John Cronin, Robert Gleason, Nathan Hagens, James Howard Kunstler, Michael Ruppert

THE STORY OF EVERY EMPIRE is one of RISE and FALL

[The following article is excerpted from a two hour documentary film broadcast by the History Channel on January 6, 2011, called "Prophets of Doom." It brought together a group of experts to talk about the future of industrial civilization. Each person spoke about their area of concern and also participated in general discussion.]

The United States dominates the world today on a scale far greater than even the Roman Empire, but history as well as nature proves that size itself is no guarantee of continued survival. America, like ancient Rome, has this blind faith that we are superior to the rest of the world and it's our destiny to reign supreme forever. It's not going to happen. We are going to learn some hard lessons and adjust to some hard circumstances, but we do have choices. The American Empire is going to fall, but we do not all have to fall with it.

The America we know today could look very different tomorrow as converging forces threaten not only our prosperity but ultimately our very survival.

The question of survival is very much like the Titanic, a huge ship that was believed to be unsinkable, that could go forever. On its maiden voyage, it sank, but there weren't enough lifeboats on that ship to save all the lives on board. At any point in the voyage, and especially after the iceberg hit, had there been an organized effort to scavenge from the Titanic enough material to make lifeboats, many hundreds more lives might have been saved.

"Titanic," of course, is a great word. It implies and encompasses the size and the complexity of human industrial civilization. The Titanic is going to sink, and there are some people that will not believe it until they're under water.

Population

If we had to sum all the problems down to one word, it is "overpopulation," because there are 5 billion more people on the planet today who did not exist at the dawn of the oil age.

Limits to Growth

We have built an entire industrial civilization on the assumption that there will be more every year. Technology is in a race with depletion, and depletion is winning. People need to recognize that we live on a finite planet, and we have virtually infinite wants and perceived needs. But those two trends are butting up against each other, and what are we going to do about it?

We've been so endowed with natural resources for 60, 70, 80 years, we have not really thought that this was a problem. We can live within our means, but only when we acknowledge that there are limits. And our economic system right now does not acknowledge that there are limits.

The Economy — Nathan Hagens

The future is going to look very different than the past in one primary regard, in that the world economy will no longer continue to grow. We've lived beyond our means, and we've extended that living beyond our means by issuing more credit, and there's gonna be a reckoning there.

Our economic system is actually a giant global ponzi scheme, and the way that translates is, a lot of this debt and credit that has been built may some day never be paid off. How that unravels is gonna have big consequences for the average American.

History shows time and again that the more people prepare, the less likely a major financial shock is going to be a disaster.

Clean Water — John Cronin

Water is the substance upon which we depend. It is the foundation of life. It's the foundation of the planet. Everything everybody else has talked about we have lived without once before. We've never lived without water, which is one of the reasons it's taken for granted.

We've never lived without it, we're running out of it, and we don't see it. We live in a water economy. We do not live in a petroleum economy. Water runs the world. In five years, at our current rate of behavior, we will have far more options for energy sources and far fewer options for water.

But what's the big difference? There are replacements for oil. There are no replacements for water.

In Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago, where Iraq is today, the Sumerians invented irrigation using water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And just as we are careless with our use of water now, the Sumerians were careless then. In an attempt to feed their increasing population, they over-irrigated. The consequence for the Sumerians was the death of their civilization.

The stakes are just as high for us today. Imagine anything of consequence to the daily operation of the nation as a whole. If the White House ran out of water, everybody would have to leave the White House. If the offices of Congress ran out of water, everybody would have to leave Congress. The lights go out, you can sit at your desk. You run out of water, you pretty much have to leave.

If you go now to other parts of the world, you go to Singapore—Singapore is the canary in the mine for the rest of the world. Singapore's entire future is based on recycling its sewage waste into drinking water.

And you know who else is thinking about this right now? Australia, California, Arizona are thinking about the dramatic cultural change it's going to require to get their citizens to accept the idea that we may have to start recycling sewage waste for drinking water.

The Geological Survey projected that at least 36 states would face water shortages within five years. That means some of these states are already facing challenges.

Peak Oil — James Howard Kunstler

We consume 20 million barrels of oil each day in the United States, and every day our demand for oil increases. Oil, however, is a finite resource. Diminishing oil supplies will play a critical role in our downfall. America made up for its problem of peak oil and of entering the arc of depletion by importing oil from other countries. The assumption is that the down slope is a gentle down slope, that it's ... we're just sort of gliding into depletion. But I think that really misrepresents the reality of the situation.

