Comment 41896

By moylek (registered) - website | Posted June 11, 2010 at 16:11:26

Oil's not the precise enemy. Before we had oil, we choked our air with coal smoke. And armies fought brutal and rapacious wars before either oil or coal. We could stop using oil and still manage to do incalculable damage to one another, ourselves and our world.

That doesn't mean that I think that we're doomed to burn and destroy forever and ever, amen. We have degrees of civilization, education, literacy, technology, awareness and organization which our forebears had not and I believe that we can change our trajectory. We've improved society before and we can do it again.

We can learn from the successes of the past: how to do with less waste, less travel, fewer things, more self-reliance, more efficiency. And we can strive to avoid the mistakes of the past: the short-sighted exploitation of resources, the blind faith in technology, the knee-jerk rejection of tradition, the willingness to consider the good of only our own family/tribe/race/nation.

Specifically, we need to ... uhm ... well. Bike more? Plant a garden? Telling people to stop blowing each other up, please?

Well, that's where it gets trickier, isn't it? Is there an expert we could ask?

Comment edited by moylek on 2010-06-11 15:14:40

-- Kenneth Moyle Hamilton, Ontario

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