I’ve been at this blogging for about six weeks now, reading and researching industrial civilization’s demise. The more one goes back and looks at the wholesale destruction we have done and continue to do to this planet, and in turn ourselves, the more you come to realize how blind and foolish we have been. Entire ecosystems have been wiped off the face of the earth and whole environmental systems altered beyond their normal evolution. In place of forests, jungles, and deserts, we have constructed vast tracts of monoculture industrial farming, endless vistas of cookie cutter suburbia, thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt roads, parking lots, and concrete paths, and cathedral-like malls for the citizenry to partake in the consumption of goods made by someone we’ll never meet and shipped from lands we may never visit.

What underpinned the creation of this entire edifice of modern man in less than two centuries? The power to transform the earth in our image came from cheap, energy-dense fossil fuel, i.e. oil. So highly dense in energy is oil that just one barrel of it equates to the labor of one man working forty hours a week for twelve years. Was all of this frenetic, ant-like labor worth it if, at the end of the day, we find that all of that effort to be for nought, cleared away by an escalating, civilization-ending climate chaos? It seems that we went to a party and drank so much of the intoxicating drinks offered to us that we ended up killing ourselves from the overdose and subsequent poisoning. For those sitting at the top of the capitalist hierarchy, do they not fully understand that a world thrown out of balance will not spare the elite sitting behind their barb-wire walled and guarded mansions? Is the desperate clawing at low EROEI fossil fuel sources worth the expense of further, unmitigated environmental destruction just to eke out a few more decades of what is inevitably a self-destructive system? What will we be left with but a completely poisoned and pillaged planet with no resources left to construct an alternative that might replace the current bankrupt system.

Right now we are in the intoxication phase, blind to the self-imposed eradication that comprises our present course in energy policy. So blind are the elite that they are willing to lie and propagandize in order to make sure the plans go forth. Having poisoned the biosphere, oceans, and land, the only place left seems to be deep beneath the ground beyond everyone’s sight where the remaining life-giving reservoirs of water rest.