Principles that appear to govern all systems including human societies were used to consider the time of economic descent ahead. These include the energy laws, the emergy concept, the maximum empower principle, the universal energy hierarchy, the conservation and hierarchical distribution of materials, the spatial organization of centers, and the pulsing paradigm. Population and cities, energy consumption and climate change, agriculture and environment, information and electric power, capitalism and economic policies, structures and materials, human life and standard of living are dealt with in this paper as interconnected aspects of the same problem, i.e. the necessary descent phase of human economies, due to decreasing resource base. We expect much of the resource use, culture and public policy appropriate for the growth period to be replaced with a new set of ethics and policies affecting each scale of time and space during descent. Decisive changes in attitudes and practices can divert a destructive collapse, leading instead to a prosperous way down. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.