Wednesday, December 10, 2008

The Long Emergency: Do our big heads need a BIG SHAKE?

I continue to read The Long Emergency, and learn as I go (re what could happen as oil, electricity and factory farm food supplies decline).

As fuels that undergird our lifestyle dry up every human will be affected.


[Oil charts and excellent link]

“The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plenitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years.” [pg 7]

Is our best hundred years ending?

Is the current BIG SHAKE to our economic and environmental network a sign we should reduce spending and production of unnecessary goods to a minimum?


I call it the BIG SHAKE because that is what our heads need. If we think that driving our current economic model harder is the answer we’re wrong.

I agree with Emergency’s author J. Kunstler when he says, “The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, as some seem to believe it was, but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era.”

Should we be saying, “Everybody. Out of the pool?”

.

Do you think about 'life with less, or very little, oil?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I live in an amish "neighbourhood" and often envy how smart they have been. Although I really wouldn't want to spend the entire day washing everyone's clothes by hand, I am practicing baking in my wood cookstove.

I did give up my car a month ago (with the foresight that it may be increasingly more difficult to unload it). But I'm a little ashamed of the gas guzzlers that my hubby chooses to drive... a terrible addiction to old land rovers I'm afraid.

And I'm becoming more like my father... "turn off the lights", "turn down the heat", "turn off the faucet" but for entirely different reasons than he did (he was just frugal).

G. Harrison said...

the amish and mennonites in my former hometown of Norwich will survive a downturn much better than many other folks.

living small isn't in our nature but is a learned habit, I think. Having frugal parents (I can relate to that) helps in many ways.

I can say, "I'll just live without or downsize" more easily because I know what it means by their example.

cheers,

gord h.