Hello BobCousins,

Thxs for responding.

Your Quote: "Zimbabwe provides an illustration of what happens when an economy collapses for those who lack imagination, but none of it has anything to do with Peak Oil."

I believe Zimbabwe provides a good example of the long term problems every country will need to solve as we all go postPeak:

1. The decline of Zim under Mugabe is a nerve-wracking parallel to a 25-year postPeak decline in fossil fuels, Olduvai Gorge Theory, and WT's Exportland Model. What will other leaders learn from this disaster? Seek the same policies of corruption and power consolidation, or pursue full-on Peakoil Outreach?

2. Mugabe's term in power is very representative of a long-term drought such as what scientists predict for the SW US and Australia. Law of Diminishing Returns, or Receding Horizons, Liebig's Law, MPP, Tainterian Collapse of carrying-capacity, and other concepts leap to my mind.

3. Mugabe's term in power is very symbolically similar to a 25 year Kunstlerian suburbia campaign. The proficient farmers were driven off the land, the new landowners were inept farmers, but at least they have not paved it over with asphalt, strip malls, and McMansions. Yet.

But it is no different in terms of the loss of productive food-growing lands. Zim can go to relocalized permaculture at a much faster speed and lower energy cost than most of the US. That greatly worries me for the future violence levels that we might see here in the USA. Compare agricultural labor force %'s between US and Zim.

4. Yes, Zim's Mugabe showed a great lack of imagination and understanding of Peakoil. Mitigation, shifting to wise social planning, and not practising Peakoil Outreach was his great failure. Has the US done any better since Pres. Carter's Sweater Speech of 1977? Recall that this was even before Mugabe took the reins of power in 1983.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?