Hey everybody, KMO here. Today is March 24th,
2026. In the spring of 2010, 16 years ago, I
was living at the Ecovillage Training Center
in Summertown, Tennessee, and I decided to turn
a set of early Sea Realm podcast interviews into
a book. At the time, that was a pretty ambitious
self -publishing project compared to what it
would be today. There was no AI transcription,
and there weren't the same kinds of turnkey self
-publishing pipelines that now make that sort
of thing much easier. But I was briefly seized
by an ambitious spirit, and I got the project
done in a matter of weeks. The result was Conversations
on Collapse, Sea Realm podcast transcripts. And
what you're about to hear is not something I
just now assembled. This recording goes back
to the original creation of Conversations on
Collapse. I put it together at the time as a
sampler to send to Doug Lane, whose name is in
the file name. Doug went on to become a well
-known podcaster and public intellectual in his
own right, and he was one of the people who came
along partly under the influence of the Sea Realm
podcast. So this audio is also a small artifact
from that moment. Now, 16 years later, I'm returning
to that material from a different angle. The
new project is called Getting Over Collapse.
It won't be just another collection of transcripts.
It's shaping up to be a reflection on the worldview
I was caught up in at the time and an attempt
to unpack it with the benefit of time and distance.
I'm not going to try to do all of that here because
I've got a lot of material I want to share with
you, but if you'd like to follow the progress
of Getting Over Collapse, head on over to crome
.org. That's crome .org, not crome .com. The
.com website is... what's left of the Sea Realm
Podcast archive. The newer .org site is one that
is focused on my current projects, including
Getting Over Collapse. So once again, sea -realm
.org. I don't have time to say something about
each of the people you're about to hear, but
the first and last voice in this collection of
excerpts is that of Dmitry Orlov. He played a
pivotal role in changing the direction of the
Sea Realm podcast, which is why my first conversation
with him makes up the first chapter of Conversations
on Collapse. Since the peak oil scene dissolved,
and the people who gathered under that banner
went their different ways, I know many of you
do not approve, not only of some of the trajectories
those people have taken, but also of the newer
narratives they've gravitated toward, Dimitri
included. I'm not going to get into any of that
here. What I will say is that Dimitri was my
introduction to peak oil. I had heard the phrase
before, but I mostly associated it with people
I didn't particularly want to hear from. What
changed that was a slide deck from a PowerPoint
presentation Dimitri had done called Closing
the Collapse Gap. This was before he was blogging
regularly, before any of his books, before he
had much of a public profile at all. All I had
seen were those slides. But that was enough to
make me think, I need to get this guy on the
podcast. And really, it was Dimitri who put me
on the peak oil vector. Once I had spoken with
people like James Howard Kunstler and Albert
Bates, it became much easier to keep interviewing
people associated with the peak oil worldview.
But Dimitri was my point of entry. And what I'll
say for him, entirely to his credit, is that
he was always entertaining to interview. He did
not rely on a set of safe, prepackaged talking
points. He was willing to take chances. He was
willing to think out loud. In the next hour,
you're going to hear at least one person who
really did sound locked into a fixed set of polished
lines. Dimitri was not that guy. He was willing
to perform without a net. So this first excerpt
comes from Episodes 21 and 22 of the Sea Realm
podcast. Episode 21 was called Closing the Disinfo
Gap, and Episode 22 was called Space. They were
released on February 14th and February 21st,
2007. You know, in the United States, people
who stay away from doctors tend to be healthier
than people who don't. So if you want to live
long and be healthy, don't go see a doctor. In
this country. In other countries, you know, it's
different. in some places. But here, it's basically
a bunch of people who are there to push pharmaceuticals
on you. And the more experimental the pharmaceuticals,
the better. So if you have some really strange
symptoms, you're a goldmine for a doctor or for
a pharmaceutical company. And they're not likely
to help you in any way. They're just going to
treat you as a lab animal. But in general, you
can read up on the statistics. People who stay
away from doctors generally do better in terms
of health. And, you know, the more general point
is, okay, well, nobody has a retirement. Everybody
knows that. Now, why is that? Well, that's because
everybody has been basically spending money they
don't have. People in this country can't afford
to drive cars. They can't afford to live out
in suburbia. None of these things are things
that they can afford. And so there are credit
card companies to take advantage of the fact
that, you know, they're living beyond their means
and they don't care that they're basically destroying
their future. And so I don't know if it's really
all that immoral to help people destroy their
future if that's what they want to do. But seeing
an entire country try to do this is a little,
you know, disappointing, I would say. Certainly,
we are all responsible for the situations that
we create for ourselves, and we are all responsible
for exercising financial prudence. But at the
same time, vast fortunes have been made by seducing
folks with easy credit and with a constant barrage
of imagery, which describes the lifestyle of
a happy, successful person in the United States.
Well, that's another difference between the Soviet
Union and the United States. turned out to be
to the advantage of the Soviet Union, which is
American propaganda is very good. There is all
this advertising, all this marketing, you know,
seducing people and doing things that are bad
for them. Soviet propaganda was heavy -handed,
it was kind of ugly, and it was not seducing
people. It was trying to basically harangue and
browse -beat people into doing things that were
good for them. Now it turns out that human nature
is such that people won't respond very well to
that treatment. Humans like to be seduced. They
like to be, you know, cajoled, and they like
to do things that are bad for them if somebody
tells them that that's okay. So... In terms of
that, you know, Soviet propaganda pretty much
made people kind of think for themselves a little
bit, you know. And American propaganda kills
that, you know. So you have very few people in
this country, you know. There's all this talk
about individualism, but really it's very much
a, you know, hard mentality kind of country where
everybody thinks that, you know, it's okay to
have credit cards. It's okay to, you know, max
out your credits. It's fine. That's what everybody's
doing. And the thing is, I've seen a lot of just
really horrendous suffering, you know, and so
I can't really be sort of lighthearted about
it. Oh, you know, capitalism is going to fall
apart. People are not going to be exploited anymore.
You know, how wonderful. You know, the fact is
that, you know, it's going to be really painful
to watch. You know, and that's the part that
I don't like about it. That was Dmitry Orlov.
