"The long-term implication of peak oil is that when oil production peaks
and begins to decline all of this increased societal complexity that
comes from replacing human and animal muscle power with fossil fuel
energy will have to move back in the direction of our pre-petroleum
living arrangements. We will not be able to sustain the level of
societal complexity that exists now ... I agree with John Michael Greer that we are living through what he calls a catabolic collapse, which is to say that society is slowly eating itself as it goes through a stair step progression of collapse, partial recovery and reorganization, and that this process takes place over a couple of centuries. It has been happening for most of my lifetime, and it will continue through the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren. This view doesn’t mean that we won’t encounter hardships, shocks and discontinuities. I certainly believe that we will, but I don’t think that we are headed for a Mad Max world in which people who once made their livings selling insurance or working at Walmart turn to living as medieval serfs, or roving bandits ... If we remain fixated on visions of epochal changes like the ones I just
mentioned, then we?re likely to completely miss the actual trends that
really do create extreme disruption on the time scale of an individual
human lifetime ... I think that the people in the Transition Network, and other people who
understand the implications of peak oil and are not scaremongering to
grab attention, understand that we have inherited an extravagant and
wasteful lifestyle and that material consumption, beyond the level that
satisfies our physical needs, does not create happiness. We can
simultaneously decrease our material consumption and increase our
quality of life."
Zum Artikel von Michel Bauwens, erschienen im P2P Foundation's Blog (9. Januar 2014) »
Zum Artikel von Michel Bauwens, erschienen im P2P Foundation's Blog (9. Januar 2014) »
