A Time Like No Other
There has been no other time in history like the current era. This is without any doubt one of the most unusual moments in history – bar none. With even just a few moments thought almost anyone could come up with a list of things which modern humans [1] enjoy today which those living in past societies (including some pretty recent ones) could either barely even conceive of, or at best had only very rudimentary forms of. This includes: safe, globe-spanning transport; abundant and affordable food; precision manufactured items; healthcare and pharmaceuticals; law and order enforced by professional police and courts; piped drinking water; worldwide communications; home-delivered consumer goods; human rights and freedom of thought; all human knowledge on tap via the internet; central heating and air conditioning; paid holidays; and unlimited, on demand, 24/7 electrical power. And the list goes on and on.
An Improved Context
To make sense of the deep contrasts between the societies that existed through history and the current moment, it is necessary to identify what the golden threads (common or consistent themes) and distal drivers (ultimate or fundamental causes) underpinning these grand historical shifts are. Much has been written by historians, philosophers and economist about the various political, economic, social and cultural factors generally thought and accepted to be important, but on the most part, these narratives offer only incomplete, biased or too narrowly-focused perspectives. To get to the real insight we must listen to those who offer the biophysical perspective; the true distal driver of the transformations in human societies is energy, or more specifically, the forms, quantities, quality and applications of energy and how this has varied through time.
Energy is a fundamental physical quantity and through improving mastery and scope of energy use, humans have massively broadened their prospects and opened new horizons. We have shown a clear innovative genius in the machines and devices we have successively created over time, but without energy sources (from oxen-drawn ploughs to coal-fired steam engines to moon rockets) none of these amount to anything. Taking this perspective of energy, it is possible to trace the golden thread of energy transformations through human history, which is summarised as follows.
Humans first became ‘anatomically modern’ approximately 300,000 years ago, and for the vast majority of the time between then and now (around 95% of it) the only mode of living available was as hunter-gatherers. During this prolonged period humans lived in small (likely mostly in the range of 30-50 individuals), mobile and (at least partly) autonomous bands/tribes that obtained their energetic needs (which covered endosomatic [2] food energy and exosomatic [3] biomass energy for fires) from their immediate environment on a continuous basis. Available energy was limited by that stored in photosynthetically-derived biomass that could be readily accessed, and this constrained and limited human population densities and ultimate numbers.
Despite being thinly spread, these human hunter-gatherer bands in time spread across most the planet’s dry land and eliminated both genetically close competitors, and much megafauna (both of which were harbingers of humanity’s future power and impact on the world). This way of life persisted for an extended period of time, but the spread of humans to a range of physical settings and biomes, combined with long-term shifts in climate, set the scene for a fundamental, pervasive and permanent change in the prevailing mode of living to take hold (starting from around 12,000 years ago) which changed human societies forever: agriculture.
Agriculture provided the means for humans to more systematically collect photosynthetic biomass energy, supplemented by animal power (i.e., muscle metabolism) and in time environmental energy flows (primarily wind and flowing water). This provided an expanded and reliable energetic basis for human societies to become (amongst many other things) complex, hierarchical, technological and sedentary, and human numbers consequently grew to hitherto unseen heights. In time, the next revolution started as societies of ever greater size and complexity learned (from around 200 years ago) new technological tricks, and to exploit alternative energy sources at steadily increasing scales. A tipping point eventually occurred which changed human societies even more profoundly: industry.
The key change was a switch from obtaining energy predominantly from environmental energy flows, to the huge stocks or reserves of energy in the form of fossil fuels, which had accumulated via geological processes over deep time (this slow accumulation and later rapid human use of these sources is akin to the charging/discharging of a giant battery). The mass exploitation of fossil fuels led to a paradigm shift far more fundamental and rapid than agriculture, and has allowed humanity to build a planet-spanning civilisation supporting more than eight billion individuals.
The imperative nature of energy to the current form of civilisation is captured succinctly via the concept of high-energy modernity. What is also apparent is that many of us alive in this time have only vague notions of just how differently most humans throughout history lived, and just how unusual it is to be endowed with such technological wonders and comforts as are widespread now. This generally limited understanding and lack of awareness has been described by energy and economics commentator Nate Hagens as ‘energy blindness’.
