Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
The Hollowing Out of the American Empire
The following text was delivered (in English) as a lecture on Southwest
German Educational Television in March 2006, and has been
rebroadcast several times since.
[Intro]
Greetings! As an unofficial ambassador from the fictional country of
Ecotopia, I am pleased to be speaking to you from Freiburg, the
intellectual heart of the Green movement in Germany.
I propose to explore with you a process called “hollowing out”in
which an empire, such as the contemporary American oil empire, is
increasingly heavily armored and strong toward the outside world, but
is gradually decaying within and becoming fragile and vulnerable.
Understanding this process can help us interpret some otherwise
puzzling happenings in American political life and thought. And
perhaps it can also help us begin thinking about a fundamental
change of values that will be needed to recover from the decline of the
empire.
Ecotopia is a novel I published in 1975 as a vision of a future
ecologically sustainable societysituated in the bioregion that had
been the American states of Washington, Oregon, and northern
California. It has sold about a million copies in nine languages
(including Japanese) and the word “Ecotopian” has become a widely
understood term for the values and attitudes that contribute to a
sustainable and satisfying life. The founders of the Green Party in
Germany were inspired by the translated novel (Oekotopia), and it still
offers a vision of a hopeful future to young people who are distressed
by the ecological and social impoverishment that seems inherent in
expansionist, consumerist industrialism. I will employ an Ecotopian
perspective in my analysis of the hollowing out of the American
empire.
America today appears to be at the pinnacle of world power. Its
total military budget is greater than those of all other countries
combined. Its air force completely dominates global skies. Its navy
patrols every sea. Its 750 military bases occupy key locations all over
the planet; significantly, many of the permanent ones are located near
oil fields and pipelines. The American empire runs on oil, which is
essential in huge quantities for not only our transportation but for our
agriculture, our fisheries, our chemical and plastics and wood and
paper industriesfor virtually everything modern societies do. The
American military (which also runs on oil) rapidly mobilizes “shock and
awe” campaigns to destroy any organized armed force that might arise
against it. Its sophisticated technological weapons have the
overwhelming impact that the Blitzkrieg did in World War II.
Nonetheless, we are beginning to see signs that this powerful
empire is weakeningboth without and within. The process is not
visible to most Americans who live comfortably in the heart of the
empire, and are exposed to very restricted and controlled news media.
But some concerned Americans are trying to figure out what is
happening to our country. What is the big, longterm picture? Part of it,
certainly, is the prospect of “peak oil”the likelihood that the world will
soon enter a long, slow decline in the affordability and utility of oil.
That is a key part of the process, but it is part of a larger pattern that I
wish to address.
Of course, we must not forget that Europeans and Japanese are
also deeply involved in the hollowing out process, through their own
dependence on oil.
What I will do in this talk is: (first) summarize the usual
trajectories of empires, (second) examine how certain social forces
are operating to hollow out the American empire, and (third) look
ahead to what will happen later. We tend to assume an empire’s
decline is dramatic: The city of Rome’s population ultimately dropped
from a million to only 20,000, and the Western Roman Empire’s
infrastructure crumbled. Whenever an empire declines, there is of
course severe hardship for many people, especially the poor. But
modern empires (at least in the absence of a catastrophic new
plague) do not contract so precipitiously. Most of an empire’s major
institutions falter gradually, and new ones begin growing up to take
their place. In a declining empire, there is a long struggle between
people clinging to past values at any cost, and people seeking to
develop new and more workable ideas. Values change slowly, as
people struggle to see a more sustainable way into the future.
[Main Point #1]
Let us begin by summarizing the usual trajectories of empires.
Most begin as rich citystates or regions. At first, they are local in their
perspectives and values. They grow on the basis of their agricultural,
forest, mineral, or fisheries wealth. Their central cities expand and
diversify, producing a wide variety of goods and services. Sometimes
they use protective tariffs to help them become independent of
imports from abroad. As they take over their region and its periphery,
they forcibly displace and eliminate the earlier inhabitants, as Euro
Americans displaced the Native Americans. Thus they develop
powerful militaries, which are linked to wealthy aristocracies that make
it their business to shape the government to their needs.
