If peak oil matters now, what will matter 20 years from now?

I just finished reading At Day's Close:  Night in Times Past by A Roger Ekirch. 

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

"It's been thus for so many generations that we take it for granted: Night is when we go out, when we entertain, when we read, when -- of course -- we sleep. Yet in the long span of human history this is a relatively recent development. Not until "the period from 1730 to 1830," Ekirch argues in this interesting, original book, did the Western world undergo "such a sustained assault upon the nocturnal realm," and not until the 20th century and its near-universal use of artificial light did nighttime become what we know now. So At Day's Close is uncommonly welcome, for it covers ground that just about all others have ignored."

The book is somewhat repetitious, but it's a very detailed look at nighttime in pre-industrial Europe and America:  work, play, crime, sleep...  Sleep was very interesting.  In the absence of artificial light, the body seems to divide sleep into two periods--historically referred to "first sleep" (roughly from 10 p,m to midnight), then an interval of wakefulness when people would read, meditate, analyse dreams, talk with family, have sex, etc. and then "second sleep" till time to rise.  Time between sunset and sunrise had names:  sunset, shutting-in (locking up the house), candle-lighting, which may have been delayed an hour or two after sunset to save candles, bed-time, which may have been an hour or two before actually going to sleep, midnight, the dead of night--about 2-3 am--cock-crow, and dawn. Before street lighting, people consulted their almanacs to travel by moonlight and told time by the stars...  Not many of us can even see the stars today.

I've been meditating a return to natural time for quite a while.  Most Pagans celebrate the Wheel of the Year:  the Solstices, the Equinoxes, and the Cross-quarter days,  These are not, of course, man-made holidays but reoccuring annual events.  For our ancestors they had agricultural significance:  Imbolc or Candlemas was the time when ewes began to lactate, birds began to lay eggs again around the Spring Equinox...we celebrate three harvest festivals in late summer and fall.  The third one at Samhain or Halloween was the meat harvest.

--Which is something that our descendants will have to learn again:  hamburger is a seasonal food!  It's not naturally available 24/7.  People are starting realize that tomatoes are seasonal, but most moderns have absolutely no concept of seasonal meat!  (Unless it's corn dogs!)  While our ancestors might have had fresh fish or chicken on a regular basis or hunted for the pot, livestock was usually slaughtered a couple of times a year and preserved.  Bacon, ham, salt pork, pickled or potted meat would have appeared far more often than pot roast!

I expect Green Wizards to be ahead of the curve when it comes to relearning natural time, but as communities go off the grid, everyone will eventually fall back into the old rhythms.

Watching a Nova episode "Extreme Cave Diving" about blue holes in the Bahamas.  Evidence seems to indicate that at the end of the last ice age, massive sand storms from the Sahara caused a significant rise in temperature and sea levels in the Bahamas in something like 50 years.  And the same conditions seem to be building now in the Sahara...  Watch the video at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/extreme-cave-diving.html#.   The part about climate change is chapter 6 of 6, 45 minutes into the program.  Pretty impressive....!

I think there is a whole lot of vaporware here, but this is Thomas Frey's summary of the presentation he gave last week at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbulon.  Subject: employment trends over the next 18 years...which industries will be going away, jobs lost and new jobs created.   For my money, I'd be tempted to bet on iTunes U, BigDog robotics, and 3D printing--at least in during the next two decades.

"So much of nature, culture and economic activity utterly depend upon the commons – the atmosphere, the oceans, wildlife and seeds as well as the Internet, scientific knowledge and creative works, among countless other commons.  And yet corporate-dominated markets are doing everything they can to privatize and commodify our commons.  After all, there is big money to be made in mining the deepsea ocean floor, patenting the genes of plants and animals, claiming proprietary control of agricultural seeds, owning new sorts of synthetic nano-matter that can replace ordinary substances, and owning mathematical algorithms that power software programs.

"The great, unacknowledged scandal of our times is the market enclosure of things that belong to all of us.  Instead of having free or low-cost access to the shared resources that belong to all of us, companies are privatizing them and forcing us to pay."

"Can the Commons Move from the Margins to the Mainstream?"

