The Hollowing Out of the American Empire

By Ernest Callenbach

Greetings! As an unofficial ambassador from the fictional country of Ecotopia, I am pleased to be speaking to you from Freiburg, the intellectual heart of the Green movement in Germany.

I propose to explore with you a process called “hollowing out”--in which an empire, such as the contemporary American oil empire, is increasingly heavily armored and strong toward the outside world, but is gradually decaying within and becoming fragile and vulnerable. Understanding this process can help us interpret some otherwise puzzling happenings in American political life and thought. And perhaps it can also help us begin thinking about a fundamental change of values that will be needed to recover from the decline of the empire.

Ecotopia is a novel I published in 1975 as a vision of a future ecologically sustainable society--situated in the bioregion that had been the American states of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. It has sold about a million copies in nine languages (including Japanese) and the word “Ecotopian” has become a widely understood term for the values and attitudes that contribute to a sustainable and satisfying life. The founders of the Green Party in Germany were inspired by the translated novel (Oekotopia), and it still offers a vision of a hopeful future to young people who are distressed by the ecological and social impoverishment that seems inherent in expansionist, consumerist industrialism. I will employ an Ecotopian perspective in my analysis of the hollowing out of the American empire.

America today appears to be at the pinnacle of world power. Its total military budget is greater than those of all other countries combined. Its air force completely dominates global skies. Its navy patrols every sea. Its 750 military bases occupy key locations all over the planet; significantly, many of the permanent ones are located near oil fields and pipelines. The American empire runs on oil, which is essential in huge quantities for not only our transportation but for our agriculture, our fisheries, our chemical and plastics and wood and paper industries--for virtually everything modern societies do. The American military (which also runs on oil) rapidly mobilizes “shock and awe” campaigns to destroy any organized armed force that might arise against it. Its sophisticated technological weapons have the overwhelming impact that the Blitzkrieg did in World War II.

Nonetheless, we are beginning to see signs that this powerful empire is weakening--both without and within. The process is not visible to most Americans who live comfortably in the heart of the empire, and are exposed to very restricted and controlled news media. But some concerned Americans are trying to figure out what is happening to our country. What is the big, long-term picture? Part of it, certainly, is the prospect of “peak oil”--the likelihood that the world will soon enter a long, slow decline in the affordability and utility of oil. That is a key part of the process, but it is part of a larger pattern that I wish to address.

Of course, we must not forget that Europeans and Japanese are also deeply involved in the hollowing out process, through their own dependence on oil.

What I will do in this talk is: (first) summarize the usual trajectories of empires, (second) examine how certain social forces are operating to hollow out the American empire, and (third) look ahead to what will happen later. We tend to assume an empire’s decline is dramatic: The city of Rome’s population ultimately dropped from a million to only 20,000, and the Western Roman Empire’s infrastructure crumbled. Whenever an empire declines, there is of course severe hardship for many people, especially the poor. But modern empires (at least in the absence of a catastrophic new plague) do not contract so precipitiously. Most of an empire’s major institutions falter gradually, and new ones begin growing up to take their place. In a declining empire, there is a long struggle between people clinging to past values at any cost, and people seeking to develop new and more workable ideas. Values change slowly, as people struggle to see a more sustainable way into the future.

[Main Point #1]
Let us begin by summarizing the usual trajectories of empires. Most begin as rich city-states or regions. At first, they are local in their perspectives and values. They grow on the basis of their agricultural, forest, mineral, or fisheries wealth. Their central cities expand and diversify, producing a wide variety of goods and services. Sometimes they use protective tariffs to help them become independent of imports from abroad. As they take over their region and its periphery, they forcibly displace and eliminate the earlier inhabitants, as Euro-Americans displaced the Native Americans. Thus they develop powerful militaries, which are linked to wealthy aristocracies that make it their business to shape the government to their needs.

Above all, the growing empire needs cheap access to resources that lie outside the state. So the empire’s military forces are increasingly directed further abroad, to control the known world. Thus Athens with its triremes, Rome with its legions, and later Venice with its navy, attempted to control the whole Mediterranean basin. Alexander sought dominion as far east as India. The Mongol hordes swept through much of the Eurasian land mass. The British navy maintained the first truly global empire. In the 19th century, when the United States first became a full-scale imperial power, occupying the Philippines and Cuba, it declared the entire Western Hemisphere its province, deploying Marines whenever necessary to subdue rebellious puppets.

