Barath’s guest post provides another way of looking at the reality that Peak Oil and Climate Change are THE Progressive Crises.
What is progressivism? What is it to be a progressive?
The history of the concept goes back a few hundred years to the enlightenment, and in one reasonable definition:
…the Idea of Progress is the theory that advances in technology, science, and social organization inevitably produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become happier in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development (modernization), and the application of science and technology (scientific progress).
It is primarily the social organization aspect of progress that we discuss here—things that can be affected by public policy. But we also look to science to help find ways to progress. It’s also by the opposition—conservatives or reactionaries—that progressives are defined. Conservatives want to prevent social change and at least in their modern form also openly distrust science.
It seems in this which is the clear winner. Yet progressivism as we’ve known it is just as dead as conservatism as we’ve known it. The problem is that most progressives and conservatives don’t know that yet.
Enter the Limits to Growth. This classic ecological study complicates the picture, along with the many other warnings (World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, Footprint Study, Overshoot, etc.). The science is telling us that progress as we’ve known it cannot continue: it’s running into the physical, ecological limits of the planet we live on.
Maybe this is a conflation of progressivism and progress, though the two have intertwined in the past at many times. It tells us at the very least that we need to rethink progressivism for this new age (if we decide not to abandon it).
To quote the footprint study:
Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year.
How has progressivism adapted over the past couple of decades to this scientific consensus? It has ignored the science, or taken the science piecemeal and applied it to political causes when convenient and ignored it when it was inconvenient. The progressive approach has tended to want to address environmental issues (say, climate change) but at the same time insist that we should still pursue growth (maybe with some euphemisms like “green growth” or “smart growth”). That’s better, maybe, than the modern conservative approach of ignoring the science entirely. But not much better. In fact one of the few things you’ll find agreement upon between progressives and conservatives is that growth is what we want.
We have yet to successfully reframe the notion of progress within the limits of the Earth—the ecological limits that cannot be circumvented. Or maybe ditch the notion of progress and find something that fits better.
This last part often gets ignored: “ecological limits that cannot be circumvented.” That doesn’t mean “it would be nice to pay attention to the environment.” Unlike many environmental causes of the past few decades (i.e. saving specific species, avoiding specific types of pollution, etc.), ecological limits have to do with the entire ecosystem we live in and depend upon. That includes our economy, which is a subset of the global ecosystem and derives 3/4 of its value from natural processes over which we have no control or input (a fact that almost nobody knows).
We’re in overshoot. And any system can stay in overshoot for some amount of time—you can overspend for a little while by drawing down savings in your bank account, but it’s easy to forecast that the bank account will go empty at some point and that spending can’t continue. And ecologists have been forecasting that our global bank account—the resources we could extract and the wastes we could produce—would start to run dry sometime around now. And we’re starting to see it all around us.
Why has progressivism fallen down on the job?
William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, explained our predicament well:
Our lifestyles, mores, institutions, patterns of interaction, values, and expectations are shaped by a cultural heritage that was formed in a time when carrying capacity exceeded the human load. A cultural heritage can outlast the conditions that produced it. That carrying capacity surplus is gone now, eroded both by population increase and immense technological enlargement of per capita resource appetites and environmental impacts. Human life is now being lived in an era of deepening carrying capacity deficit. All of the familiar aspects of human societal life are under compelling pressure to change in this new era when the load increasingly exceeds the carrying capacities of many local regions—and of a finite planet.
Not to be pushy, but try reading that paragraph again, and letting its message sink in.
The idea of progress, and of progressivism, is what got us to where we are today in the United States, and in industrial societies. It’s a cultural heritage that has served us well. But it has now outlasted the conditions that produced it. Progress, as we had previously seen it and thought of it, isn’t possible any longer.
Should we keep clinging to progressivism as it is, assuming that what worked before will automatically work again? No. I’m reminded of this every time I read a suggestion that we should employ the approaches used by FDR to improve the economy and fix the nation. Two fundamental things were different then: taking bold action through the federal government was a mostly untried new approach at the time, one that stood to reap vast benefits (an advance in social organization), but more importantly, the nation had vast natural resources (oil in particular) that were available to tap via scientific advancement, and ecological limits were nowhere in sight.
