A harrowing but ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of the age of oil, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age explores the approaching end of an industrial civilization based on cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy. Rather than the sudden catastrophes imagined by so many social critics today, The Long Descent explores the possibility that our civilization is facing the well-worn path of gradual, uneven decline that so many other cultures have followed in their time, and proposes concrete steps to deal with a future very different from the ones our cultural narratives lead us to expect.