At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by Preside… - James Howard Kunstler

Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was.

It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly about when the industrial adventure began to gain traction. It has been inferred from this that a billion people is about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis. World population is now past six and a half billion, having more than doubled since my childhood in the 1950s. The mid-twentieth century was a time of rising anxiety over the “population explosion.” The marvelous technological victory over food shortages, including the “green revolution” in crop yields, accelerated that already robust leap in world population that had begun with modernity. Dramatic improvements in sanitation and medicine extended lives. Industry sopped up expanding populations and reassigned them from rural lands to work in the burgeoning cities. The perceived ability of the world to accommodate these newcomers and latecomers in a wholly new disposition of social and economic arrangements seemed [to] be the final nail in the coffin of Thomas Robert Malthus, the much-abused author of the 1798 [groundbreaking work] An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society.

The lucky suburbanites will be the ones with the forethought to trade in their suburban McHouses for property in the towns and small cities and prepare for a vocational life doing something useful and practical on the small scale.