The collapse part 2

How do we envision the end of the world? Will it all end in a big fiery blast on judgment day where the good will be lifted up into heaven and the sinners will meet there comeuppance? Will Nostradamus's ancient speculations come to pass? Or will we single handedly destroy the earth? Philosophers, economists, and religiousos alike have dealt with this question throughout the entire history of man kind, not for the sake of being morbid, but because it occupies a certain place in all of our minds. We are all fixated on this idea that the world will end; even today millions of Americans are exposed to theories on the coming apocalypse through the history channel and other such mass, televised programming. How it will end, none of us can rightfully say, as religious beliefs cannot rightfully be disproven, and one can never know the validity of a theory (nostradamus) until it actually occurs. All that we can deal with is the concrete.

As many Americans have probably realized, our country is in trouble. Some blame it on the mortage crisis, others on the past administration, etc... There are many different theories on what is wrong, although I would have to argue that many of them are shortsighted. There is one fundamental issue with America and all other industrialized societies; since we have all grown so comfortable with having machines and the poor do everything for us we consider it unsanitary or demeaning to perform such lowly tasks. Thus, we are unwilling to alter our status of life to anything other than what it currently is. This staunch inflexibility is what will lead to our downfall...

...but of course its not that simple. This issue permeates every aspect of our culture, be it food, housing, or transportation. Having looked at many of these aspects in this class I feel that I can rightfully proclaim that they bear certain similarities to one another. Out of all of these, however, one thing stands alone, for it permits us to perpetuate the overindulgent lifestyle that all industrialists follow; Oil! Who'd think that this black, tarry, noxious fluid would literally pave the way to our peak and our ultimate demise? Certainly not the creators of the first oil well, nor the many individuals who first used their product. In this day and age, however, we all know full well that oil is bad for the environment and how incredibly limited of a resource it is, so one would assume we would do something to stop tearing apart the world around us like a spoiled infant with tinker toys.

First off, I'd like to establish this one fact: EVERYTHING IS RUN AND CREATED BY OR BY USING OIL IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER. The Hummer drivers aren't the only ones at fault; even many of those so called health nuts that work out at the local YMCA contribute; they buy nylon exercise outfits to allow for flexibility (nylon being a derivative of oil), they buy shoes with rubber soles which are also made out of rubber, and they buy bottled drinks on the fly because canteens require commitment that they aren't quite prepared to give simply because they are cumbersome and once you are done working out you have to carry it around, at which point it is no longer of use or wanted. The point being that we all contribute. Hell, even using water requires oil to filter and heat. Its truly inescapable.

Now lets take a country as massive as ours; just think how much oil it takes to run things...evaluating everything in our daily lives that is somehow related to oil is no small task. According to the documentary "A Crude Awakening" the U.S. uses 25% of the worlds oil despite the fact that we make up a whopping 3% of the world population. Shocking, right? And worst of all is that its not just us doing it; the majority of people in any industrialized country go through life with blinders on, ignoring all the shit that goes on out of pure convenience, entirely disregarding the obvious effects on the natural world.

Peak oil is the theory that the peak of our oil production "coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted" (Life After The Oil Crash, Matthew David Savinar) Once we reach this peak oil production continuously decreases while cost simultaneously increases. Because we are a constantly growing nation, both in regards to population and the economy, demand for oil will certainly increase and we will need an even greater amount to satisfy our thirst. The U.S. reached peak oil in 1971 and since then the theory has held true. Of course we, the people, haven't actually seen this, after all we are still producing more and more crap each year. We leach oil from other countries to sustain ourselves, and what do we have to show for it? We produce very little of anything and most of the goods we buy are from foreign countries.

But what would we ever do with out oil in this day and age? Nothing. We simply cannot do without oil since it is now firmly ingrained in every aspect of our existence. The real worry, however, is not so much that we will run out, but that our world supplies will diminish to the point where we will no longer be able to sustain our status of life. "In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn't need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him." I like how he characterized America as this tremendous, obviously overindulgent man. The main point here being, that this lifestyle is unsustainable.

Yet what do we do? Millions upon millions of Americans continue driving and buying plastic despite knowing how it will affect the earth. Even when the world spells it out for them in the weather and in the news people still don't take a hint. But as the theory of entropy states, all societies will inevitably decline and degenerate.

We can see that this theory has held strong throughout the entire history of human kind; the mayans fell, The Roman empire fell, china has fallen several times...Every past civilization has been reduced to ruins, whey then do we feel that we can preserve what we now have, especially with all the many new complexities our system has placed on us. We no longer have just sticks and rocks, nor do we have only our own seperate islands at our disposal; we have the entire world at our finger tips. Its not just us exploiting our own local natural resources anymore, no, we can now take from the rest of the world because everything, the earth included is treated like a commodity. This is made especially clear in the case of the Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island. In order to build the monumental statues off of which they have been made famous, the Polynesians cut down trees to construct lifting mechanisms, for the strength of no man nor group of men was enough to lift the tremendous statues. To build more they had to cut down more trees, and for a while they could sustain this ideal, but as time bore on and the trees steadily decreased in number their land already reflected the impact that they themselves had caused. And thus their society fell apart; the people overthrew the chiefs, toppled the statues that they had sacrificed so much to build, and people fled or died.

There are obvious parallels between these two different circumstances, the main one being the rapid depletion of natural resources to uphold a certain standard to which they held themselves and the society around them, the standard in this case being the statues. History has told us that any society that exploits mother nature to such a degree will collapse, yet we still follow our ancestors with the misguided optimism of a pack of freerange cattle being led into a truck to the slaughterhouse.

After reading most of these articles and hearing of our disgusting, gold-digging affair with petroleum I feel that I can proclaim with the utmost certainty that our civilization is going to fall and we're taking the rest of the world with us. God can send all the plague and pestilence that he wants; one way or another, no matter what religious deity we pray to, our addiction to oil will be our downfall.

While investing and utilization of alternative sources of energy such as sunlight and wind could definitely improve our current situation and provide us with something to fallback on I believe that it is only prolonging the collapse...that and you can't build bottles out of wind or sunlight. Also, our country has so firmly embedded oil in its structure that switching to another more expensive source on which to fuel our country would not likely fly. Do you really think people would give up their hummers for some dinky looking electric car? Do you think that people would be willing to stop buying their morning bottle of water? I think people wont be willing to alter their way of living until the reprecussions of their actions are pointing a a big fat GAT at their porky fucking heads, at which point it will be too late for us. And as for reverting to a more primitive lifestyle, I think we will keep on searching for ways to mimic what we currently have, and each time we find away entropy will follow through once again. Its the nature of the world.