Somebody mentioned System D, the informal economy on TAR, but I just finished The Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth.  I'm going to call it a "must read" book.  Here's an excerpt.

The oceans are full of discarded plastics, the landfills are full of discarded plastics, roadsides and creeks are filling with discarded plastics, our bodies are filling with inhaled and ingested plastics...  Just like the effects of global warming, even if we kick the plastics habit today, we will still be generations cleaning up residual plastic.

See the current issue of Green American for more info.

I think a possible blind spot is the consequence of commercializing "greening" - I'm very glad to see recycling and reusing becoming a bit more trendy, but I have seen before that when merchants sniff "profit" they are quick to block avenues for amateurs. For example - I am thrilled that some cities in Oregon have curbsite pickup of food waste to be composted... but might that lead to the repression of backyard composting ("One, you don't need to and two, it's smelly")? And we've all seen the proliferation of "greenware" - shopping bags, worm farm kits, etc. - and those who can out-advertise and make a profit from cheap merchandise are already doing that... so I worry that a blind spot is: once the profit becomes the key motivator and the enthusiastic amateurs are shouldered aside, we will only have pseudo-green at a higher price. Look at the food industry, if you don't think it's possible.

I'm just now following Bruce Sterling and John Lebkowsky's annual State of the World discussion (which is well worth reading through for those interested in various upcoming issues, both technological and otherwise).

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/430/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.htmlBruce

Sterling has mentioned two issues that I had pushed to the back of my mind: urbanisation and age demographics. Urbanisation is continuing at a quite steady pace globally, and doesn't show signs of abating. 

The age gap is already a problem in most developed nations, with many uncertain of how they will care for a growing population of retirees.  I think it's likely that a major vector of depopulation will be the same thing as is driving the age demographic shift (falling birth rates in response to hard times -- just look at Russia), so the problem shows no sign of abating. Thus, a potential problem in the future will be the question of who will care for us when we are old, the economy has evaporated our pension funds, and the younger generations blame older generations for the state of their world.

Things to mull over, anyway. 

Some issues that get lost in concerns over fossil fuels include overfishing, habitat destruction and long-term pollution (heavy metals, etc).

As McThick pointed out, it's quite likely that the ruling class will continue its "unrelenting pursuit of natural resources at home, regardless of environmental damage".  At some point the underclass will have had enough of the impacts this will have on them, but it will likely get pretty bad before it gets better.

Oh, and the other thing you will likely see is an expansion of the surveillance state, particularly on the Internet. People in the IT world are often quite aware and active in protesting developments along these lines, but they only occasionally spill out into the view of the general public. And I expect that this will continue even as resources for computer technology shrink -- states will likely hold on to the remaining tech with a deathgrip, particularly if it can be used to maintain the status quo.

I think that peak oil will remain a 'big deal' for far longer than an additional 2-3 years.  There are a number of things that I believe are going to become more prominent that they are now:

1. Immigration and ethnic violence
2. Militarization of police forces
3. Further polarization of political viewpoints resulting in federal paralysis
4. More frequent and more effective 99% type movements eventually resulting in violence.  Think "The Mob" from the French Revolution
5. Unrelenting pursuit of natural resources at home, regardless of environmental damage
6. Further criminalization of poverty
7. Further disenfrachisement of minority groups and youth voters

In all respects, I believe that anything that you can put on the spectrum of a journey into a police-state or dictatorship clothed in free-market and democratic ideals, the more likey you are to be correct.

I am lousy at prognostication, so I venture that anything I mention here will automatically be wrong.

I think that in twenty years we will definitely be seeing widespread migration due to climate change/environmental degradation.  They were saying on network news the other evening that the drought in Texas is officially the worst in a century, and when it inevitably persists into next summer, it will be the worst drought on record for that state.  I don't know how long Texans can hold out before they start  moving to greener pastures.

Likewise, rising sea levels will start hitting people in the U.S. as insurance companies refuse insure future disaster sites.

Look for a convergence between climate change, shifts in insect- and animal-borne diseases, super drug-resistant infections, and drug shortages.

And maybe read "The Long Now Blog", if you don't already.  I am sure the next big Pow! will appear there soon--if it hasn't already been discussed.  Like the new Center for Postnatural History.