Climate change, competition for water, and polluted water sources will also be exacerbated by failures in the electric grid caused by oil and gas sup… - James Howard Kunstler

Did Americans sell out their towns, their neighbors, the memory of their ancestors, and the future of their grandchildren because they were helplessly in thrall to the blandishments of a cheap-oil economy? I honestly don’t know, though I tend to view the outcome as the result of many collective bad choices made by the public and its leaders. But were those choices inescapable? Certainly, the process was insidious and played out over several generations.

The Long Emergency will cause unprecedented social and economic dislocation, and the outcome may be a world we would barely recognize. The... egalitarian society we knew in the... twentieth century may become drastically more hierarchical as large numbers of desperate people place themselves in the service of those who control land, especially following a period of anarchy. Under such harsh conditions, the weaker individuals will sell their allegiance in return for security.

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].