National Decline as the End of the World: The "Peak Oil" Movement in the United States, 2005–10

Recent concerns about global oil depletion (known as the “peak oil” theory) have received coverage in the media and a wide variety of academic fields, but scholars have thus far ignored the “peak oil” movement itself.  From 2005 to 2010, over 200,000 Americans adopted an apocalyptic ideology claiming that resource scarcity would lead to the imminent collapse of industrial society. While fears of global environmental catastrophe as a result of climate change led to political and individual actions that barely address the magnitude of the issue, “peakists” responded to a perceived apocalyptic threat in dramatic ways—many participants change occupations, purchase land, and even leave their partners. Their beliefs and actions should challenge and revise the consensus view of American indifference to ecological collapse.  However, unlike similar movements in American history, “peakists” turned to private and personal solutions instead of collective political action, creating a rich subculture of non-fiction books, films, forums, websites, blogs, Podcasts, YouTube channels, and video games, and novels.

I examine this environmental movement from the perspective of cultural history.  Oil is undoubtedly the lifeblood of modern civilization, but what conditions in the millennial United States gave rise to this phenomenon?  Based on two large-scale surveys (N=1000 and N=600) and three years of ethnographic research, I show that the “peak oil” movement reflects the concerns many Americans harbored about national decline. “Peakists,” who are overwhelmingly American, white, liberal, and male, naturalized the expectation of American geopolitical supremacy and unlimited economic growth to such an extent that failed wars in the Middle East and the economic recession were interpreted, almost literally, as the end of the world. This paper will constitute an original contribution on the relationship between energy, environmentalism, popular culture and social movements in American history by analysing a unique phenomenon that has thus far escaped scholarly attention.