Above all, the growing empire needs cheap access to resources
that lie outside the state. So the empire’s military forces are
increasingly directed further abroad, to control the known world. Thus
Athens with its triremes, Rome with its legions, and later Venice with
its navy, attempted to control the whole Mediterranean basin.
Alexander sought dominion as far east as India. The Mongol hordes
swept through much of the Eurasian land mass. The British navy
maintained the first truly global empire. In the 19th century, when the
United States first became a fullscale imperial power, occupying the
Philippines and Cuba, it declared the entire Western Hemisphere its
province, deploying Marines whenever necessary to subdue rebellious
puppets.
Some empires, like the Roman or the American, arise from
democratic, republican, even libertarian beginnings. Originally, the
vigorous government of a proud people defends those people and
seeks to make their country strong internally. It supports domestic
industries, independent farmers, education, health care and public
health, community development, city beautification. Yet gradually, and
inevitably, these populist values will be forgotten. A fullblown empire
that seeks to dominate the world can only do so at the expense of its
own people. It comes to spend its treasure on armaments, on costly
displays of pomp and power, on secret police and surveillance. In
addition, great sums of public money are siphoned off to the rich and
wellconnected. In its values, an empire slowly turns toward dominator
attitudes and ideologies. It comes to value the power of the state more
than the welfare of its citizens. It develops a belligerent foreign policy
relying not on diplomatic or economic leverage but on on weapons
technology which can supposedly sweep enemies away and maintain
hegemony. In the end, however, it exhausts and bankrupts itself.
In many empires, the public lacks political organizations to face a
strong institutional (corporate) structure. This prevents even wise and
wellmeaning leaders from dealing with essential problems, since the
rich and powerful are not motivated to solve basic longterm social
problems. To do so would cost them shortterm profits. Hence, the
costs of outmoded and destructive arrangements are passed on to the
population at large, and to posterity. In the case of the contemporary
United States, this means, for one example, running up a vast
international debt to maintain an otherwise unsustainable high level of
consumption (public and private). Americans get to buy a lot of cheap
goods now, but their children will pay very heavy taxes to service the
nation’s skyrocketing debt. Shortterm thinking comes to pervade
national financial and investment strategies. Governments indulge in
“distractive” investments which do not contribute to the welfare of the
mass of people, rather than “productive” investments which lead to
better factories or farms. Our spectacle equivalents of the Roman
circus are things like sending humans to Mars, publicly subsidized
athletic stadiums, and almost surrealistically destructive weapons.
Now this process does not happen because some evil men with
antisocial personal values gain control of corporations and
governments. The imperial evolutionary process is quite impersonal,
at bottom. Later historians may describe some emperor figures as
clever and apparently prudent and kindly, or some as stupid, reckless,
and punitive. In fact, however, the ruling class of an empire, whoever it
selects for high office, is narrowly constrained by imperial realities.
Indeed it is caught in an exquisite trap. Because the economic
workings of the empire, and the political support (or at least consent)
of the empire’s citizens, have become dependent on the extraction of
wealth and resources from distant places occupied by resentful
peoples, the empire cannot withdraw. In the case of the oil empire, it
would be quite literally impossible to continue American lifeor
European or Canadian or Japanese lifewithout maintaining the
benefits that come from American control of oil. Even if the US
instituted a crash program of alternative energy development (wind,
solar, biomass) we would face a meltdown of our societiesevery
aspect of which, most critically including food production, is massively
dependent on oil inputs. In fact, research at Cornell University in the
US found that we put many more caloriesfrom oilinto our
agricultural system than we get out of it in food calories. We are
almost literally “eating oil.” We have netenergynegative agriculture, a
contradictory situation that is unsustainable over any long period.
