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By Thurman, on September 1st, 20102010-09-01T23:02:19ZF jS, Y%
 This week, The Witch of Hebron, sequel to James Howard Kunstler’s post petroleum novel, World Made By Hand, began shipping to booksellers worldwide. I wrote the following brief review in January of 2009.
To this day, World Made By Hand remains one of my favorite pieces of fiction and with this week’s release of the sequel, I thought perhaps it might be fitting to republish my original reflections here.
If you haven’t read World Made By Hand, I encourage you to do so, and I hope that if you enjoy it, like me, you’ll look forward to acquiring a copy of The Witch of Hebron very soon.
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World Made By Hand is a first person narrative told by Robert Earle, a former corporate executive turned carpenter, living in a small town in upstate New York a few years into the future and his telling of the events he has lived through from now until then. James Howard Kunstler weaves an interesting and believable tale of the world we may find ourselves living in as oil, the one natural resource that our technology dependent world cannot exist without, becomes harder and harder to acquire.
Kunstler’s characters travel on foot or by horseback, cook and heat their homes with wood, and grow most of their own food. Those who do not possess much needed basic skills such as carpentry, masonry, or medical knowledge, or who do not own large tracts of tillable land find themselves living as peasants, hiring themselves out by day for their manual labor or otherwise indenturing themselves to more powerful land owners. In many ways, society has returned to a form of feudalism. Scavenging has become a lucrative business and bands of robbers and pirates make travel and trade risky endeavors in Kunstler’s vision of the future. Continue reading Book Review: World Made By Hand
By Thurman, on August 20th, 20102010-08-20T19:15:49ZF jS, Y%
Unemployment filings continue to rise as our economy continues to stagnate. Despite some reports to the contrary, the recession is not over yet, and some economists are now talking openly about a “double-dip” recession.
I’m still not convinced we’re in a recession, or that there will ever be any sort of meaningful recovery in terms most of us would recognize. Instead, I believe we may be experiencing the slow death an unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent lifestyle, built upon an economic system that demands sociopathic behavior as a prerequisite for success in business, and a political system unable to divorce itself from the corrupt corporate oligarchy it was designed to serve
As Jim Morrison once sang, “This is the end,” hope you’ve all enjoyed the ride.
An earlier version of the following post was originally published February 15, 2009 and was featured at A World of Progress.
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A while back I read the transcript of a talk given in San Francisco by Dmitry Orlov. The title of Mr. Orlov’s speech was Social Collapse Best Practices. There were a lot of thought provoking ideas tossed out to the audience, but what struck me most was the contrast between the differences in how well prepared to handle economic turmoil the old Soviet Union was in comparison to how American society is to likely to bear a similar challenge.
Dmitry Orlov is in a good position to make such a comparison, having spent the first twelve years of his life living in the USSR, before immigrating to the US. He has traveled back many times since, and thus has a unique perspective from which to observe both societies. Continue reading Gimme That Old Time Religion
By Thurman, on August 15th, 20102010-08-15T21:00:29ZF jS, Y%
In The Long Emergency – Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, James Howard Kunstler details exactly what the peak oil phenomenon is and explains why you, I, and every other citizen of the United States, if not the world should be very, very concerned about it.
Briefly stated, peak oil is the point at which fifty percent of the world’s petroleum has been pumped from the ground. Most experts believe that peak production occurred sometime between 2000 and 2010. From this point onward it will become more and more difficult to supply the petroleum products that almost everything in the modern world depends upon – transportation, agriculture, medicine, energy distribution, plastics…everything.
After relating detailed background information regarding the addiction of our modern civilization to petroleum, its derivatives, and how we got this way, Mr. Kunstler proceeds to make some pretty dire predictions about things that may happen as the lifeblood of industrial civilization runs dry. This book would be worth the cover price for the tremendous amount of historical background and analysis that the author provides.
Eventually, the cost to extract one barrel of oil will exceed its value. Eventually the price of gasoline and every other petroleum based commodity and those dependent upon fossil fuel based transportation to reach the market will outstrip the purchasing power of most people. It’s an ugly scenario. Continue reading Book Review: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler
By Thurman, on August 15th, 20102010-08-15T15:22:27ZF jS, Y%
I run across articles like this one, proclaiming the end of the world as we know it and the collapse of industrial society on a pretty regular basis. They’re usually brimming with doom and gloom, filled with fear-mongering, and it seems to me, often aimed at getting the reader to buy gold, bullets, MRE’s, or some other survivalist oriented products.
