The Future Is Rural: Societal Adaptation to Energy Descent

Jason C. Bradford

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2020, vol. 79, issue 3, 751-798

Abstract: Our present era of high‐energy modernity will likely end over the course of the 21st century, as fossil hydrocarbons wane and new energy technologies fail to compensate. Long‐term trends of urbanization will reverse and a migration back to the countryside to regions of high biocapacity will ensue during the coming decades of energy descent. Food will become a central and organizing concern for de‐industrializing populations, and key concepts and general methods to secure food supplies using less mechanization and with few outside inputs are presented. Given that high social complexity is institutionalized, with system identities locked‐in, we should not expect a planned response to declining net energy. Instead, the so‐called Great Simplification will unfold through a series of crises that force reorganization and alter belief systems. Resilience science suggests a role for promoting system transformability along more benign paths and into social forms that are more frugal.

Date: 2020
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