FIRST PEAK-OIL NOVEL PUBLISHED IN U.S.! –

After the Crash imagines life after fossil fuels. The story is set in the Philadelphia area in the not-too-distant-future of the 21^st century, and the whimsical plot carries a serious message. Efforts to construct a plausible cast of characters and imagine a new human type are interspersed with wry humor and satirical interludes. Supplementing the narrative and character descriptions, many of the chapters have notes, incorporating the insights and commentary of oil geologists, historians, philosophers, and social commentators – Jim Kunstler, Colin Campbell, Matt Simmons, and many others. In this way the novel attempts to integrate the two sides of the mind – imaginative and analytical. The narrative and the notes together make a powerful and mutually reinforcing statement of my message.

Most of the action of the narrative deals with Pete (short for "petroleum") and his girl friend Sas, who is engaged in a book project about the Hydrocarbon Era. I describe what life is like in an era of low energy and hydrocarbon "ruins," and the device of Sas’s book – involving recollection and flashback – allows for much satirical humor, as well as serious reflection, about our present age. I describe post-hydrocarbon literary life, mating habits, food, transportation, legal and philosophical issues, and many aspects of daily life. But the light touch and subtle balancing of reality and fantasy in this work should not blind the attentive reader to my serious purpose, which is to alert people to the reality of fossil fuel depletion and the gravity of our predicament today. As Richard Heinberg entitled his book on oil depletion, "the party’s over."

Chapter One: No-Frills Future

If you become still, if you listen very carefully, you might be able to hear the footsteps of Post-Hydrocarbon Man as he comes this way. If you put your ear to the ground, if you kneel down, if you go deep, you might be able to tell something about him. But you will have to prepare yourself for the possibility that he might see you. He is looking this way with an intense expression.

The one thing you know in advance is that he will be a pitiful forked creature, just as we are, born hungry, naked and wailing into this world – however he is to be born.

Let us consider this "forking," starting with the two legs. Having legs, the decision must be made where to go – a decision made every minute of life. If we sit, it is because legs have taken us there; if we stand, it is because we are deciding where to go.

Unfortunately on this point a whole weight of philosophical and, shall we say, circumstantial problems have tumbled upon the shoulders of hapless post-hydrocarbon man. (And from now on I am going to call post-hydrocarbon man "Pete" – short for petroleum). It seems that Pete’s predecessors (namely, we ourselves) invented a whole range of substitutes for legs (cars, trucks, busses, trains, planes, etc.) Our grand mobility has somewhat restricted his, but Pete has been born into a world in which legs have re-emerged. This re-emergence was first only framed as a philosophical problem, and it was only much later that people remembered that they had always possessed legs. It was rather a revelation to realize that something you had just discovered already belonged to you in this intimate and innate way.

This, however, is to run ahead of our story. The problem that Pete is faced with is the problem that faces any creature with legs: where to go? "History is ruins" – I think it was Hegel who declared this. It is nothing new for a human being to be born into a world of ruins. What was new in Pete’s situation, what was new about hydrocarbon ruins, was that while they may rust, they do not age. Hydrocarbon ruins are youthful ruins, ruinously permanent ruins, ruins that do not ruin.

So Pete has two condition of his life: legs and unruined ruins. Fortunately there are enough soybeans to live on at present. Food is a problem but not as much of a problem as you would think. The Great Obesity Epidemics of the 21^st Century, which ravaged the Western world while the rest of the world remained at near-starvation, caused quite few lifestyle changes. For one thing, fasting became a way of life. The range of food choices was a little wider than lentils and herbal tea, but most people actually seemed to prefer them. That, and a little fruit, if it could be had.

In one way everything had become simplified. Getting a job meant actually working at something. Pete remembered this had not always been the case in society. He had known something of what the Hydrocarbon Era was like, having been born at the tail-end of it, and he recalled how everybody in those days believed in citations. If you said something that was just your opinion, it would be discounted for that reason. But if you expressed opinions that had been cited previously in the literature, you were considered a safe bet, and probably a candidate for the chief executive position.

