I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen. For over half my life now, this poet has drawn the blueprints for my inner world’s most important architectural projects. Those projects always crumble, allowing the wilderness of circumstance and the soul to reclaim the ruins. In this, the projects based on Leonard’s blueprints are the same as any other, except that whereas so many plans promise monuments of everlasting durability, his acknowledge the supremacy of the wilderness. Cohen tells us that if we aspire to build anything within the geographies of the heart, we should build only what the wilderness will welcome: we should build with ruination in mind. In other words, we should hope and dream in the knowledge that all our hopes and dreams will, sooner or later, be destroyed by the world they’ve tried to touch.

And it will probably be sooner rather than later. According to an October 2007 report by Dr Werner Zittel and Jorg Schindler for the Energy Watch Group entitled Crude Oil: The Supply Outlook, “world oil production has peaked in 2006. Production will start to decline at a rate of several percent per year. By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame. The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.”

They called it right

If this report is correct—and, given that global oil production has been flat for the last 18 months, it seems likely that it is—this means that even as the demand for oil from countries like China and India explodes, there’s going to be less and less for sale. This will have grave consequences.

Our economy is thoroughly dependent on cheap petroleum, and not just for energy: petroleum is a raw material in plastics as well as in many pharmaceuticals, solvents, and fertilizers. As the price of petroleum skyrockets, all of these products will become far more expensive, leading to runaway inflation. Many things that we take for granted today, such as driving a car and traveling by air, may soon become too expensive for the average consumer. Transportation costs will become too onerous for many businesses. It will no longer be cost effective to distribute products like food over great distances. Economic growth will give way to economic decline, leading to widespread social dislocation. The rates of unemployment, homelessness, violence, mental illness, and other social ills will begin climbing, and they won’t stop for a very long time. Globalization will reverse itself, and we will enter an era of economic misery worse than the Great Depression, an era that may not end during our lifetime or even the lifetime of our grandchildren. It’s very possible that this will lead to the de-industrialization of our economy.

Our governments will be thrown into turmoil. With falling tax revenues, even left-leaning governments—if there are any—will be unable to maintain their existing social welfare and infrastructure programs. Tsunamis of legal and illegal migration, millions upon millions of refugees and internally displaced people, and planet-wide resource scarcity will lead to increasingly violent confrontations between states and also between governments and their domestic populations.

Unfortunately, it won’t be easy to return to an agrarian lifestyle. Industrial civilization has consumed and poisoned the resources that once supported entire nations of family farms, and in a desperate search for hidden pockets of petroleum, corporations and governments will ravage the last intact terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Falling petroleum production will eventually lead to a decline in greenhouse gas emissions, but not for many decades, and not fast enough to prevent climate change from flooding our coastlines, multiplying our weather-related disasters, scorching our breadbaskets, and spreading pestilence and disease across territories once protected by the winter’s chill. In coming decades, the global population is probably going to fall precipitously because of sickness, starvation, and savagery. Those of us who have lived our lives in the Global North will finally understand those who’ve lived theirs in the Global South. Perhaps we will also perceive the fundamental identity we share with the Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, and the other countless multitudes whose dreams of civilization have ended in ruins buried by the wild.

Get ready for the future

Cohen says it best in The Future: “Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further. And now the wheels of heaven stop, you feel the devil's riding crop. Get ready for the future: it is murder.” Despite lyrics such as these, Cohen isn’t a pessimist. I seem to recall hearing him say that “a pessimist is afraid of rain, but I’m already soaked to the bone.” This gives him an understanding of downpours that most of us lack, and his perspective isn’t as terrible as it may initially seem. In the same song, he sings, “I've seen the nations rise and fall, I've heard their stories, heard them all, but love's the only engine of survival.”

He isn’t being saccharin, and he’s not a Pollyanna. If his work demonstrates anything, then it demonstrates that he honestly and wisely believes that love is indeed the only engine of survival. To build within the wilderness, to build for the wilderness, we must be strong, and to be strong we must love. Only love, only the ability to perceive deep beauty within the world, within other people, within ourselves, the ability to commit ourselves to nurturing and protecting and celebrating others, only this can save us from despair, only this can redeem our dignity and salvage our courage. Love alone can free us from the terrors of the ego, from the all-consuming panic of self-preservation.

Love makes it possible for us to sacrifice even our lives for the sake of the other, for the sake of the whole. It lifts the mask of mortal history from the face of the infinite and eternal. It is the mystic’s third eye, and the faculty that inspired the author of 1 John 4:8 to write, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” It is the spiritual potential that has allowed our species to endure the most terrible hardships, and it exists, in however rudimentary and fragmented a form, in each of us.

And even as our bodies, minds, and societies are shattered, there is good cause to love. By now we must know that an economy that demands infinite growth upon a finite planet is inherently unsustainable, which is a sanitized way of saying that ethically it’s murderous and suicidal, and that ecologically it’s cancerous. For the sake of the biosphere, it must end. Life itself, to which we owe our highest loyalty, calls upon us to make this sacrifice; life itself calls upon us to love.

Break out the love

Love will not protect us from evil and suffering, but by breaking our egos open evil and suffering can sometimes liberate a capacity for love that we’ve kept imprisoned deep within the innermost chambers of our being. As Cohen sings in Anthem, “Every heart, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” If there is a goal worthy enough to strive for during such times of merciless catastrophe, then it is this and only this: to burn with love, to become what Cohen calls a saint, whose nature he described in his 1962 book of poetry, Beautiful Losers: “Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid, bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”

Since the tribulations of the coming age will make monsters of all of us, let us try to become monsters of love, monsters at home among the ruins of dreams, in the wilderness of our broken world.