Trillium Book Award Author Readings June 16

On Writing, with Peter Goodchild

 
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Peter Goodchild

In Peter Goodchild's latest book Tumbling Tide: Population, Petroleum, and Systemic Collapse (Insomniac Press), he explores what life will look like in a post-peak oil world. Peter explores topics such as housing, food production, education and politics and examines the troubling social effects that could stem from the crisis.

Today we speak with Peter about his book, what sparked the idea for it and what got us into our current situation of over-reliance on fossil fuels.

Open Book:

Tell us about your new book, Tumbling Tide.

Peter Goodchild:

The book is about something that many people don't like to think about — the fact that our civilization is highly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels and the ominous fact that oil hit a "rough plateau in" 2010 and is about to become depleted. Annual oil production will fall to 50% of its peak level within the next decade or two. The ores for most metals are also running out, or about to do so. There will also be a decline in electricity, for which fossil fuels are the main energy source.

Actually what I've just described is only a small part of the book, roughly 5 out of 30 chapters. "Peak oil" has been discussed by many other authors. What the remaining 25 chapters of my book are covering is the consequences of that decline.

The first word in my subtitle, though, is "population," even more of a taboo topic than "peak oil." The world's population has tripled since I was born, in 1949, and that's an awfully fast leap in view of the fact that Homo sapiens and other members of our genus had a fairly stable population for 2 million years. There are now 7.2 billion human beings, and overpopulation is the main reason for the decline in oil and other resources.

OB:

How do you think we got into our current situation of over-reliance on fossil fuels? Was it inevitable or could things have gone differently?

PG:

In some ways it was inevitable. Even though democracy may be the best form of government, one of its main weaknesses is that the average political career lasts a very few years, with the result that most politicians are not inclined to worry about matters that are relatively far down the road. Politicians are also reluctant to speak up about matters that they might lose them votes. But if there had been sufficient willpower several decades ago, then, yes, almost anything might have been possible.

It's not as if the information had been unavailable. M. King Hubbert, among others, was accurately predicting back in the 1950s that the peak of global oil production would arrive around the end of the century. Earth Day was founded in 1970, mainly by Senator Gaylord Nelson, and one of his main concerns was overpopulation, but since those days it's been politically incorrect to discuss the topic. Silence on these issues can be attributed in part to the persistent dumbing-down of the western world, but we must also consider the willful acquiescence of the victims— keeping oneself informed is a basic moral responsibility in a supposedly free society.

OB:

Do you think that we overestimate the amount of energy we'll be able to source from solar and wind? Are these viable alternatives to fossil fuels or is the situation more complex than switching from one source to another?

PG:

Of the world's total energy consumption, solar power is a meager 0.06%, and wind power is only 0.51%. It's easy to say that governments should spend more tax money to get these things working properly, but solar and wind enterprises have been around for decades, never getting very far. Solar and wind have insoluble limits with net energy— a great deal of sunlight, for example, reaches the earth, but it's too spread out to be of much use. They simply cannot produce the same "bang" as fossil fuels. Also, solar and wind produce only electricity, whereas the biggest upcoming issue is one of oil, not of electricity.

Finally, proponents of wind and solar ignore the vast infrastructure of our civilization. It's possible to build a few solar or wind devices right now, but how are we going to build more such devices later on, and how are we to service and repair them, when fossil fuels are virtually gone? And how are we to explore for the necessary metals, or dig them out, or process them, or transport them?

OB:

What sparked the idea for this book at this particular time?

PG:

The manuscript went through several versions over the years. The finished book, though, appeared at a time of great complexity. There's a huge amount of disinformation out there nowadays. There are major scams, such as "fracking," which is destroying the water supply, with drilling operations that die out soon after they're started, which lose billions of dollars and which hypnotize the populace with "press releases" that are just thinly disguised advertising. The mixed bag of so-called unconventional oil is causing a lot of confusion in readers' minds, but enterprises of these types keep the corpse of industrial civilization looking as if it still had some life in it.

There are also two other reasons for presenting such a book at the present time. The first is that, up to now, nobody has stated the blunt truth— that the game is over, that the Industrial Age is finished. The final reason for writing this book is that it's not so much a matter of stating the obvious, that oil will run out. My own concern, rather, is with the question of what comes next, of what we do next.

OB:

What do you think some of the social and cultural effects would be of a post-peak world? Would our social relationships change as our energy habits change?

PG:

The slide into the world of oil decline will happen slowly enough that it might barely be noticed. Little by little, places like Canada and the US will have a deteriotating "lifestyle" (not my favorite word), our urban environment will resemble some less-fortunate part of the ex-Soviet world. We'll keep trying to hang on to our accustomed elegant living. And yet, during those same years, I think there will be a few who will take a more "survivalist" approach, who will find ways to get out of the death traps of the oil-dependent cities.

Hunger will be the big issue. Without fossil fuels for harvesting, transporting, and processing, for irrigation and for pesticides and fertilizers, crop yields will drop to pre-industrial levels, which means to about a third of what they have been in modern times. But localization of food production is one of several partial solutions.

OB:

What are some other books – fiction or non-fiction – that you found inspiring before or during the writing process for this book?

PG:

My mentor has always been William Catton, whose book Overshoot explains that human beings, like so many other organisms, have an inability to deal with expanding population and an inability to understand that the problem even exists. Other major texts include Beyond Oil by John Gever, The Ends of the Earth by Robert Kaplan, Twilight in the Desert by Matthew Simmons, and several books by Michael Klare.

OB:

What are you working on now?

PG:

I've already posted on my own blog a 3,000-word short story called "Dregs," a version of how I see the future, and I'd like to expand that to book size. At the same time, I'm putting together ideas that are more abstract than those in Tumbling Tide, although again dealing with the probable future. I'd like to re-examine the old question, "How should I live my life?" Although I wouldn't say the Middle Ages were a utopia, I nevertheless think there was in those days a better sense of morality than we have today. In modern times, unfortunately, we've created a society in which it's considered alright never to grow up, never to become adults. As children, we were never taught that there are limits, when in fact an understanding of limits is part of living the good life.


Peter Goodchild was born in Germany, although his parents were from England. He has spent most of his life in Canada, and he now lives in Kingston, Ontario. His education includes an M.A. in English literature from the University of Toronto. For about a dozen years he was teaching English as a second language (ESL), and training ESL teachers, with two years in Japan and three years in Oman. Several of his books have been published over the years; the first was Survival Skills of the North American Indians (Chicago Review Press, 1984). Although he is quite a bookworm, he also enjoys hiking and other outdoor activities. For seven years he owned and ran a market garden in southern Ontario. In general, his interests include nature, outdoor survival, peak oil, languages, literature, and medieval history.

For more information about Tumbling Tide please visit the Insomniac Press website.

Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.

Check out all the On Writing interviews in our archives.

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