Some empires, like the Roman or the American, arise from democratic, republican, even libertarian beginnings. Originally, the vigorous government of a proud people defends those people and seeks to make their country strong internally. It supports domestic industries, independent farmers, education, health care and public health, community development, city beautification. Yet gradually, and inevitably, these populist values will be forgotten. A full-blown empire that seeks to dominate the world can only do so at the expense of its own people. It comes to spend its treasure on armaments, on costly displays of pomp and power, on secret police and surveillance. In addition, great sums of public money are siphoned off to the rich and well-connected. In its values, an empire slowly turns toward dominator attitudes and ideologies. It comes to value the power of the state more than the welfare of its citizens. It develops a belligerent foreign policy--relying not on diplomatic or economic leverage but on on weapons technology which can supposedly sweep enemies away and maintain hegemony. In the end, however, it exhausts and bankrupts itself.

In many empires, the public lacks political organizations to face a strong institutional (corporate) structure. This prevents even wise and well-meaning leaders from dealing with essential problems, since the rich and powerful are not motivated to solve basic long-term social problems. To do so would cost them short-term profits. Hence, the costs of outmoded and destructive arrangements are passed on to the population at large, and to posterity. In the case of the contemporary United States, this means, for one example, running up a vast international debt to maintain an otherwise unsustainable high level of consumption (public and private). Americans get to buy a lot of cheap goods now, but their children will pay very heavy taxes to service the nation’s sky-rocketing debt. Short-term thinking comes to pervade national financial and investment strategies. Governments indulge in “distractive” investments which do not contribute to the welfare of the mass of people, rather than “productive” investments which lead to better factories or farms. Our spectacle equivalents of the Roman circus are things like sending humans to Mars, publicly subsidized athletic stadiums, and almost surrealistically destructive weapons.

Now this process does not happen because some evil men with antisocial personal values gain control of corporations and governments. The imperial evolutionary process is quite impersonal, at bottom. Later historians may describe some emperor figures as clever and apparently prudent and kindly, or some as stupid, reckless, and punitive. In fact, however, the ruling class of an empire, whoever it selects for high office, is narrowly constrained by imperial realities. Indeed it is caught in an exquisite trap. Because the economic workings of the empire, and the political support (or at least consent) of the empire’s citizens, have become dependent on the extraction of wealth and resources from distant places occupied by resentful peoples, the empire cannot withdraw. In the case of the oil empire, it would be quite literally impossible to continue American life--or European or Canadian or Japanese life--without maintaining the benefits that come from American control of oil. Even if the US instituted a crash program of alternative energy development (wind, solar, biomass) we would face a melt-down of our societies--every aspect of which, most critically including food production, is massively dependent on oil inputs. In fact, research at Cornell University in the US found that we put many more calories--from oil--into our agricultural system than we get out of it in food calories. We are almost literally “eating oil.” We have net-energy-negative agriculture, a contradictory situation that is unsustainable over any long period.

The operations of a massive empire are naturally open to favoritism, fraud, graft, collusion, and the diversion of public funds into private pockets. Moreover, as an empire matures, its wealthy class generates “looters”--executives who extract maximum personal gain from the corporations they are entrusted to manage. In contemporary America, the looters abandon the traditional capitalist values of efficiency and thrift, and even sometimes corporate profit, aiming instead at private rewards mainly linked to stock prices. This is the motivation for much of the accounting fraud that has plagued large American companies, and stock brokerage houses too. But the looters have powerful friends in the government who come to the rescue. The federal government bailed out reckless savings-and-loan operations to a total of more than $50 billion. If nuclear plants cut corners on safety, the Price-Anderson Act protects them from potential financially catastrophic liability for reactor accidents. Government also assumes pension liabilities for failing companies. It did this for US Steel, has done it for hundreds of smaller companies, and is now doing it with United Airlines. Many more large companies are now lining up to use apparent bankruptcy as a way to escape pension obligations.

In brief, the evolution of empires traditionally leads to over-expansion, internal corruption, and fatally expensive militarism.

