"The car is on fire." "And there is no driver at the wheel." "And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides." "And a dark wind blows." "The government is corrupt, and we're all so many drunks with the radio on and the curtains drawn." "We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death." "The sun has fallen down and the billboards are all leering." "And the flags are all dead." "At the top of their poles." "It went like this; the buildings toppled in on themselves, mothers crushing babies, they pulled the rubble and pulled out their hair." "The skyline was beautifull on fire, all twisted metals, stretching upwards everything awash in a thin orange haze" "I said kiss me here beautiful, these are truly the last days." "and grabbed my hand and we fell in good, like a daydream or a fever." "life out of balance" "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here." "It came to me when I tried to classify your species." "I realized that you're not actually mammals." "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not." "You move to an area, and you multiply, and mutliply, until every natural resource is consumed." "The only way you can survive is to spread to another area." "There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern." "Do you know what it is?" "A virus." "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague." "prognosis: collapse" "But..." "Agent Smith got one thing wrong." "Humanity is not a cancer." "Civilization is." "I think it does go all the way back to the main aspects of the civilizing process and its foundations in domestication, for example, that, really, makes it go this way." "so just what is civilization?" "1." "Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people 2." "Full-time division of labor 3." "Concentration of surplus 4." "Hierarchical class structure 5." "State-level political organization" "All of which depend on agriculture" ""...the worst mistake in the history of the human race"" "Jared Diamond" "It isn't surprising that more people are beginning to think of it as a problem that involves civilization and the definition, really, the meaning of what is civilization, both in terms of the precedent;" "in terms of its origins and its course." "past collapses" "The Mayans had the most extensive writing in the New World, they had detailed knowledge of astronomy, great cities, wonderful monuments and art, and there were lots of them" " there may have been as many as 50 million Maya." "But by the time Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, marched through the Yucatan peninsula, he passed within a few miles of these abandoned cities covered by jungle without even knowing, that there were cities there, because there were no people." "And the Maya crash, which happened between about 809 - 810 A.D." "Maybe as many as 90 % of the Maya died or scattered, and all of the kings were overthrown, and the cities were abandoned." "They disapeared partly through inadvertant environmental damage of their own making, particularly choping down forests on which they depended for plaster and fuel." "And as there were more and more people fighting over less and less land, naturally the fighting got more intense, and finaly this combination of overpopulation for too few resources, came at a time of a severe drought, and so within a century or so," "Maya society collapsed and the Maya heartland had been virtually emptied of people." "They could have avoided extinction by doing some of the obvious things, limiting their population growth, not cutting down all their trees, getting into a political union rather than fighting each other regulaly." "It would have been obvious to them, that the hillsides were getting deforested, and that their buildings at the bottom of the hills were getting covered up with 9 feet of sediment." "My UCLA students really bored home with that question," "Why on earth didn't these past societies see what they were doing?" "But then I reflect, "If there are still people around 70 years from now, they'll look back at the United States in 2005 and they too will say:" "weren't they thinking about their water problems and global warming and toxic waste?" "How could they have been so blind?" "peak oil as catalyst" "The question of when we'll actually run out of oil is absolutely the wrong question to be asking." "We should be asking, "When will production peak?"" "Back in the 1950s, M. King Hubbert, the petroleum geologist who worked for Shell and a bunch of other companies and taught at UCLA and MIT and a bunch of other universities, realized that for any given oil province," "when about half the oil has been extracted, it becomes more difficult to extract whats left, and so the rate of extraction begins to taper off, production peaks." "Without those fossil fuels, the Industrial Revolution would never have sputtered to life." "And without them, it will collapse." "If all of the services performed for us on a daily basis by fossil fuels had to be done once again by human muscle power, lighting our homes, cleaning our clothes, vacuuming our carpets, pushing us around on the road to get to and from wherever we're going from and to," "if all of that had to be done by human muscle power once again, it would take about 300 people, working hard, to keep us in the manner to which we have become accustomed." "I believe that that event, the US oil production peak of 1970 deserves to be considered the most important economic event of the 20th century." "But when global oil production peaks and begins its inevitable decline, we are not gona be able to make up for the short fall by importing oil from other planets." "We are gona have make due, with what we have, and what we have will be shrinking, declining with every passing year." "Currently the world uses something on the order of 84 - 85 milion barrels of oil per day." "By 2010 we are gona have to find and develop about 30 milion barrels a day of new production capacity, just to stay even." "Forget about increases in demand, if you count that, then we are talking closer to 45 or 50 milion barels a day." "It's possible to look out for the next 5 years and say, "Well, you know, whats in the pipeline?" "Whats on the conveyor belt?" "And when we look, we don't find nearly enough." "So as Scroboszky calculates, that the likely all time global oil production peak will occur in 2007-2008." "Prices will skyrocket." "We'll have a virtual complete shortage." "There will still be oil in the ground, but its erroneous to think that there will be a transition or a slowing down of the economy, which is so dependent on oil." "And this brings us to the techno-fix." "People imagine that solar panels will work and that wind-power and other forms of alternative energy and renewable energy will supply all our needs and that we will continue this wonderful way of life, where we have mastered nature and we have all these amazing gadgets and technology" "to be the envy of the civilized world." "It really isn't going to work that way." "Thats really the big question:" "can we continue running things the way we have with these substitutes?" "And the answer is no." "And the dirty secret of the American predicament is that our economy is now based almost entirely on the creation of suburban sprawl, on the servicing of it, and the furnishing of it." "Without energy, nothing happens." "Energy is 100% of the economy." "You can't change out the energy infrastructure of a society overnight." "It takes decades, and it costs a lot of money we're talking, whether it's nuclear power or solar or wind, or any combination of the above, we're talking about trillions of dollars of new investment that will be