- Ever wake up with a headache? Ever open your eyes in
the morning with a hangover? Ever wake up without a good night's sleep?
Ever have anyone be ugly or rude to you for no reason you knew about?
-
- If the USA allows an added 100 million within the next
25 years and another 100 million beyond that, as projected in demographic
studies, your kids will wake up to multiple rude awakenings on countless
fronts.
-
- Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines By
Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers, ISBN-10:086571598X
, ISBN-13: 978-0865715981, www.postcarbon.org;
- www.richardheinberg.com
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- "The subtitle of this book, Waking up to the Century
of Declines," reflects my impression that even those of us who have
been thinking about resource depletion for many years are still just beginning
to awaken to its full implications," said Heinberg. "And if we're
all in various stages of waking up to the problem, we are also waking up
from the cultural trance of denial in which we are all embedded. This awakening
is multi-dimensional. The very fabric of modern life is woven from illusion-thousands
of illusions."
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- "What illusions?" you ask.
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- First of all, most Americans 'think' this party will
continue forever. Sure, it's real today because oil continues flowing
out of the ground. But the minute it stops, and it WILL run out, or water
WILL run out, or resources WILL run out as population overwhelms the planet-the
party becomes an illusion. The Age of Oil presented us with a 100 year
window of population growth and unlimited energy.
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- That illusion continues in the minds of most of the countries
of the world and their leaders. You won't see a single world leader preparing
for Peak Oil and the decline of energy in the majority of the world.
-
- "The great transition of the 21st century will
entail enormous adjustments on the part of every individual, family and
community," said Heinberg. "We will need to plan rationally.
Implications and strategies will have to be explored in nearly every area
of human interest-agriculture, transportation, global war and peace, public
health, resource management, and on and on."
-
- Today, with gasoline powering our cars, we enjoy food,
travel and unlimited 'gadgets' to buy. We don't need 90 percent of the
junk we inhale from manufacturers. What amazes me stems from the fact
that people buy that junk, 'live' at computers, text their friends instead
of talking with them and zombie-out in front of the TV.
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- Heinberg mentions "Living a Life of Value"
by Jason A. Merchey; "Fifty Million Farmers" by the Schumacher
Society which we will need to feed ourselves when oil runs out in this
century; "Five Axioms of Sustainability" by Heinberg , which
clarifies the fact that our current civilization cannot be sustained;
"Boomers' Last Chance" by Heinberg illustrates how our generation
burned up all the oil in less than 70 years; "A Letter from the
Future" by Heinberg; and finally "Talking Ourselves into Extinction"
by Heinberg shows how we cleverly advanced so well that we caused our own
extinction by our actions.
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- HUMANS PROGRESS TO LIVE OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE OF LIFE
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- As we advanced from the Stone Age, we careered into the
Bronze Age and, from there, we rocketed into steam engine, automobile and
now, Computer and Space Age. Every step carried us further away from Mother
Nature and the natural rhythms of life. John Zerzan asserts, "that
it is the human tendency to abstract and manipulate, which are at the heart
of our tool-making ability, that cut us off from our innate connections
with the natural world, and therefore, obscure our own inherent nature."
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- Today, in Western societies, kids and parents text, twitter,
Skype, Kindle, digg, dang, dog, dangle and dazzle-anything, but talk face
to face with each other.
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- Izhak Bentov wrote: Stalking the Wild Pendulum.
Bentov notes that all life and non-life in the universe vibrates at certain
frequencies. Slowly, as humans continue surrounding themselves with steel,
concrete and glass-they skewer their natural vibrations. In the biggest
cities, most cannot reconnect with nature, thus, they sprint toward losing
their minds, bodies and spiritual connections. The larger the city, accelerating
aberrant behavior explodes on TV nightly. He connoted that Western society
drives itself crazy at breakneck speed.
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- How can those big cities continue? How can they grow?
What supports their cancer-like growth? Answer: oil, coal, natural gas.
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- Specifically, it takes 84 million barrels of oil daily!
That quantity cannot be maintained much longer.
-
- With an added 100 million humans to the USA in 25 years
and another 2.0 billion to the planet in that same 25 years, whoa Nellie,
what will humans do when their collective "Rude Awakening" hits?
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- Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents
- from the Arctic to the South Pole - as well as six times across the USA,
coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic
Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents "The Coming Population
Crisis in America: and what you can do about it" to civic clubs, church
groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world
population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com He is the author of: America
on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans. Copies available: 1
888 280 7715
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