There’s a deeper notion of progress that most people in the country share, one that Greer describes well:
Other cultures put their faith in gods or stars or cosmic cycles; we put ours in progress.It’s not going too far, I think, to call belief in progress the dominant religion of the modern world. For most people nowadays, what matters about our past is that it’s a story of progress, a vast upward sweep from the brutal squalor of a primitive past to the Promethean splendor of a science-fiction future out among the stars. In the modern imagination, the present is by definition bigger and better than the past, just as the future will by definition be bigger and better than the present. For believers in progress, to call something “new” is to define it as “better,” while what’s old is by definition inadequate.
…
Every myth encodes its own values and its own agenda, and the myth of progress is no exception. To believe in progress, in the modern sense of the world, is to believe that history has a predetermined direction that leads to us. Pay attention to the way that people use historical periods as a way of classifying other people’s cultures as inferior—for example, saying that hunting and gathering peoples in the Third World are still in the Stone Age, or that the Muslim world is still in the Middle Ages, while only the industrial countries are actually in the 21st century. Of course this is nonsense, but it’s nonsense with a purpose. Admitting that hunter-gatherers and Muslims are just as much part of the 21st century as the industrial societies, as of course they are, strips the industrial world of its claim to be the logical culmination of history. You could as reasonably say that the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari desert are the culmination of history—and there’s some point to the claim, as their way of life is a good deal more durable than ours.
…
All this has an important role in driving the predicament of industrial society, because the dead end of dependence on rapidly depleting fossil fuels can’t be escaped by going further ahead on the path we’ve been following. Almost without exception, the technological progress of the last century will have to shift into reverse as its foundation—cheap abundant petroleum—goes away, and most of the social and cultural phenomena that grew out of petroleum-based technology will go away as well.
…
When the parade of wonders stops, then, the impact on deindustrializing cultures may be immense. If, as I’ve suggested, progress is the unrecognized religion of the industrial world, the failure of its priests to produce miracles as expected could plunge many people into a crisis of faith with no easy way out.
So should we just throw up our hands? No. I think we need to ground ourselves in the “present conditions.” That is, if progressivism was birthed in a time and place when science and resource extraction and social organization yielded vast benefits, what are the conditions today that will define a new way of thinking? This new way of thinking will need to replace progressivism.
In other words, what are these limits we’re facing? I’ve been a bit vague about them, but they’re actually quite concrete. As an example (a limited one), here’s a figure from the Footprint studies:
Essentially we need to look at the resources we extract and the damage we do / wastes we produce. On the matter of resources, I’ve written a number of diaries discussing how we’ve basically maxed out on oil production, and soon on other fossil fuels as well. (I figure it’s best to not repeat that information here.)
On the latter question of damage / wastes, the Planetary Boundaries study produced this helpful diagram:
Anything within the green zone is “within limits”. Note that two of the pieces haven’t been quantified yet.
This brings us back to the limits to growth. That landmark study discussed how growth, which has been intimately tied into our notion of progress, must end. And we’re seeing now that it is ending—we’re at the point (plus or minus a few years) where growth as we have known it for centuries will end. (People often make the mistake of thinking that they predicted that growth would end in the 1970s and thus were wrong. They didn’t. They didn’t make any specific predictions, in fact, but simply said that if we were to follow business-as-usual policies that growth would end around the second decade of the 21st century. That’s now–see the chart below.)
We need a new way forward, one that doesn’t depend upon now defuct ideas like progress or growth or advancement or other similar ideas. Instead, as Bill McKibben put it in his excellent book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, we need a new vocabulary, one with words like durable that convey what we really need: to weather the storm of the reversal of growth as our bills from our overshoot come due.
This is a conversation that we need to start having. The progress durability of our nation depends upon it.