Next up is Albert K. Bates. And what you're about
to hear was either in episode 29 of the Sea Realm
podcast, it was called Corporatized, and that
was released on April 18th, 2007, or the next
episode, Vine of the Soul, which was released
on the 25th of April, 2007. I think that what
I'm seeing is a race. It's a race between whether
we will attain a degree of consciousness on this
planet. And it's a race between whether we're
going to have a habitable planet or whether we'll
attain as life forms on this planet some form
of cosmic consciousness in time. to carry out,
finish out this experiment that was begun many
billions of years ago. And I think that what
I've been seeing in this last few weeks or months
is some warning signs that we're not winning
our race, that Gaia is in a lot worse trouble
than we thought. And I'm seeing all of this,
and it's sad to say it, but it seems to me that
history might indeed be ended. And if climate
change tips us into a desert world and it does
it in less than a thousand years, maybe even
a hundred years instead of a billion years, well,
it's our fault that, you know, blame is pretty
useless. So what was the end result of the experiment?
You know, some would say that the purpose of
the experiment of having life on this planet
was to lift off consciousness, you know, to transcend
the corporeal realm. And to start working consciousness
through various dimensions. And for the past
many decades, that's what we've been doing. You
know, Albert Hoffman discovered LSD about the
end of the 1940s. You had Gordon Wasson going
down to meet with the curanderos in Mexico in
the 50s. You had a lot of people who were gaining
this exploration. And the fact that those numbers
have been expanding every year. And time is now
getting very short. And we have to wonder whether
we're going to make it to the finish line in
time. That's the race I see underway. And who
knows how it's going to come out. But I think
whoever is engaged in this exploration is doing
the heavy lifting for all life on Earth at this
point. It's absolutely essential work. And it's
much more important than sending rockets to Mars
or building fusion reactors. Consciousness is
the most important field of scientific endeavor
we could possibly engage right now. And, you
know, at the same time, I had to say that I think
the age of science may soon be ending and giving
way to an age of art. And it'll be artists, not
scientists, who save us. I think one of the major
problems that we face is that we have this set
of expectations that are part of our education,
part of our development as individuals when we're
young. And it comes from our heritage, which
is out of a kind of war -like evolutionary process
over the course of many centuries. And we see
the need to be somehow striving constantly for
achievement in some way or shape or form. And
I think that that's one of the big problems that
we have as... As a society, it's why we're having
the issues that we're having with climate change,
because we are overextended. We're overextended
on our resource. Our demands on Gaia have greatly
exceeded what Gaia's capabilities are. And I
think that we have to change that mean. We need
to shift. We need to go to a much more less consumptive,
but also easygoing. society. And I think that
probably that's going to happen through education
of children more than any other way. Although
we need to also think about how do adults change
and what are the ways we change adult thinking.
And I think arts are one of the ways that we
do that. But I think that also the change may
not happen fast enough if we wait generationally
to make the shifts that we need to make. One
of the major changes that has to happen has to
deal with population. We have religious and ethical
and cultural boundaries that we've placed on
large families. You know, we say, okay, we should
have people, a lot of religions want you to have
more and more kids and prohibit birth control
and so forth. And what we find is we get into
the situation now where we are exceeding the
carrying capacity of the planet with us. sudden
explosion in the last few hundred years of up
to six and a half billion of us now headed on
its way to nine billion, pretty hard to stop
that. And the question is, how do we bring that
down? What's the process by which we bring our
population down? And I think as we go through
this crisis in coming years and have to shift
to an agricultural economy, in some ways that
even gets harder because people will think of,
you know, They need their kids in order to help
them grow food and to care for them in old age
and that sort of thing, which is traditional.
And a farming economy is an economy that tends
to have large families. But we really have to
change. We need to figure out ways to make not
having kids more fashionable and to begin to
bring the population down by whatever means we
can come to. Because if we can't do that in an
organized, peaceful way, then nature will take
a hand and do it in a way that's not very pleasant.
That was Albert Bates. Next up is Thomas Homer
Dixon. He's the author of a book called The Upside
of Down. And my one interview with him, and I
only talked to him once, was really, it was quite
profound to me in retrospect. And what you're
about to hear came from episode number 36, Locus
of Agency, released May 30th, 2007. The most
adaptive systems in the world tend to solve their
problems through distributed or decentralized
action of problem -solving agents. These systems
would include market economies, immune systems,
or many kinds of ecological systems. They deal
with their problems by creating loosely coupled
networks of relatively autonomous agents. You
think about a market, for example, relatively
autonomous firms, each of which can attempt to
tackle a part of the problem in experimental
ways. And solutions that turn out to be reasonably
effective can be communicated across the network
quite quickly. And also, things that turn out
not to work, experiments that fail, that information
can also be communicated across the network.
Decentralized systems and distributed problem
solving, those approaches tend to produce solutions
to complex problems much faster. They may seem
inefficient because you get a lot of experimentation
and pursuit of dead ends and a lot of stuff that
just doesn't work. But the point is that you
need to do a lot of that experimentation to find
out what does work. This is fundamentally the
distinction between, for instance, the old style
command and control hierarchical Soviet economies
and the highly adaptive Western economies. And
we saw ultimately that the Soviet economies were
incapable of adapting to a rapidly changing global
economy and a rapidly changing economic environment,
whereas market economies not only were capable
of adapting, but in many ways actually defined
the larger economic environment. And I think
that lesson of the power of distributed systems
is one that we need to take to heart. I think
that it's an interesting ideological twist in
a way, because you could say that people who
are progressive, liberal in the American context,
even on the left, need to understand that there
are some very important things that we can learn
from people whom we would have regarded traditionally
as being conservative and on the right, that
markets are... very effective problem -solving
institutions. This is the new kind, I think,
of liberalism, a new kind of left -of -center
ideology that understands that distributed problem
-solving and decentralization is exactly the
kind of thing that somebody like Adam Smith was
talking about in The Wealth of Nations. And there's
a possibility for a constructive dialogue, I
think, across ideological divides here. What
we've learned, I think, in the recent decades,
and this is sort of my point, The point I was
trying to make about the Soviet command control
economies is that the top -down hierarchical
problem -solving approaches tend not to work
in a very dynamic and complex environment. There's
a principle derived from complexity theory, the
study of complex systems. It's called the law
of requisite variety. And it goes something like
this, that any... in order to be successfully
adaptive to its environment has to be as complex
as its environment. And that's because the complex
environment will produce a certain range of behaviors.
If it becomes more complex, it produces a larger
range of behaviors. A system that's trying to
survive within that complex environment needs
to have a repertoire of behaviors that's just
as broad. as the range of behaviors of its environment.
And so it needs to be as complex as its environment.