The operations of a massive empire are naturally open to
favoritism, fraud, graft, collusion, and the diversion of public funds into
private pockets. Moreover, as an empire matures, its wealthy class
generates “looters”executives who extract maximum personal gain
from the corporations they are entrusted to manage. In contemporary
America, the looters abandon the traditional capitalist values of
efficiency and thrift, and even sometimes corporate profit, aiming
instead at private rewards mainly linked to stock prices. This is the
motivation for much of the accounting fraud that has plagued large
American companies, and stock brokerage houses too. But the looters
have powerful friends in the government who come to the rescue. The
federal government bailed out reckless savingsandloan operations to
a total of more than $50 billion. If nuclear plants cut corners on safety,
the PriceAnderson Act protects them from potential financially
catastrophic liability for reactor accidents. Government also assumes
pension liabilities for failing companies. It did this for US Steel, has
done it for hundreds of smaller companies, and is now doing it with
United Airlines. Many more large companies are now lining up to use
apparent bankruptcy as a way to escape pension obligations.
In brief, the evolution of empires traditionally leads to over
expansion, internal corruption, and fatally expensive militarism.
[Main Point #2]
Now I will turn to my second main point: How social forces drive
the hollowing out process. One of the key mechanisms lies,
paradoxically, in the modern American corporationour fundamental
institution. As Karl Marx astutely observed, “Capital has no country.”
The American corporation faces few legal limitations and is in fact
superior to real persons in its legal rights. Its officials are compelled,
under threat of job loss or stockholder lawsuits, to maximize profits for
shareholders. This is the paramount obligation that any “public” (stock
traded) corporation must live by. A corporation may sometimes
undertake altruistic activities, but these are normally “cosmetic.” Of
course some profit maximization can be achieved through more
ecologically sophisticated product design, more energyefficient
production, and more informed management generally. This strategy
is well established in Germany, and has substantial green benefits, but
it is practically unknown in the heart of the empire. There, on the
contrary, the head of Cisco, an enormous hightechnology company,
announces that the longterm goal of Cisco is to “become a Chinese
company”because that is the road to maximum profits. Whether
American workers have jobs, or homes, or a future for their children,
not to mention a decent society or a healthy environment, is of trifling
concern to Cisco. So a peculiarity of the American empire’s hollowing
out is that many major American corporations, from Boeing to General
Motors, outsource manufacturing to lowwage countries. The effect of
their zeal to obtain products at the lowest possible cost is that much of
the American industrial base now exists in China, Thailand, Indonesia,
and so on.
This fundamentally nonnational corporate agenda sets the
pattern for the hollowing out process. The resources of American
society are increasingly diverted to the rich. America is dividing into
two nationsthe very rich and the poor: what we recognize as the
Latin American pattern. The ratio between the earnings of executives
and the earnings of workers becomes shockingly large, especially if
compared with European or Japanese patterns. The rich live in
segregated and gated enclaves, and shop in exclusive stores. The
poor live in deteriorating neighborhoods. Their streets are potholed,
their garbage is not reliably collected, and the police act like an
occupying army.
As to the former modestly prosperous American working middle
class, it is being crushed. During the Great Depression and after
World War II, strong unions gained working Americans a greater share
of the national pie. A huge proportion of ordinary people were able to
buy small houses and cars and send their children to college. In the
US today, however, the values that supported fairer distribution of
income have weakened. We observe a concerted corporate campaign
to destroy unions and reduce wages, and also benefits such as
pensions and health insurance. This is excused by crying about
international competition from lowwage nationsa competition which
we have exacerbated by establishing the World Trade Organization.
Because even a modest lifestyle can no longer be supported on one
person’s wages, both parents must work. Sometimes they need
several lowpaid jobs. The result is a dissolution of family ties and
neglectful or abusive upbringing of children.
