(This is Part 34 of a series. Go back to Part 33.)
The same situation is occurring with fossil fuels, which have acted as a very real stimulant drug for the Industrial Age. Something which took tens of millions of years to make is being gobbled up in a century-long energy "hit" that is rapidly coming to a close.
The results are the same as in other areas. The injection of energy-dense fossil fuels, like a stimulant drug, has lifted the industrialised world's activity to a euphoric 150 level. Our entire world is predicated on cheap fossil-fuel energy.
Of course, "tolerance" has set in and it is taking more and more energy just to keep the extremely complex industrial structure intact. Yet oil discovery peaked in the 1970s and has been declining ever since. Production, as we've seen, is either at or near its peak and due to decline from here.
Meanwhile, the planet has become "toxified" and, like the body of a cocaine or crank addict, is becoming exhausted. As pollution accumulates, temperatures rise, and forests, water, species and topsoils decline, the ecological base on which our global economic and energy "mania" rests has become severely compromised.
So now, taken as a whole, the world is at a level of 100 now and striving mightily to stay there. But it is not to be. As we've noted, nothing conceivably on the horizon can prevent an energy "gap" from appearing.
As energy-dense fossil fuels begin to leave the system, therefore, the industrialised world will descend to a much lower level of energy use (level 50) and suffer through a "withdrawal" process in doing so.
However, as with depressions and drug detoxifications, this is a corrective, restorative process and will ultimately lead to a world that is sustainable (level 100) in terms of population, agriculture, water, ecology, energy and so on.
As the various distortions of our century-long energy high are corrected and rebalanced, and as we universally begin to understand that sustainability in all its different hues is intimately related to our long-term survival, the potential will exist for humanity and our beautiful planet to coexist in harmony once again—but consciously this time.
In this series so far, we have tried to show how the same principle might apply across widely varying dimensions. In each case we have been talking about primary effects vs secondary effects and dealing with causes rather than
dealing with symptoms. We've seen the effects of:
–"easy" vitality from stimulants;
–"easy" energy from fossil fuels;
–"easy" money from credit creation;
–"easy" water from depleting aquifers;
–"easy" topsoil from industrial farming;
–"easy" health from pharmaceutical drugs;
–"easy" calories from calorie-dense foods;
...and so on. In each case we've seen that the obvious, primary effect is followed by a deeper, more profound secondary effect that is usually the very opposite of the primary effect.
Secondly, we've seen that focusing on getting the "easy" primary effect is often to our long-term detriment because after the easy "high" or "boom" or "stimulus" comes the difficult "crash" or "depression" or "exhaustion", etc.
And we've seen that to avoid this cycle we must look at deep causes related to our desired outcomes and focus our efforts there—on obtaining long-term, sustainable results rather than "easy", short-term or superficial results from focusing on symptoms and surface effects.
(This is the end of Part 34. Go to Part 35.)
—jim sloman, 10.29.04 for Jul 13
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