The Crappening?

For most of my life, things in America have generally not been going in the right direction.  At least, that's what all of the polls have said when people are asked about the economy, quality of life, and the like.  Author and blogger John Michael Greer refers to the process of the decline of our country as the Long Descent, which is appropriate.  Much in the way that Global Warming as a phrase accurately reflects the impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, but misses the lived experience that most people understand (Climate Weirding is much more useful), the Long Descent accurately captures the impact of the decline of industrial civilization in the face of resource limits, environmental degradation, and cultural sclerosis.  At the same time, as a phrase, it misses the daily experience for most people who will live through it (or not). 

That sense of an accurate but misleading phrase to describe a lived phenomenon was nicely summed up by one of the regular commenters on Mr. Greer's blog on this post.  "team10tim" wrote:

"We are living in the beginning of the long descent (though I call it The Crappening, the process of things getting gradually crappier, but it basically means the same thing: peak oil, over population, degraded environment, decline and fall of industrial civilization, coming dark age, overshoot, die-off, and bottleneck. People tend to have a poor ability to handle the verbose explanation, but my friends and family, peers and coworkers seem better able to handle the scope and scale and time frame when I call it The Crappening)."

That's the point of this blog: to discuss the trends that are shaping our future on the road down from the peak of oil extraction 8 years ago.  People may not get that oil extraction rates have been essentially flat since late 2005, especially with all the hype in the news about the shale boom in the US, but everybody understands that oil prices have gone up and a lot of people can't afford to use as much as we used to.  People may not know that real wages have declined for most working people since 1973, but everybody understands that by and large we're working harder but still falling behind economically.  People may see official unemployment numbers dropping and wonder why so many people they know still can't find a good job, and plenty of people in their 20s and early 30s are still (or once again) living with their parents, postponing marriage and childbirth, or working part-time or low wage jobs because there just aren't that many "middle class" jobs available these days.  People may not understand the impacts of ethanol grain diversion, rising affluence in all the countries where our factory jobs got sent, rising population, and climate change-driven weather extremes on crop failures, but everyone notices when food prices go up or the same $2 bag of chips or cereal has a lot more air and a lot less food in it.

All of these trends are signs of the Crappening, and they all stem from the same fundamental disconnect between our way of life and the inability of the Earth to provide all of the things we want from it.