needed." "Even if they were maximized, with a planning kind of approach, and an attempt at transitioning to these and phasing out fossil fuels, it really isn't going to work, because oil is unique in its high-energy content" "and its flexible uses, and our whole infrastructure is about petroleum, so we need to think about, and start taking action on, decreasing radically our use of petroleum and not imagining that there is a pie in the sky" "techno-fix around the corner." "Things are so pressurized today with the economy, relying absolutely on more and more growth and debt, and the kind of expansion has only been possible through unlimited petroleum supplies." "Developers!" "Developers!" "Developers!" "Developers!" "Developers!" "Developers!" "Developers!" "Developers!" "When this becomes too tight to accomodate growth, we're going to have a cessation of growth, and that will translate to a lot of job loss, it will be a collapse of certain kinds of industries," "and then you'll have a general economic collapse." "What we'll see is probably an instant type of depression, and that will include die-off; we are overpopulated, in this country as well." "And any part of the world that is very petroleum dependent, is going to be a lot worse off, then third world countries." "And they're going to create tremendous domestic political turmoil in the attempt to hold onto those entitlements, which can not be held onto." "So I think it's gonna be a big goddamn mess." "I think it's probably going to lead to violence." "It may lead to some degree to the dissolution of our democratic institutions in the United States, and we may not recognize our nation by the time." "three meals away from revolution" "Food and agriculture." "In effect, we are eating oil and natural gas right now." "We don't think of it that way, and maybe it doesn't taste like that, but pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers - all made from fossil fuels, from oil and natural gas." "And then foods are processed and shipped." "The typical food item on our plate has travelled 13 to 15 hundred miles to get to us." "Fossil-fuel miles." "So we are gonna be faced with a challenge in feeding ourselves, without as much oil to go around." "Well, we have overpopulation, having vastly overshot the carrying capacity of the ecosystem." "And we're virtually eating petroleum." "When so much food is produced, and we do so many things with energy to replace human labor, we're not going to be able to instantly go to a sustainable lifestyle and care for so many people as we're presently doing." "What drives the population increase from the beginning seems to have been domestication, because it didn't exist before that." "Anthropologists have noticed that the population began shooting up with the adoption of agriculture, and so if you pull the plug on that, in other words, looking at population as more of an effect than a cause." "You can make some persuasive arguments that the world is revving up for a combination of events that are going to considerably thin out the population." "another story to be in:" "afterculture" "This strange complacency that overtook us kind of gave us the idea that there is a guaranteed happy endind to every terrible pridicament that you find yourself in - that life is sort of like a TV show." "Or a Bruce Willis movie." "That there is a happy ending." "But in my opinion, the great shock to Americans is going to be to find out that there is no smooth transition between the end of the cheap oil era and whatever follows." "In fact it's going to be very disorderly and very turbulent, and its going to involve a lot of stress, and woe, and ruin, and whatever emerges from it, is going to emerge from really a great kind of fire of the soul," "that I think may even match what we went through in the civil war." "We're in a situation right now where we can't really accomplish much at the national level." "We don't need new policies, we don't need a different president." "What we need is a new culture." "So the kind of change that must occur if we are to survive and have a sustainable culture will be probably a new value system, where people are glad to appreciate nature and each other instead of trying to attain power" "and satisfy their lust for material things." "There have to be alternatives, or else people will just say," ""Well, these are interesting ideas." "That makes sense, but so what?"" "How do you go from A to B?" "How do you step out of this life world and into another one thats not on the same foundations?" "We fail to practice what worked for millennia, to keep people together and satisfy our basic needs." "I'm personally looking forward to that." "Now, how do we get there?" "It may be that we will be forced to get there through the final energy shortage that peak oil will trigger, or people can start now to create these models of sustainability." "Globalization has been all about destroying local economies." "It's been all about cheap energy for transportation of resources and manufacturing goods for ever further distances." "We need to run that movie of globalization that we've been living in over the past twenty years in reverse." "We need to find out who has the talents and skills and the abilities and the knowledge here locally, to grow food, to make shoes, to make clothing, and we need to make friends of those people," "and make sure they stay in business." "You know, I think people that have had at least a little experience with that." "For example, I lived in a housing co-op for fifteen years, and I'm not saying it was band society, we made all these decisions together and did a lot of things and projects and it was a great experience." "And in a very small way, it kind of rehearses, what I'd like to see, you know, like-minded people who rely on each other, and care about each other, and thats a real possible community." "One of the great sad lessons that, among the many diminishing returns of technology that we've learned over the last hundred years, is that the virtual really isn't an adequate substitute for the authentic." "All that we've lost is just such a theme." "And we see that in all the nostalgia stuff; there is an awareness on some level thats very widespread, that we've just lost so much." "We're just cut off." "As life becomes more and more artificial and mediated and disembodied, and the techno culture it's just becomnig very impoverished and cold and empty and perhaps it just is." "And everybody feels it." "Well I can only, really, say it for myself, what kind of goal I have, and thats the...it really does have a lot to do with what we understand as the kind of original anarchy of band society." "It completely, very radically decentralized world of face to face, real community, of really the non political, where people are living in intimate terms with the earth and with each other in a completely direct way," "an unmediated way." "That worked for so long, and thats really the basis." "And of course, its needless to say, it's the exact opposite of globalization and of the whole trend in our society and this world, its exatly the opposite." "To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be." "To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of action and know we're making it happen." "It will be an intensity never before known in everyday life." "To exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions." "An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation." "that we many find hope in the coming collapse to rediscover the balance and fullness of life we enjoyed for millenia" "Yu Koyo Peya:" "An expression from the Ipili tribe of highland Papua New Guinea meaning "the land is ending"."