The problems of peak oil ebb and flow in my awareness. Sometimes I feel panicky and other times it’s hardly a blip on my radar. Right now I’m somewhere in between.
In the end, it all comes down to finding a balance. Neither isolation nor immersion in major cities; neither paranoia nor apathy. Civilization probably won’t crash in one huge fiery explosion, but we ought to be prepared for crises amidst a steady decline. The middle way is best.
Above all, we should be aware that this is a natural process. Just as complex living beings live and die, so do civilizations. The time of industrial civilization is almost over. The organism that has been fed by oil is dying and transforming into something else. We’re going to be a part of that. Kind of exciting.
Anyway, here’s an article about it by John Michael Greer, current Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, about the diagnosis and treatment of the peak oil situation. It echoes many other articles out there, but I like the balance in this presentation of it.
With the coming of Peak Oil and the beginning of long-term, irreversible declines in the availability of fossil fuels (along with many other resources), modern industrial civilization faces a wrenching series of unwelcome transitions. This comes as a surprise only for those who haven’t been paying attention. More than thirty years ago, the Club of Rome’s epochal study The Limits to Growth pointed out that unless something was done, a global economy based on fantasies of perpetual growth would collide disastrously with the hard limits of a finite planet sometime in the early twenty-first century.
The early twenty-first century is here, nothing was done, and the consequences are arriving on schedule. The road that would have brought industrial society through a transformation to sustainability turned out to be the road not taken. The question that remains is what we can do with the limited time we have left.