The impoverishing of large masses of trained and experienced
working people entails vast indirect social costs, in addition to lost
productivity, but these costs are borne by the general public’s taxes if
they are met at all. The foodstamp program, for instance, which
subsidizes food for the very poor, is being reduced. This sends people
to “soup kitchens” or to seeking scraps in garbage bins. Many
members of the middle class are falling into poverty: forty percent of
the families who go bankrupt in the US do so because of catastrophic
financial medical problems. These people will now seek care at
underfunded public charity hospitals or clinics. They may end up
homeless, depressing the quality of urban life. They will die younger
depriving their families of their support and depriving society of their
productivity.
But an American corporation cannot care seriously about these
results. To keep up its stock prices and the earnings of its executives,
it must divert resources abroad, and hire the cheapest labor it can
find. In the US today, young people thinking about their future look
around for jobs that cannot be outsourced to India or China. They
seek jobs that require personal contact or labor on the spot. Nurses,
dentists, carpenters and plumbers, caretakers for the aged, bus
drivers: these are the kinds of jobs that cannot be sent abroad. But
almost every kind of office work can now be electronically automated
and sent to any country with a substantial population of English
speakers. Professional jobs, such as Xray readers, designers,
programmers, accountants, and financial analysts, are also
disappearing. It is predicted that in the next decade, many hundreds of
thousands of such wellpaid jobs will vanish from America. As an
indirect consequence, our public educational system suffers because
it is no longer a priority for the society to have a generally well
educated working classthe corporations can readily employ people
abroad who have been educated at the expense of their governments,
not ours.
While the consumptionminded uppermiddle class prospers,
most of the population inside the empire feels its welfare declining.
Thus a large majority of Americans now tell polltakers that they are
less optimistic. They expect that their children will not do as well as
they have. It is especially depressing that the US medical system,
because we lack a rational nonprofit national health service, is
enormously expensive and incapable of delivering good care to
everyone. 40% of Americans have no healthinsurance at all. Many of
them cannot afford medicines or visits to doctors; they appear at
public clinics when they are near dying. In these and many other
ways, American life gradually comes to resemble life in Mexico or
other socalled underdeveloped countries. But in America, families
cannot provide the mutual support that Mexican families still can.
Consequently, the value consensus which sustained the
American empire in its expansionist period has begun to disintegrate.
Once, citizens sturdily volunteered to fight in wars; now the military is
having difficulty recruiting, even from the lower levels of society. Once,
Americans cooperated to maintain solid communities for working folks;
they participated in many voluntary groups; they voted. Now many
retreat into solitary anger, listening to “hate radio” to stoke their
feelings of outrage.
Empires in the past have mostly faced external barbarians, often
from the north. In the US, we have only the friendly Canadians to the
north, but we are producing our own barbarians internally. Most
damaging are the business looting class, who have noticed that the
society is so rich, so full of fat, and so badly managed that huge
opportunities exist for more or less illicit private gain. But ordinary
people notice the rich stealing, in Enron or WorldCom or Tyco or a
hundred others. So they decide they too may as well grab a few things
if they can.
When people see that their institutions do not operate fairly or
responsibly, they lose their loyalty to them. More than half the
American electorate thinks so little of the political process that they
don’t bother to vote. (The establishment, of course, keeps it difficult to
vote by holding elections on Tuesdays.) For some, the values of hard
work weaken; people have to show up to avoid getting fired, but many
work only as hard as absolutely necessary. If they can harm the
company and get ahead by doing so, they do not hesitate. For others,
eager to protect their status or move up, working 60 or 80 hours per
week is commonwith short vacations or no vacations at all. The
mobile phone, in fact, means that some people are never really away
from their job. Workers with special skills jump from job to job
frequentlytaking some of their old company’s knowhow with them.
And a lumpen culture of rage, misogny, violence, and selfishness
generates a nihilist atmosphere, especially in the lower levels of the
society. Ethnic separatism and racism may have declined among
adults, at least in sophisticated “blue” cities, but it is still common
among the young. White suburban highschools spawn massacres.