The crux of this article is to offer a new framing or perspective on energy, and modern lifestyles and societies. The intent is to offer scope for improved understanding of the importance of energy and its role in past and current societies (to address energy blindness); to illustrate the importance of this to our personal circumstances; and also, to highlight what dangers we collectively face if modern energy systems were to cease providing what we have become so accustomed to and reliant on.
An Alternative Perspective
The nature of changing human energy use has been written about previously in several places, but the alternative framing presented here focuses on how changing energy use over time has led to major shifts in the nature and quality of the lives of individual people as well as collectively at societal scale, and what the current and future significance of this may be. This different perspective is based on a concept which traces its origin to psychology, sociology and related disciplines: the Hierarchy of [Human] Needs, first formulated and defined by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in a 1943 study. The central idea is that universal needs of humans can be arranged according to a hierarchical classification system, with the different levels related to factors such as successive phases of life and different individual and collective circumstances.
This is typically depicted in the pyramid structure shown below in Figure 1, with the most fundamental and basic survival needs located near the base, psychological needs which align with greater functioning and flourishing in the middle, and the most ‘sophisticated’ self-fulfilment needs at the top. A central theme is that once needs at one level are met and satisfied, the meeting of the needs at the next level then take precedence and start to dominate behaviours. Conversely, if needs cease to be met at one level, the needs at the next level down will become prevalent. It is generally applied to individuals in contexts such as education and healthcare (e.g., to assess drivers of behaviour in accordance with the changes in needs from childhood through to adulthood).
Figure 1 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The levels of the hierarchy refer to the following:
- Physiological Needs – these are fundamental needs related to the maintenance of basic biological functions, and includes an adequate supply of food and water, and the provision of shelter and warmth.
- Safety Needs – these are needs related to the elimination or minimisation of threats and risks, and includes physical safety (e.g., from violence and natural hazards) and economic safety (e.g., from economic crises and lack of employment opportunities).
- Love & Belonging – these are interpersonal needs related to feelings of love, trust, belongingness and acceptance by others in groups such as family, friends and communities, which are necessary to reduce social anxiety and maintain mental health.
- Esteem Needs – these are related to the need for respect, admiration, recognition and attention, which provide dignity, status and a ‘sense of self’.
- Self-Actualisation – this relates to the realisation of a person’s or group’s full potential through accomplishment, mastery and the reaching of life goals.
The perspective proposed here is somewhat different to the standard application of the Hierarchy of Needs, namely to collective, societal-scale needs i.e., what proportion of large groups of humans are achieving the different levels of the hierarchy (which are of course continuous and not sharply defined). Different individuals in any given society may achieve higher levels due to their specific circumstances whilst others may not, but there is likely an ‘average’ level achieved across populations, enabled by the general conditions a society provides to its inhabitants.
These ambient social, economic and technological conditions are closely correlated with energy, so there is logically a link with the average level on the hierarchy and the changing energetic paradigms of societies through time, as described above. Put another way, the characteristics of human societies as they have changed through time according to the types and quantities of energy they have had at their command and disposal, can be ‘mapped’ to the meeting of the Hierarchy of Needs. Figure 2 places a different iteration of society through time against each level of the same pyramid structure as in the Hierarchy of Needs, and Figure 3 the predominant energy paradigm that existed in each of these societies.
Note that the situations depicted in Figures 2 & 3 focus on the interplay of endo- and exosomatic energy sources (see Footnotes 1 & 2) available to humans over time. Many of the most profound changes were in the forms and applications of exosomatic energy which allowed technological structures to change, but changes to the availability of endosomatic energy were also crucial in enabling this (e.g., by driving population increases through rising food availability).
Figure 2 – Maslow’s Hierarchy Applied to Societal Stages
Figure 3 – Maslow’s Hierarchy Applied to Stages of Energy Use
The following points provide interpretation of how the levels of the Hierarchy of Needs, the named past societies, and their associated energy use, relate to each other:
- Hunting-gathering and early agricultural societies; open biomass fires – these societies were able to more effectively meet the Physiological Needs of their inhabitants, relative to the very earliest humans without this energy source (along with all non-human species). This is because fire enhanced the availability of food, as cooking made nutrients more available (and may been a factor in the evolution of the human brain) and likely enhanced tool availability for hunting. It also directly provided warmth and increased the effectiveness of shelter, which likely opened up climatic zones that humans would not have readily survived in without access to fire (especially during the cold Pleistocene). Fire may have also become something of a central organising factor in human groups, which through the promotion of cooperative behaviour, enhanced human capabilities to obtain further basic resources.
