Is this related to the fact that humans are evolutionally predisposed to being very capable of dealing with immediate crisis but are very poor at responding to the emergency that happens in slow motion and takes a decade or more to unfold? I think this is another huge problem that we face with the Peak Oil problem.

Absolutely! I think we are this way because it's adaptive - especially in a hunter gatherer context. The future is hard to predict, so acting too forcefully on our theoretical beliefs about it is likely to be maladaptive. However, bad or good things that happened to us, or almost happened to us, are probably a pretty serious factor in the environment so we learn from them. If we didn't become habituated to an existing situation but instead kept enjoying it, we'd sit on our asses instead of going out restlessly to improve it still further. The latter is likely to be more adaptive than the former. Correspondingly, if the situation inevitably degrades, there's no point in being permanently miserable - instead we get used to it and only get miserable again if it gets worse still (since something that has just happened might be reversible, whereas something that's been that way for a while is probably not, or we would have reversed it already).

I actually think this is more up my academic alley anyway, as my background is in Psychology, Political Science, and Philosophy (undergrad, so take it with a grain of salt).  

My first thought process on this is interesting:  It's said often of Americans, that we are the only group of people who don't expect suffering.  So, when suffering happens to us in a tertiary sense, it creates a sense of novelty.  Who of us, in private conversation, haven't said something along the lines of "I'm looking forward to the next disaster"?  The interesting thing about novelty is that is actually stimulates our dopamine sensors, and is more of a "amusement" reaction than an "alert" reaction (imagine prairie dogs, or such).  Could it be possible we're flooding our reactions with our constant perception of novalty?  After all, that's the same type of reaction that happens under the use of Ecstacy, and one of the long-term side effects of X use is known to be severe depression, as the receptors become "numb."  So, I sort of feel all of the novelties in our lives are actually contributing to this American crisis with depression.  

Now, onto my Fruedian/Jungian analysis (I'm neo-Freudian, with hints of evolutionary and behaviorism thrown in, in case anyone cared).  It's my feeling that we're in a definite existance of Baudrillardian hyperreality, something that's especially set in over the past 5 years with the Bush illusion of government.  When we break down the Freudian model of the brain we have the Id (the pleasure-seeker), the Ego (the reality principle, ie the sharer), and the Superego which acts as the reconciler between desires and reality.  This process has served us well throughout our more "natural" history, but has started failing as we've entered into modernity.  As reality degrades, and the meme of living life "reconciled" to hyperreality spreads through the collective unconscious, our Superego cannot reconcile between the Id and the Ego, and our consciousness degrades.  We rely more and more on the Id and Ego, and cannot conceive of the long-term, nor can we apply any longer the moral and social constraints that create our modern life, causing collapse of our social construct.  So, in this sense, you can almost imagine a Bell curve of modernity, matching almost identically with the Peak Oil curve.  This is why we cannot escape the path we are on.  You can say that we lack Der Wille zur Macht.

Ok, all that babble behind me, I think it's obvious I'm a rather pessimist in the situation.  And further, despite my ability to recognize these trends, I am still helpless to escape the course, which is a huge source of the undercurrent of nihilism in our culture.

My rather long-winded $.02