The Future Is Rural: Societal Adaptation to Energy Descent

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12335
• Author: Jason C. Bradford
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020

Part II

How Will We Feed Ourselves?

Farming was the occupation of most people during the past six millennia. That changed

in the past century as urban economies absorbed most agricultural labor, even as population

grew. Food production and distribution will be deeply affected as the world responds to the

joint challenges of climate and energy change. The expectation that a small rural population

can provide enough sustenance to feed a growing urban population will be overturned as

rising energy costs  lter through the economy, reducing mechanization and demanding more

labor-intensive forms of production at shorter distances from urban areas. Climate instability

will add to the dif culties faced by farmers, foresters, and  shers. Without the availability of

cheap fertilizers from natural gas, the importance of natural soil fertility will become more

evident, and soil regeneration will become a signi cant aspect of an economy based on re-

newable energy. In addition, the distribution of food will become more decentralized, creating

an advantage for cooperatives, which are currently operating in the shadows of large grocery

chains.

The Future Is Rural: Societal Adaptation to

Energy Descent

By Jason C. Bradford*

aBstraCt. Our present era of high-energy modernity will likely end

over the course of the 21st century, as fossil hydrocarbons wane and

new energy technologies fail to compensate. Long-term trends of

urbanization will reverse and a migration back to the countryside to

regions of high biocapacity will ensue during the coming decades of

energy descent. Food will become a central and organizing concern

for de-industrializing populations, and key concepts and general

methods to secure food supplies using less mechanization and with

few outside inputs are presented. Given that high social complexity

is institutionalized, with system identities locked-in, we should not

expect a planned response to declining net energy. Instead, the

so-called Great Simplification will unfold through a series of crises

that force reorganization and alter belief systems. Resilience science

suggests a role for promoting system transformability along more

benign paths and into social forms that are more frugal.

“Make hay when the sun shines.”

old English proverb

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always

so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Bertrand Russell

Introduction

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, energy supplies extended far

beyond contemporary sunlight and derivatives such as crops and

wood for the first time in human history. Fossil hydrocarbons, namely,

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 3 (May, 2020).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12335

© 2020 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

*Research Fellow, Post Carbon Institute. Author: The Future Is Rural: Food System

Adaptations to the Great Simplification (2019, Post Carbon Institute). Email: jcbrad-

ford4@gmail.com

754 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

coal, oil, and natural gas, now comprise 81 percent of global energy

consumption (IEA 2019). Over the course of several human genera-

tions, our now global civilization has used this energy glut to create a

built environment of immense proportions. Even though people once

made large monuments, such as stone pyramids, with the power of

human bodies, human labor as a motive force is now an insignificant

contribution to work in so-called advanced economies compared to

the power wielded by machines. Construction of monuments such as

modern skyscrapers and stadiums would have been impossible in ear-

lier eras. Even more profound than an individual edifice is the scale of

the built systems that comprise a megacity. But building something is

not a one-time investment; like an elephant that has reached maturity,

it still needs to eat each day. All infrastructure decays and needs to be

replaced or decommissioned, in whole or by parts, eventually.

Our present time is an anomalous case of extreme energy use that

we take for granted as we are “energy blind,” like fish who don’t know

they are in water. Anthropologists Love and Isenhour (2016) call our

period “high-energy modernity” and urge their colleagues to “concep-

tualize what a now fragmented anthropology might offer a global-

ized world potentially on the brink of unprecedented power-down.”

“Power-down” is a good term for what we should be doing, that is,

systematically curtailing energy consumption, like an animal enter-

ing hibernation, knowing that as the sun gets lower on the horizon

the ecosystem will provide less food over the coming months. What

Holmgren (2006) calls “energy descent” could be considered a normal

part of the daily and seasonal rhythms to which life has adapted. But

we are not yet planning the energy descent of our civilization as we

rapidly oxidize fossil hydrocarbons and they become progressively

rarer. In fact, our behavioral norms, institutionalized rules, and even

myths, especially in the field of neoclassical economics, continue to

push for expansion and conflate energy-demanding growth with no-

tions of progress (Hagens 2020).

The size of the human economy is limited by well-understood dy-

namics between physical resources, environmental sinks, and system

feedbacks (Meadows et al. 2004). While a precise estimate of when a

rising metric such as gross world product (GWP) will stall and then