- Large agricultural societies; controlled biomass fires and animal metabolism – these societies were able to better meet Safety Needs because one of the key benefits of agriculture (in parallel to its many downsides) is that it provided much more food energy for a given area of land (e.g., through use of animal-driven ploughs, and organised labour for harvesting). The resulting food surpluses were a direct buffer against shortages and famines, but this also allowed human societies to complexify significantly by providing the means for parts of the population to focus on activities other than food production. The most important changes were the development of permanent settlements, labour specialisation, and development of trade, which also drove gains in technology (e.g., copper, and later iron metallurgy using more effectively controlled fires) and the creation of the first societal systems such as legal systems, and organised standing militaries. These in turn generally increased the economic and physical safety of many (though certainly not all) inhabitants of these societies.
- Pre-industrial societies; renewables and widespread biomass fires – these societies provided enhanced capacity for Love & Belonging because the trend of complexification (which started with early agricultural societies) continued and expanded to regional and in time global scale, with the establishment of cities, empires and proto-nation states, and the emergence of multiple levels of hierarchy. This was underpinned with continued technological changes and trade, enabled by the changing scale and improving technological application of fire (e.g., for steel making) and harnessing renewable energy flows for further enhancing the food supply (e.g., grain processing). New cultural and social phenomena, which provided enhanced scope for identity and belonging beyond the self, were able to emerge from the resulting very large scale, complex societies e.g., mass organised religion, national identities, and trade guilds.
- Early industrial societies; widespread fossil fuel fires and limited electricity – these societies provided heightened scope for meeting Esteem Needs, due to rapid and profound technological changes and physical expansion (e.g., of population and infrastructure). Technological developments (primarily the steam engine) operated in enhancing feedback loops with the rapid scaling in the appropriation and application of fossil fuel energy (primarily coal), and eventually culminated in the introduction of electrical power, which paved the way for future intensification of energy use (see below). The dynamics of industrialisation raised societies to much greater levels of complexity, wealth and specialisation than in previous eras, which allowed professional and middle classes to emerge (i.e., for non-royalty/non-nobility to raise their wealth and social status), personal fortunes to become relatively widespread, and for there to be the surplus (financial) resources for societies to start providing public services such as compulsory education and organised policing.
- High-energy modernity; 24-7 electricity and widespread refined fuels – finally, modern (meaning post-World War II) societies have been able to provide their citizens with the opportunity for Self-Actualisation. As described above, the most recent timeframes have seen the development and dispersal of a fantastic range of technologies and consumer goods, far beyond those available in early industrial societies, and fantastically greater than in earlier societies. This is enabled by highly complex, globe-spanning systems such as industrial agriculture; very large scale mineral extraction; mass and specialised manufacturing; supply chains spanning whole continents and ocean basins; and information and communication networks centred on the internet, to which the majority of humans are connected. These systems are not only all highly energy intensive, but also require this energy in particular, high-quality forms that are highly concentrated and instantly available. Namely, they are enabled by centralised power stations and electrical grids installed in virtually every nation providing round-the-clock electrical power, and the near-universal availability of refined, energy-dense fuels (primarily diesel). This consumption of high-quality energy is at rates and scales dwarfing those of past eras, and is dominated (82% globally in 2023, whether in primary form or used to generate electricity) by fossil fuels. These underpinning systems may be thought of as ‘fossil slaves’ that provide energetic capabilities equivalent to vast amounts of human labour, all at very low cost. Having these working continuously in the background is what frees up the ‘capacity’ for modern humans to worry far less about the lower levels of the Hierarchy of Needs, and instead invest their mental and other resources in achieving personal needs and desires.
