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Richard Heinberg

A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE

Greetings to you, people of the year 2001! You are living in
the year of my birth; I am one hundred years old now,
writing to you from the year 2101. I am using the last
remnants of the advanced physics that scientists developed
during your era, in order to send this electronic message
back in time to one of your computer networks. I hope that
you receive it, and that it will give you reason to pause
and reflect on your world and what actions to take with
regard to it.

Of myself I shall say only what it is necessary to say: I am
a survivor. I have been extremely fortunate on many
occasions and in many ways, and I regard it as something of
a miracle that I am here to compose this message. I have
spent much of my life attempting to pursue the career of
historian, but circumstances have compelled me also to learn
and practice the skills of farmer, forager, guerrilla
fighter, engineer - and now physicist. My life has been long
and eventful . . . but that is not what I have gone to so
much trouble to convey to you. It is what I have witnessed
during this past century that I feel compelled to tell you
by these extraordinary means.

You are living at the end of an era. Perhaps you cannot
understand that. I hope that, by the time you have finished
reading this letter, you will.

I want to tell you what is important for you to know, but
you may find some of this information hard to absorb. Please
have patience with me. I am an old man and I don't have much
time for niceties. If what I say seems unbelievable, think
of it as science fiction. But please pay attention. The
communication device I am using is quite unstable and
there's no telling how much of my story will actually get
through to you. Please pass it along to others. It will
probably be the only such message you will ever receive.

Since I don't know how much information I will actually be
able to convey, I'll start with the most important items,
ones that will be of greatest help in your understanding of
where your world is headed. Energy has been the central
organizing - or should I say, disorganizing? - principle of
this century. Actually, in historical retrospect, I would
have to say that energy was the central organizing principle
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. People
discovered new energy sources - coal, then petroleum - in
the nineteenth century, and then invented all sorts of new
technologies to make use of this freshly released energy.
Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, lighting,
heating - all were revolutionized, and the results reached
deep into the lives of everyone in the industrialized world.
Everybody became utterly dependent on the new gadgets; on
imported, chemically fertilized food; on chemically
synthesized and fossil-fuel-delivered therapeutic drugs; on
the very idea of perpetual growth (after all, it would
always be possible to produce more energy to fuel more
transportation and manufacturing - wouldn't it?). Well, if
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the upside of
the growth curve, this past century has been the downside -
the cliff. It should have been perfectly obvious to everyone
that the energy sources on which they were coming to rely
were exhaustible. Somehow the thought never sank in very
deep. I suppose that's because people generally tend to get
used to a certain way of life, and from then on they don't
think about it very much. That's true today, too. The young
people now have never known anything different; they take
for granted our way of life - scavenging among the remains
of industrial civilization for whatever can be put to
immediate use - as though this is how people have always
lived, as if this is how we were meant to live. That's why
I've always been attracted to history, so that I could get
some perspective on human societies as they change through
time. But I'm digressing. Where was I?

Yes - the energy crisis. Well, it all started around the
time I was born. Folks then thought it would be brief, that
it was just a political or technical problem, that soon
everything would get back to normal. They didn't stop to
think that "normal," in the longer-term historical sense,
meant living on the energy budget of incoming sunlight and
of the vegetative growth of the biosphere. Perversely, they
thought "normal" meant using fossil energy like there was no
tomorrow. And, I guess, there almost wasn't. That was a
classic self-confirming expectation - nearly.

