Heavy Lifting in the Big Picture

Every now and then a book gets published that offers a Big Picture critique of how things have gotten so messed up along with a proposal for correctives. You know, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Warren Johnson’s Muddling toward Frugality, Steve Hallett’s Life without Oil, and now (in 2025) Samuel Miller McDonald’s Progress, with its sprawling subtitle: “How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It.”

Progress consists of 335 pages of doom and gloom, all rationally presented, with virtually no hope for any in-time correction, only tough (but perhaps also joyful) survival for those who not only recognize the seriousness of our predicament but who are willing and able to find or build a niche of cooperative and self-provisioning community. Starting soon. Starting now.

McDonald is a thirty-something Ph.D. geographer originally from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He’s a Yupper in regional parlance. (The U. P. Yuppers are wolverines compared to us northern Wisconsin mink. They have, we might say, a rather tough reputation. McDonald’s flap photograph shows a serious five o’clock shadow, for what that’s worth.) He says he grew up with a belief in liberal progress; but an in-depth study of human ecology and history has stripped away his youthful optimism. He’s come to see how the parasitic behavior of civilization, a parasitism embedded in civilization’s origins, is now culminating in global disasters.

There’s no mention in Progress of Arnold J. Toynbee or of Lewis Mumford, although there’s no need for every new writer to celebrate the same array of old-time heroes, even as I find McDonald’s endnotes dismayingly loaded with online references rather than with real books. Perhaps I’m only showing my age. . . .

There’s no question that McDonald’s got fight in him; I don’t think he’d call himself a pacifist. But he’s also not optimistic about armed struggle. Rebellions, he says, have only rarely succeeded; often the victors just impose new forms of the old tyranny. He has something close to contempt for the techno-trillionaires who imagine they can colonize space or download their egos into computerized immortality. Disintegration, he says, is moving faster than positive progress (with a small p). Or, as he frequently asserts, disintegration is the accelerating externality of Progress with a big P: “The parasitic economy that has been spreading from empire to empire for the last five thousand years is now globally networked in a way it has never been in all its history, meaning it could fully collapse at a global scale and leave a lot of unfamiliar sorts of societies in its wake.”[1]

McDonald’s spiritual theme becomes most explicit in his closing pages. There he implies an “animistic worldview” and a “love of the divinity within the world.”[2] But these are rather tiny, opaque windows to peer through, a few bread crumbs tossed without a discernible pattern in a directionless forest. There’s not much spiritual guidance in those crumbs.

Nevertheless, as an old man about to hit eighty, it’s refreshing for me to read a young guy whose attention is oriented in what I consider the right directions—both his critique of civilization and his recognition of the need for a new indigenousness with spiritual implications. But there are books out there in the world—Steve Hallett’s Life without Oil and The Efficiency Trap to several of my own, from Nature’s Unruly Mob to Picking Fights with the Gods—that cover much of this ground with greater specificity. That’s not to disparage Samuel Miller McDonald’s contribution. If anything, I’m inclined to goad him toward an ever-deepening analysis and a more invigorating prognosis. It is, after all, his generation that will be faced with the heavy lifting of civiscollapse and the reconstruction of a redeemed pagus.

If willful and headstrong utopia generates dystopia, then an awakened eutopia may prove to be a surprisingly tough and wholesome survivor. And despite what Sam McDonald says about hope—“I can’t give you hope, wouldn’t delude you with it if I could, but I can just about guarantee that there will come a time when there is too little energy, both living carbon and fossilized carbon, to run the engine of this vast parasitic global network”[3]—I’m not sure we can live without hope. Perhaps it’s just built into us as living beings. Every crack in the sidewalk is space for a blade of grass and, perhaps, a totally insouciant butter-yellow dandelion. Hope, I think, is in our cells. Life has a thing about surviving. Or, as Megha Majumdar puts it rather brutally in her 2025 novel A Guardian and a Thief, set in the early stages of a dystopian Kolkata: “Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present. Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.”[4]

Perhaps McDonald’s hope and Majumdar’s hope are the extreme ends of a hope spectrum. Perhaps the sturdiest and most capable hope lies between wishful thinking and blood-maddened hostility. Perhaps the spirituality that McDonald so vaguely alludes to, the spirituality he (dare we say?) hopes for, has an ethical sturdiness that’s neither vacuously wishful nor meanly toothed and clawed. I don’t know that the lion will ever lie down with the lamb, but more gardens and fewer slaughterhouses would be a good place to land. The spirituality that can get us there is both tough and gentle. Given the tenacity of life, I don’t know how it could be otherwise than tough and gentle.

Notes.

[1] McDonald, Progress, pages 274-5.

[2] McDonald, Progress, pages 332-3.

[3] McDonald, Progress, page 334.

[4] Majumdar, Guardian, pages 126-27.

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