Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohaw… - James Howard Kunstler

[...] The disturbance of global oil markets as the permanent energy crisis begins is liable to interrupt global commerce and global travel. Fewer… will fly [...]. However, these same energy problems will surely reduce crop production, which would lead to reduced food aid to desperate populations [...], which would then lead to compromised immune systems and the... [invasion] of poor, hungry, and... unhealthy people [...]. This is an obvious recipe for conflict and woe. Where the refugee camps [are] set up, [the] disease will surely follow.

As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved, and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in effect, that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.

The attrition of global populations by disease[s] may be unavoidable. Some... may regard it as the inevitable revenge of nature against the hubris of a human species arrogantly exceeding the carrying capacity of its habitat. Some may regard it as a moral victory against wickedness. Some may view it in the therapeutic mode as a positive development for the health of the planet. Many self-conscious "humanists" have militated for the goal of reducing population growth—though most of them would have... preferred widespread birth control [using contraceptive methods like the birth pill and condoms, ironically made from cheap oil] to a die-off. But that kind of thinking might have been just another product of the narcotic comfort of cheap oil, as merely stabilizing the earth’s population at current levels (or even 1968 levels) would arguably still have left humanity beyond the earth’s carrying capacity. Apart from these issues of attitude and ethics, however, a major decline in world population, or change in demographic profiles, is apt to have profound and strange repercussions on everyday life.