Energy and Lifestyle Nexus
For a large proportion of (though certainly not all) the people alive today, armies of fossil slaves provide the energetic basis for the full Hierarchy of Needs to be met on an abundant and continuous basis. It is in this context that people are freed from the chattels, obligations and hard labour that characterised the lives of so many in past eras. Instead, people’s attention and efforts are freed up for anything and everything else, in ways that no previous era was able to provide at mass scale. Using the model presented above, energy use and lifestyle in the modern context can be described as a nexus, illustrated in Figure 4:
Figure 4 – Nexus of Energy and Lifestyle
The energy-lifestyle nexus has manifested in a wide variety of ways, but the following bullets describe some key examples of how Self-Actualisation and other self-focused needs and desires have been achieved in a widespread way in this context:
- Societal stability and continuity – high-energy modernity has provided many societies with sufficient physical and financial resources to provide public services such as healthcare, law and order, and education which in previous societies did not occur or were only available to wealthier individuals as private services. This has meant that much of the population have been able to live healthier, safer lives focused on themselves and immediate family, which is supported by societal conditions being (generally) much more stable and predictable; in this situation knowledge and assets can be transferred to successive generations.
- New economic sectors – whole new economic and societal sectors have been able to form in the context of high-energy modernity, which are far removed from the ‘base activities’ (notably agriculture and manufacturing, which now occur ‘in the background’ supported by fossil slaves) e.g., finance, advertising, publishing and luxury goods and services. The existence of these sectors has opened up careers which people can pursue out of interest and aspiration rather than necessity and survival, with far greater provision of things like safety and work-life balance.
- Advancement of rights – in past eras, many sub-parts of and minorities within societies (defined on the basis of e.g., gender, race, socio-economic status, sexuality, political alignment etc.) were openly discriminated against. In the modern context, significant progress has been made in attaining rights, equality, dignity and freedoms of many of these minorities. This has come about through economic conditions improving, governments having the capacity to pass new laws, and societal leaders and members of these communities being freed from struggles against more basic needs to pursue these causes.
- Culture and sports – culture such as the arts, music and organised sport have existed throughout human history, but regular access to these was mostly restricted to elites. It is only in the context of modernity that sufficiently abundant physical and financial resources have been available to make these accessible to much of the population as large-scale leisure and consumptive phenomena. Modern societal systems can support the existence of professional artists and sportspeople, but these systems also permit large portions of the population to have the leisure time and financial resources to frequently engage with these activities.
- Introspection – activities which are at least partly introspective (i.e., in pursuit of ‘finding yourself’ and ‘self-improvement’) such as hobbies and travel were also available in the past to restricted sections of society (as with culture and sport; see above). These have however become highly varied and mass-scale activities as societal systems have freed up the time, resources and mental capacity of many to pursue activities of benefit to themselves, but which are not directly ‘productive’ for society.
So What? – Wider Implications
The model presented here integrates a few different concepts to provide a new perspective. Namely, that the changing nature of societies over historical time due to the types of energy they had at their disposal, and the rising capacity for individual and societal needs to be met, can be mapped. However, the most useful interpretation provided by this perspective may be whether this trajectory of progress (from the past through to now) likely can and will extrapolate, and what the implications might be of it not doing so. To frame this, we might need to think about a concept which is gaining increasing traction in discussion of the global predicament: polycrisis.
Polycrisis describes the manifold and interlinked risks and potential crises that appear to be developing throughout the world, and which could overshadow the coming years and decades. As the world situation potentially becomes steadily more defined by this, the risk rises that expansive energy systems (and other societal systems they underpin) may be increasingly vulnerable to reductions and failures in capacity and function. This is largely because the underpinning systems of high-energy modernity are increasingly agents of their own downfall, due to factors including (but not limited to) dwindling economic reserves of fossil fuels, accelerating greenhouse gas emissions associated with their operation, and the impacts of rising geopolitical tension on the implementation of newer and greener technologies.
Should such a predicament arise, whether progressively or abruptly, it could result in significant sections of global society being rapidly driven down multiple levels of the Hierarchy of Needs. Put another way, the lifestyles many of us have come accustomed to, and in many cases reliant on, could swiftly and irreversibly change. More significantly, the focus of many people’s lives would likely have to re-orientate to the provision of more basic needs that had previously been provided by those systems. It could in essence be a reversion to past timeframes where esteem and belonging, and even food, shelter and safety were not so readily obtained.