[Main Point #2]
Now I will turn to my second main point: How social forces drive the hollowing out process. One of the key mechanisms lies, paradoxically, in the modern American corporation--our fundamental institution. As Karl Marx astutely observed, “Capital has no country.” The American corporation faces few legal limitations and is in fact superior to real persons in its legal rights. Its officials are compelled, under threat of job loss or stockholder lawsuits, to maximize profits for shareholders. This is the paramount obligation that any “public” (stock-traded) corporation must live by. A corporation may sometimes undertake altruistic activities, but these are normally “cosmetic.” Of course some profit maximization can be achieved through more ecologically sophisticated product design, more energy-efficient production, and more informed management generally. This strategy is well established in Germany, and has substantial green benefits, but it is practically unknown in the heart of the empire. There, on the contrary, the head of Cisco, an enormous high-technology company, announces that the long-term goal of Cisco is to “become a Chinese company”--because that is the road to maximum profits. Whether American workers have jobs, or homes, or a future for their children, not to mention a decent society or a healthy environment, is of trifling concern to Cisco. So a peculiarity of the American empire’s hollowing out is that many major American corporations, from Boeing to General Motors, outsource manufacturing to low-wage countries. The effect of their zeal to obtain products at the lowest possible cost is that much of the American industrial base now exists in China, Thailand, and Indonesia.

This fundamentally non-national corporate agenda sets the pattern for the hollowing out process. The resources of American society are increasingly diverted to the rich. America is dividing into two nations--the very rich and the poor: what we recognize as the Latin American pattern. The ratio between the earnings of executives and the earnings of workers becomes shockingly large, especially if compared with European or Japanese patterns. The rich live in segregated and gated enclaves, and shop in exclusive stores. The poor live in deteriorating neighborhoods. Their streets are potholed, their garbage is not reliably collected, and the police act like an occupying army.

As to the former modestly prosperous American working middle-class, it is being crushed. During the Great Depression and after World War II, strong unions gained working Americans a greater share of the national pie. A huge proportion of ordinary people were able to buy small houses and cars and send their children to college. In the US today, however, the values that supported fairer distribution of income have weakened. We observe a concerted corporate campaign to destroy unions and reduce wages, and also benefits such as pensions and health insurance. This is excused by crying about international competition from low-wage nations--a competition which we have exacerbated by establishing the World Trade Organization. Because even a modest life-style can no longer be supported on one person’s wages, both parents must work. Sometimes they need several low-paid jobs. The result is a dissolution of family ties and neglectful or abusive upbringing of children.

The impoverishing of large masses of trained and experienced working people entails vast indirect social costs, in addition to lost productivity, but these costs are borne by the general public’s taxes if they are met at all. The food-stamp program, for instance, which subsidizes food for the very poor, is being reduced. This sends people to “soup kitchens” or to seeking scraps in garbage bins. Many members of the middle class are falling into poverty: forty percent of the families who go bankrupt in the US do so because of catastrophic financial medical problems. These people will now seek care at underfunded public charity hospitals or clinics. They may end up homeless, depressing the quality of urban life. They will die younger--depriving their families of their support and depriving society of their productivity.

But an American corporation cannot care seriously about these results. To keep up its stock prices and the earnings of its executives, it must divert resources abroad, and hire the cheapest labor it can find. In the US today, young people thinking about their future look around for jobs that cannot be outsourced to India or China. They seek jobs that require personal contact or labor on the spot. Nurses, dentists, carpenters and plumbers, caretakers for the aged, bus drivers: these are the kinds of jobs that cannot be sent abroad. But almost every kind of office work can now be electronically automated and sent to any country with a substantial population of English-speakers. Professional jobs, such as X-ray readers, designers, programmers, accountants, and financial analysts, are also disappearing. It is predicted that in the next decade, many hundreds of thousands of such well-paid jobs will vanish from America. As an indirect consequence, our public educational system suffers because it is no longer a priority for the society to have a generally well educated working class--the corporations can readily employ people abroad who have been educated at the expense of their governments, not ours.

