Learning from Icarus
What if Icarus’ father—knowing his son would fly too close to the sun—had made the wings he designed more resilient?
collapse of industrial civilization
The Buffalo Wind
I’ve talked more than once in these essays about the challenge of discussing the fall of civilizations when the current example is picking up speed right outside the window.
Mr. Toad in Union Grove: Review of A History of The Future by James Howard Kunstler
The novel is an exploration of the process of rebuilding a broken civilization, even as the old continues to decay and collapse in both expected and unexpected ways.
Bottom Up, Top Down
How can we reverse course to avert an unprecedented series of crises that might entail massive human mortality and the more or less permanent crippling of planetary ecosystems?
The End of Employment
Nothing is easier, as the Long Descent begins to pick up speed around us, than giving in to despair—and nothing is more pointless.
A Bargain with the Archdruid
My anomalous position as a writer and speaker on the future of industrial society who holds down a day job as an archdruid has its share of drawbacks, no question, but it also has significant advantages. One of the most important of those is that I don’t have to worry about maintaining a reputation as a serious public figure. That may not sound like an advantage, but believe me, it is one.
6 ways to become more miserable about climate change and peak oil!
There’s plenty of reason for anyone to be depressed these days. Yet, somehow, some people still manage to keep calm and carry on.
Man, Conqueror of Nature, Dead at 408
Man, the conqueror of Nature, died Monday night of a petroleum overdose, the medical examiner’s office confirmed this morning. The abstract representation of the human race was 408 years old.
Deep thought – headlines
•’Sleepwalking to Extinction’: Capitalism and the Destruction of Life and Earth •The story of how greens became energy enemy number one •Collapsing Consciously
Cultural Diversity
Modern societies like cultural diversity, preferably when it is far away, reasonably photogenic and does not inconvenience them politically. They also like to marginalize minority cultures and transform them either into folkloric caricatures or into assimilated ghosts of their former selves. During the last two centuries, modern civilization has absorbed most of Earth’s cultural diversity and is currently quite busy assimilating or destroying the rest while multiplying the subcultures in its midst. It is a typical case of replacing geographical cultural diversity by internal heterogeneity. It had to be expected from societies which had, until recently, accumulated an embarrassing surplus of cheap energy, but that is still a bad idea, and one which will become really problematic as our energetic surplus dries up.
The Beginning of the World
Last Friday was, as I’m sure most of my readers noticed, an ordinary day. Here in the north central Appalachians, it was chilly but not unseasonably so, with high gray clouds overhead and a lively wind setting the dead leaves aswirl; wrens and sparrows hopped here and there in my garden, poking among the recently turned soil of the beds. No cataclysmic earth changes, alien landings, returning messiahs, or vast leaps of consciousness disturbed their foraging. They neither knew nor cared that one of the great apocalyptic delusions of modern times was reaching its inevitable end around them.