The real story is going to be how the major complex systems of daily life begin to destabilize. And we truly reinforce each other's instabilities and failures as we get into trouble with this peak oil problem.

The peak oil story is not really about running out of oil. It's about what happens to all these complex systems. The way we produce our food, that's one system. And that mainly means industrial agriculture, where you're applying a lot of oil and gas byproducts to huge factory farms and producing cheese doodles and chicken and Pepsi-cola, or hogs or whatever it is. That's how we do farming. That's how we feed ourselves in America today. That's gonna be coming to an end, and it'll be a huge problem.

You can't imagine anything more destabilizing to a culture than people going hungry.

The way we make things, buy things, sell things, move them around, that's all gonna change. There's been really one model for the last 30 years or so, and that's national chain retail, giant corporations moving massive amounts of stuff, the semi trucks that are incessantly circulating around the interstate highways. They pick the stuff up in San Pedro, California, and they schlep it across the nation to Philadelphia, and that's how we do commerce in America. It's normal for people.

There's a lot of fantasizing that's going on right now, a lot of wishing that's going on in America right now that we're gonna run this stuff by other means, that we're gonna run all the cars and that we're gonna run Walt Disney World and the interstate highway system and Walmart and the U.S. Army and suburbia on something other than oil.

It's not gonna happen. We're gonna be very disappointed about that.

We will develop alternatives to fossil fuels, but many experts believe we may never develop replacements. Oil is simply more potent and costs less to produce than any other energy source, at least for the foreseeable future.

We are not the first society in history to face the depletion of its most precious resource. We just have to hope we are the first to overcome it.

Behavior and Culture

America, unfortunately, is asleep with a lot of these issues, and part of this is due to cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when our brains don't want to acknowledge the gravity or seriousness of a situation. A good example is in Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, where he gave the example of a dam that was about to break. People three miles downstream were really afraid. And people two miles downstream were really freaked out, but people living within a mile of the dam, weren't concerned at all.

If things are too frightening and too threatening, our brains tune it out, because it would affect our behavior, and it would be too painful to accept. So the depletion of cheap fossil fuels and economic collapse and what that means for the end of growth, it's too overwhelming.

I think you can state categorically that as a society becomes more fearful and desperate and economically stressed, that the delusional thinking increases.

Solutions —Michael Ruppert and James Howard Kunstler

There are three things we recommend that we can do. The first thing is that we can reestablish the rule of law in our banking and financial practice. Second thing is, we need to direct our dwindling resources into the task of rebuilding local economies. The third thing we need to do is rebuild the railroad system, and we should do that right away; and if we don't do it, I'm not sure that there will be anything that will physically allow the U.S. to hang together as a culture, a people, and a nation.

We've mentioned the collapse of advanced industrial civilization several times, and my gut and my research of historical civilizations suggests that our population will, in the end, be more resilient than some people give credit to. The average person needs to start thinking about a future where instead of more every year, there might be the same every year or less every year.

The moves to relocalize food production, to start growing food where people live, to relocalize your support groups close to where you live is really a worldwide movement. The most important thing is to stimulate and liberate local food production, to do anything possible to help people grow food where they live.

But how do you grow your own local food if you're living in a high-rise apartment?

It's happening all over the world right now. There are rooftop gardens. There are window box gardens. Vacant lots in major metropolitan areas are being converted to community-supported agriculture.

Enough to live on?

Enough to feed more people than will be fed otherwise. I offer no magic bullets that will allow everybody to live the way we have been living.

In effect, we need to "insource" where we have been outsourcing because of corporate efficiency and profits around the world. I think "buy American" really makes sense, because the things that we need to make and that we need for our lives should be closer together.

I think a consensus is emerging that relocalization is a solution to many problems, in terms of food production, resource usage, and anything else. Anything you can do to be sustainable close to where you live is not a total solution, but I'm seeing an agreement that it is an important step.

History teaches us that the way things are today are not the way they're gonna be tomorrow. What we're finding out is that the way we're going to have to live is the way we should have been living all along anyway.

We think it's gonna be much more rewarding.

We don't see it as all suffering, by any means.

Sources: The entire transcript - http://www.livedash.com/transcript/prophets_of_doom/58/HISTP/Thursday_January_6_2011/543793/ ; The DVD - The History Channel, http://shop.history.com/