Thursday, September 15, 2011
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Are you familiar with the work of James Howard Kunstler? His podcast will make you feel better about this stuff.
ReplyDeleteI am. I read two of his books. Kunstler is interesting, but not my favorite spokesman on the subject.
ReplyDeleteToday, to teach your kids how to grow food, is not a luxury you have. So your future looks rather good, considering contact with nature and the knowledge about the true conection between the energy, where it comes from, and what it really costs.
ReplyDeleteDont see it all like a bad thing in itself.
Used to fear this kind of stuff, but you have to consider spiritual work alongside information retrieval, or you'll be blind to the good things in the caos.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. I've been thinking of going woofing to learn the basics of organic farming. These things are going to be pretty damn important before long.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks/worries about this stuff. While people consume more and more energy, resources, and space, there will come a time (probably soon) when our planet just cannot sustain us anymore. What's worse: our world leaders can't or are unwilling to take the lead and try to remedy this. I'm convinced that my children will inherit a very different world from the one we live in now. *sigh* I'm depressed... very powerful comic, though.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is: regardless of how dire the situation is, the solutions that are coming out of the urbanization movement are GOOD ones.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to say, These figures and Ideas are a bit more complicated than they seem. I don't think the population levels themselves are a problem. The US has had a birth rate roughly equal to it's deathrate. Any population increases we take lately are due to immigration.
ReplyDeleteSee, as the average education and standard of living go up, the drive to have children goes down.
The REAL kick in the ass is going to be China. They think their citizens deserve the same quality of life as ours, and maybe thats true, So they are driving towards a first world status... but there is a billion of them. More then 3 times the population we have here in the states. Considering that we (5% of worlds population) use 25% of its energy and 30% of it's resources, think how much we'll collectively (20+% world pop) use when china lives like we do.
Interesting, these commments run the gamut:
ReplyDeleteThere is no problem
Even if there is a problem, god will help you deal with it
Even if there is a problem, man will overcome the problem
There is a serious problem, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
I Recommend you read the posts at this site. Start with 2010 posts and work your way forward in time. Brilliant writing about the coming collapse.
ReplyDeletehttp://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
6 months ago, I was in the same situation. Then I discovered I was not alone and many people started to do something to survive the collapse. They are for example the "Transition Towns" (http://www.transitionnetwork.org/). They experiment many solutions like Permaculture (http://permacultureprinciples.com/).
ReplyDeletesee
ReplyDeletechrismartenson.com
massive network of very sane, very thoughtful, very prepared, very diverse people in various stages of preparedness, willing to share their strategies. Little overly focused on money but i find them to be a very inspirational group.
the lesson? join your community and work together. :)
ReplyDeleteI've tried to aggregate some of the best resources related to preparing for the coming collapse. Please see www.MalthusUniversity.com. Hopefully this helps some, and please offer any suggestions for resources/info I may be missing.
ReplyDeletebest,
Anthony Schiano
aka "President Malthus"
Nice, I know a lot of people that feel this way.
ReplyDeleteAM Burns
I believe that less than 1% of the people even think about this type of thing. That 1% is just like all other fringe 1%'ers. Glad that I am not alone wish that I knew more people in my area so that I wouldn't have to try and convert people that I know.
ReplyDeleteExcellent strip. I suffer the same thoughts. It is a heavy burden to understand the reality of our future, especially when most do not care. I highly recommend you check out the Arch Druid Report (mentioned previously). The druid dude understands this completely and provides a simple and helpful vision forward.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it will be a slow crash tied to energy availability. If there is any good news, consider this: we are so wasteful with energy now there are plenty of easy and simple things we can do that will ease the steps down the energy slope.
SG in Virginia
This hit home. Great work man.
ReplyDeleteAnother epic comic. Good work!
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see you pick back up on this plot. Completely solid work!
ReplyDelete"The 8 Emotional Responses to Peak Oil" http://www.chelseagreen.com/content/the-8-emotional-responses-to-peak-oil/ (from The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience by Rob Hopkins.)
ReplyDeletethe decline is going to be steep,
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/8317
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/11/peak-oil-is-history.html
Wow John, you're a true storyteller. I really enjoy your comic!
ReplyDeleteMy wife has the same worries about collapse, she fears the world cannot sustain us much longer. Very nice vertical strip.
ReplyDeletethis is a great topic, and I know the feeling: you wanna be a survivalist, but you do not know where to start, so far the society has provided for us all; how you're gonna grow food, provide basic medical aid for yourself and for your loved ones, seek protection from imminent anarchy - there's just so many practical skills one must learn to survive after civilization collapses. And then you start to wonder whats the point in surviving at all if our world collapses, because we have vested in it our entire purpose: science, progress, art, literature - when all that is gonne, what is there to live for?
ReplyDeleteWe are not going to "run out" of energy -- not until the sun goes out, anyway, which is too far in the future to merit any realistic concern. We might, however, run out of forms that we can put to use.
ReplyDeleteEvery form of energy on Earth, including oil, is a transformation of light from the sun. Here's a quote from Richard Feynman's essay "Judging Books by Their Covers:"
'It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up," I would say. "How did the spring get wound up?" he would ask.
"I wound it up."
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating."
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the sun is shining that all these things are moving." That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.'
It's really a question of human ingenuity -- will we master other energy sources before our supply of fossil fuel runs out? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it's not a question of truly running out of anything.
I've just found your comics and I am so glad that I did. You are amazing. Thank you for making these.
ReplyDelete