At first, most people thought the shortages could be solved
with "technology." However, in retrospect that's quite
ludicrous. After all, their modern gadgetry had been
invented to use a temporary abundance of energy. It didn't
produce energy. Yes, there were the nuclear reactors
(heavens, those things turned out to be nightmares!), but
they cost so much energy to build and decommission that the
power they produced during their lifetimes barely paid for
them in energy terms. The same with photovoltaic panels: it
seems that nobody ever sat down and calculated how much
energy it actually took to manufacture them, starting with
the silicon wafers produced as byproducts of the computer
industry, and including the construction of the
manufacturing plant itself. It turned out that the making of
the panels ate up nearly as much power as the panels
themselves generated duing their lifetime. Nevertheless,
quite a few of them were built - I wish that more had been!
- and many are still operating (that's what's powering the
device that allows me to transmit this signal to you from
the future). Solar power was a good idea; its main drawback
was simply that it was incapable of satisfying people's
energy-guzzling habits. With the exhaustion of fossil fuels,
no technology could have maintained the way of life that
people had gotten used to. But it took quite a while for
many to realize that. Their pathetic faith in technology
turned out to be almost religious in character, as though
their gadgets were votive objects connecting them with an
invisible but omnipotent god capable of overturning the laws
of thermodynamics.

Naturally, some of the first effects of the energy shortages
showed up as economic recessions, followed by an endless
depression. The economists had been operating on the basis
of their own religion - an absolute, unshakable faith in the
Market-as-God; in supply-and-demand. They figured that if
oil started to run out, the price would rise, offering
incentives for research into alternatives. But the
economists never bothered to think this through. If they
had, they would have realized that the revamping of
society's entire energy infrastructure would take decades,
while the price signal from resource shortages might come
only weeks or months before some hypothetical replacement
would be needed. Moreover, they should have realized that
there was no substitute for basic energy resources.

The economists could think only in terms of money; basic
necessities like water and energy only showed up in their
calculations in terms of dollar cost, which made them
functionally interchangeable with everything else that was
priceable - oranges, airliners, diamonds, baseball cards,
whatever. But, in the last analysis, basic resources weren't
interchangeable with other economic goods at all: you
couldn't drink baseball cards, no matter how big or valuable
your collection, once the water ran out. Nor could you eat
dollars, if nobody had food to sell. And so, after a certain
point, people started to lose faith in their money. And as
they did so, they realized that faith had been the only
thing that made money worth anything in the first place.
Currencies just collapsed - first in one country, then in
another. There was inflation, deflation, barter, and
thievery on every imaginable scale as matters sorted
themselves out.

In the era when I was born, commentators used to liken the
global economy to a casino. A few folks were making
trillions of dollars, euros, and yen trading in currencies,
companies, and commodity futures. None of these people were
actually doing anything useful; they were just laying down
their bets and, in many cases, raking in colossal winnings.
If you followed the economic chain, you'd see that all of
that money was coming out of ordinary people's pockets . . .
but that's another story. Anyway: all of that economic
activity depended on energy, on global transportation and
communication, and on faith in the currencies. Early in the
twenty-first century, the global casino went bankrupt.
Gradually, a new metaphor became operational. We went from
global casino to village flea market.

With less energy available each year, and with unstable
currencies plaguing transactions, manufacturing and
transportation shrank in scale. It didn't matter how little
Nike paid its workers in Indonesia: once shipping became
prohibitively expensive, profits from the globalization of
its operations vanished. But Nike couldn't just start up
factories back in the States again; all of those factories
had been closed two decades earlier. The same with all the
other clothing manufacturers, electronics manufacturers, and
so on. All of that local manufacturing infrastructure had
been destroyed to make way for globalization, for cheaper
goods, for bigger corporate profits. And now, to recreate
that infrastructure would require a huge financial and
energy investment - just when money and energy were in ever
shorter supply.

Stores were empty. People were out of work. How were they to
survive? The only way they could do so was by endlessly
recycling all the used stuff that had been manufactured
before the energy crisis. At first, after the initial
economic shock waves, people were selling their stuff on
internet auctions - when there was electricity. Then, when
it became clear that lack of reliable transportation made
delivery of the goods problematic, people started selling
stuff on street corners so they could pay their rents and
mortgages and buy food. But, after the currency collapse,
that didn't make sense either, so people began just trading
stuff, refurbishing it, using it however they could in order
to get by. The cruel irony was that most of their stuff
consisted of cars and electronic gadgets that nobody could
afford to operate anymore. Worthless! Anybody who had
human-powered hand tools and knew how to use them was
wealthy indeed. And still is.

