The old high school complex itself was a 1970s-vintage modernist monstrosity, a U-shaped set of low-slung rectilinear boxes like ten thousand other s… - James Howard Kunstler

Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like coal,] oil [and gas] skewed the [supply-demand] equation over the past [two] hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of [a fraction of] nonrenewable condensed solar energy accumulated over eons of prehistory. The “green revolution” in boosting crop yields was minimally about scientific innovation in crop genetics and mostly about dumping massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides made out of fossil fuels onto crops, as well as employing irrigation at a fantastic scale made possible by abundant oil and gas. The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plenitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years. Within that comfortable bubble, the idea took hold that only grouches, spoilsports, and godless maniacs considered population hypergrowth a problem, and that to even raise the issue was indecent… [but] as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves arc toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population... that the ecology of the earth will not support. No political program of birth control will [be] avail[able]. The people are already here. The journey back to non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age. It was [more of] a condition [without a remedy], not a problem with a [direct] solution. That is what happened, and we are stuck with it.

Western Civ[ilization]’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways. The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day ­— the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in [hu]mankind’s universal antic journey to… death. On the plus side, as modern interpolators [historians]… say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, [the] land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance [which led to the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution], the Enlightenment [which led to the Industrial Revolution which, in turn, led] eventually [to] our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity [which led to the problems we face today].

In the chaotic period around the peak oil event, China will not be without extraordinary problems of its own, starting with enormous population pressures, and moving on to massive environmental degradation and the incubation and spread of epidemic diseases, including deadly influenzas associated with factory farming as well as accelerated AIDS infection […]. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak was a preview of coming attractions. On top of these vicissitudes will be added the severe economic hardship entailed when an economically strapped America (and the rest of the West) can no longer sop up the many products of China's tremendous industrial capacity. This would produce widespread unemployment in China, …leading to [a] political turmoil of a kind not seen since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.