It’s hard to realize that we live in a time of decline. I don’t mean the temporary decline in our employment levels. I mean the decline of a nation that still considers itself the greatest power ever to stride the earth. I mean the end of American primacy.
We’ll recall the Deepwater Horizon spill as a punctuation mark in an ongoing story that, in my mind, began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy but included events as disparate was the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the 2000 election, the oil embargos of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon, Woodstock and other monuments to the 60s Counterculture, the backward thinking of a resurgent New Right, the rise of anti-scientific thinking at home and apocalyptic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Our victories in this era were signal and I hope they will endure: the women’s, civil rights, and environmental movements.
But the punctuation mark that sticks with me most over the years is the Apollo 17 moon landing.
Why that mission? Its commander, Gene Cernan, has said as much on several occasions, but it marked the end of America as explorer. It saddened me as a kid, and it still does. I was 12 then, but I felt that the glory days were over. We’ve never gone out so far with human beings again, and I doubt we will in the sort of civilization we now have. While the moon landings may have spent too much money on what could have been done cheaply with robots, they provided me and many others with a sense of wonder, a look above events on a very troubled horizon, one that has only become more troubled since 1972.
What we live through now may not be the long-predicted “Decline of the West,” but it may be “the rise of the rest” as America’s and many European economies come to terms with living far beyond our means, at both the governmental and personal levels. It’s going to be hard to claw our way back to Kennedy-era prosperity without cheap and easily extracted oil, and if you’ve been following my and others’ writing about oil depletion, you know that those days, like tail-fins or moon landings, are relics of our national glory days.
When oil drilling begins in the Gulf again–and it will–the anti-environmental Right will forget the killed animals, lost jobs in fishing, the soiled coasts. It will be “drill here, drill now, pay less” again, even though those who place those stickers on their bumpers take it on faith that enough oil can be gotten if only we forget about Mother Earth. It’s doubly ironic that they won’t make any leap of faith to see the realities of climate change, even though that is backed by good science and the evidence of our senses. Scientists are to be trusted only when they confirm what we already believe.
I predict we’ll see a time of chaos, even worse leadership than we have seen, and shattered hopes until those in denial about the glory days fade from view–the Right is old, after all–or change their hearts.
That time will call upon us to build communities like never before. No one who is unconnected to others will have the spiritual resources, let alone the financial and material ones, to weather the rapid decline of our society into something that looks more like the 1890s, or if we are lucky, 1930s, technologically. I figure we’ll have survivals of high technology such as local electrical grids, locally made fuels, and, I hope, Internet connectivity to remind of that another world exists over the next range of hills.
Now that Deep Water Horizon is capped, one hopes forever, it’s time to take stock of our pantries and our circles of friends. My spouse has been, in her quiet way, preparing our “hurricane pantry” for a longer time without trips to the grocery store. We work with a few very skilled and talented friends to prepare retirement land in the country, and we hope to find community there, and in our walkable and sensibly designed urban area, when a long motor trip will be a luxury to be done once a month.
Food is all around us now at the time of first harvests, so in my next post I’ll dedicate a more upbeat column to harvesting and storing food without refrigeration. That’s a skill each of us should have.