Book review: Culture Change by Alexis Zeigler

With superb insight, wisdom and erudition—one is almost tempted to say omniscience—Alexis Zeigler’s Culture Change charts an ambitious course for the future of our civilization. The book calls for a revolution to bring about what Zeigler terms a “conscious culture” capable of responding intelligently to our ecological crisis. (Full book title: Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak Oil, and the End of Empire)

Future perfect: the future is Mayberry, not Mad Max

[Peak oil prophets] are national heroes for sounding the alarm before anyone believed them. They have often been right, and any solar-powered Mayberrys of 2100 should have statues of them in the town square. But their long-held note of dread is useful only to the extent that it inspires people to do something more practical. The world we create will be, up to a point, whatever we were preparing for, and as we enter the opening years of the crisis, it is time we all take a deep breath and talk about what we realistically expect from the future.