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The last 150 years have amounted to such a cavalcade of wonders and technological marvels that we’ve literally programmed ourselves to expect it will… - James Howard Kunstler
" "The last 150 years have amounted to such a cavalcade of wonders and technological marvels that we’ve literally programmed ourselves to expect it will continue indefinitely. This sequence of events — the telephone, the light bulb, electricity in every home, airplanes, motion pictures, television, the computer, and thousands of other conveniences to human life—programmed us to think there’s an endless supply of technological magic that can overcome anything. I think we’re heading into a time-out from technological progress as we’ve known it—and by that, I mean just the way I’ve described it, the expectation of endless magic. And I think that will come as an enormous shock to our culture.
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About James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.
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[Globalism's] demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. As markets close, societies will turn increasingly to import replacement[s] for sheer economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and... by more intensive... labor as oil and natural gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all... the... relationships... that we have taken for granted as permanent will be radically changed [...]. Life will become intensely and increasingly local.
Because… systems are self-organizing in the face of circumstance, the big questions are how much disorder must we endure as things change, and how hard will we struggle to continue a particular way of life with no future? […] The… economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not high-tech, […] “information,” or “services,” or space travel, […] tourism, or finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labor.
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Roman architecture would have been impossible without the complex socioeconomic platform of [the] empire. The medieval social platform for northern European life was less elaborate and… less complex. Compare these two historical cases with the complexity of social and economic organization that allows oil to be extracted from the ground, refined to gasoline, transported six thousand miles, and used in a highly engineered, fine-tuned machine called a car, [to be] driven on a six-lane freeway. If the social and economic platform fails, how long before the knowledge base dissolves? Two hundred years from now, will anyone know how to build or even repair a 1962 Chrysler slant-six engine? Not to mention a Nordex 1500 kW wind turbine? […] The existing knowledge in basic physics and chemistry is so widespread that it is likely to persist quite a while into the future and provide a foundation for doing more with less than, say, the people of the eighteenth century were able to do with their more limited knowledge.
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