And it turns out that if we're talking about
human systems, human decision -making environments
and human problem -solving systems, the hierarchical
ones tend to be too simple for what has become
an enormously complex world. So we see hierarchies
breaking apart. We see... tightly controlled
corporation going bankrupt and not adapting to
their environments. We see social and political
systems like the Soviet political system finding
themselves incapable of surviving within our
new world of recent decades. And I think people
on the political left need to understand that
we can't return to state -centric solution to
the challenges we face. This is why I recommend
in much of my work, and I'll be pursuing this
issue further in my future research, that we
must think a lot more about distributed or decentralized
problem -solving based electronically on the
Internet that involves large numbers of people
incorporated into some kind of open architecture
decision -making or problem -solving process,
a kind of wiki process. Next up is Sharon Astic.
She's the author or co -author of a book called
Nation of Farmers. And I think she came to my
attention when she was pushing back against Albert
Bartlett's metaphor about 20 people having to
share a single bathroom. It was an anti -overpopulation
metaphor, and she didn't like it. So that is
basically the topic of the conversation with
Sharon Astic. Population control. fertility rates,
and their trajectories. This is from episode
number 42, Tragedy of the Bathroom, released
June 20, 2007. I should be up front and say I
have four children. Not entirely intentionally,
but I have four children, and I'm not unhappy
about that fact. So there certainly are plenty
of people who will say that I am a major contributor
to the problem. And honestly, first world children
are a much bigger problem than third world children.
I mean, I don't actually deny that what I do
doesn't meet the requirements of the categorical
imperative. That is, everybody can't do what
I do and have a livable world. So I just want
to get that out of the way up front because,
you know, people know this and it's appropriate
that sort of I acknowledge my own complicity
in this. I think the point at which we have to
start dealing with the population issue is right
now. But I don't necessarily believe in dealing
with it in some of the sort of stronger ways
that get floated around among people who feel
very strongly about this. That is, I believe
that on some level, we are dealing with population
growth right now. Since 1950, the world TFR,
that's total fertility rate. has fallen from
around five children per person to about 2 .7,
which is just an enormous drop in fertility.
There is a fertility transition that happened
after death rates began to fall due to modern
medicine and vaccines and things in the world,
is that for a short period of time, people have
a lot more children because they haven't quite
adapted to the fact that more of their children
are going to survive into adulthood. And then
you begin to see a demographic transition, which
is what demographers call it, where birth rates
begin to fall and people start having fewer children.
And all over the world, that's actually happening.
Now, it's famously happening in places like Europe
and Japan, where total fertility rates are, you
know, one and a half and under. That's also happening
in poor countries. It's happening in Sri Lanka,
in Thailand, in Kerala, in the state of Kerala,
in India. in much of Eastern Europe. And these
are places that tend to be quite poor, but where
women have simply managed to get to the point
where their children are starting to live to
adulthood, and they're making rational choices.
That is, they're choosing to have fewer children.
What seems to help world PFR is good education
for women. reasonable chances of infant survival
rates, which is actually something that does
require some medical infrastructure, but can
be done quite cheaply and doesn't require a lot
of medical infrastructure. And the reasonable
hope that your kid won't be taken off and killed
in some war or something. Essentially, women,
you could get to have the kids they do have grow
up and they have fewer children. We're in the
process of a vast demographic transition. It
may not be happening as fast as we like. It may
not even be happening fast enough. And that's
another issue. But it's happening around the
world. And it's so the more coercive methods
that people advocate, for example, the China
-style solutions, actually China's birthright
is still well above a number of poor nations
where it's happening voluntarily, including,
again, like Sri Lanka and Thailand. I think a
lot of people have this vision of agriculture
as endless drudgery and drudgery um they think
oh god i'm going to spend the rest of my life
you know working in the hot sun you know sort
of you know one of those chain gang movies and
part i mean one of the things i can say is that
that it just doesn't have to be that hard um
one of my favorite poems is a wordsworth poem
called the solitary reaper and it's about this
woman out with the sides cut and grain and she's
singing while she's doing it And, you know, when
I read it in graduate school, I don't think it
ever registered on me that if you can sue while
you're doing something, it's not that hard. You
know, if you ever try and do it, it's not that
much work. It's not that farming isn't work.
It's a lot of, it can be a lot of work, but there
are a lot of methodologies that make it anything
but, okay, I'm going to spend the rest of my
life swinging a mattock at the clods of dirt
for the rest, for those things. You don't have
to do that stuff. A lot of our models of agriculture
have been based on cheap oil. That is, it makes
a lot of sense to pill up fields with tractors,
even though that's really bad for the soil and
things if you have all that horsepower. On the
other hand, if you have a yard and limited free
time, it makes a lot of sense to mulch with your
own grass clipping and with the compost that
you make on your property and never pill anything
at all. Just stir it up a little with a fork
and plant some vegetables into it. I know a lot
of people who live in neighborhoods and they
don't know the people on the other side of them
well enough to talk to. But if you depend on
other people for help with things that you now
have sort of electric servants to do for you,
then you have to know your neighbors. You can't
get away with that. And that does come with,
as Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, with some
real opportunities for celebration and festivity.
Helena Norberg -Hodge talks about the Ladakis
who live in high plain areas around Sedet, who
said that basically they spend four months working
really hard to get their food and the rest of
the year they spend partying. They drink beer
and socialize and have a really good time. Medieval
peasants in Britain in the 11th century used
to work only 176 days a year. The rest were Sabbaths
and festivals. And there was a hog set of beer
for every six peasants for every festival. There's
a real culture of celebration and of joy and
delight that goes around with strong community
structures and local economies and local food.
The other thing is I think that there's a chance
we could get back some of our political power.
A lot of people that I know feel very powerless.
They feel like their world is won by interests
they don't control. And I think that's absolutely
true. But when you reduce the scale of your world,
when you take away power from corporate... corporate
hands, where you don't depend on corporations
to feed you and clothe you and shelter you, then
you can also take that political power. You can
get a little closer to sort of the democracy
that was imagined by our founding fathers. And
I think that alone might be worth an enormous
amount of change, is to get back the right to
a kind of self -determination that I think a
lot of us really have lost. All right. Next up
is Albert Bartlett. Albert Bartlett was the guest.
