Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization
Who’s Afraid of the Great Reset?
Saturday, November 6th, 2021In a recent piece I said, “Great Reset narratives reveal that transnational capital and national ruling elites realize the implications of degrowth. Hence, they are planning degrowth for us that preserves growth and prosperity for them.” Because their agenda calls for a major systemic shift in resource allocation, a centralized digital currency and other draconian policies [...]
What props up the delusion of growth paradigm?
Sunday, September 19th, 2021The general trend in the global economy has been toward lower growth and productivity in the last half century. This trend is easily explained in biophysical economics as due to 1) increasing scarcity of finite resources due to depletion, itself the result of massive consumption in the modern age, and 2) erosion of carrying capacity [...]
End Games of Modern Civilization: false flag scare strategies and global cultural revolutions
Monday, May 10th, 2021Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it… – Santayana
…First as tragedy, then as farce. – Karl Marx
Modern civilization is an interactive and interdependent whole that ties together, however loosely, specific energy drivers, technologies, physical and social structures, ways of living and cultural beliefs and values. Elements distinctive of this whole [...]
Polarization in crisis: Nazi Germany and US today
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021Anna Segher’s short stories and especially her novel of political imprisonment and escape, The Seventh Cross, explore a progressive fracture of German society in the 1930s caused by the rise of the Nazi party. Reading her painstaking descriptions of where the ripple effects of the polarization catch individuals and whole social networks evokes constant parallels [...]
Farm restoration – a Downeast Maine story
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021More a set of recalled vignettes than a systemic history, this essay will at least capture some of my photo archive in an explanatory framework.
Property purchase and rebuilding
As we drove up to the top of Ridge Rd. in Robbinston to the last visit on our hunt for a retirement farm in Maine, the vista that [...]
A holistic view of catabolic collapse
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” ~ H.L. Mencken
The graphic view of catabolic collapse as a serpent eating its tail was familiar to the ancients. Descriptions of collapse of industrial society [...]
Scenarios of Degrowth
Wednesday, November 25th, 2020Prosperity in the Western world (aka the American Way of Life) has been in decline for decades, and no government since Nixon has done anything significant about it. Nor could they, in the long run. As any oil geologist knows, it is all about the end of cheap energy. All policies attempted simply to kick [...]
The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival
Tuesday, November 17th, 2020Histories of peasant life that characterize it as nasty, brutish and short ignore the vast variety around the world of peasant quality of life and attendant differences in environment, social organization and culture. Differences of degree of overlordship alone range from several layers of overlords to complete autonomy. It is just this great variety, the [...]
Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society
Thursday, July 9th, 2020Near the end of the modern age, sustainability assessment of the economic activities of modern society has encountered two problems, one physical, the other cultural. The discovery of a dense, high quality energy source had led to an explosion of human use of the planet’s raw materials and facilitated invention of new technologies, which in [...]
Human designs for ecosystem management and survival after the oil era
Saturday, January 18th, 2020All societies in history have relied on the land and its plant and animal resources. The superstructure of high technologies and complex forms of social organization like cities that fossil energy has made possible only conceal our essential reliance on the land. As access to the dense, high quality forms of energy in fossil fuels [...]
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