While the consumption-minded upper-middle class prospers, most of the population inside the empire feels its welfare declining. Thus a large majority of Americans now tell poll-takers that they are less optimistic. They expect that their children will not do as well as they have. It is especially depressing that the US medical system, because we lack a rational non-profit national health service, is enormously expensive and incapable of delivering good care to everyone. 40% of Americans have no health-insurance at all. Many of them cannot afford medicines or visits to doctors; they appear at public clinics when they are near dying. In these and many other ways, American life gradually comes to resemble life in Mexico or other so-called underdeveloped countries. But in America, families cannot provide the mutual support that Mexican families still can.

Consequently, the value consensus which sustained the American empire in its expansionist period has begun to disintegrate. Once, citizens sturdily volunteered to fight in wars; now the military is having difficulty recruiting, even from the lower levels of society. Once, Americans cooperated to maintain solid communities for working folks; they participated in many voluntary groups; they voted. Now many they retreat into solitary anger, listening to “hate radio” to stoke their feelings of outrage.

Empires in the past have mostly faced external barbarians, often from the north. In the US, we have only the friendly Canadians to the north, but we are producing our own barbarians internally. Most damaging are the business looting class, who have noticed that the society is so rich, so full of fat, and so badly managed that huge opportunities exist for more or less illicit private gain. But ordinary people notice the rich stealing, in Enron or WorldCom or Tyco or a hundred others. So they decide they too may as well grab a few things if they can.

When people see that their institutions do not operate fairly or responsibly, they lose their loyalty to them. More than half the American electorate thinks so little of the political process that they don’t bother to vote. (The establishment, of course, keeps it difficult to vote by holding elections on Tuesdays.) For some, the values of hard work weaken; people have to show up to avoid getting fired, but many work only as hard as absolutely necessary. If they can harm the company and get ahead by doing so, they do not hesitate. For others, eager to protect their status or move up, working 60 or 80 hours per week is common--with short vacations or no vacations at all. The mobile phone, in fact, means that some people are never really away from their job. Workers with special skills jump from job to job frequently--taking some of their old company’s know-how with them. And a lumpen culture of rage, misogny, violence, and selfishness generates a nihilist atmosphere, especially in the lower levels of the society. Ethnic separatism and racism may have declined among adults, at least in sophisticated “blue” cities, but it is still common among the young. White suburban high-schools spawn massacres. Inner city schools experience violence so severe that police must be on hand at all times; school bathrooms become so dangerous that kids must learn to go a whole day without using a toilet. Metal detectors stand at the school gates. We are witnessing, in fact, a new kind of “lost generation.”

In the empire’s maturity, politics becomes increasingly corrupt, and this too contributes to hollowing out. Both politicians and the media who report on them espouse values of winning at any cost. Honesty is no longer valued. Lying and deception become the norm, even at the highest levels. The intelligence apparatus of the government is politicized and forced into an embarrassing decline. Analysts are forced to produce intelligence reports justifying adminstration policies. Then when reality surfaces, as in the case of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence community is blamed for faulty analysis. The once critical press, now owned almost entirely by megacorporations, is shamelessly sycophantic to the regime. For example, recently a British government memo came to light that established without a doubt that Bush had decided to attack Iraq when he was first elected. He was using alleged weapons of mass destruction as a deceptive scare tactic. But American press simply ignored it. Challenged, some reporters said it was old news: we had known about Bush’s deception long ago. But because of the press’s passivity, a majority of Americans don’t know. In fact a lot of them still think there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, or that Iraq had some connection with the World Trade Center attack. Thus public policy becomes increasingly erratic--because it is unchallenged by intelligent public debate. The imperial regime even convinces itself that it “creates” reality through its manipulation of the news.

Naturally enough, under such confusing and demoralizing circumstances many people grow increasingly cynical--whether they are alert and skeptical, or simply puzzled. Some of them, especially those under severe economic or emotional stress in their personal lives, turn for consolation to fundamentalist religions--in the US, the evangelical churches that offer easy, simple “Biblical” values. These values are harshly patriarchal, punitive, and prone to violence--a sort of mirror image of militant Islam. But they comfort people in a difficult, unsupportive world by giving easy answers to uncertainty and change. They drastically remove doubts about the future: 56% of Americans say they believe the prophecies in the Book of Revelations will literally come true.