I talked to him a couple times, but the interview
that provides the segment or the excerpt that
you're about to hear is either from episode number
53, important but trivial, or episode 54, Malthusian
Memes, released August 29th and September 5th,
2007. Well, we don't have the resources to supply
the present world population. The world population
today is unsustainable. reach our conclusion
by just observing that if any fraction of the
present global warming is due to the actions
of humans, then this by itself is proof that
the human population has exceeded the carrying
capacity of the Earth. 200 years ago, oil production
worldwide was zero. 200 years from now, it's
going to be zero. In between, it rises to one
or more maxima. and you can approximate that
by a smooth error curve. And the real question
is, a lot of reporters ask, well, when are we
going to run out of oil? And the answer is never.
We'll never run out of oil. But the question
that has to be asked and understood is, when
will oil production peak? When will we pass that
peak production? And the peak production marks
the point at which we have consumed half of the
initial resource. And so after you pass the peak,
then production declines and approaches zero,
and it may take another hundred years for it
to approach zero. It took a hundred years to
get up to where it is now. But as you have declining
production and a growing world population and
a growing world per capita demand for oil, then
you have all the makings of a real disaster because
everything in our modern society is dependent
on oil. And the first thing you think of is a
food production. And one can observe that modern
agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum
into food. And, you know, we can see rapidly
rising prices of petroleum as we pass over the
peak. And that'll immediately be reflected in
very rapid rise in the cost of food and a cost
of everything else in society. Now, where are
we with regard to the world peak? The U .S. peaked
in 1970, and we're well down on the downhill
side of the curve. World production could peak
any time now. There are some experts who say
the peak has already been passed. My own analysis
says we're very close to the peak, and there
are the latest I have heard from any practical...
from any scientist in the field, a geologist,
is about 2020. But I think most of the consensus
feeling among people who are really into this
problem is that it's much earlier than 2020,
that it's any day now. And unfortunately, we
won't know when we pass the peak. We could already
have passed it. You'll have to have... four or
five or ten years of consistent downturn in world
production before you can say statistically it's
clear that back there five years ago or so that
was the peak. One point being a little bit lower
than the current trend does not prove that the
peak has been passed. So we won't know for at
least five years after the peak that the peak
has actually been passed. You know, it's in our
national self -interest to reduce our annual
consumption of petroleum right now. Now, you
hear people say, and again, these are people
who are well -meaning, often well -educated,
but don't understand the problem, say that all
American agriculture is the most efficient in
the world today. That's nonsense. It's the least
efficient in the world today. It's the least
efficient because... If you have to use as your
definition of efficiency, how much energy does
it take in the form of petroleum, natural gas,
et cetera, to produce one unit of energy that's
on your dinner table? And that's about 10 units
of petroleum energy for one unit of food energy
on your table. Now, the thing to make people
say we're more efficient is they use a different
measure. They say how many person... hours on
the farm are required to produce one unit of
food. Well, that number has been going down,
leading these people, without understanding,
to say, oh, we're more efficient. We don't use
as many people farming as we used to. But that's
not a good measure. That's just a measure of
we're substituting petroleum for people on the
farm. And as petroleum peaks and starts down,
we're not going to be able to continue to do
that. That was Albert Bartlett. Next up is another
voice that you probably wouldn't associate with
the peak oil scene. As far as I know, she didn't
really have anything to say on the topic of peak
oil specifically, but somehow she came to my
attention at a time when I was talking about
issues related to agriculture and modern life
and farming and that sort of thing. And I think
that you'll find what Cornelia Butler Flora had
to say on the topic of community and human psychological
needs is very much in place here in this collection
of interviews. This is from episode 56, Quality
of Life, released September 19th, 2007. What
a number of the 9 -11 terrorists have demonstrated
is that these are people who actually whose standard
of living was fine, and the folks that are being
arrested now in England and France and Spain,
the issue is quality of life. The things that
we have found as we have done studies of quality
of life is this. You are respected by the people
around you. The notion of inclusion, not being
the same as, But being respected by the people
around you turns out to be an incredibly important
part of quality of life. And you're respected
not for what you have. It's not because of the
car you drive. This is why we tend to conflate
quality of life and standard of living. But it's
based on relationships. And these take time.
And you can't just drop relationships on people.
Whereas you can do things to increase income,
it's much more difficult to increase quality
of relationships. But we can make investments
collectively as a society that can greatly increase
the possibilities of people feeling included,
respected, and heard. And it seems to me that
might be a better investment against terrorism
rather than assuming it's all economics. I mean,
there has been a really interesting explanation
by our president and others that somehow people
are jealous of our stuff. And that's why we're
having these problems in terms of terrorism.
I just read an interesting... review of a new
book called the republic where they're saying
you know the problem with the internet communities
is they are incredibly ideologically similar
so you never talk to anybody who doesn't share
all your values and beliefs and part of quality
of life is feeling comfortable around people
who aren't like you so you don't feel you live
in some sort of enclave which you can't venture
out of unless you're totally armed. Interacting
with and being respected by people who aren't
exactly like you definitely helps increase your
quality of life. But even more importantly, it
really helps create a safer world. It gives you
the opportunity to examine your own values and
beliefs and to decide what's really important.
And what really is important is neither stuff
nor homogeneity. And right now we're, I think,
in a crisis of quality of life, not because we
don't have enough stuff, but because we have
become very fearful that other people somehow
want our stuff. And we simply don't understand
different ways of seeing the world and different
ways of viewing things that can help us then
fit ourselves into a very complex and interesting
puzzle rather than simply being the answer that's
all clearly black and white That was Cornelia
Butler Flora, the late Cornelia Butler Flora,
I'm afraid to say. She is the second of three
people that I interviewed for the Sea Realm podcast
and whose words are recorded here in this book,
who has since passed. The other is Albert Bartlett,
and then the third is Joe Bajent, who appears
late in this book. But next up is an interview
or an excerpt from an interview with Bill McKibben.
He appeared on episode number 68 of the Sea Realm
podcast, Durable Communities, released December
12, 2007. There's polling data in this country.
