Not to say that one would have to go back to a hunter-gatherer [or even a herbivore-insectivore] mode of existence in order to live on a solar budget… - James Howard Kunstler

Industrialism hasn’t been an abiding set of activities in any particular place but rather a dynamic cycle, of takeoff, peak, and ebb. It has rotated from region to region and country to country, along the way disposing of whole classes of people when it was through with them, chewing through habitats, resources, political systems, and landscapes. The working classes of Europe and America had their decades of factory life and the scene has shifted to Asia, which may be peaking now in the face of constraints on fossil fuels. In the United States, the cultural memory lingers on of the brief, ecstatic period after the Second World War when men on the automobile assembly lines made better salaries than college professors and factory workers enjoyed all the blandishments of suburban living. But of course that was the very peak of the cycle in America. The same class of people is now on the scrap heap, reduced to minimum-wage service jobs at best, or relegated to the cottage industry in outlawed drugs, with the gaps filled by subsidized idleness. Great Britain is a similar story, with Germany and France less eager to surrender their manufacturing.

Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life. All the necessities, comforts, luxuries, and miracles of our time–, , , , , , , , , , surgery, the , you name it–owe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuel. Even our nuclear power plants ultimately depend on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil and gas for all the procedures of construction, maintenance, and extracting and processing nuclear fuels. The blandishments of cheap oil and gas were so seductive, and induced such transports of mesmerizing contentment, that we ceased paying attention to the essential nature of these miraculous gifts from the [deep] earth: that they exist in finite, nonrenewable supplies, unevenly distributed around the world. To aggravate matters, the wonders of steady technological progress under the reign of oil have tricked us... [in]to believ[ing] that anything we wish for hard enough can come true. These days, even people in our culture who ought to know better are wishing ardently that a smooth, seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements... lies just a few years ahead… [but] this is a dangerous fantasy. The true best-case scenario may be that some of these technologies will take decades to develop–meaning that we can expect an extremely turbulent interval between the end of cheap oil and whatever comes next. A more likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the scale, rate, and manner at which the [industrial] world currently consumes them.

The American scene changed hugely in the 1920s. Modernity transformed everything from women’s clothing to the human imprint on the landscape. The car liberated rural America and began cluttering up the cities. The first tractors started a revolution on the farm.* Muscular American industry outinvented and outproduced all competitors around the world. Foreigners watched our movies and learned to play jazz. A sense of intoxication ran through Wall Street, prompting excessive risk-taking and wild speculation in any novelty, the participation of easily snookered, inexperienced investors buying stocks with borrowed money (“on margin”), unregulated investment pools that behaved like hedge funds do today, “bucket shops” that amounted to betting parlors, and a great deal of insider banking misconduct around financial markets that were hardly policed at all. After it all crashed in October 1929 the loss of confidence was epic. Decades later, scholars still puzzle over the cause of the Great Depression. It was a reality failure. The things that people believed in proved spectacularly unreliable, especially in the realm of money and other abstract paper extensions of it.