Running Out

The high price of oil and gasoline has gotten peoples attention. Unfortunately, the aversive reflex response is so far pretty much unmediated by any higher thought. A Congressman back from his district said all his constituents were upset by it and wondered what he was going to do about it. They might as well have asked him how he was going to prevent the Sun from rising tomorrow.

We hear a lot of facile suggestions, but the fact is that there isn't any short term fix, there might not be any long term fixes, and living with the end of cheap oil is going to be painful.

The depletion of this resource is only one symptom of the increasing autotoxicity of our presence on the planet. Many crucial resources are at or near their limit, and there is little public realization of the fact.

This situation is a familiar one for cultures. Human history and prehistory is littered with the corpses of civilizations and other cultures that collapsed due to exhaustion of one or more critical resources. Jared Diamond tackles exactly this subject in his new book Collapse. Our case may not yet be hopeless, but it is dire, and his book has a nice collection of tales of failure and success in trying to adapt to this kind of impending disaster.

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