Yesterday, Julie and I came home from the unreal city of Boise. We hope that a few days of work around the house will ground us in a solid material world, one where fences can be nailed back together, lawns can be raked, and a new vinyl floor can be installed in the bathroom. Also, the garage needs a thorough spring cleaning.
Yesterday morning we parked the SUV in a Home Depot parking lot and picked up some potting soil, drought-resistant grass seed, and a push broom. The old push broom’s plastic head broke in half when I used it to knock ice off the eaves at a point in April when the ice should have been long gone. The grass seed is for the bottom of the back yard pond, which by August will be bone-dry and baking. I’ll try to keep it wet and green, but late last summer our sprinkler system ran short of water and I could only run it for a half hour before shutting it down and waiting for the backyard sump to refill. Hence the purchase of seed that could take a drying and keep on trying.
Julie bought the potting soil for the pansies she plants at the front of the house every summer. They give our place a festive, happy-people-live-here look, and for the most part, that’s truth-in-advertising. We eat well. We laugh a lot. We like each other’s company.
The dark spot in this picture is that I’m certain this good life will all end someday, and not because of old age. I used to think we wouldn’t live to see the fall of civilization. Old age was God’s promise to hand out get-out-of-the-gulag-free cards. No matter what went wrong with the climate, politics, or the economy, it wouldn’t be our problem. I don’t think that anymore.
What the fall of civilization will look like to us brings up our second stop in Boise. I waited in the car with Juno while Julie went in and bought groceries at Winco. She came back to the car with milk, yogurt, salad greens, artichokes, potatoes, peas, asparagus, and blue cheese, Armor-all, shampoo, allergy eye-drops, candy, baking powder, Nut-Thins, and kimchi. I’m quoting from her shopping list, and there’s more, but I’ve listed enough to show that the fall of civilization—I’m assuming Winco will fall with it—will play hell with our identities as consumers.
I grew up hunting and fishing but haven’t done either in years. I won’t, while the Winco meat department still sells beef and chicken, salmon and pork.
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Boise changes with the fluidity and substance of a dream. Every time we visit, it has transformed into something new. High-rises are appearing on blocks that in my memory contain only small and modest houses. The freeways and highways into town are forever under construction. It’s a common sight to see new Jeep Wranglers with California plates in the parking lots of big-box stores. Real estate prices keep driving poor people out of homes and apartments. New companies keep moving to town, and huge new buildings keep appearing in fields that once grew corn, alfalfa, potatoes, peas. A vast urban area is being constructed, one stretching from Mountain Home in the east to Vale, Oregon in the west. It will have to feed and water itself, power itself, entertain itself, maintain its churches and universities, and keep its oligarchs oligarching.
Sustainability is a dubious matter. Already cracks are appearing between urban and agrarian, rich and poor, homed and homeless, educated and unschooled, people who have faith in the rule of law and people who live by the gun. Counties in Idaho and Oregon are experiencing armed resistance to tax collectors and Forest Service officials. Sovereign citizen movements are questioning the legitimacy of government—any government—that restricts individual freedoms, even when exercising those freedoms destroys the poor and the unarmed.
What will the new megacity of Boise do in the face of shortages of water and energy and—maybe as early as this summer—food? Historical precedent suggests a retreat into small-time fascism, where brutal police keep shrinking elites ruling roughshod over shrinking fiefdoms. The off-the-grid survivalists with their solar panels and food caches and gardens will survive as long as they don’t threaten the people who built Boise—and Idaho—into a money-making operation. But in an era of inflation, inequality, declining resources and energy, supply-chain disruptions, and civil unrest, it’s easy to threaten the powers that be, and if history is any guide, they will destroy a civilization before they would give up their place in it.