Industrial civilization sure produced a hell of a lot of
junk during its brief existence. Over the past fifty or
sixty years, folks have dug up just about every landfill
there ever was, looking for anything at all that could be
useful. What a god-awful mess! With all due respect, I have
always had a hard time understanding why - and even how -
you people could take billions of tons of invaluable,
ancient, basic resources and turn them into mountains of
stinking garbage, with apparently almost no measurable
period of practical use in between! Couldn't you at least
have made durable, well-designed stuff? I must say that the
quality of the tools, furniture, houses, and so on that we
have inherited from you - and are forced to use, given that
few of us are capable of replacing them - is pretty dismal.

Well, I apologize for those last remarks. I don't mean to be
nasty or rude. Actually some of the hand tools left behind
are quite good. But you have to understand: the industrial
way of life to which you have become accustomed will have
horrific consequences for your children and grandchildren. I
can vaguely remember seeing - when I was very young, maybe
five or six - some old television shows from the 1950s:
Ozzie and Harriet . . . Father Knows Best . . . Lassie. They
portrayed an innocent world, one in which children grew up
in small communities surrounded by friends and family. All
problems were easily dealt with by adults who were mostly
kind and wise. It all seemed so stable and benign.

When I was born, that world, if it had ever really existed,
was long gone. By the time I was old enough to know much
about what was happening on the bigger scene, society was
beginning to come apart at the seams. It started with
electricity blackouts - just a few hours at a time at first.
Then the natural gas shortages clicked in. Not only were we
cold most of the winter, but the blackouts got dramatically
worse because so much electricity was being produced using
natural gas. And then the oil and gasoline shortages hit. At
this point - I guess I was a young teenager then - the
economy was in tatters and there was political chaos.

By the time I was an older teenager, a certain identifiable
attitude was developing among the young people. It was a
feeling of utter contempt for anyone over a certain age -
maybe thirty or forty. The adults had consumed so many
resources, and now there were none left for their own
children. Of course, when those adults were younger they had
just been doing what everybody else was doing. They figured
it was normal to cut down ancient forests for wood pulp for
their phone books, pump every last gallon of oil to power
their SUVs, or flick on the air conditioner if they were a
little warm. For the kids of my generation, all of that was
just a dim memory. What we knew was very different. We were
living in darkness, with shortages of food and water, with
riots in the streets, with people begging on street corners,
with unpredictable weather, with pollution and garbage that
could no longer be carted away and hidden from sight. For
us, the adults were the enemy.

In some places, the age wars remained just a matter of
simmering resentment. In others, there were random attacks
on older people. In still others, there were systematic
purges. I'm ashamed to say that, while I didn't actually
physically attack any older people, I did participate in the
shaming and name-calling. Those poor old folks - some of
them still quite young, by my present perspective! - were
just as confused and betrayed as we kids were. I can imagine
myself in their shoes. Try to do the same: try to remember
the last time you went to a store to buy something and the
store didn't have it. (This little thought exercise is a
real stretch for me, since I haven't been in a "store" that
actually had much of anything for several decades, but I'm
trying to put this in terms that you will understand.) Did
you feel frustrated? Did you get angry, thinking, "I drove
all the way here for this thing, and now I'm going to have
to drive all the way across town to another store to get
it"? Well, multiply that frustration and anger by a
thousand, ten thousand. This is what people were going
through every day, with regard to just about every consumer
item, service, or bureaucratic necessity they had grown
accustomed to. Moreover, those adults had lost most of what
they had in the economic crash. And now gangs of kids were
stealing whatever was left and heaping scorn on them as they
did so. That must have been devastating for them. Unbearable.

Now that I'm so ancient myself, I have a little more
tolerance for people. We're all just trying to get by, doing
the best we can.

I suppose you're curious to know more about what has
happened during this past century - the politics, wars,
revolutions. Well, I'll tell you what I know, but there's a
lot that I don't. For the last sixty years or so we haven't
had anything like the global communications networks that
used to exist. There are large parts of the world about
which I know almost nothing. But I'll share what I can.