Inner city schools experience violence so severe that police must be
on hand at all times; school bathrooms become so dangerous that
kids must learn to go a whole day without using a toilet. Metal
detectors stand at the school gates. We are witnessing, in fact, a new
kind of “lost generation.”
In the empire’s maturity, politics becomes increasingly corrupt,
and this too contributes to hollowing out. Both politicians and the
media who report on them espouse values of winning at any cost.
Honesty is no longer valued. Lying and deception become the norm,
even at the highest levels. The intelligence apparatus of the
government is politicized and forced into an embarrassing decline.
Analysts are forced to produce intelligence reports justifying
adminstration policies. Then when reality surfaces, as in the case of
Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence
community is blamed for faulty analysis. The once critical press, now
owned almost entirely by megacorporations, is shamelessly
sycophantic to the regime. For example, recently a British government
memo came to light that established without a doubt that Bush had
decided to attack Iraq when he was first elected. He was using alleged
weapons of mass destruction as a deceptive scare tactic. But
American press simply ignored it. Challenged, some reporters said it
was old news: we had known about Bush’s deception long ago. But
because of the press’s passivity, a majority of Americans don’t know.
In fact a lot of them still think there were Weapons of Mass Destruction
in Iraq, or that Iraq had some connection with the World Trade Center
attack. Thus public policy becomes increasingly erraticbecause it is
unchallenged by intelligent public debate. The imperial regime even
convinces itself that it “creates” reality through its manipulation of the
news.
Naturally enough, under such confusing and demoralizing
circumstances many people grow increasingly cynicalwhether they
are alert and skeptical, or simply puzzled. Some of them, especially
those under severe economic or emotional stress in their personal
lives, turn for consolation to fundamentalist religionsin the US, the
evangelical churches that offer easy, simple “Biblical” values. These
values are harshly patriarchal, punitive, and prone to violencea sort
of mirror image of militant Islam. But they comfort people in a difficult,
unsupportive world by giving easy answers to uncertainty and change.
They drastically remove doubts about the future: 56% of Americans
say they believe the prophecies in the Book of Revelations will literally
come true.
As these kinds of social breakdown proceed, the potential
instability of the empire grows. With its wealth inequality and its
institutional corruption, America is now like a vast upsidedown
pyramid resting on its point. So far, it has not tottered, probably
because no society on earth has ever had the degree of social control
exerted by American media. So far the American public’s resentment
of its situation has been safely channeled into controversies about
“social issues”such as abortion, church/state separation, gay
marriage. But whether this stability will persist against severe
difficulties brought on by oil shortages, international financial crises, or
potential epidemics, remains to be seen. After all, reality does still
exist, independent of the government’s news management.
Most obviously, as has happened with many earlier empires,
people outside have begun to notice that the American empire is
domestically weakening, and that its military is overstretched and
hardly invincible either. Our military, caught in the quagmire of Iraq,
would have grave difficulty dealing with other potential foessuch as
Iran or North Korea. These, unlike Saddam's Iraq, might pose a
serious threat. On the frontiers, wherever occupation is halfhearted,
challenges are not met: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. In both Vietnam
and Iraq, the empire has been unable to subdue determined
resistance. In Afghanistan, it has been content to control Kabul and
leave the rest of the country to the opiumgrowers and warlords. It has
had to tread lightly with Chavez’s oilrich Venezuela. These are
examples of the limits of “imperial overstretch” (a term coined by
historian Paul Kennedy). What is the overall lesson here? As Kennedy
shows, empires characteristically take on more foreign commitments
than they can finance, or manage, and the marginal gains obtained
are increasingly not worth the expenditures. The costs of war and the
unilateral powergrabs of the Bush administration increase the US
thirst for capital, but they reduce the return earned by it. This is in fact
the single most important dynamic factor in the hollowingout process.
In the case of oil, for instance, huge outlays for war in the Middle East
have drastically increased the real total cost of oil. But those costs are
hidden in the government budget and appear only in your tax bill, and
the future tax bills of your children, not at the petrol pump.