They've asked Americans every year since the
end of World War II, are you happy with your
life or not? And the number of Americans who
say, I'm very happy with my life, peaks in 1956
and goes downhill since. And... That's odd, because
in that same 50 years, we've trebled our material
standard of living. If the economy worked the
way we intuitively think it does, those curves
shouldn't go that way. It turns out that around
the world, once you get past a per capita income
of about $10 ,000 per year, any correlation between
more and better scatters, the plot goes in all
different directions. And, you know, that's something
we need to know. It's a basic fact about human
beings that's as important as knowing, you know,
what temperature water freezes at. Because we
have geared so much of our life as a country
to endlessly expanding the economy past the point
where it's producing anything in terms of satisfaction.
also producing great negative consequences, environmentally
in particular, it would be good to get a hold
of that. It would be good to figure out some
other things to be asking our economy to aim
for. We've concentrated obsessive interest on
growth, and hence we've largely ignored durability,
the idea that we might be building an economy
and a society that could last. for a long time
that could survive disruptions. And we've ignored
this question of whether that growth is producing
satisfaction or not. If we aimed for those two
things in addition or instead of just endless
expansion, I think we'd have more interesting
possibilities for getting out of some of the
trouble we've gotten into with things like global
warming and for building the kind of society
that people actually want to live in. a kind
of society that's marked by more connection and
more community than we have at the moment. That's
what the data shows people are most missing from
their lives. Cheap fossil fuel and the affluence
that it provides have allowed us to become the
first people in the world who have no need of
our neighbors. We've taken that to be a good
thing and talked a lot about independence and
individualism and all that. But in fact, as the
descendants of socially evolved primates who
spent all day sitting around grooming each other,
it turns out that it's not what we were built
for and it's not what we like. And, you know,
one of the benefits of getting away from the
fossil fuel world we now inhabit will be the
inevitable resurgence of more community. We see
it happening already. Farmer's markets are the
fastest growing part of the food economy in this
country. And one of the reasons that they're
going fast is because people like the experience
of shopping at them. The average shopper at a
farmer's market has 10 times as many conversations
as the average shopper at a supermarket. That's
a lot. That's what we're built for. One of the
uses of the 20th century was that we found out
things that don't work. For instance, huge centrally
planned economies where the government tells
everybody what to do all the time does prove
to be a bad idea in a lot of ways. However, that
doesn't mean that what does work is everybody
doing exactly what they want to and no one ever
trying to get together as a community and figure
out what makes sense. That is ideologically extreme
and is unlike sort of where human beings have
come from. Marxist collectivism was. What we
need are things that sound and are normal. Communities,
neighbors, people figuring out how to do things
together. That's what government at its best
is. And there were some tasks that only government
can perform. We're going to need to deal with
climate change. One of the places where I lost
a lot of respect for libertarians in the last
decade was the that they became in many ways
scientific denialists about global warming. All
you had to do was read the webpage of the Cato
Institute or Reason magazine or things. And one
of the reasons was that the chemistry and physics
conflicted with their ideology. And the syllogism
became markets solve all problems. Markets aren't
solving global warming. Therefore, global warming
isn't a problem. That's poor logic, but it's
emotionally comforting. If you're the kind of
person who needs some abstract ideological system,
you know, Marxism, Leninism, Randian objectivism,
whatever it is to order your life. For the rest
of us, what we need is trying to figure out what
scale to solve what problems at. And some of
those are solved individually and some of them
are solved in your neighborhood. and some of
them are solved internationally, and, you know,
it's not as comforting as having a one -size
-fits -all explanation for everything. On the
other hand, those don't work. The logic of the
fossil fuel world has been a logic of great globalization,
of great... disconnection, one from each other,
because we no longer have a practical need for
our neighbors. Hence the logic of a world past
cheap fossil fuel, I think, is one where we begin
to draw a little closer together again. What
we know about human satisfaction would lead us
to believe that that will have at least as many
benefits as costs. And we'll get better at it
as we do it. We've lost some of those skills
in the last 50 years. We're not that good at
cooperating. We could each other on things, you
know. We're all obsessed with the idea that we
should pay less taxes and be left alone and whatever.
But in fact, the community that survived best,
the people that survived best in more challenging
times. are going to be those who live in communities
that are able to adapt and work with each other
well. Next up is the name probably most associated
with the Sea Realm podcast in its entirety, and
that is James Howard Kunstler. The segment you're
about to hear comes from either episode number
72, The Long Emergency, or episode 73, Cui Bono.
They were released on January 9th and 16th, 2008.
So this is the first... interview in the book
that is post -2007. It's from very early, from
January of 2008. I want to point out that I was
having all of these conversations, which were
seemingly academic and speculative in 2007. And
then in mid to late 2008, it started to feel
very, very real. Anyway, here are excerpts from
a C -ROM conversation with James Howard Kunstler.
You know, I think that the most obvious difficult
transition for us is going to be what entails
the destiny of suburbia, you know, and how we're
going to cope with our inability to live in this
arrangement that we constructed for ourselves,
this elaborate suburban arrangement. I really...
have no idea how we're going to manage that.
I can only think that it will entail a lot of
loss, economic loss, and eventually maybe some
fighting over the cable scraps of the 20th century.
It's going to be very difficult for us to...
get back to farming at a scale that is appropriate
to what our conditions present, because so many
of those skills have been lost. But perhaps even
more importantly, the difficulty of reallocating
land, you know, in smaller parcels to people
who know what to do with it. I mean, right now,
an awful lot of the ag land in the heartland
of America, you know, in the grain belt and...
you know, in the center of the country, is owned
in very large chunks, in some cases by corporations.
And I really don't know how we're going to adapt
to the need to do this on a smaller scale. I
have to say, I am not a conspiracy theory aficionado.
I really don't. I'm allergic to conspiracy theories.
I think that an awful lot of what's happened
to us has been a totally consensual thing in
the sense that the American public went along
with whatever their leaders or corporate plutocracy
wanted them to do. So it's been a completely
consensual trip the whole way. But the American
public is certainly going to be greatly disappointed.
When things really don't hold together and they
discover, well, there aren't going to be hydrogen
cars and there is no realistic way of putting
up the hydrogen filling stations all over America.
And we're probably just not going to be able
to drive as much as we did, if at all. So these
things are going to come as huge disappointments
to the nation. I do think that the restoration
of public space and indeed the restoration of
satisfying daily environments in the U .S. is
liable to follow that kind of socially emergent
quality that I alluded to earlier. Just as the
disaggregation of our towns and cities proceeded
from the conditions of the 20th century, namely...
You know, this incredible abundance of cheap
oil. So things are going to, I think, reorganize
and re -self -organize in the other direction
as we're forced to downscale. The only real big
question is how disorderly this process is likely
to be, because unlike a lot of other people who
think about these issues, I assume that there
will be quite a bit of disorder. In the process
and that it won't be a simple segue or transition
to the next thing, because we're going to be
left with an awful lot of liabilities and frankly,
just a big myth to clean up. You know, a lot
of the stuff that we've invested in over the
last 60 years, the shopping malls and the strip
malls and all of the automobile infrastructure
and the parking lots, most of this stuff doesn't
really lend itself to being retrofitted. along
the lines that a lot of people fantasize about.
