Review by my friend Mark on a non-post carbon list.

RE: http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.24.09/cover-0925.html

What an interesting article, contrasting the hopeful and the pessimistic.   The one thing about the rosy scenario which bothers me is that it ignores the fact the barbarians are currently making their easy gains in places like Wall Street, and when that is no longer possible they will turn to new avenues of easy predatory exploitation.   Historically, it seems that “farmers” are on the bottom of the social ladder and suffer from hard toil and abuse from their masters above them, whoever they happen to be.   The transitionists seem to be blind to this fact, so their happy little communities, which are a substitute for the suburban cul-de-sac of security and comfort, are probably too optimistic.  There will still be large numbers of unprepared, desperate and angry people who will not make an easy transition, and the people who have will still be vulnerable as targets.   That’s not stopping me from trying, anyway, but I don’t want to fool myself about this.

I think that all examples from life are present in the past, and the past should be examined for previous “transitions.”   I doubt that any of them have been peaceful and idylic.  Usually, they result in social collapse and abandonment, fighting and disease.   Maybe afterwards, after the excess population has died off, then some tiny little self-sufficient communities might be created, but they still will be vulnerable to outside attack.  Most villages had stockades or stone walls around them for protection, and this is the other, blindered side of the transitionist equation (notice how “Sandanista” has spawned imitative descriptors?  “Transitionistas”).   You always get the bad with the good in human behavior.

Given human proclivity to persist in the known rather than accept the unknown, I believe that coal will be turned to first, heating up the extraction and consumption until that too is more rapdily exhausted than expected.  Then, well…ta da, Gloom and Doom will reign!  I was thinking about one upcoming niche-jumping possibility in regards to food, however, and that is the transition from eating food to eating artificially-manufactured nutrients, which I heard or read was in the process.  So, agribusiness giants will grow “meat” in labs, and they’ll look just like fish sticks or boneless chicken breasts but with the middle-animal cut out of the process, and we’ll all eat fake food to continue getting along.  This will be more “efficient” than raising cattle in mega-lots with all of that oil, and humanity will escape their final reckoning once more, albeit living in an ever-more damaged environment.  Already, developing countries are buying land in third world nations for producing biofuels on a massive scale.  In Mozambique, a couple of national parks have been corruptly sold-off for such purposes.   So much for gentle calihippy transitions.   M