In America, after the crash of 1929, the loss of faith in various forms of credit represented by abstract… — James Howard Kunstler
In America, after the crash of 1929, the loss of faith in various forms of credit represented by abstract instruments of finance translated into a persistent lack of money—that is, a means of exchange— and the institutions devised to create it stood in disrepute. People could buy very little. Business stagnated. Companies would not hire workers when there was so little demand for products. It was a vicious cycle and it had vicious side effects. Another way of looking at the financial debacle of the 1930s is an ecological view such as ’s metaphor of the industrial economy as a “detritus ecosystem.”
Catton argues that the human race living off the “drawdown” of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources is the equivalent of the algae in a pond enjoying a temporary rush of nutrients in one brief season. Catton’s analogy can be applied and extended to clarify the Great Depression in the context of ecological economics. After the crash of 1929, something… definitely changed in America. But the puzzling part is that the “nutrients in the form of cheap oil—the plenty” Roosevelt spoke of—still flowed. So why did the economic environment become so intractably unhealthy? From an ecological view, the Great Depression represented the effects of severe socioeconomic pollution” produced by the oil-fueled boom of the 1920s, and this “pollution” had the effect of “poisoning the financial ecosystem and consequently killing off financial “organs” that people had come to depend on in order to “thrive” (i.e., to grow wealthy and reproduce). Specifically, the “pollution” killed off the organs that generated credit and turned it into money. This systemic “pollution” of the financial ecosystem harmed the industrial environment enough to temporarily quash any further exuberant “growth.” There was no human die-off but there was a die-off of expectations and a reduction in [the] carrying capacity of the U.S. economy.
Is it fair to say that the by-product of zealous oil use literally converts into such an abstract form of "pollution" capable of poisoning what amounts to a social consensus? This must return us to the idea of entropy. Entropy is the spending down of energy and its translation into negative by-products. […] Air pollution is one expression of entropy. But so is social disorder. So is [the] institutional breakdown. Bodily death is another. These negative by-products of entropy can become interchangeable as entropy progresses, depending on any combination of variable conditions and circumstances. A careful reading of twentieth-century history would bear this out. In the modern era, entropy has been expressed in conditions as seemingly unrelated as war, industrial pollution, pornography, mass political murder, the shattering of a consensus about the value of money, and incompetent parenting. The introduction of high entropy into a given system is profoundly destabilizing in many ways.
p. 208Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called “globalism.” It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputs—the ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy.
p. 219
Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, “a corporation… is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance… It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.
p. 186
It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the “affordable” range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy can’t be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its… technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws.
p. 194