Very worth reading. A taste: It’s entirely possible, to be sure, that central banks and governments will be able to jerry-rig another round of temporary supports for the fraying architecture of the global economy, and postpone a crash—or at least drag out the agony a bit longer. It’s equally possible that other dimensions of the crisis of our age can be forestalled or postponed by drastic actions here and now. That said, whether the process is fast or slow, whether the crunch hits now or a bit further down the road, the form of technic society I’ve termed abundance industrialism is on its way out through history’s exit turnstile, and an entire world of institutions and activities familiar to all of us is going with it. It doesn’t require any particular genius or prescience to grasp this, merely the willingness to recognize that if something is unsustainable, sooner or later it won’t be sustained. Of course that’s the sticking point, because what can’t be sustained at this point is the collection of wildly extravagant energy- and resource-intensive habits that used to pass for a normal lifestyle in the world’s industrial nations, and has recently become just a little less normal than it used to be. Those lifestyles, and most of what goes with them, only existed in the first place because a handful of the world’s nations burned through half a billion years of fossil sunlight in a few short centuries, and stripped the planet of most of its other concentrated resource stocks into the bargain. ---- I’ve noted before more than once that the collapse of industrial society isn’t something located off in the nearer or further future; it’s something that got under way a good many years ago, has been accelerating around us for decades, and is simply hitting one of the rougher patches of the normal process of decline and fall just now. Most of the nonserious proposals just referred to start from the insistence that that can’t happen. Comforting in the short term, that insistence is a rich source of disaster and misery from any longer perspective, and the sooner each of us gets over it and starts to survey the wreckage around us, the better. Then we can make camp in the ruins, light a fire, get some soup heating in a salvaged iron pot, and begin to talk about where we can go from here.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:23:06 +0000
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