Pete had covered the Great Science Controversy (he had worked as a reporter for a while) that had erupted at about the same time as the serious energy shortages, and he knew a little about how the medical, scientific, and business worlds were twisted around the same greasy pole like interlocking vines. It was all built on the assumption that cheap fossil fuel energy would last forever, but unfortunately, this assumption had never made it into the literature. No one had thought fit to question the energy basis of it all, the one thing that, if removed, would cause the whole show to topple.

The Crash caused great changes in the professional world. Everything had become oriented toward "Skill Development." Anybody who had a skill could teach, and anybody who wanted to gain a skill could learn and there was a renewed interest in craftsmanship. Pete’s skill was learning how to make soles for shoes out of old cast-off rubber tires. Hey, it’s a job!

Some people still had money. It wasn’t much good to them because it couldn’t really buy much of anything with it. Well technically, yes. You could use it to rent Live Sex-Shows for your evening parties where you served herbal tea laced with alcohol (when you could get it). Or you could hire a gloomy poet to entertain you with his ghostly rantings, emotional imitations of the past glories of that art. Sometimes musicians accepted money, but as a rule this group preferred food.

The people with money tended to be the "split-type" personality. These were the kind of people who construct elaborate intellectual justifications for everything they do. They were a little out of their era – like "throwbacks," remnants of another age. The previous Age of Hydrocarbons was sometimes referred to as the Cognitive Age, or the last of the Cognitive Ages. In the Cognitive Age, people built everything on cheap energy (and they were fanatically oriented towards building, and expressing their will in constructions of all kinds). They built enormous road to transport an enormous number of goods to enormous stores – all of which, when the oil and gas began to give out, presented an enormous problem. People in the Hydrocarbon Age hardly seemed to have given a moment’s thought to the consequences of such an economic system other than how to maximize their profits. This disassociation of thought from reality was considered to be the hallmark of the Cognitive Age.

People nowadays took a different view about energy. The characteristic personality of the new generation was "seam-type." Post-Hydrocarbon man always appeared to be searching for the deeper seam, the underground connections between things. Maybe it was because the deep seams was where the hydrocarbons had been, and what was formerly the chief preoccupation of the previous age had been metamorphosed into a personality type. In any case, the "seam-type" personality reflected the transition that society had undergone, and was still undergoing, from an intellectual emphasis to a more emotional one.

There were also two other categories of people – the "wide-ends" and the "rotundas." The "wide-ends" were the all-feeling types, the people who seemed to have the antennae out in all directions to sense feelings. Their dark side was that the wide-ends specialized in rehashing the previous age ad infinitum ad nauseum. They were prospectors of the nuggets of guilt and shame, and you could always count on a wide-end to tally up your internal ruins.

The rotundas were the only group of people with any hint of body fat. Actually few people in this society were fat – abundant food had gone out with petroleum – but the rotundas exuded a comfortable aura of plumpness all the same. Rotundas were either very intelligent or very stupid. According to the pitch of the statement, different aspects of the rotundas were expressed. The hard-impact of "Oh, don’t be so rotunda!" would mean something like "Don’t be so dense!" Whereas the singsong of, "Oh, how utterly rotunda of you!" would mean something like, "Oh, how sweet you are!"

Pete often reflected on these different types of people, and he had classified himself as a seam-man. On one day, when he was out scouring the territory for tires, he had the thought that the petroleum that once went into the manufacture of tires was now being put into the service of shoes. He asked himself rhetorically, "But what is petroleum for petroleum’s sake?"

It seemed a profound question at the time, but later that day he forgot all about it. But then he remembered it again before he went to sleep that night, and for a moment he felt quite free of guilt and shame. The world had once had petroleum; now it no longer did. When the world had petroleum, people didn’t ask about what it meant for its own sake. Now that it was gone, people were asking what the existence of petroleum signified. The things that people take for granted they don’t ask about; when they start to miss them, they ask about them. This was the connection he was trying to make. He was sure it meant something and went to sleep that night with a sense of accomplishment.