Beyond just the provision of physical and financial resources, these underpinning systems have provided the basis for much of the civility and social progress (e.g., civil rights for women and minorities, as described above) in recent decades; this has been enabled in part because society has become less self-centred and more altruistic. The capacity for these gains has been possible as long as the more basic needs of large parts of the population have been ‘taken care of’ in the background by societal systems. Failure or degradation of high-energy modernity could therefore drive shifts in societies towards more selfish, less civil behaviours, which could act as a feedback which further drives polycrisis conditions.
It may be that much of the shift towards the political right in many western nations in recent years is related to the changes in the lives of many citizens; societal systems have progressively degraded and failed in widening parts of those societies, and the focus for many citizens has by necessity shifted to more fundamental needs. People in these societies who are genuinely worried about whether an unexpected cost could see them lose their homes, or where the next meal is coming from, are demonstrably less likely to vote for those politicians focusing on things like gender fluidity (a need associated with the higher levels of the Hierarchy of Needs) than those promising the return of cheap groceries and energy, however unrealistic those promises may be.
What Should We Do?
The model presented here is that the higher parts of the Hierarchy of Needs are closely correlated with high-energy modernity and its underlying globe-spanning systems, therefore the logical response to the risk of reversion to lower parts could be to seek to maintain, expand and intensify these systems. Proponent of such philosophies (such as eco-modernists) would argue that this would surely secure the existing benefits of high-energy modernity, and then extend it to all people globally. At first glance, seeking to extend high energy, developed lifestyles to the whole human population could seem to be a just thing to aim for.
However, the feasibility of extending the levels of resource consumption currently seen in the developed world to eight billion people is doubtful, and would soon drive the further breaching of planetary boundaries to a dangerous extent. Furthermore, multiple aspects of developed world lifestyles, far from guaranteeing the achievement of Self-Actualisation and other types of fulfilment, are instead increasingly making more and more their adherents acutely unhealthy and unhappy at the same time as mortgaging the future of the planet. We may therefore need to think about whether there’s a more nuanced relationship between high-energy modernity and the ‘good life’.
Calculations have shown that modern lifestyles this could be universally achieved on far less energy than is consumed in developed countries; an annual per capita energy consumption figure well below that in the counties with the most energy-intensive lifestyles could underpin the majority of the metrics that define modernity. Aiming for this figure globally would give underdeveloped parts of the world the ‘space’ to improve lifestyles and achieve the upper levels of the Hierarchy of Needs whilst driving down the bloated consumption of the developed world. Concepts such as Doughnut Economics further underpin this by providing a structure in which a ‘social foundation’ and an ‘ecological ceiling’ bound a ‘sweet spot’ for general human flourishing.
It could therefore be possible to provide the benefits of modernity to all, with the freedoms to seek Self-Actualisation and other higher needs, without the downside of mass energy consumption and planetary destruction. Although we are clearly a long way from achieving such an idealised situation at global scale (though some parts of the world are much closer than others), this could be our best hope against a future mass ‘slide down’ the Hierarchy of Needs. This is especially urgent as the accompanying lurch towards more extreme politics and weakening of civil society, which could occur in that scenario, could well become major contributors to future growing polycrisis situations.
It’s clear that not everyone achieves any form of Self-Actualisation even where widespread high-quality energy has been available, nor that it was impossible in the eras leading to this one where it wasn’t. In reality, achieving this is unique journey for every individual as they identify what it means to them and strive for this in their lives, but the current generalised application of the ‘sledgehammer’ of high-energy modernity to drive it at mass scale, will likely deliver increasingly mixed success as we head into the future. Whatever model replaces the current one in providing comfortable, well-nourished, safe and stable societies will clearly need a lot of work to define and drive, but should clearly aim to achieve these things without the need for lots of shiny but unsustainable toys. Time is short, but there’s no time like the present to get started.
[1] Clearly not all people and societies have access to all of these to the same extent in the modern era due to disparities in wealth etc., but this refers more to whether these things exist in current society, rather than levels and distributions of access.
[2] This refers to energy used within the body via metabolic processes.
[3] This refers to energy used in a controlled manner outside the body, and is a capability which is essentially unique to humans.