As these kinds of social breakdown proceed, the potential instability of the empire grows. With its wealth inequality and its institutional corruption, America is now like a vast upside-down pyramid resting on its point. So far, it has not tottered, probably because no society on earth has ever had the degree of social control exerted by American media. So far the American public’s resentment of its situation has been safely channeled into controversies about “social issues”--such as abortion, church/state separation, gay marriage. But whether this stability will persist against severe difficulties brought on by oil shortages, international financial crises, or potential epidemics, remains to be seen. After all, reality does still exist, independent of the government’s news management.

Most obviously, as has happened with many earlier empires, people outside have begun to notice that the American empire is domestically weakening, and that its military is overstretched and hardly invincible either. Our military, caught in the quagmire of Iraq, would have grave difficulty dealing with other potential foes--such as Iran or North Korea. These, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, might pose a serious threat. On the frontiers, wherever occupation is half-hearted, challenges are not met: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. In both Vietnam and Iraq, the empire has been unable to subdue determined resistance. In Afghanistan, it has been content to control Kabul and leave the rest of the country to the opium-growers and warlords. It has had to tread lightly with Chavez’s oil-rich Venezuela. These are examples of the limits of “imperial overstretch” (a term coined by historian Paul Kennedy). What is the overall lesson here? As Kennedy shows, empires characteristically take on more foreign commitments than they can finance, or manage, and the marginal gains obtained are increasingly not worth the expenditures. The costs of war and the unilateral power-grabs of the Bush administration increase the US thirst for capital, but they reduce the return earned by it. This is in fact the single most important dynamic factor in the hollowing-out process. In the case of oil, for instance, huge outlays for war in the Middle East have drastically increased the real total cost of oil. But those costs are hidden in the government budget and appear only in your tax bill, and the future tax bills of your children, not at the petrol pump.

Enormous war expenditures are routinely approved by Congress outside the normal budget, as if they would never have to be paid for. (“Reconstruction” money is also appropriated, but very little of it has been actually spent in Iraq. It now appears doubtful that the Bush regime has any serious intention of rebuilding the country.) The total cost to American citizens of the current Middle East adventure seems certain to considerably exceed $500 billion, since massive American military presence is now expected to endure a decade. Thus, oil in the Empire actually costs at least twice as much as we think. This reality bites. It has real consequences.

Any empire suffers the paradox of spectacular military power externally and social decline internally--no matter who its leaders are. Hollowing out, unfortunately, decreases the ability of American people to explore and develop alternative technologies or alternative ways of doing business. The trained and educated American work force is seeing its jobs exported. Our universities are being forced away from basic science toward corporate-oriented and military research. This increasingly leaves innovative leadership to the rest of the world. A good example of this is in wind power, which California pioneered in the 1970s. We abandoned it under Reagan in the 1980s. Now Germany, Denmark, Spain, and even Britain are the leaders in wind power.

Nonetheless, to quote Karl Marx again, “The new society is born in the womb of the old.” So, around us we still see examples of Americans developing new values and skills that will be useful in the future. And they defend themselves as best they can. In the US, people turn away from the deadlocked national level toward local action. We seek to employ powers of the separate states to counter failures in Washington. Thus California has been able to maintain far more stringent regulations on air pollution than the rest of the nation. California gives rebates (subsidies) to people who install solar photo-voltaic arrays on their houses, or purchase energy-efficient appliances. Such measures, which are familiar in Germany but still unusual in the US, somewhat decrease our dependence on oil, and reduce the impacts of oil use. They prepare the way to a sustainable “Ecotopian” society of the future.

[Main point #3]
What can we predict about the course of the American oil empire in the years ahead? It’s most likely that the empire will decline, but not really collapse, over several more generations. A multipolar world will evolve in which Europe, Japan, China, and even perhaps Brazil are also centers of power. Some ancient societies, and isolated ones such as Easter Island, have collapsed utterly, leaving only a tiny remnant population behind. But they were almost entirely dependent on local resources, whose mismanagement led to their downfall. By contrast, the American empire is a complex global phenomenon, and techologically should remain resilient even if many of its components suffer declines and breakdowns. America’s oil-driven hegemony is only two generations old. What will we see in the next two generations, when oil has peaked and the empire is hollowing out? Here are my cautious predictions:

First of all, we will see a long, continued process of impoverishment of the middle and working class --though the upper-middle and upper classes will continue to live well. Military hegemony requires, as Stirling Newberry puts it, a society “filled with people who are desperate for work, a stone’s throw from poverty, and feeling themselves surrounded and beset by terrors and disaster. People who, therefore, cling zealously to arbitrary rules and partisan passions.” We will be a society characterized by fundamentalist delusions, widespread illiteracy, and political venality and incompetence, filled with envy, rage, and superstitition.

