Reduction in energy leads to simplification
December 18th, 2008 by Jim JustRichard Heinberg has posted a really interesting piece at Post Carbon Institute on the relationship between energy and societal complexity. He ponders the consequences of the fact that reduced energy will inevitably result in simplification – a reduction in societal complexity or, more ominously stated, collapse.
Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is the touchstone work. As Heinberg summarizes:
Tainter saw societal complexity as a strategy for solving problems (too many people, not enough food, warlike neighbors, changing climate, and so on). But investments in complexity yield diminishing returns, so eventually the strategy always fails and the society must simplify again. This simplification typically manifests as political and economic crisis, abandonment of urban centers, declining population, or war.
One of the reasons that returns on complexity begin to decline is that growth in exploitation of energy sources cannot be sustained: soils erode, forests disappear, fossil fuels deplete, the climate changes around us.
Heinberg poses the questions that we will be forced to confront: How will that simplification occur? How simple will society become?
Heinberg says adaptation strategies are likely to be more successful if we can organize the simplification process. But as we are seeing in the reactions to the multiple crises we’re facing, our automatic response is ever more complexity:
[W]e labor instead under the belief that our current problems can be solved with ever more complexity in the forms of technology (genetically modified crops and hybrid cars) and government bailouts for failing companies.
Will we as a society continue doing what we have been doing until it simply doesn’t work any longer and we’re compelled to do something else? Time will tell.
Heinberg helpfully lists others who have been exploring in their works the phenomenon of collapse and what it means for us: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; and Dmitri Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.