As you can imagine, when the energy resource shortages hit
the United States and the economy started to go into a
tailspin (it's interesting that I still use that word: only
the oldest among us, such as myself, have ever seen an
airplane tailspin, nose-dive, or even fly), people became
angry and started looking around for someone to blame. Of
course, the government didn't want to be the culprit, so
those bastards in power (sorry, I still don't have much
sympathy for them) did what political leaders have always
done - they created a foreign enemy. They sent warships,
bombers, missiles, and tanks off across the oceans for
heaven knows what grisly purpose. People were told that this
was being done to protect their "American Way of Life."
Well, there was nothing on Earth that could have
accomplished that. It was the American Way of Life that was
the problem!

The generals managed to kill a few million people. Actually,
it could have been tens or hundreds of millions for all I
know; the news media were never very clear on that, since
they were censored by the military. There were antiwar
protests in the streets, and persecutions of the antiwar
protesters - some of whom were rounded up and put in
concentration camps. The government became utterly fascistic
in its methods toward the end. There were local uprisings
and brutal crackdowns. But it was all for nothing. The wars
only depleted what few resources were still available, and
after five horrible years the central government just
collapsed. Ran out of gas.

Speaking of political events, it's worth noting that, in the
early years of the shortages, the existing political
philosophies had very little to offer that was helpful. The
right-wingers were completely devoted to shielding the
wealthy from blame and shifting all of the pain onto poor
people and overseas scapegoats - the Arabs, North Koreans,
and so on. Meanwhile, the Left was so habituated to fighting
corporate meanies that it couldn't grasp the fact that the
problems now facing society couldn't be solved by economic
redistribution. Personally, as a historian, I tend to be
much more sympathetic to the Left because I think that the
accumulation of wealth that was occurring was just obscene.
I suspect that a hell of a lot of suffering could have been
averted if all of that wealth had been spread around early
on, when the money was worth something. But to hear some of
the leftist leaders talk, you'd think that once all the
corporations had been reined in, once the billionaire
plutocrats had been relieved of their riches, everything
would be fine. Well, everything wasn't going to be fine, no way.

So here were these two political factions fighting to the
death, blaming each other, while everybody around them was
starving or going crazy. What the people really needed was
just some basic common-sense information and advice,
somebody to tell them the truth - that their way of life was
coming to an end - and to offer them some sensible
collective survival strategies.

Much of what has happened during the past century was what
you have every reason to expect on the basis of your
scientists' forecasts: we have seen dramatic climate shifts,
species extinctions, and horrible epidemics, just as the
ecologists at the turn of the last century warned there
would be. I don't think that's a matter of much satisfaction
to those ecologists descendants. Getting to say "I told you
so" is paltry comfort in this situation. Tigers and whales
are gone, and probably tens of thousands of other species;
but our lack of reliable global communications makes it
difficult for anyone to know just which species and where.
For me, songbirds are a fond but distant memory. I suppose
my counterparts in China or Africa have long lists. Climate
change has been a real problem for growing food, and for
just getting by. You never know from one year to the next
what swarms of unfamiliar insects will show up. For a year
or two or three, all we get is rain. Then there's drought
for the next five or six. It's much worse than a nuisance;
it's life-threatening. That's just one of the factors that
has led to the dramatic reduction in human population during
this past century.

Many people call it "The Die-off." Others call it "The
Pruning," "The Purification," or "The Cleansing." Some terms
are more palatable than others, but there really are no nice
ways to describe the actual events - the wars, epidemics,
and famines.

Food and water have been big factors in all of this. Fresh,
clean water has been scarce for decades now. One way to make
young people mad at me is to tell them stories about how
folks in the old days used to pour millions upon millions of
gallons of water on their lawns. When I describe to them how
flush toilets worked, they just can't bear it. Some of them
'm making this stuff up! These days water is serious
business. If you waste it, somebody's likely to die.