Enormous war expenditures are routinely approved by Congress
outside the normal budget, as if they would never have to be paid for.
(“Reconstruction” money is also appropriated, but very little of it has
been actually spent in Iraq. It now appears doubtful that the Bush
regime has any serious intention of rebuilding the country.) The total
cost to American citizens of the current Middle East adventure seems
certain to considerably exceed $500 billion, since massive American
military presence is now expected to endure a decade. Thus, oil in the
Empire actually costs at least twice as much as we think. This reality
bites. It has real consequences.
Any empire suffers the paradox of spectacular military power
externally and social decline internallyno matter who its leaders are.
Hollowing out, unfortunately, decreases the ability of American people
to explore and develop alternative technologies or alternative ways of
doing business. The trained and educated American work force is
seeing its jobs exported. Our universities are being forced away from
basic science toward corporateoriented and military research. This
increasingly leaves innovative leadership to the rest of the world. A
good example of this is in wind power, which California pioneered in
the 1970s. We abandoned it under Reagan in the 1980s. Now
Germany, Denmark, Spain, and even Britain are the leaders in wind
power.
Nonetheless, to quote Karl Marx again, “The new society is born
in the womb of the old.” So, around us we still see examples of
Americans developing new values and skills that will be useful in the
future. And they defend themselves as best they can. In the US,
people turn away from the deadlocked national level toward local
action. We seek to employ powers of the separate states to counter
failures in Washington. Thus California has been able to maintain far
more stringent regulations on air pollution than the rest of the nation.
California gives rebates (subsidies) to people who install solar photo
voltaic arrays on their houses, or purchase energyefficient
appliances. Such measures, which are familiar in Germany but still
unusual in the US, somewhat decrease our dependence on oil, and
reduce the impacts of oil use. They prepare the way to a sustainable
“Ecotopian” society of the future.
[Main point #3]
What can we predict about the course of the American oil empire in
the years ahead? It’s most likely that the empire will decline, but not
really collapse, over several more generations. A multipolar world will
evolve in which Europe, Japan, China, and even perhaps Brazil are
also centers of power. Some ancient societies, and isolated ones such
as Easter Island, have collapsed utterly, leaving only a tiny remnant
population behind. But they were almost entirely dependent on local
resources, whose mismanagement led to their downfall. By contrast,
the American empire is a complex global phenomenon, and
techologically should remain resilient even if many of its components
suffer declines and breakdowns. America’s oildriven hegemony is
only two generations old. What will we see in the next two
generations, when oil has peaked and the empire is hollowing out?
Here are my cautious predictions:
First of all, we will see a long, continued process of
impoverishment of the middle and working class though the upper
middle and upper classes will continue to live well. Military hegemony
requires, as Stirling Newberry puts it, a society “filled with people who
are desperate for work, a stone's throw from poverty, and feeling
themselves surrounded and beset by terrors and disaster. People
who, therefore, cling zealously to arbitrary rules and partisan
passions.” We will be a society characterized by fundamentalist
delusions, widespread illiteracy, and political venality and
incompetence, filled with envy, rage, and superstitition.
Second, a gradual rise in the price of energy and of fossil fuels
will drive a slow transformation of all the suburban arrangements of
American life, which are predicated upon cheap oil. Replacement of
the global oil shortfall through liquified natural gas, nuclear, or coal
(the dirtiest of all fuels), or even a crash program of alternative
energies (wind, solar, biomass), would require a lead time of decades.
As unsteady stock markets may be reflecting, an unprecedented
energy crisis is upon us. In the coming decades, we will have to
downscale and localize how and where we grow our food, where we
live and how we get to work, how we organize health care, and so on.
Megaenterprises, from WalMart to United Airlines, will shrink
drastically or disappear. Any activity with long, petroleumdependent
supply lines will become perilous. Our enormous plastics industry will
shrink too, along with the waste it produces. Paint, paper, building
materials, piping, and almost everything we use will become more
expensive.