For one thing, we're probably going to be a much
less affluent society in the coming decades than
we were in the previous decades. So we're not
going to have the investment resources to put
into retrofitting the suburbs and the mall. That's
why I maintain a lot of those things will end
up as either ruins, plums, or salvage yards.
We are probably going to have to return to traditional
human environments, namely smaller cities, small
towns that have a meaningful relationship with
productive agricultural surroundings. And, you
know, we do have a lot of small towns and small
cities in America that are suitable for this.
The fate of our larger cities, I think, is somewhat
more tragic. because we're not going to be able
to maintain these so -called metroplexes in their
current scale. And what happens to them is liable
to be extremely messy and disorderly, especially
the ones that are overburdened with skyscrapers,
although there aren't that many of them, mainly
New York and Chicago. There are going to be a
lot of forces in motion. I think that the redevelopment
that we see in the future... is going to be on
a much smaller increment and a much finer grain
than what we've been used to. We're not going
to be doing 40 -acre redevelopments. We're going
to be doing the single building lot in a town
at a time because the investment is simply not
going to be there to do $50 million projects
anymore or $300 million projects. We're going
to have to do it on a much finer scale than that.
As we also move into an era in which the car
is a diminishing presence in our lives, we're
not going to be designing strictly for cars and
for motoring anymore. And I think we're going
to naturally return to some of the modes of design
that can be described as traditional. And when
we do that, we're going to rediscover that the
street is the primary public place that we have
in our... in our world, and that we're going
to find a way to embellish it and honor it that
is consistent with a much healthier existence.
So, you know, a lot of the traditional things
that we understood how to do in architecture
and urban design, which we threw in the garbage
in the mid -20th century, are going to return,
and indeed they are returning already. That was
James Howard Kunstler, a name and a voice and
personality that will be familiar to anybody
who was following the peak oil scene when it
was at its most vital. The next person you're
going to hear from is possibly a name that you
either don't know, or if you remember it, it's
only because he was on the Zero -Om podcast once.
I'm talking about Colin Tudge. who wrote a book
called Feeding People is Easy. Colin Tudge was
the guest on Episode 77, Agricultural Intelligence,
and 78, Fuel vs. Food, Not. Released February
13th and 20th, 2008. If we are serious about
wanting to feed people, then we have to start
from the very beginning, from first principles,
and say, what do we need to do if we want to
feed people? And the answer can be provided in
one simple... sentence which is if you want to
feed people you have to design agriculture especially
for that purpose what we need to do is design
agriculture to feed people now i call that agriculture
in my book enlightened agriculture and the reason
i call my book feeding people is easy is that
i think it really should be possible if we design
agriculture especially to feed people it should
be easy to feed or fairly easy to feed everybody
who is likely to be born onto this earth forever
and to feed them furthermore to the highest standards
of nutrition and gastronomy if we continue going
down the present route then they're heading for
disaster and i know there are scientists and
mathematicians who control all sorts of grass
to show that what they're doing is right but
actually common sense and what actually happening
on the ground shows that what they're doing is
absolutely disastrous I know there are also people
who say that if you try to design agriculture,
as it were, to feed people, and you start re
-using, you know, you start re -invoking the
kind of methods that people did use 30 years
ago or 100 years ago, not that I'm talking about
being old -fashioned, but if you do this, then
you're simply going backwards. You know, this
is regressive. And you have to go forward. You
have to get more industrial life and make more
money and all that kind of stuff. And to me,
this is just nonsense. I think... What happened
over the last 30, 40, 50 years shouldn't be seen
as progress. It should be seen as a massive diversion
away from common sense. And I think the world
has got to come to its senses and say this really
is just anomalous, what they're doing at the
moment. We have to move back to first principles.
In effect, redesign, start again. And then I
think we're in with a chance. That's basically
what I think about that. So if you're really
trying to feed... people well provide maximum
amount of food easily you finish up focus on
the arable fit in the horticulture in the best
places and then just fit in the uh um the the
the animals well you can if you do that you finish
up with a lot of plants not much meat and maximum
variety. The whole thing becomes very, very varied
if you start doing it in this kind of way, using
different classes of livestock, different kinds
of crops, playing one off against another. If
you then say, well, take this little slogan,
rock of plants, not much meat, maximum variety.
This also, this is what you do if you want to
farm well, but it also summarizes the best of
the nutritional theory from the last 30 years.
In other words, farming that's designed simply
to produce lots of good food will also meet human
nutritional requirements as well as they can
be met. If you now look at all the great cooking
in the world, all the great cuisine, and I'm
talking about places like India, Turkey, China,
southern France, Italy, Italy possibly being
the greatest of all, North Africa, and indeed
from your own country, you know, Cajun cooking
and that kind of thing. you find that all great
cuisines also make use of this fundamental pattern
of a lot of plants, not much meat and maximum
variety and what this means is that good farming
designs and produces lots of good food is perfect
nutritionally and also supports the greatest
cuisines that the world has ever produced and
this is why I'm saying that feeding people is
easy because actually If you farm reasonably,
according to a basic good principle, you would...
Basically, you don't have to ask people even
to be austere. You don't have to ask them to
do without. You merely have to ask them to take
food very, very seriously. And, in fact, to become
gourmets. And the kind of people who are very
easy to feed, are people like the Italians who
really do understand food, and the southern French
who really do understand food. love their food
and it's a very high standard they're very easy
to feed because they like a lot of plants not
much meat maximum variety so this is the kind
of route i want to go down now then the other
thing if you then ask the question but how do
you farm in this beautiful way lots of plants
maximum you know not much meat maximum but how
do you do that the answer is it has to have you
have to have a very high standard of husbandry
because this kind of farming is very intricate
so you have to have lots and lots of farmers
And if you've got lots and lots of farmers farming
intricately, then really you're better off with
lots of small farms, none as farm, family farms,
than you are by having very big, you know, very
big places, very big, not, than you are by having
very big places and just trying to, you know,
produce monocultures. I admire, in my, enormously,
you know, and you're one of the great founders
of your country, Thomas Jefferson. I think they
got it entirely right in the early 19th century.
One of the things that Thomas Jefferson said
was, I envisage America as a country of small
farmers. And it was a country of small farmers
until well into the 20th century. And now, as
I'm sure you know, you have only 1 % of people
working on the land in your country. In your
country, you've got more people in jail than
are working full -time on the land, which I think
is a pretty foul statistic. The thing is that
you talk to these big industrial types and they
say, well, we're interested in farming efficiency.
