industrial economy – Page 8

Apocalypse or extinction?

October 15, 2009

Your medical doctor informs you: “You need to stop all industrial activities immediately, or you’ll be dead in twenty years. And so will your five-year-old child. You might die anyway — after all, nobody gets out alive — but your death is guaranteed if you do not stop relying on fossil fuels for travel, heating and cooling, water from the tap, and food from the grocery store.”
Naturally, you go straight from the clinic to the nearest store. You need liquor, and time to ponder whether the trade-off is worth it.

Tarnished gold

October 9, 2009

I suppose the king of Norway could endow me with the Nobel Prize for Medicine. After all, I’ve done no harm, thereby adhering to the first rule of medical practice. As a consequence, I demonstrate great promise.
But of course there would be no political reason to hand me a Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee is nothing if not political, and there is no more political act than awarding the Nobel Peace Prize.

Whack!

August 29, 2009

The next case of $120 oil, assuming we get there before the industrial economy falls into the abyss, will be brutal for an already over-stretched American consumer. Banks are falling like dominoes on a mule cart over the bumpy terrain of declining energy supplies. When will the lights go out?

A Typical Reaction

August 23, 2009

Occasionally when people talk to me about my new life in and around the mud hut, their conclusions include one of the following statements: (1) You’re selfishly wasting your talent as an excellent and inspiring teacher. You should be teaching at the university, saving students, instead of preparing for economic collapse. (2) Don’t be silly. The United States cannot suffer economic collapse.
My responses go something like this:

Bring on the doomers

August 12, 2009

As I’ve pointed out before, I’m proud to be a doomer. I’ve never minded the negative connotation and rapid dismissal by mainstream folks. But it turns out there’s more to doomerism than I knew nearly a year ago. Kathy McMahon has developed a clever classification system for doomers. I’m easily classified as the ecosophic action-oriented variety.

Twilight of the Machines

July 8, 2009

“The crisis deepens. Everyday life is plundered as much as the physical environment. Our predicament points us toward a solution. The voluntary abandonment of the industrial mode of existence is not self-renunciation, but a healing return.”

Power Outage

June 8, 2009

As should be clear by now, industrial humans -- or at least our "leaders" -- have chosen not door number one (ecological collapse) and not door number two (economic collapse), but both of the above.