Gravity

As I kid I remember the cautionary tale well where Moses leads the Israelites (formerly slaves) into the desert (into hardship, but freedom). Time and again he delivers them, and after a certain amount of time they forget, they second guess the 'miracle', and want to return to the comfort of their slavery. This short term memory expresses very well the human condition, and it's inability to function using reserves, not to exhaust it's credit balance, to hold something back. This bankruptcy of the Human Race has exacted a massive toll on Nature, and balance is about to be restored (which will exact a terrible toll I'm afraid to say, on ourselves.

We're in a consensus trance. None are really thinking about this because none of us are uncomfortable, and frankly, it may seem irrelevant. Especially when even the news media are not really talking about, neither are our presidents. Thus, it's not part of our present reality right? If you think it's irrelevant, that it's in the future, consider the present converging catastrophes (all present in our lifestimes):

peak oil and the onset of global economic meltdown
overpopulation (now at 6.5 billion, was at 1 billion before the use of oil to finance, amongst other things, the Green Revolution)
scarce fresh water resources
global warming (exacerbated by alternative cheap fossil fuels like coal)
the spread and beginning of new virusses (AIDS and other pandemics like Marburg regrouping, the world is due for another superbug, a superflu like the one that rose up and wiped out millions about 80 years ago

I've been reading The Long Emergency, and I am even more alarmed, and convinced we all need to be. This is not conspiracy theory stuff, it's kind've insight which we've lost because our lives seem so normal because we've been born into the cheap oil era. This era of jets, cargo pants, rock 'n roll and ecstacy is nothing like the lives our great grandfather's had (who probably didn't even own or see an automobile. We like to believe we are omnipotent, because we fly, we've been to the moon. But all this was paid for by oil, by millions of years of bottled up sunlight. It can't be substituted quickly, and the experts say it's here, and we've run out of time (and even now we're loathe to face it). Whatever we use in its place will require oil investments to develop new technology, and stability. It will not replace the massive resources that went into setting all this up, it might replace a fraction. It's all about to topple down, this huge mountain of cards.

If there are survivors, what will they think of us?

Well they might wonder how we managed to get ourselves into this mess. How did Germany start the 2nd World War? Not on purpose. They thought they could get away with one more land acquisition, then another, then Poland and then BAM! We think we can get away with a few more years living the way we're living. No. It's gone, and our future is accelarating to meet us.

Did no one see this coming? Not a single person? What were they doing?
(Watching infomercials, reality tv, movies, shopping, commuting to work - yes, amazingly all this seemed normal to them.)
What's that? You mean none of those people were growing food? How did they manage to get to where they did?
Oil. Oil is the reason behind this anomalous leap in man's consumption of the Earth, and with oil gone, guess what happens, Nature steps in and with surgical position, using diseases, the weather and our own behaviour, we get wiped back to Pre Oil. In the end we revert to mere farmers like all those, and all those civilisations that preceded us. We didn't learn the lesson in time.

Oil underpins the 100 years and more of fantastic abundance, and no one, not the investors or even the oil companies want to talk about 'depletion'. It scares away money. This is the world where image and appearance is everything, and reality and fact, and consequence, play second fiddle. Nevertheless even the oil companies themselves are downsizing, merging, contracting and fewer refineries are being built. Is oil superabundant, will we keep finding more of it? No. It's finished. What we have now is pretty much it, and what we've used was the half that was fairly easy and cheap to extract. The other half is more difficult to extract, and more expensive. It doesn't make sense to use a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, and that of course represents the very end of oil.

This is where one religion believes they are exclusively right, so does another, and they fight tooth and dagger, an eye for an eye, until all are blind and deaf and dumb. But whatever your beliefs, and however strongly you believe in them, as Kunstler says, 'gravity effects everyone'.
How the hell did we manage to get to 6.5 billion people with these beliefs and attitudes.
So obesity became an epidemic in one country, while people were starving in another?

And after all this, I wonder, am I being pessimistic?
I recieved this email from a friend of mine:

I don't think you are pessimistic. The Bible tells us that there will be end-times and also that the earth and the animals will start to cry out for God to return and restore the earth, so I think all of that is in motion and clear with what we are seeing around us. I think oil will run out, I am not sure what will replace it though, but would think that the human race has evolved to such an extent that it is just a matter of time until we find a substitute. However, overall I think the resources of the world will run out and a lot of bad things can happen ,like desease etc. I think there is a threshold for the amount of people that could sustain themselves on this planet and we are going to exceed that number soon. So the end will come and maybe its not in our lives, but it will come.

Yes, we are at that threshold now. This is a sensible and intelligent and successful friend of mine, yet that paragraph makes me worry even more. We're asleep in our rituals and beliefs, in a world in our minds, not a real world, but one we believe in.
Believing in an apocalypse is not the way to find a way through it. We need to act, to do, not to wait for disaster as though it is our salvation.

Here are some suggestions:
- conserve energy (use a bicycle instead of a car, use public transport, walk and get used to it)
- learn a skill, building, cooking, any handyman kind of thing
- invest in alternative energy (still very expensive and still only capable of producing relatively small amounts of energy)
- be alert, spread awareness
- invest in local agriculture and competencies (not supermarkets)
- buy property close to fresh water and farmland, and away from huge conflagrations of peeople, and beyond suburbian sprawl
- grow a vegetable garden
- maintain a healthy lifestyle

Can you add any to these?