There’s nothing wrong with a healthy dose of preparedness and a full ration of skepticism in these troubling times, but it seems to me that if and when the shit really does hit the proverbial fan (and it will, someday), two things that cannot be purchased will be far more important than bullets or bullion – knowledge and community.
Being the socially dysfunctional individual I am, I have no advice to offer regarding community other than that you should probably get to know your neighbors and build at least some sort of minimal relationship based on trust and mutual respect. When it all falls apart, you don’t want to be the outsider in a tight knit community.
The other important, non-material commodity we should all strive to acquire while we can is knowledge – skills and experience in such areas as healing, sanitation, food production and preservation, and many other areas of life currently maintained by advanced technologies. Low-tech solutions, archaic knowledge, and labor intensive skills are far more likely to earn you a meal or a warm place to sleep in a world without machines than a pocket full of gold or silver coins. Continue reading You Can’t Eat Gold
By Thurman, on June 27th, 20102010-06-27T20:15:35ZF jS, Y%
“…faced with what may be the biggest ecological disaster in human history, I’m hearing average Americans up here talk of the Gulf oil “spill” (when they speak of it at all — TV gives the illusion those outside the Gulf region give a shit), in terms of its effect on: (A) the price of seafood; and (B) jobs in tourism and fishing. Only trolls stunted by generations of inbred American style capitalism could do such a thing: reduce a massive ocean dead zone to the cost of a shrimp cocktail or a car payment.” ~ Joe Bageant, June, 2010
Once in a while someone comes along who so eloquently expresses my thoughts and sentiments that I simply want to shut down my laptop and give up my feeble attempts at writing altogether. Who needs me when there are writers like Joe Bageant around. Continue reading Deep Down We’re All Just Inbred Trolls
By Thurman, on November 20th, 20092009-11-21T04:47:36ZF jS, Y%
Modern industrial civilization is more dependent on fossil fuels than most people realize. For instance, most of the electricity in the United States is generated by burning coal. From mountaintop removal, to sulfur dioxide emissions, to ash disposal, coal is perhaps more destructive to the environment than any other fuel we use, but this essay isn’t about coal.
Peak oil is the ugly step-sister of our dependence on coal and these two fossil fuel siblings present the modern world with an almost overwhelming dilemma. Most people are familiar with the connections between fossil fuels, carbon dioxide emissions, and climate change, whether they accept the relationships or not. While it may be too late to prevent many of the negative consequences of climate change; if we move quickly and begin reorienting our lives toward more localized, sustainable ways of living, we may still be able to reduce some of the most negative impacts of peak oil on human civilization.
Continue reading Peak Oil & Climate Change
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Gardening Without Gas
I’m one of those nut jobs that believes there are limits to our natural resources, at least some of them. Solar energy is virtually infinite, but that’s an exception I can live with. I also believe in the fairy tale that is the greenhouse effect and the impact of human industrial activity on the global climate.
Call me crazy but some things just make sense, like the idea that if you spew tons and tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and a bunch of other chemicals into the atmosphere there’s a better than good chance that you’ll eventually upset the balance of nature and alter the cycles and structure of the biosphere.
Another of my favorite “myths” is peak oil, which suggests that there is a finite amount of fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, coal, etc.) in the world and that sooner or later we’ll use up most of it. The other side of this coin is that after we’ve sucked or stripped most of these naturally occurring substances from the subcutaneous layer of the planet’s skin, it will get too expensive too continue doing so while still banking a healthy profit.
Everybody knows profits are the only reason our best and brightest minds bother getting out of bed in the morning, so when the money stops flowing one of two things will be the likely result. Either the extracted petroleum products will be so expensive that most of us will get priced out of the market, or the profit mongers in charge of the operation will find better ways to make obscene amounts of money, the lights will go out, and trucks, trains, and jet planes will cease to deliver the lifestyle we’ve all come to depend on. Continue reading Gardening Without Gas