The guilt and shame that everybody in Post-Hydrocarbon society was dealing with was the result of the profligate habits of the Cognitive Age just behind. The Cognitives had almost managed to destroy the world. It was a miracle, really, that Life on Earth was still going on, even in its current attenuated form – scouting for tires and living on herbal teas. The Cognitives just kept piling up disasters on top of disasters, but one of the things that really brought them low was not having any more frontiers to conquer with their fierce technical know-how. You knew that things had gotten really bad when the U.S. president, Horge Lush, announced a program to mine methane on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. People just stared at him. Where was the energy for the spaceship going to come from? This was in the days of national blackouts and empty filling stations, when thousands of the obese were expiring in their suburban ranch-style homes. But Horge was only one of a long line of insane U.S. presidents that had all drunk from the same poisoned well. The Age of Cognition had sprouted serpents.

So there was this guilt and shame aspect of life that everyone Pete knew was dealing with in one way or another. It wasn’t exactly like the call to Christian repentance. It wasn’t like "Victorian prudishness" (the two terms were always linked together) nor was it the "liberal-guilt-trip" (a case of triple term-linkage) of 20^th century crusaders and feminists who blamed males and whites, and particularly white males, for everything that had gone sour. No, the guilt and shame of the Post-Hydrocarbon era wasn’t exactly like any of these, although it might distill elements from all of them.

The mood of guilt and shame appeared at about the time it became apparent that the Cognitive-Hydrocarbon complex was going to come to a screeching crash. The people who ran the Hydrocarbon Complex had apparently failed to plan for the depletion of the energy resource base, and when this became generally known, it triggered a kind of societal swoon. You could hear people mutter things like, "Well, what were they thinking of?" and, "You’d think they would plan ahead!" Mutterings like this preceded the realization that the Hydrocarbon Era’s exalted self-opinion was based upon the technical, methodical, and relentlessly organized exploitation of the planet’s natural resources. The Hydrocarbons apparently had every intention of using up every prospect of the future – selling it off one barrel of oil at a time, one truck-load of mineral-ore at a time, one cubic foot of gas at a time – to pay for the prolonging of their present. When people began to realize what the Hydrocarbons were doing, when they began to realize that the Hydrocarbons intended to will themselves into a perpetual present, leaving no heirs and no assigns --- this was the shock that precipitated the Great Carbon Crash.

It began with consumption skyrocketing to unheard-of levels. People seemed to be trying to stock up on everything --- food, water, gas, fuel, batteries, generators, garden tools, seeds, cosmetics, plastics, fertilizer, clothing, blankets, toilet paper, office supplies, medicines, and yes, even money. Having lived for so long oblivious to the needs of the future, it was as if the future had arrived with a sudden body blow. With the run on the banks and the stores, with tanks of spare fuel in everybody’s basement, and the Wal-Mart store shelves empty and gaping, it was as if the planet itself had been crucified. It gave a great groan and then it was night.

When the crash came, the world split along a different seam – which may have been the origin of the expression ‘seam-types.’ Seam-types were the ones who saw the fracturing as it was beginning to occur. They were the ones to perceive new fissure forming amidst the ruins of guilt and shame. The old fissure, based upon the applications of technical rules to the natural resources (and of course, it was these technical applications that had so filled the Hydrocarbons with pride) was filling up slowly with the new consciousness of shame. It was left to the Post-Hydrocarbons to discover shame in the deep places of the earth where oil had once been.

Seam-people had seen it coming -- the end of the age of oil. They had been the ones to peer down the long deep seams even in the days of flush oil production. They had been the ones to make the first warnings of the coming end. They had been the ones to be laughed at, ridiculed, ignored. But they had been the ones to make the subterranean journeys, the ones who had actually walked in the valleys of the landscape, observing the conformations of the rocks. They had crushed the petroliferous rocks between their fingers, they had known and felt the difference between light sweet crude and the heavy sours, so full of sulfur, so problematic for the needs of modern production.

In the old days it was the seam-men who had found the oil. The seam-men were the explorers and the geologists, and after them came the technicians, the drillers, the financiers, the transporters and finally the consumers. All of this was based upon the work of the seam-men. The seam-men had been happy to work for their living in the seams of the Earth, and to travel over great lands and oceans searching for oil. But they were a little dismayed by how quickly the great adventure settled into the dusts of greed, and how quickly the old wells were used up and abandoned.

So the seam-men sounded warnings that were not heard. But in the new days they would sometimes say, "I-told-you-so." Sometimes, in the new days, they could be a little smug.

Notes