Karl North

The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in the post-petroleum era has been the object of much debate because their present organization makes their operation so energy-intensive. The debate heretofore has tended to swing between two extremes. One claims that these forms of social organization on the land are so unsustainable that their populations will be forced to abandon them gradually as the energy descent progresses. The other extreme entertains dreams of massive programs of public transportation to save suburbia. It also relies heavily on technologies like high-rise agriculture and on the efficiencies of population density to save cities. This is the vision of the eco-cities movement. Neither of these scenarios makes much sense.

Spreading awareness that the human population is in overshoot of the carrying capacity of the planet has led to a number of attempts to calculate what the true carrying capacity might be. My objective here is not to provide another calculation, but to explore some issues that need to be faced to address the question properly. To start thinking about the problem, I am choosing as a point of reference the global population of about 1 billion that existed in 1800 before the main thrust of the industrial revolution.

The seventies counterculture generation embraced voluntary simplicity and its low levels of resource use because it enabled not only a lighter ecological footprint but also the chance to escape the stifling straitjacket of bourgeois institutions. Decades later the whole world faces a future of involuntary simplicity, or decroissance (degrowth), as its advocates call it in Europe. Invevitable degrowth? Really? How did that happen?

Assuming the inevitability of a lower energy civilization, How low will it go? What will civilization look like? While accurate prediction is impossible, there are ways to look at the question that provide insights, and can even dispel some visions of ‘gloom and doom’. We know a lot about the way the world looked before the advent of fossil fuels, so we can look at how societies used the available energy late in that period, say 1800 in European civilization and its extensions as a point of departure, and ask, how will the post-petroleum age differ?

The energy descent from peak oil production imposes decades of contraction in the global economy. An orderly contraction, particularly in the US, is not likely for a number of reasons. The decline of the oil civilization is a phenomenon and spectacle of such complexity that understanding it requires a systems perspective. This summary of the case for a disorderly contraction and its core drivers demonstrates the capacity of systems tools to show the interlocking feedback structure that shapes how this momentous change plays out over time.