Third, all but the rich will suffer from declining health: We face
continued obesity, with diabetes and heart disease becoming more
burdensome, along with continued lung cancer from smoking. We will
experience a slight loss of average stature, probably due to bad
nutrition in childhood and adolescence. (This is in contrast to northern
Europe, where people are getting taller, presumably because of
widespread good nutrition while American adolescents eat a junkfood
diet.) There will be a continued loss of fitness, even among the young,
due to spending too much sedentary time with computers, video
games, and in cars. Improvement in length of life will probably reverse
itself, as it did in the collapsing Soviet Union. Our child mortality rates,
already among the worst in the industrial countries, will get still worse.
Fourth, there will be a deterioration of infrastructure: highways
and streets, bridges, and other roadtransport facilities will all receive
less maintenance, partly because they are now maintained with petrol
tax revenues which will decline. America’s very poor railroad network,
however, will probably be improved. As cars become more difficult to
own, people will have to share rides, and jitneylike services, such as
are common in Mexico, will partly take the place of private cars. The
focus of life will become much more local: people will try to work, live,
and play in their own neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the maintenance
of neighborhood buildings will deteriorate.
Fifth, we will face a loss of scientific preeminence, as Asia and
Europe maintain superior levels of education despite their own peak
oil decline. The best American scientific minds are already being lured
from basic university science to military and industrial work. This will
lead in turn to a loss of technical preeminence, even in information
technology. Paradoxically, the US will possess fantastic globegirdling
space armaments that could almost instantly destroy any army rising
against it, yet our mobile phones will remain inferior to those of the
rest of the world. Hightech arms are highly profitable to aerospace
companies. But armament sophistication will increasingly mean little,
as enemies have already learned not to rely on conventional armies.
Finally, on the financial front, we can expect some readjustment
of the recent pattern of lowering taxes on the rich while increasing
borrowing from abroad. This may be brought on by different thinking in
Washington. Or actions by foreign creditors, such as turning away
from dollars to euros (a process already happening) may be decisive.
In any case, it will mean a significant downturn in American material
goods consumption. European countries will share in this downturn,
through loss of American sales, but possibly their direct experience of
war and privation equip them to cope better. Americans may relearn
their own earlier values of thrift, resourceful competence, and
practical, cooperative “making do.” If so, it will soften their landing on
economic terra firma.
[Conclusion]
So, to look ahead, like many empires before it, if the American
empire has passed its peak and is hollowing out, what comes after the
hollowing out? In conclusion, please let me sketch my Ecotopian
perspective on this question. In the years since I wrote Ecotopia,
American society on the whole has continued toward more energy
intensive, environmentally destructive, sprawloriented car
dependence. Within that pattern, however, a slow process of learning
has been taking placelearning the lessons that will be essential after
the oil empire has declined.
These lessons are stoutly resisted by the oil industry executives
who are now in charge in Washington. But let me try to summarize the
new values and attitudes that Americans will have to learn, over the
coming decades, in order to recover from the decline of the empire.
Of course we will have to give these new values political
expression. In the US, the systemic corruption of our legislatures by
campaign financing can be cured by “Fair Elections,” a system of
public financing now employed in Arizona and Maine. Since a majority
of Americans are not in fact sympathetic to the military priorities of the
empire, this (and only this) will make it possible to roll back the
dynamic of the oil empire and begin to build a new sustainable,
Ecotopian world. Among many other things, that will mean that as
people understand that the corporation is not a Godgiven institution
but one invented by humans and changeable by humans, we can alter
the corporate DNA and push corporations toward social responsibility.
These are huge challenges, but essential for our future. Now to our list
of new values:
“Sustainability” as a goal is practical and satisfying, in the
same way that “growth” prevailed as a shared value during the
empire’s industrial expansion. “Sustainability” can be as powerful and
emotionally appealing a metaphor as growth. We will have to accept
that we can have growth only qualitatively, not quantitatively. Life
can get better, indefinitely, but not through the production and
acquisition of more material goods. We need to prize technology
that is not only mechanically ingenious but ecologically and
humanly appropriate. Miniaturization and dematerialization in the
design of manufactured goods can help greatly in reducing our
ecological impacts. These efforts, however, need to be coupled with
new values that emphasize less materialistic, objectfocused living.
