Nobody here but us Chicken Littles. I managed to depress my blog friend eRobin (of Fact-esque) with my post a week ago about the likelihood that Saudi oil production is at or near peak. (Though I can't take too much credit: what really depressed eRobin was my sending her off, from the comments, to read the enormously depressing James Howard Kunstler on the Long Emergency, aka the coming permanent oil decline.) eRobin, bless her, took it to heart, and went off across the Internets seeking solace, finding some in a post at In Search of Telford that takes issue with Kunstler's dismissal of biomass fuels as a partial solution to petroleum shortages. (An argument I'm not going to take up, as it's beside the point of this post anyway.)

And she found some solace in the comments on that post, which is what interests me here. (And eRobin, I hope it doesn't seem like I'm making fun, 'cause I'm not.) It interests me as illustrating a powerful emotional pattern in response to warnings of catastrophe: because the comments eRobin responded gratefully to were, in fact, utterly without argumentative content—something I think eRobin would have seen if she hadn't wanted so badly to get past the doom-and-gloom. That is, the commenters are basically just calling Kunstler bad names—"catastrophist," "Chicken Little." Those are the same bad names people have been calling environmentalists for years, and while the name-calling may be satisfying in some emotional way, it doesn't address any of the questions actually being raised.

Of course you want to pull your head in when you hear the sky is falling. You want to find ways to be reassured that it's not really falling: and reassurance isn't hard to find, especially when—since the Chicken Littles are forced to be over-eager, and early, and repeated, in their warnings, hoping to goad people into working to prop up the sky before it's too late—there are a lot of people standing around, saying, hey, look, the sky's still up there, isn't it? Maybe slipped a bit in one or two spots, couple of cracks here or there, but still basically the same old sky it's always been, and always will be. No particular urgency about patching it. And since, in fact, the sky-propping project is enormous, and far beyond the power of any one person to undertake, and we're all disposed to believe in the timeless permanance of the way things are—it takes almost nothing to convince people that Chicken Littles are just killjoys who get some sick pleasure out of making everybody else miserable and afraid.

And yet there's a fundamental truth the Chicken Littles have been articulating for lo these thirty years and more, since the first Club of Rome report, and it's not really going away. Thirty years of history haven't even changed its shape much: they've only added precision and reinforcement. There are natural limits that must collide with our regime of essentially unlimited growth in human consumption, and the point of collision (once we're sufficiently far down the path, as we are now) is available to be extrapolated.

And what's ironic is that the longer we ignore that truth, the longer we persist in comforting ourselves that the sky can't really fall, we can't possibly be faced with a fundamental change in the ratios of our economy, the more we guarantee that those natural limits, once they express themselves, will express themselves catastrophically. One doesn't insist on acknowledging those limits because one hates life, but because the outcome is so much worse to the extent we fail to acknowledge them. The Telford commenters seem to think it's some kind of devastating (and not trite at all) critique of Kunstler to note that he doesn't offer solutions. Well, so what? If the thing you're sounding alarms about is a real threat, isn't ringing the bell and shouting the first, essential step toward a solution? Isn't diving back under the covers precisely the thing that prevents any solution being reached?

posted by michael  9:50:11 PM  
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