Second, a gradual rise in the price of energy and of fossil fuels will drive a slow transformation of all the suburban arrangements of American life, which are predicated upon cheap oil. Replacement of the global oil shortfall through liquified natural gas, nuclear, or coal (the dirtiest of all fuels), or even a crash program of alternative energies (wind, solar, biomass), would require a lead time of decades. As unsteady stock markets may be reflecting, an unprecedented energy crisis is upon us. In the coming decades, we will have to downscale and localize how and where we grow our food, where we live and how we get to work, how we organize health care, and so on. Mega-enterprises, from WalMart to United Airlines, will shrink drastically or disappear. Any activity with long, petroleum-dependent supply lines will become perilous. Our enormous plastics industry will shrink too, along with the waste it produces. Paint, paper, building materials, piping, and almost everything we use will become more expensive.

Third, all but the rich will suffer from declining health: We face continued obesity, with diabetes and heart disease becoming more burdensome, along with continued lung cancer from smoking. We will experience a slight loss of average stature, probably due to bad nutrition in childhood and adolescence. (This is in contrast to northern Europe, where people are getting taller, presumably because of widespread good nutrition while American adolescents eat a junk-food diet.) There will be a continued loss of fitness, even among the young, due to spending too much sedentary time with computers, video games, and in cars. Improvement in length of life will probably reverse itself, as it did in the collapsing Soviet Union. Our child mortality rates, already among the worst in the industrial countries, will get still worse.

Fourth, there will be a deterioration of infrastructure: highways and streets, bridges, and other road-transport facilities will all receive less maintenance, partly because they are now maintained with petrol-tax revenues which will decline. America’s very poor railroad network, however, will probably be improved. As cars become more difficult to own, people will have to share rides, and jitney-like services, such as are common in Mexico, will partly take the place of private cars. The focus of life will become much more local: people will try to work, live, and play in their own neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the maintenance of neighborhood buildings will deteriorate.

Fifth, we will face a loss of scientific pre-eminence, as Asia and Europe maintain superior levels of education despite their own peak-oil decline. The best American scientific minds are already being lured from basic university science to military and industrial work. This will lead in turn to a loss of technical pre-eminence, even in information technology. Paradoxically, the US will possess fantastic globe-girdling space armaments that could almost instantly destroy any army rising against it, yet our mobile phones will remain far inferior to those of the rest of the world. High-tech arms are highly profitable to aerospace companies. But armament sophistication will increasingly mean little, as enemies have already learned not to rely on conventional armies.

Finally, on the financial front, we can expect some readjustment of the recent pattern of lowering taxes on the rich while increasing borrowing from abroad. This may be brought on by different thinking in Washington. Or actions by foreign creditors, such as turning away from dollars to euros (a process already happening) may be decisive. In any case, it will mean a significant downturn in American material-goods consumption. European countries will share in this downturn, through loss of American sales, but possibly their direct experience of war and privation equip them to cope better. Americans may re-learn their own earlier values of thrift, resourceful competence, and practical, cooperative “making do.” If so, it will soften their landing on economic terra firma.

[Conclusion]
So, to look ahead, like many empires before it, if the American empire has passed its peak and is hollowing out, what comes after the hollowing out? In conclusion, please let me sketch my Ecotopian perspective on this question. In the years since I wrote Ecotopia, American society on the whole has continued toward more energy-intensive, environmentally destructive, sprawl-oriented car-dependence. Within that pattern, however, a slow process of learning has been taking place--learning the lessons that will be essential after the oil empire has declined.

These lessons are stoutly resisted by the oil industry executives who are now in charge in Washington. But let me try to summarize the new values and attitudes that Americans will have to learn, over the coming decades, in order to recover from the decline of the empire.

