[Peakoil] Collapse of the shiny pretty things

[Alex Pollard]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [roeoz] Collapse of the shiny pretty things
From:    "MikeS" <mstasse at yahoo.com>
Date:    Mon, March 19, 2012 08:43
To:      roeoz at yahoogroups.com
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Collapse of the shiny pretty things

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/03/14/notes031412.DTL

All the green initiatives in the world combined with all your good
intentions intermixed with a million heartfelt promises to do better, all
the environmental summit agreements and all the solar panels and recycled
toothbrushes and spending all those hours sorting plastic from glass and
carefully rinsing your mustard bottles?

Not helping. Or rather, not helping much, given how it appears we would
need, according to recent measures, 1.5 Earths to sustain our current rate
of consumption, and you can point to China and India all you want but
they're far from the primary culprits (that would be, of course, us) and
anyway the odds are very good you're pointing to them on your iPad and
your smart phone as you sit at a fine cafe gorging on five times more food
than the average Hindu eats in a year.

It absolutely cannot be sustained much longer, is what they're (still)
saying, this rapaciousness, this constant craving for more. They say we're
pushing the planet to her absolute breaking point quicker than ever, no
really we are, and in fact she's actually now well past the breaking point
in many categories and has run out of many natural resources, ores and
precious minerals and essential planetary nutrients, not to mention
thousands of animal species and sufficient fresh water and nuanced human
thinking. The oceans? Don't even start.

This is the current reality: The hardcore global meltdown discussed 50,
20, ten years ago? The great recoil? No longer just a possibility. It's
happening now. It's already underway, you just don't feel it yet because
we're so goddamn wealthy we can cushion the blow with cash credit cards
and cheap foreign labor and oh my God this artisanal boutique coffee at $5
a cup is ridiculously overrated. But never mind that now.

What's that you say? You've heard it all before? The end is nigh and
civilization as we know it is on track for serious collapse, meltdown,
infrastructure implosion unless -- and this might be the biggest unless in
modern world history -- unless there's a major and they do mean major
overhaul of how culture, greed and entitlement operate? Sure you have. So
did the Romans.

And there's your main culprit, by the way: Greed culture. Consumerism run
wild. Ravaging and raping the planet's resources faster and faster because
the population is still growing like a weed; after all, everyone loves
better food, new cars and shiny bleepy sexy iStuff because, well, who
wouldn't? It's totally pleasurable, even magical.

Except when it's not. Except when seven billion people are all craving and
clawing for the same shiny things, except when stunning gadget-making
factories in China employ nearly one million people and still can't hire
people fast enough, except when everything we've been told we should love,
crave and buy uses copper and nickel, petroleum and a billion gallons of
fresh water to manufacture.

Hence, zombies. Hence, Rick Santorum's sad little existence, his and his
followers' blind faith in an angry, self-hating God to save us all from
His own creation.

Hence, gruesome end times scenarios, apocalypse porn and a new reality
show called "Doomsday Preppers" -- or was that "Doomsday Bunkers"? -- all
about numbly misanthropic, unbathed white nutballs in mostly Podunk towns
readying themselves for the end of the world by stockpiling canned meat,
coddling large firearms and training themselves in hand-to-zombie combat
as they feed their twitchy kids stuff they killed with a crossbow in the
driveway. Neat.

Problem is, save for the nutcases and the think tanks, and maybe few
environmental blogs, no one really believes it. No one seriously thinks
society can collapse completely. After all, there's so much wealth in the
world that first-world nations like America can cover the gushing wounds
with sheer economic force and Band-Aids made of even more shiny pretty
things. What a weird world.

What's more, it's far more comforting to remember that culture and society
operate more on a fluxive continuum, the world adapting and revising
itself on the fly to meet major downturn or roadblock. Despite our best
efforts to destroy ourselves, despite our fantasy of the Singular
Cataclysmic Event, we are still part of the larger organism of life, we
are still wildly ingenious and flexible when we need to be. We're just not
that easy to get rid of. Yet.

Is the question getting louder? Is the wolf breathing ever closer to the
door? What will it take? What's really required for massive cultural
upheaval and a return to simpler and more thoughtful, more sustainable,
less rapacious way of life? Everyone guesses, but no one seems to know.
Because it's never happened before.

Wait, that's not quite true. If we're forced and coerced for the right
reasons, we can make massive change and sacrifice on a large scale,
relatively quickly. WWII forced a dramatic overhaul in the American way of
life in an instant. September 11 did the same for dramatically different
reasons. What else you got? Hurricanes? Earthquakes? Snarky hackers taking
out the power grid? Sure, for awhile. Until we rebuild, Wal-Mart re-opens,
the Wi-Fi comes back online, Amazon can deliver again and everything is
right with the world.

But herein lies the problem: Never before in human history, to my
knowledge and I'd be happy to be proven wrong, have we made a change, a
massive cultural transformation of everything we believe and love about
capitalism and the great art of owning stuff, simply because it was the
right thing to do, simply because the moral compass was going absolutely
haywire and enough scientists, think tanks and spiritual masters said we'd
better, or else.

What, light bulbs? Organic hot dogs? The Prius? Sure. But I mean, large
scale. An entire reworking of the school system. Value system. A
ground-up, top-down overhaul of how it all works and how much you really
need, really and true, to be healthy and happy and loved. It's very
doubtful it's much more than you have now. It's not nearly as much as you
think.

Obama, in the early, utopian gasps of his presidency, made a few inspiring
gestures toward a serious overhaul of energy and education. Then he found
out just how hateful and nasty Congress and the Republicans can be, which
occurred at about the same moment the rest of us realized just how
infuriatingly moderate and cautious Obama really is. Then it slowly
dawned: the Great Shift probably won't come from government after all.

Here is the question of our day: Does it take a cataclysm? It takes a wake
up call so massive and deadly there is nothing else to be done but make
ferocious and painful change? Or can it be induced by something more calm
and deeply felt, a flip and turn in the soul, an intimate spiritual
awakening writ large? What's it going to take? I don't know, either, but
whatever it is, it really might require some intense sacrifice on the part
of -- whoa, wait a second. Is that the new iPad? Wow. Pretty.