Fall: a garden, a transgression at the moment we broke the soil, a sin carried in the blood ever since, an approaching judgment, a remnant who see it coming, grace on the far side for whoever comes through. That is not an accusation. He and Wes Jackson say so themselves in An Inconvenient Apocalypse, offering secular readings of the prophetic, the apocalyptic, the saving remnant and grace.

In this story the destination is not in doubt; there will be judgment, and nature will measure us. Jensen is careful about timing and says plainly he cannot predict when or how. But the destination is settled, and the story’s work is to reveal the nature that settles it. That is apocalypse in the sense he prefers: an unveiling.

What gets unveiled? The evidence of which I’m aware shows that no major movement has chosen contraction, and that people mostly take the dense energy within reach, though the Amish have declined much of it for three centuries, by rule, on grounds of what it would do to a community. The ending to this story requires something stronger: that we cannot choose otherwise. Between “has not” and “cannot” lies the whole argument, and no record can cross that gap. A fall crosses it without argument: the flaw is not an error but a change in what one is. Adam does not err; he is altered. What we have done becomes what we are.

So human nature is revealed, and it turns out to be carbon-nature. It is our nature, like the nature of all life, to seek out energy-rich carbon. The drive was unleashed by agriculture and amplified by fossil fuels, and almost nobody, he writes, can give up the work that fossil fuels do for us. Thus, the transgression, the sin, the fall, the judgment. And thus, the price for the sin, the penance: fewer and less.

It is a secular prophetic story, and a material one. A man, a trench, a tool, a water line, a pump: things. And human nature is carbon-nature, a scramble for material energy, which is the constant of the story, steady enough across conditions to be counted on, and the drive that tempts us into the sin of tapping dense carbon.

Since nature is the measure of all things, including us, let’s look closer at nature. And since carbon is essential to human nature, let’s look at carbon in a prairie.

Neither the prairie nor the carbon flowing through it is fixed, constant, stable, unchanging, permanent. Sunlight into grass, most of the energy sent belowground, fire lifting some back into the air, grazers running more through their guts, and what the decomposers leave accumulating as soil – soil that will, in time, run to the sea, where all processes end, and all processes begin.

Look closer at the prairie and you find a sea. Both are flowing, in time.

Extend the timeline and flows, not things, become evident. Where there is prairie now in Kansas, there was once an inland sea. In the late Cretaceous, roughly a hundred million years ago, this ground was the floor of the Western Interior Seaway, which ran from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf, 2,500 feet deep and six hundred miles across, splitting the continent in two.

Grass. Water. Carbon. Nature. Things. Snapshots in time.

Things are processes. In relation. Unfinished. Becoming.

None of which means processes lack regularities. Water freezes, carbon bonds, grass greens in April. Being a process does not rule out having a nature. But the regularities of a process are conditional. Water freezes at zero degrees at one atmosphere. Change the pressure and the number moves. The regularity is real. It is also relational, constituted by conditions rather than standing prior to them. Carbon nature can be a regularity. What it cannot be is a property that holds independent of the conditions producing it, and that is precisely what a fall requires.

Alfred North Whitehead named this mistake of making an abstraction into a concrete thing, calling it the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Human carbon nature is a summary of what people have tended to do under the conditions they have met so far, handled as though it were an object lodged in the body, prior to conditions and unmoved by them.

Fewer and less is an exceptional story because it is a story about an exceptional creature. A story that begins by refusing human exceptionalism ends by granting humans the one property nothing else in nature has: a regularity that owes nothing to conditions. Grass, water, carbon, the seaway, the soil running to the sea, all of it holds its shape relative to what surrounds it. We alone are credited with a nature that does not. This is exceptionalism coming in the back door, wearing the clothes of humility.

Relax the assumption that carbon nature is fixed; call it a tendency instead, and a settled destination still requires that tendency to hold under conditions not yet met, and nothing licenses that step. A tendency does not generate a fall. Original sin does. Even if the prose may want to take a process view, the narrative cannot. Strip the narrative and the argument survives, but only as a probability under present conditions, which settles nothing about the destination.

It is true that no high-energy society has ever halved its material throughput and existed at that level across generations. But an absent precedent for an unprecedented situation merely tells us the situation is new, not what people will do.

It may appear that fewer and less is just an extension of what has been under way for 10,000 years: carbon from the soil, then the forests, then deeper underground, each source denser than the last, one unchanging appetite scrambling for whatever it could reach. But a sequence is a description, not an explanation. That the sources got denser does not demonstrate that an invariant appetite selected each one. We have consumed more carbon. It does not follow that it had to be this way. Unless. 

Unless we are following a story in which the ending is known and the nature of the characters, as things, is fixed.

The prairie in Kansas is eight to ten thousand years into becoming. Earth’s seas are about four billion years into it. Carbon is a few hundred million years younger than a universe 13.8 billion years into becoming. Translate Earth’s timeline into a single day and Homo sapiens arrives six seconds before midnight.

We are six seconds into becoming.

Collapse in some form does appear inevitable when the range of all possible outcomes is collapsed into one. But fewer and less describes different worlds and different falls. It can describe one where numbers fall through the empowerment of women and energy use falls because societies metered and taxed and placed things off limits. It equally describes one where numbers fall through famine and war and energy falls because the infrastructure did. Everything anyone has ever cared about lies in the difference.

The backhoe question, put to a man alone with a shovel, has one answer and always will. Put to a society deciding how many trenches get dug, where, at what cost, with what tools, or whether to dig them at all, it has many. Which of those two is the real question depends on whether you think the creature is fixed and the ending already written, judgment imminent, the book finished.

I do not believe either.

If nature is the measure, then it is still becoming, and so are we, in relation with the world, in our stories.

That is a story too. Collapse and renewal are processes in relation, and have co-existed as long as there has been anything to collapse. We are not exceptional in that either.

I cannot show you that collapse is not coming. Jensen cannot show you that it is. What can be said from where and when we stand is that renewal is among the endings available, along with collapse, and which one we live toward is not settled by the carbon in us.

The story’s work, then, is to reveal the changing nature that makes renewal possible.