The circumstances of the Long Emergency will be the opposite of what we currently experience. There will be hunger instead of plenty, cold where ther… - James Howard Kunstler

Inefficient economies are much more complex than efficient ones. Complexity itself can be deceiving. […] Complexity constrains entropy flows with checks and balances. What we take to be man-made artificial complexity (technology) is, paradoxically, a simplification process that increases flows by editing away inefficiencies. [Because our limited knowledge prevents us to process events on the geologic scale, we think that] The ecology of prairie will keep the soil active and healthy indefinitely [but for how long?], while the ecology of a fossil-fuel-subsidized cornfield will leach the soil of useful nutrients and physically erode it in less than a human lifetime. [We think that] The ecology of a pond, with its diverse hierarchies of life and multitude of biological niches and food chains, is much more complex than the Crown Point, New York, trout hatchery with its monoculture offish, its inputs of manufactured fish food, and its staff of attendants cleaning waste out of the cement hatchery impoundments. The natural pond also has more chance of continuing indefinitely into the future [but for how long?]. The built-in constraints of inefficient… economies reduce the flow of potential, often to the point where systems based on inefficient economies last for geologic epochs, not just a few decades in the case of a fish hatchery. Everything that we identify with nature takes the form of inefficient systems. Biogenic or living systems are self-stabilizing. They are self-buffered. Small differences are dampened out. Entropy is stalled within them. They exhibit negative feedback tending toward long-term stability [but for how long?]. Call this condition "negative entropy." Everything we identify with the man-made substitutes for natural bio-economies, that is, technologies, tends toward positive feedback, which is self-amplifying, self-reinforcing, and destabilizing, featuring the removal of constraints to entropy flows and leading to the certain eventual destruction of that system. Call this condition "positive entropy."

...Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's [sic] climate is inherently very unstable.

The entropy produced in World War II was much more widespread and profound than that of World War I. In World War I the action had taken place… entirely on rural terrain, classic battlefields. In World War II, much of the warfare was urban. The long-range bomber had reached a high stage of refinement in the twenty-plus years between world wars. None of the major capitals had been damaged in World War I. In World War II, hundreds of towns and cities were destroyed in Europe and Asia. Berlin was reduced to gravel; London was badly mutilated; and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive ashtrays. The casualties of World War I had been enormous, astonishing, [and] appalling beyond civilized peoples’ wildest dreams, but the victims had been overwhelmingly soldiers. The casualties in World War II were overwhelmingly civilians and in much greater aggregate numbers.