Well, it depends what you mean by efficiency.
If you're interested in money, efficiency defined
in terms of money, then the system is very efficient
because they've cut out all the labor, which
means they've cut out most of the cost, which
means that they're getting huge and they're putting
in loads and loads of fertilizer and so on, which
means they're getting very, very big yield at
very little cost. And in cash terms, it's very
efficient. But what we should be talking about,
if we're interested in seriously in feeding people,
and if we're talking about the long -term future,
is biological efficiency. In other words, how
much energy you're putting in compared with how
much energy you're getting out. And how sustainability,
you know, can we really go on farming in this
kind of way in a hundred years, a thousand years,
ten thousand years? If the answer to that is
no, then it's not efficient at all. So you see,
I just... You see what I mean? I mean, we need
exactly the kind of farming that the present
industrialists are doing their best to destroy.
We need lots of people on the land. We need basically
agrarian authorities. We need very, very mixed
agriculture, whereas these people are trying
to create monocultures. A million agriculture
is designed to produce food, which is entirely
different from agriculture that's designed to
produce money. And that's my non -answer to your
question. That was Colin Tudge. And now, Joe
Bajent. Again, unfortunately, the late Joe Bajent.
This is from Sea Realm Podcast episode number
149, A Chemical Season of the Mind, released
April 15, 2009. You know, when I did the book,
I had to tie it together. The book is about why
working -class people vote against their own
interests, and I didn't want to write a political
book. I wanted to write a human book about...
people I knew and grew up with. But at the end,
I had to tie it together some way, and why would
anybody behave this way against their own interest?
And so I discussed what I call the American hologram,
and it's a self -referential bubble in which
the people inside of it, you know, who directly
wired particularly to television and movies and
media, it's like a snow globe, you know, and
a bloody war killing children. disemboweling
people and hundreds of thousands of dead is reduced
to our boys and the flag and america a place
of church spires and freedom and opportunity
when the hologram gives us that message as if
it were we were inside a snow globe and it's
the only thing we have to refer to is the language
and the images that were fed practically directly
to the brain stem from all of our media it's
the uniform message there's really no big evil
guy controlling it we manifest it in ourselves
but the thing about it is is that the system
that we've created which is a malignant system
you'd have to call it malignant when you look
at it in the Total perspective, here we are 6
% of the world. We use 36 % of its resources.
I count water and air, by the way. Most of those
counts don't do that. But everybody is a willing
prisoner. And that's why I say it's the Stockholm
Syndrome of the soul. They're willing prisoners.
They identify with their captors. Capitalism
is an extractive process. It's a faceless machine
that exists for one reason. you know, to extract
from you production and profit, you know. And
as citizens, well, people have been reduced,
most people have been reduced to a market demographic.
They're consumers. They're not citizens, you
know. In no way are they citizens. You know,
no matter how active they are within the system,
the system is the problem. But they're prisoners
of it. They don't even see that it owns their
soul. that the very things they see as solutions
are also part of it buy green do this you know
capitalism offers you it co -ops everything and
offers it as a product a consumer identity and
so on so that's why i say they're prisoners willing
prisoners of their captors they totally identify
for instance the bailout of the banks we cannot
live without corporations corporations feed us
corporations give us health corporations give
us transportation we cannot let them die we cannot
let the banks die and so just like the egyptians
making their offerings or the aztecs drop the
temples we get the bailouts the extracted sweat
of the people is offered up to reserve the vast
corporations because you know as sole prisoners
you know They will not die if the corporations
die, but they believe they will. You know, the
evidence around them, you know, tells them, oh,
I will die if the banks fail. I will, you know
what I mean? The world as I know it will disappear.
Well, no, 6 % of the world will have their ass
up the crick real quick, but the rest of the
world is not as affected. You know, if the banks
go broke in the third world, gee, what else is
new? Yes, it causes a lot of pain and inconvenience,
but life is full of pain and inconvenience. I've
never made any bones about it. LSD, along with
Buddhism and psychology, but particularly LSD,
the other two wouldn't have even happened, was
the great awakening for me. I was a rural kid
living in a small town, and I'd read about it
when I was in the ninth grade and wanted some.
I'd read about it in Life magazine. This terrifying
drug, and hell, I never even thought to figure
it out in my life, but I wanted some. And anyway,
it finally came along. John Hopkins, a friend
of mine who was being treated for his homosexuality
with LSD, went, man, we can take his treatment
as long as we could possibly push it. I need
to bring it. And it was legal. It was the first
three years I took it, it was legal. And from
the very first time I took it, For once, I saw
the world, you know, and I saw how malleable
reality was. And when it was done, I sat and
cried because I knew life could be this good.
I knew there was more meaning there. It was more
to be felt and lived and know and to be, you
know. And so nothing was ever the same after
that, but because I had applied myself, like
so many other people, not because it was LSD.
Same way with ayahuasca. Until very recently,
I had a big... refrigerator full of it. I haven't
taken it in years, but there seems to be a lot
of interest in it. Anyway, the expansion of consciousness,
you have to call it that, realizing how malleable
and that reality is a consensus agreement between
people. You could also agree on something else
than capitalism and brutal commuting and murdering
each other psychologically for jobs. It's possible
that they agree on something else, and maybe
that's why I like the third world in my later
years is that they have agreed on something else.
I personally think that it was one of the greatest
threats to the system. I mean, my God, the Republicans
spent, what was it, $30 million to things like
the Heritage Foundation erasing the 60s. It was
a terrible threat, you know, because here you
had this generation. This baby boom post -war
generation that was best fed, best educated,
had every reason to be optimistic. I mean, we
really believed we were going to win. Now, people
were told today that we were naive and it was
all just bell bottoms, pot smoke, beads. Well,
that's just not so. There was a core of very
dedicated people who essentially, you have to
call it spiritual, But anyway, that generation
was very well equipped. And so the tide of optimism
was just huge. It wasn't all the war in Vietnam.
The war in Vietnam was like the war now. But
it wasn't the catalyst. Everybody wants to politicize
everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes. There were demonstrations.
