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TOD Book Review: World Made by Hand
Robert Rapier, The Oil Drum
… In JHK’s latest book – World Made by Hand – he shares his vision of life after oil. It’s a far cry from the future I imagined as a child; a future in which man was conquering the galaxy and we were all flying around like the Jetsons. The future JHK evokes resembles the Wild West of 150 years ago – except with a few modern touches surviving.
The book is set in upstate New York (JHK’s home state) in the fictional town of Union Grove. In this world, life is very hard. There are no cars, electricity is rarely on, wars have wiped out major U.S. cities (Washington D.C. was wiped out on my birthday, 12/21), religion has made a resurgence, warlords carve out territory, and lawlessness is rampant. But communities are much tighter, the food is healthier, neighbors lend a helping hand, and people have to be a lot more self sufficient. I believe these latter aspects of the future world represents a future that JHK would like to see.
As with his previous book [The Long Emergency], this one caused me to think about possibilities I had not previously considered. I spent a lot of my time pausing to evaluate whether I felt like a particular scenario was likely. I think if you accept the key premise – that no more oil is available – then the future he envisions is probably pretty close to the mark. Oil provides all kinds of conveniences that we take for granted, and I doubt the average person realizes how different their world would be if the taps dried up. Yet that is the world that JHK has produced in this novel.
But that’s not the way I think things will play out.
(1 May 2008)
The Day the Gas Dried Up
Julian Darley, Global Public Media
“You know what’s worse than a slow computer?” a professor in Texas once asked his class. “No computer.” He was telling the class about his son who was complaining that his processor wouldn’t go fast enough. Now many Americans are complaining that gasoline prices are too high as they crest the astronomical price of four dollars a gallon. They might spare a thought for the Scottish who would be grateful to pay $8.30 a gallon, if only they could get it. For rationing and actual dry gas stations have arrived in what was once an early engine of the Industrial Revolution and later a major oil exporter, while the government warns against the spectre of panic buying and hoarding.
… Scotland will no doubt soon be back online and things will be back to normal. Or so it will seem. But this may yet be a portent of how the decline of petroleum may unfold in the industrialized world – not smoothly or predictably, or with gently rising prices, but with sudden supply shocks, administered from unexpected places, such as Scots striking over pensions or a fire at a single refinery. When a long and complex supply chain is stretched to too tight, it doesn’t take much to break it.
… The deeper lesson is that unfortunately many of our systems, both of thinking and supply, require multiple serious shocks before they begin to respond by considering change at an infrastructural level. From one point of view, this is actually sensible since we do want to safeguard our food and water supplies for instance, but when we are really undergoing an epochal shift, that inertia becomes dangerous and tends to block change. If this speculative and not very cheerful analysis has any validity, then it may yet be useful in this way: considering the very possibility of ‘necessary serial shocks’ may reduce the number of serious shocks necessary for systemic change to be brought forward. Furthermore, we may be able to begin to plan earlier and test those plans in more environments than might be possible if many supply chains are broken later on.
So as the Texan computer professor was implying, it would be much better to respond positively and creatively to the system slowing down than wait till parts of it stop altogether, but we have to see the slowing as the ending of a whole way of doing things rather than just another dip in the business as usual cycle. Climate change has turned that perception corner, but peak oil still has some way to go.
(30 April 2008)
Julian Darley is founder and director of Post Carbon Institute and Global Public Media.
Food, fuel, finance: The world’s crises are inescapably intertwined
Edward M. Gomez, San Francisco Chronicle
The wacky American comedienne Phyllis Diller used to ask at the end of her litanies of side-splitting, self-deprecating one-liners, in a gravel-rattling voice: “And you think you’ve got problems?”
Right now, anyone who is awake and paying attention (that rules out bubble-insulated, “What, me worry?” George W. Bush) knows that the whole world is facing some very serious problems, that many of them are interconnected, and that many of them do not suggest any easy or quick solutions. The subprime-mortgage and related credit crisis, climate change, the weak U.S. dollar, bigger demands for oil, increasing food shortages, environmental pollution, biological hazards like bird flu and costly, endless, unnecessary wars – many of the world’s biggest problems nowadays are global in their impacts, even if they sometimes first emerge in what appear to be very local, perhaps limited contexts.
Edward M. Gomez, a former U.S. diplomat and staff reporter at TIME, has lived and worked in the U.S. and overseas, and speaks several languages. He has written for The New York Times, the Japan Times and the International Herald Tribune.
(29 April 2008)
Conversations with History – James Gustave Speth (Video)
Harry Kreisler, University of California-Berkeley via YouTube
Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
James Gustave Speth, Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Yale Professor James Gustav Speth for a discussion of his career in the environmental movement. Professor Speth traces his changing perspective on the appropriate response to the environmental crisis. Concluding that only a radical transformation of capitalism will save the planet for future generations, he outlines the changes in consciousness and in the political agenda that will be required.
globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/
(2 April 2008)
Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable
Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist via Climate Ark
DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?
Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see “Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?”). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can – we must – act now to keep disaster at bay.
(2 April 2008)