Extensive research shows that happiness is not correlated with
income, above a modest level. We need to remember that the deepest
satisfactions come from relationships, family, community, and nature.
Decentralization is satisfying and good because it is
efficient—as well as beautiful. There are inherent advantages of
comfortably human scale. This is particularly evident in the energy
field, where the costs of distributing electricity are greater than those
of generating it, even from relatively costly sources like nuclear.
Another area in which we gain efficiency by smallerscale and
dispersed sourcing is food production and distribution. Transporting
food long distances depends on oil consumption. We need to prize
compactness over bigness.
We must learn to count on each other: to expect and value
responsibility, generosity, helpfulness. Social change happens
fundamentally through social or communal or political group
processes, not just from individual actions. A few unusual people,
usually highly educated, may change their behavior because they read
a book or hear a lecture. But most of us change because we are
involved in groups. We share values. We trade information. We feel
good when we help each other. In the world after the empire, such old
fashioned values will be allimportant.
Cooperation works better than competition. Nature evolves
and maintains itself through symbiosis between species. Moreover,
research shows that the best job performance, or academic
performance, comes in cooperative conditions. So Americans will
have to abandon our belief that hostile competition is the route to
excellence.
Our values must become intergenerational. In particular, we
must always remember that what we build or make impacts not only
ourselves but our descendants. In the era of cheap oil, we built
sprawled oildependent cities and suburbs that will now be heavy
weights upon the shoulders of those who follow. American suburbs
are not only cultural wastelands but enormously wasteful materially: A
detached house requires something like 5 times as much copper,
insulation, pipes, roofing, and so on as an apartment of the same floor
area. Moreover, services such as mail and parcel delivery, ambulance
service, street lighting, and street paving are much more costly per
capita in detachedhouse areas. We must try not to make such
mistakes again.
We must learn that it is our personal responsibility to care
for the planet. US government actions to protect the environment are
declining with the empire. The current administation is busily rolling
back forest regulations, wilderness designations, and endangered
species protections. It is weakening car and powerplantemission
limits, permitting oildrilling in Arctic wilderness, and so on. But local
people see new protective roles they can play. In the absence of
meaningful political parties, for example, informal “watershed councils”
are forming. People from usually opposed groupsconservationists,
ranchers, town business owners, fishers, bicyclists, boatersmeet
regularly to resolve their conflicts and improve the health of their
shared waters and lands. They work on streambank restoration,
cattleexclusion fences, bicycle paths, trafficcalming in towns,
reduced pesticide and herbicide use, and the promotion of organic
farming.
And lastly, religious values must combine with
environmental values. The spiritual values of human life may indeed
become increasingly vital as economic life is straitened. In America,
even some evangelicals are changing their values and speaking of the
Earth as God’s body, which we should care for. Many other traditional
religions are moving steadily toward environmental consciousness.
And Buddhism, a strongly ecological religion, has a foothold in
America today. Religion remains an important force in America, so
these are promising developments.
If these lessons are learned and these values adopted, I believe
that even in the face of imperial decline and hollowing out, we can
prepare a sustainable future. We will be able to teach our children that
things will someday change for the better, and that we can achieve a
world in which old, destructive values have worn away, and new more
human, more Ecotopian, values triumph.
Ernest Callenbach is the author of Ecotopia, Ecotopia Emerging, Living Cheaply with Style,
Bring Back the Buffalo!: A Sustainable Future for America's Great Plains, and Ecology: A
Pocket Guide. With Christine Leefeldt, he also wrote a children's book, Humphrey the
Wayward Whale. For further information, go to ernestcallenbach.com.