Re: RE: POLITICS - Oil crisis was Anger management (Was: Chris and me rotting in hell)

[Guest guest]

> Bravo! Your activism is admirable. Might I add only that world oil

> production may have already peaked, which may actually be a mixed

> blessing for the planet and those who care.

>

> http://www.drydipstick.com/

>

>

> Deanna

Did you see this Tainter article there? Right on!

http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/complex.htm

introduction excerpt Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies

In our quest to understand sustainability we have rushed to comprehend such

factors as energy transformations, biophysical constraints, and

environmental deterioration, as well as the human characteristics that drive

production and consumption, and the assumptions of neoclassical economics.

As our knowledge of these matters increases, practical applications of

ecological economics are emerging. Yet amidst these advances something

important is missing. Any human problem is but a moment of reaction to prior

events and processes. Historical patterns develop over generations or even

centuries. Rarely will the experience of a lifetime disclose fully the

origin of an event or a process. Employment levels in natural resource

production, for example, may respond to a capital investment cycle with a

lag time of several decades (Watt 1992). The factors that cause societies to

collapse take centuries to develop (Tainter 1988). To design policies for

today and the future we need to understand social and economic processes at

all temporal scales, and comprehend where we are in historical patterns.

Historical knowledge is essential to sustainability (Tainter 1995a). No

program to enhance sustainability can be considered practical if it does not

incorporate such fundamental knowledge.

In this era of global environmental change we face what may be humanity's

greatest crisis. The cluster of transformations labeled global change dwarfs

all previous experiences in its speed. in the geographical scale of its

consequences, and in the numbers of people who will be affected (Norgaard

1994). Yet many times past human populations faced extraordinary challenges,

and the difference between their problems and ours is only one of degree.

One might expect that in a rational, problem-solving society, we would

eagerly seek to understand historical experiences. In actuality, our

approaches to education and our impatience for innovation have made us

averse to historical knowledge (Tainter 1995a). In ignorance, policy makers

tend to look for the causes of events only in the recent past (Watt 1992).

As a result, while we have a greater opportunity than the people of any

previous era to understand the long-term reasons for our problems, that

opportunity is largely ignored. Not only do we not know where we are in

history, most of our citizens and policy makers are not aware that we ought

to.

Wanita

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