Re: SC19

http://www.countercurrents.org/po-church170706.htm

"Down one road lies disaster, down the other utter catastrophe.Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose wisely.".................


The topic of Peak Oil is at present enveloped by a great silence and the public seems unprepared for rational discussion

This reminds me of a comment made by Sherlock Holmes in A. Conan Doyle's story "Silver Blaze."
Inspector Gregory had asked, "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
To this Holmes responded:

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night time."

"The dog did nothing in the night time," said the Inspector.

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

By asking himself what would repress the normal barking instinct of a watchdog, Holmes realized that it must be the dog's recognition of his master as the criminal trespasser.

In a similar way we should ask ourselves what repression keeps us from discussing something as important as survival long term after Peak Oil.

Curious, but understandable - for the foreseeable future I think that our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat. Posterity will be ill served if we do not.

Those who attended Peak Speak 1 in London last year may remember the lifeboat analogy I mentioned.

Greer uses a similar point in his 'The Coming of Deindustrial Society'.

'Imagine that you're on an ocean liner that's headed straight for a well marked shoal of rocks. Half the crew is dead drunk, and the other half has already responded to your attempts to alert them by telling you that you obviously don't know the first thing about navigation, and everything will be all right. At a certain point, you know, the ship will be so close to the rocks that its momentum will carry it onto them no matter what evasive actions the helmsman tries to make. You're not sure, but it looks as though that point is already well past.

What do you do? You can keep on pounding on the door to the bridge, trying to convince the crew of the approaching danger. You can join the prayer group down in the galley; they're convinced that if they pray fervently enough, God will save them from shipwreck. You can decide that everyone's doomed and go get roaring drunk. Or you can go around quietly to the other passengers, and encourage those people who have noticed the situation (or are willing to notice it) to break out the life jackets, assemble near the lifeboats, take care of people who need help, and otherwise deal with the approaching wreck in a way that will salvage as much as possible.

Although there is growing awareness of the problem, there is also widespread ignorance and denial, even by people who should know better.

Mankind has, it seems, an infinite capacity for denial. The evidence is overwhelming that we are in the "overshoot" phase of the industrial life cycle, yet most people and most organizations refuse even to discuss this matter, let alone acknowledge it. The world after the industrial age will be very different from the world of today. For most people on Earth (if mankind escapes extinction), it will be similar to the world of the past millions of years - a primitive, natural environment (although perhaps less bountiful and beautiful than before).

Although most people will not survive the collapse of the industrial age, it will belong, in concept and structure, to those who prepare for the great change that is about to happen

The arrays of skills necessary for people to 'thrive' and not just 'survive' in a non-oil economy are many. Most people do not have the essential skills to reproduce (or even repair) the technology on which we depend today.

We seem to be in a state of delusional thinking and the only thing we're debating is how we're going to keep the cars running without oil.

What I have said above is not, as some one said after my talk last year, to get you all to wear brown underwear. It is to try to show you that, even at this late stage, if we all do not think seriously, realistically and logically about the consequences of our inaction then what I have suggested may well become fact.

We will be faced with the necessity to downscale, rescale and reorganize all the fundamental activities of our daily lives; the way we grow food, the way we conduct commerce, the way we manufacture things and school our children. We must learn to do this tomorrow....at the crack of dawn.

We should seriously think of breaking out the "Life Jackets" and "Manning" the lifeboats, which is as I said last year, at least one step before "deploying" the lifeboats.........................The storm is coming