The Oil Drum

There are those among the Peak Oil community who suspect that we could be facing a failure of our interdependent society that may be sudden, profound, and complete. I have repeatedly said that I am not numbered among them. My opinion is that our way of life will have to change significantly, but slowly. I don’t expect to be clubbing anybody with a femur in any foreseeable future. This opinion is on record in both print and electronic media, and I don’t expect to be issuing a retraction any time soon.... but a recent event forced me to admit that I may have to hedge a little.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has written an interdisciplinary tour-de-force integrating the many challenges facing industrial civilization into an elegant conceptual framework. That framework – catagenesis – applies an understanding of natural cycles of growth, breakdown and renewal to the present and the future of our global society. Our prevailing complacency is based on trust in our science to give us the knowledge, our markets to give us the incentives, our democracy to give us the social resources and our brains to give us the ingenuity necessary to solve our increasingly complex problems. However, that blind trust may be misplaced given the array of tectonic stresses facing our civilization and raising the risk of synchronous failure.