From my vantage point, that makes all the sense in the world (not some of the sense. ALL of the sense). I am watching what's happening to our energy supply up close and personal. And let me just say that (while we may get a fluctuation here and there) the price of oil is going nowhere but up. China is buying tons and tons of heavy sands from Canada. We are drilling in miles of deep water offshore in the Gulf with more technology than the space program. We are now trying to drill sideways to reach trapped reserves that we have known about for decades.
I am a little freaked out, frankly, by how not freaked out many people are by this. Oh, but the connection I was going to make, and maybe this is stating the obvious, is that since our entire economy is fundamentally predicated on the unlimited availability of cheap oil, we are about to be in some pretty deep doodoo. Expensive oil means:
- low-income people will no longer be able to afford to drive (to places of employment, for example)
- I will not be able to buy kiwi fruit from the other side of the world because it will cost too much due to an increase in shipping costs (Kiwi, I will miss you)
- products built by the lowest labor bidders from all over the world will cost lots more because the shipping costs to get them to a central assembly point and to customers from there will no longer be negligible
This means, as I finally get around to it, we are going to have to shrink our supply chain to food and materials we can reach. Lots more to say here.
3 comments:
Cool!
Another good book, somewhat tangentially related, is Barbara Kingsolver's newest about local food. there are lots of books out there about 100-mile diets, local food, etc., but I think she does a really really good job of talking about the relationships between food, family, economy, and nature in a way that makes it seem like a doable enterprise -- and a critical one -- to start paying attention to the wheres and hows of our food supply.
My library is putting together a reading/discussion series on this general topic for next year. Maybe you can join us! It's time for a trip north anyway... :)
The thing is that almost nothing is tangentially related really. Everything is so incredibly interconnected that it is becoming impossible to talk about one thing without eventually coming around to the whole lot of things that define the dying paradigm we are living in.
As individuals, the sheer numbers of pleas we receive on a daily basis for worthy causes is staggering. It is extreme option paralysis. I think that, more than anything, is why we don't move...why we don't do anything...why we cannot even talk about it. The magnitude is conceptually unfathomable...what could I possibly do? is what I am doing just a bandaid on a gun wound?
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