The Long Descent by John Michael Greer Page A

care comes from an old woman whose grandmother was a doctor and who knows something about wound care and herbs. By the time his hair turns gray the squabbling regions that were once the United States have split apart. All remaining fuel and electrical power have been commandeered by new regional governments, and coastal cities have been abandoned to the rising oceans.
    For his great-granddaughter, born in 2120, the great crises are mostly things of the past. She grows up amid a ring of villages that were once suburbs, but now they surround an abandoned core of rusting skyscrapers that are visited only by salvage crews who mine them for raw materials. Local wars sputter, the oceans are still rising, and famines and epidemics come through every decade or so, but with global population less than half what it was in 2000 and still declining, humanity and nature are moving toward balance. The great-granddaughter learns to read and write, a skill most of her neighbors don’t have, and a few old books are among her prized possessions, but the days when men walked on the moon are fading into legend. When she and her family finally set out for a village in the countryside, leaving the husk of the old city to the salvage crews, it likely never occurs to her that her quiet footsteps on a crumbling asphalt road mark the end of a civilization.
    This is the process I’ve named the Long Descent — the declining arc of industrial civilization’s trajectory through time. Like the vanished civilizations of the past, ours will likely face a gradual decline, punctuated by sudden crises and periods of partial recovery. The fall of a civilization is like tumbling down a slope, not like falling off a cliff. It’s not a single massive catastrophe, or even a series of lesser disasters, but a gradual slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history’s dumpster.
    Track the impact of decline on public health and you have a model that can be applied to many other dimensions of the process. As domestic heating and air conditioning become too expensive for most, for example, deaths from pneumonia and influenza on the one hand, and heat stroke and insect-borne tropical diseases on the other, will steadily climb. So will infant mortality, while rates of live birth per capita will plunge. Russia is a good model here; since the collapse of Communism, it’s seen rising death rates and falling birth rates to such an extent that the population will be cut in half by 2100, and yet there hasn’t been any massive catastrophe to account for this — simply shifts in statistics driven by economic and political failure. 23 Those same statistical shifts become inevitable when the ecological basis for a civilization crumbles away as a result of its own mismanagement.
    The last few decades have already seen substantial decline in the real standard of living for most Americans and many people elsewhere in the industrialized world. We will likely see quite a bit more in the next few years, especially if the economic juggling act that props up trillions of dollars of paper debt in America and elsewhere gives way. Declining standards of living equate to declining public health. Declining public health impacts population levels. As people become poorer, they become sicker; childhood mortality goes up — the United States is already approaching parity with the nonindustrial world in that department 24 — and other vulnerable groups suffer as well.
    There will be crises and disasters in economic, political, social, and military spheres. At certain points along the curve of disintegration, systems become unstable and sudden breakdowns happen. These are the things people will remember afterwards: the day the electric power grid finally went down for good, the winter that the big epidemic took a third of the people in their town, the year that civil war broke out down south, and the decade in which