Starting many decades ago, people began - by necessity - to
learn how to grow their own food. Not everyone was
successful, and there was a lot of hunger. One of the
frustrating things was the lack of good seeds. Very few
people knew anything about saving seeds from one season to
the next, so existing seed stocks were depleted very
quickly. There was also a big problem with all the modern
hybrid varieties: few of the garden vegetables that were
planted would produce good seeds for the next year. The
genetically engineering plants were even worse, causing all
sorts of ecological problems that we're still dealing with,
particularly the killing off of bees and other beneficial
insects. The seeds of good open-pollinated food plants are
like gold to us.

I did some traveling by foot and on horseback when I was
younger, in my fifties and sixties, and we do get some
reports from the outside world. From what I've seen and
heard, it seems that people in different places have coped
in different ways and with widely varying degrees of
success. Ironically, perhaps, the indigenous people who were
most persecuted by civilization are probably doing the best.
They still retained a lot of knowledge of how to live simply
on the land. In some places, people are dwelling together in
makeshift rural communes; other folks are trying to survive
in what's left of the great urban centers, ripping up
concrete and growing what they can as they recycle and trade
all the old junk that was left behind when people fled the
cities in the 'twenties. As a historian, one of my biggest
frustrations is the rapid disappearance of knowledge. You
people had a mania for putting most of your important
information on electronic storage media and acid-laden paper
- which are disintegrating very quickly. For the most part,
all we have are fading photographs, random books, and
crumbling magazines.

A few of our young people look at the old magazine ads and
wonder what it must have been like to live in a world with
jet airplanes, electricity, and sports cars. It must have
been utopia, paradise! Others among us are not so sanguine
about the past. I suppose that's part of my job as a
historian: to remind everyone that the advertising images
were only one side of a story; it was the other side of that
story - the rampant exploitation of nature and people, the
blindness to consequences - that led to the horrors of the
past century.

You're probably wondering if I have any good news, anything
encouraging to say about the future of your world. Well, as
with most things, it depends on your perspective. Many of
the survivors learned valuable lessons. They learned what's
important in life and what isn't. They learned to treasure
good soil, viable seeds, clean water, unpolluted air, and
friends you can count on. They learned how to take charge of
their own lives, rather than expecting to be taken care of
by some government or corporation. There are no "jobs" now,
so people's time is all their own. They think for themselves
more. Partly as a result of that, the old religions have
largely fallen by the wayside, and folks have rediscovered
spirituality in nature and in their local communities. The
kids today are eager to learn and to create their own
culture. The traumas of industrial civilization's collapse
are in the past; that's history now. It's a new day.

Can you change the future? I don't know. There are all sorts
of logical contradictions inherent in that question. I can
barely understand the principles of physics that are
allowing me to transmit this signal to you. Possibly, as a
result of reading this letter, you might do something that
would change my world. Maybe you could save a forest or a
species, or preserve some heirloom seeds, or help prepare
yourselves and the rest of the population for the coming
energy shortages. My life might be altered as a result.
Then, I suppose this letter would change, as would your
experience of reading it. And as a result of that, you'd
take different actions. We would have set up some kind of
cosmic feedback loop between past and future. It's pretty
interesting to think about.

Speaking of physics, maybe I should mention that I've come
to accept a view of history based on what I've read about
chaos theory. According to the theory, in chaotic systems
small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes
in outcomes. Well, human society and history are chaotic
systems. Even though most of what people do is determined by
material circumstances, they still have some wiggle room,
and what they do with that can make a significant difference
down the line. In retrospect, it appears that human survival
in the twenty-first century hinged on many small and
seemingly insignificant efforts by marginalized individuals
and groups in the twentieth century. The anti-nuclear
movement, the conservation movement, the anti-biotech
movement, the organic food and gardening movements,
indigenous peoples' resistance movements, the tiny
organizations devoted to seed saving - all had a profound
and positive impact on later events.

I suppose that, logically speaking, if you were to alter the
web of causation leading up to my present existence, it is
possible that events might transpire that would preclude my
being here. In that case, this letter would constitute
history's most bizarre suicide note! But that is a risk I am
willing to take. Do what you can. Change history! And while
you're at it, be kind to one another. Don't take anything or
anyone for granted.

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