Alternative energy sources will not replace fossil fuels. They’re intermittent, and if you have intermittent electricity, you have an intermittent economy. Like nuclear energy, solar and wind get old fast and require fossil fuels to maintain and periodically rebuild. Hydroelectricity is a small and declining part of civilization’s energy budget, although I do think civilization could preserve itself for a few centuries more along the Columbia if it managed to maintain its dams and turbines, if it built up a ground-up agrarian economy, and if it based its laws and community on hard science and an ethics of kindness. That’s assuming that the Pacific Northwest doesn’t succumb to drought, or heat, or the raids of orphans on bicycles coming out of the cities, killing and eating anything they can find.
In my heart of hearts, Mad Max isn’t fiction. It’s prophecy. Every time we go to Boise I think of Boise without gasoline. We fill the SUV’s tank just as soon as we hit town.
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I don’t know when the end will come. I try to read sober scientific treatises to find out when CO2 and methane levels will start killing people in the millions and maybe billions. We are witnessing the first massacres of climate refugees, and the general replacement of democracies by dictatorships. We have seen the return of slavery as a spreading institution in China and Russia and the Gulf states, and I have thought that if this country has any intact social system in a century, it will resemble Imperial Rome, where great works were built by slaves in the absence of fossil fuels. The conquest of enemies provided plenty of slaves.
The weather is a problem. We’ve seen the last of the Holocene, where meteorology could anchor itself to climate records. It remains to be seen if the new world we’ve created with industrial effluent will allow for industrial agriculture, or even backyard gardens.
Nuclear war is a problem. I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin would destroy the world rather than give up his dream of an Imperial Russia.
The economy is a problem because it cannot deliver what it’s promised, via debt, to the future. Children and grandchildren will eat debt for dinner.
The biosphere is a problem. If ecologies are vast intricate machines, we will see how well they run without birds or insects.
Artificial intelligence will become a problem when it gets smart enough to design even smarter versions of itself.
Civil strife is a solvable problem. People with three or four houses are a solvable problem when other people are homeless. People with private jets are a solvable problem for people who must walk. People with food are a solvable problem for people who are hungry. In every case, the solution is messy.
Smart phones are a problem if you want smart, educated, ethical young people.
I can think of other problems, but they all tend to boil down to too many humans on a planet fast running out of resources. If you don’t believe me, try visiting Boise.
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It’s a long way from Boise to our house, and Julie and I think that’s a good thing. Many of the new arrivals in Boise see the lakes and peaks of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area as a reason to relocate to Idaho. It takes a while to realize that it’s a long and winding road to Stanley, and when they get there it’s hard to find a campsite or a motel room. It’s an exhausting day in the car if you go up and back, and gasoline and diesel aren’t getting any cheaper.
Still, the beaches of Redfish Lake look like Coney Island on any July day, and the trails to Sawtooth and Alice and Cramer Lakes are deep in dust by August. The highway outside our front door echoes with the roar of motorcycles and giant diesel pickup trucks.
We wait for fire season, when the heat and the smoke and the roadblocks cut down on the traffic, and hunting season, when people in camo carrying assault rifles scare off the gentler of the tourists. Come November, we have a few days of descending decibels as the remaining motorhomes and pickups head south. Whenever the highway is empty, we wonder if something awful hasn’t happened in Boise and other cities, and we’re relieved when we find the power’s still on. Ski season comes after the second foot of powder, and it’s the time of year when we’re glad to see people. We hope it comes again but we’re not counting on it.
We know that species about to go extinct tend toward the grotesque. The population of passenger pigeons exploded a few years before they disappeared. We remember the Pleistocene for its megafauna. After a forest fire, morel mushrooms, sensing the death of their lodgepole symbionts, fruit in the millions if they get enough water. We hunt them every year now, because someplace in the valley has inevitably burned. We joke that fungus is the wages of death.
I think that if you read the signs, industrial civilization is all over but the shouting. We are a dead culture walking, and if our problem was once how to save the world, it isn’t any longer. It’s how to live gently and unobtrusively, how to complete home projects while things wind down (YouTube helps), and how to stay out of the way of falling objects.