Of course we will have to give these new values political expression. In the US, the systemic corruption of our legislatures by campaign financing can be cured by “Fair Elections,” a system of public financing now employed in Arizona and Maine. Since a majority of Americans are not in fact sympathetic to the military priorities of the empire, this (and only this) will make it possible to roll back the dynamic of the oil empire and begin to build a new sustainable, Ecotopian world. Among many other things, that will mean that as people understand that the corporation is not a God-given institution but one invented by humans and changeable by humans, we can alter the corporate DNA and push corporations toward social responsibility. These are huge challenges, but essential for our future. Now to our list of new values:

“Sustainability” as a goal is practical and satisfying, in the same way that “growth” prevailed as a shared value during the empire’s industrial expansion. “Sustainability” can be as powerful and emotionally appealing a metaphor as growth. We will have to accept that we can have growth only qualitatively, not quantitatively. Life can get better, indefinitely, but not through the production and acquisition of more material goods. We need to prize technology that is not only mechanically ingenious but ecologically and humanly appropriate. Miniaturization and de-materialization in the design of manufactured goods can help greatly in reducing our ecological impacts. These efforts, however, need to be coupled with new values that emphasize less materialistic, object-focused living. Extensive research shows that happiness is not correlated with income, above a modest level. We need to remember that the deepest satisfactions come from relationships, family, community, and nature.

Decentralization is satisfying and good because it is efficient—as well as beautiful. There are inherent advantages of comfortably human scale. This is particularly evident in the energy field, where the costs of distributing electricity are greater than those of generating it, even from relatively costly sources like nuclear. Another area in which we gain efficiency by smaller-scale and dispersed sourcing is food production and distribution. Transporting food long distances depends on oil consumption. We need to prize compactness over bigness.

We must learn to count on each other: to expect and value responsibility, generosity, helpfulness. Social change happens fundamentally through social or communal or political group processes, not just from individual actions. A few unusual people, usually highly educated, may change their behavior because they read a book or hear a lecture. But most of us change because we are involved in groups. We share values. We trade information. We feel good when we help each other. In the world after the empire, such old-fashioned values will be all-important.

Cooperation works better than competition. Nature evolves and maintains itself through symbiosis between species. Moreover, research shows that the best job performance, or academic performance, comes in cooperative conditions. So Americans will have to abandon our belief that hostile competition is the route to excellence.

Our values must become inter-generational. In particular, we must always remember that What we build or make impacts not only ourselves but our descendants. In the era of cheap oil, we built sprawled oil-dependent cities and suburbs that will now be heavy weights upon the shoulders of those who follow. American suburbs are not only cultural wastelands but enormously wasteful materially: A detached house requires something like 5 times as much copper, insulation, pipes, roofing, and so on as an apartment of the same floor area. Moreover, services such as mail and parcel delivery, ambulance service, street lighting, and street paving are much more costly per capita in detached-house areas. We must try not to make such mistakes again.

We must learn that it is our personal responsibility to care for the planet. US government actions to protect the environment are declining with the empire. The current administation is busily rolling back forest regulations, wilderness designations, and endangered species protections. It is weakening car and power-plant-emission limits, permitting oil-drilling in Arctic wilderness, and so on. But local people see new protective roles they can play. In the absence of meaningful political parties, for example, informal “watershed councils” are forming. People from usually opposed groups--conservationists, ranchers, town business owners, fishers, bicyclists, boaters--meet regularly to resolve their conflicts and improve the health of their shared waters and lands. They work on stream-bank restoration, cattle-exclusion fences, bicycle paths, traffic-calming in towns, reduced pesticide and herbicide use, and the promotion of organic farming.

And lastly, religious values must combine with environmental values. The spiritual values of human life may indeed become increasingly vital as economic life is straitened. In America, even some evangelicals are changing their values and speaking of the Earth as God’s body, which we should care for. Many other traditional religions are moving steadily toward environmental consciousness. And Buddhism, a strongly ecological religion, has a foothold in America today. Religion remains an important force in America, so these are promising developments.

If these lessons are learned and these values adopted, I believe that even in the face of imperial decline and hollowing out, we can prepare a sustainable future. We will be able to teach our children that things will someday change for the better, and that we can achieve a world in which old, destructive values have worn away, and new more human, more Ecotopian, values triumph.

Thank you for listening!