Yes, yes. But the main thing going on was...
that a generation was becoming consciousness
mutants, and in a good way, believing an optimistic,
hopeful message of creativity, love, and peace
that was a direct threat to the military -industrial
complex, you know, that was built up particularly
during World War II. And finally, this was an
interview that I conducted with both Daniel Pinchbeck
and Dimitri Orlov. It is from an unnumbered episode
of the Sea Realm podcast. This is a special Reinventing
Reality Sea Realm episode, but it is from September
26th, 2008. Again, the guests are Daniel Pinchbeck
and Dmitry Orlov. Personally, I feel like probably
a lot of people at the moment are in this interesting
paradox where on the one hand I feel anxiety,
fear, concern that the food supply will go down
and all that kind of stuff as the financial system
melts down. On the other hand, I kind of feel
like popping the champagne cork because, you
know, I've always hated the Wall Street system
and, you know, have felt this incredible manipulation
of artificial value, you know, kind of sucking
off the, you know, the energy and the life energy
from the middle class and the, you know, third
world countries around the world. And the idea
that that whole system, you know, is now in a
paraxism. I think, you know, is kind of an exciting
one. And, you know, so I do think that there's
obviously the potential for things to become
very chaotic and dislocated and dangerous and
for the kind of depressing decline that Dimitri
outlines to happen. But I also think that there's
a whole other possibility or set of possibilities
or set of prospects that are much more... positive
and much more empowering and equally plausible.
Even with the stresses on the ecology, we're
still kind of in a world where we could provide
for everybody. I mean, if we were to really investigate
intensive permaculture practices, scale down
waste of resources, really think about the whole
planet as a single unified system. we potentially
could make tremendous progress. So I still feel
that basically the barrier to a kind of positive
transformation of human society is our limits
in our consciousness and our kind of projections
of shadow and negativity of the system. Yeah,
well, I don't really have any problem with trying
these. more optimistic approaches. As far as
changing the direction of society, we have to
keep in mind that rational approaches like Buckminster
Fuller's are almost beside the point because
we're dealing with an atavistic sort of very
emotional species that dwells mostly in the realm
of images as opposed to any sort of rational
thought. You know, that's why everybody insists
on having flush toilets and driving cars that
have four wheels instead of three. You know,
because that's an image that's embedded in the
psyche and nothing will dislodge it. You know,
going back to what Daniel said about the collapse
of Wall Street, I don't think that it will be
replaced with anything better. This is basically
a transfer of wealth to foreigners that will
be ongoing for quite a while now. And I don't
think that they'll be nicer to us than we have
been to ourselves. That would be wishful thinking.
the basic fundamental way money has been sort
of constructed. has a deep flaw in that. We created
the system that's basically debt -based. You
go to the bank, they check your credit rating
to see if you can compete aggressively in our
contemporary society, and then they loan you
a certain amount of money, but they don't create
the extra money and interest that you have to
bring back. So then you have to go into society
and compete with everybody else in the society
to bring back that interest, that extra money.
So that creates a situation where there's this
constantly expanding bubble of debt. And it also
creates a mentality of artificial scarcity. And
I think what's happening now is that the debt
-based expansion, which is at the basis of the
capitalist system, is no longer able to function.
And the reasons for that are, I think, twofold.
One is that we've seen a globalization of the
marketplace. earlier analyses of capitalism,
including like Lenin's and Marx's and so on,
you know, it requires constant expansion and
penetration into new markets to survive. And
so that's reached its limit. And one answer to
that was like Naomi Klein, the shock doctrine,
talked about how they began to, you know, capitalists
began almost like look forward to destruction,
like hurricanes and terrorist attacks that allowed
them to rebuild, you know, aspects of their own
society as if they were new markets, you know,
but that's really unsustainable. And then the
other second piece of that is the decline in
world energy production. So in a way, having
a debt -fueled expansion model of economics is
only going to work as there's an increasing abundance
of cheap oil, cheap energy. And then now that
that energy is no longer available, there's kind
of a law of thermodynamics in effect, where the
debt is just not going to be recoupable. So the
entire debt -based structure of the system is
now collapsing. But in a way, I think it's one
of the best things that could possibly happen
to us at the moment because, first of all, the
post -industrial economy is literally destroying
the ecosystems of the planet and immiserating
vast populations. So for it to not be able to
continue... would be a good thing. And for this
to happen, you know, without, you know, nuclear
war or, you know, martial law, you know, which,
you know, it might be on the cards, but it seems
to be happening in an almost kind of like sudden
deflation of the whole, you know, hypertrophied
enterprise. So I think there's a potential here
for a new proposition of value to sort of enter
the equation. You know, what I'd like to say
to Daniel is that, you know, his optimism, I
hope it's, you know, it's catchy because I'm
really sick of people telling me that what I'm
proposing is, you know, doom and gloom or anything
like that. Because, you know, my point is that
life goes on no matter what. You just have to
adjust. You have to get rid of some preconceived
notions, maybe endure some hardship. But, you
know, that builds character in some people, at
least. It's not the end of the world. So I think
that, you know, I hope that his optimism is helpful.
And, you know, I enjoyed listening to him and
responding to him. So thank you, Kimmel. And
I guess that's it. The last voice you heard there
was Dmitry Orlov, speaking with me and Daniel
Pinchbeck. When I decided to revisit this material,
I expected to approach it mainly as a record
of failed predictions. Back then, I was deeply
invested, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally,
in the idea of a rapid collapse of industrial
civilization. Sitting here in 2026, with the
grid still up, the internet still humming, and
AI embedding itself into everyday life, it is
impossible not to look back critically on the
expectations I promoted during that period. But...
Listening again, I'm reminded that those conversations
contained more than just failed predictions.
Again and again, guests returned to a simple
but profound point. Human flourishing does not
actually require the scale of energy use, complexity,
and systemic overhead that industrial society
demands. Food, shelter, clothing, health, dignity,
recognition, community. These are basic human
goods. And we have built a civilization that
burns staggering quantities of fossil fuel while
frustrating our yearning to live meaningful lives.
Feeding people is easy. Community is not thermodynamically
expensive. Life in industrial society is more
expensive than we can afford in the long term.
There was a time when I wanted to build a small
farmstead for myself and my family and live in
community with people who shared that vision.
I don't think preparing for collapse is a workable
way to create the sort of world I want to live
in, but I still think the impulse was motivated
by something true. So, getting over collapse
is not just an exercise in correcting bad predictions.
It's also an attempt to recover what was valuable
in that world. The civilizational criticism.
The psychological insight. The intuition that
a viable human life may require much less energy
throughput. Then the system insists. If you want
to follow that project, you can sign up for updates
at crome .org. All right. That's all for now.
Stay well.