I find this kind of urban myths about peak everything very obscene. In them one can read a desire for decadence, resulting from the fact that ordinary suburban life has become boring to opulent people. This type of people has nothing to live for, nothing to survive for. So they want some action, and they project it into a vision of a grim future.

Go tell the 4 billion people in the developing world about this depressing, luxurious game of thinking about cataclysms. They will rightly kick you out - because these people know what survival really means, and they are modernists with a vision of progress, not bored post-modernist twits from Europe or America.

Most of the 'peak' stories and eco-hysteria is groundless and purely the result of opulence, intellectual laziness and the dissipation of any life strength in the late modern bourgeoisie.

The billions of people who are living a survivalist lifestyle out of necessity, would be shocked to hear some in the wealthy West fantasizing about emulating their instincts just because it's fashionable or because it's a way to get rid of boredom.

We need a new form of Stalinism and Optimism to crush these crazy spoiled Euro-Americans who celebrate macabre fantasies of 'mass die-off' and decay. I'm sure the people of the South will bring us this new bright vision on the world.

I've been thinking a lot lately of leaving that dead, sick, pessimistic, bourgeois chunk of culture called Europe. Nowadays, life can only be found in the Global South.

Duh, of course we're bored!  As you say, we aren't living real life.  And perhaps some of us actually recognize this and want to change this.  To think that the only place you can find real life any more is in the South is pretty silly... I find pleny of real life around my home town; with the small farmers and crafts people who choose that work because its real life for them.

People in the South would probably be just as appalled by your attitude as they would by the trendy let's-be-all-survivalist-cause-it-cool attitude.  I mean, they want the kind of security that we have.  The knowing that the next day isn't going to be a struggle just to survive, being able to take amoment to breath and not worry and just be happy to be alive.

We're at opposite ends of the spectrum here.  They don't have any free time while we have way too much.  We need to both get into the middle, where we all have good meaningful work but also time to relax and enjoy it.  That's real life.

Ya' know, Jonas, you sound like one of those over-educated college kids who advocates for violent overthrow of running-dog capitalist, and ends up joining the Sendoro Luminoso or Red Brigades. Stilainism, man!? Are you insane? Do you not read history? How many people did Stalin consign to a mass grave? How many people died in Cambodia? Er, I mean, Kampuchea. You are a fool, Jonas. Just like Jabailo and Nucbuddy. You offer nothing but tired, pedantic, and ultimately impotent, political rhetoric which contributes nothing to the debate. So you live in Europe, eh? I guess all those bourgeois devices you use, invented by "Northerners", such as the  computer you type your pointless screeds on and the mobile you call all of your "Southern" friends,  will not be joining you when you return to...Am I too harsh with you Jonas? Do I sound chauvinistic when I mention the inventions of "Northerners"? I'm really just a smart-ass masquerading as a nationalist. Except you promote the idea of superior connection that "Southerners" have to actual life. As opposed to the marketed life which is the dominant choice faced by most "Northerners". Sorry, J, but I see the same greed, corruption, malfeasance, infamy, rape, slavery, dismemberment in the "Global South" as I do in the north. Well, I actually don't see much dismemberment in the North. Perhaps you could make a claim that "Northerner" capitalist endeavors exacerbates, or worse, drives these behaviors, and with that I would agree, but only to a point. We all have choices in our lives. Some people choose to live according to how their actions affect their neighbors, and others decide only on what is good for them. I see both in abundance in both the North and the South. Although I don't see ANY militias composed of boys stolen from their villages and families in the North. However, it's likely that something similar did occur in American and European history. You poison the debate with your sophomoric language. Please leave the kooky nomenclature at the door.  

The mellotron is your friend.

Archigeek, over here in Europe, it's very fashionable to call for a return to Stalinism.

Our most hip continental philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, continuously interjects his lectures with references to Stalinism. Marx is bourgeois and mainstream coopted literature, Lenin is for contratian capitalist Wall-Street bankers, so we have only Stalin left to make a point.

I just follow the latest fashion.

So "Stalinism" just means "in your face"? or is it sort of kitsch, like a "socialist realist" painting, you know, "we can all march into the future as the proletariat is victorious" kind of thing? I just think I'm having a "cultural experience" here (and probably other people).

we need ecology without nature

the negation of the negation! the contradiction of the contradiction!

The conspiracy of the nonconspiring!

Jon, I don't think we're French (or Slovenian) enough!

would get nauseous looking at a tree! (and Jonas, Belgians are not allowed to defend Frenchmen)

Having been raised on East Kentucky hard times I find most of this laughable. I think they had to come to this area and tell them there was a depression going on in the 30's. When you subsistance farm and are not used to having a lot, you don't miss what you never had.

Peak oil is causing the problems it was predicted it would minus the food shortage because of biofuel ethanol made from a food source. I think the fertilizer situation was not included in that either.

The one advantage of growing up in a previously landlocked region in poverty is the knowledge of how to survive and having direct knowledge of the lifestyle it will not be as difficult to adjust back to the former.

It is not a matter of having to shoot your neighbor, it would be just as simple as laying low until they all shoot themselves or starve to death. Nobody relishes the thought and I seriously doubt it will ever come to that.

Civilization reoders itself every now and then. There is nothing like $6.00 a gallon gas to get the U.S. serious about alternative fuels and life styles. When a dollar is to made with alternative fuels the capitalist will take over and solve the problem.

It was probably not as hard to get weined off whale oil, I don't think society was 60% dependant upon it from foreign sorces. Agriculural society and it was not important enough to go to war over. We should make the adjustment without forming tribal bands or developing the ally oop syndrome.

As for me, it's not something I worry about on a daily basis. Like the song says a country boy can survive.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

...but I haven't a clue what you're on about saying "Stalinist" is the height of fashion in the adjectives department over there. Could this trend possibly be limited to certain compulsively ironic segments of the university population? (Not meaning to knock university education - I have one myself - just puzzled, that's all).

Sharon - thank you! I'm a regular reader of your blog, and very much appreciate your mix of ethical/spiritual concerns and the entirely practical.

As someone who currently resides in "the South", I see every day incomprehensible contrasts between the super wealthy and the desperately poor, often living within metres of each other (separated only by a some golf course and a few feet of concrete, barb wire-clad wall). Charitable acts by the rich - guiltily, grudgingly, absentmindedly or at a whim - sometimes make all the difference between life and death.

Things are quickly making a turn for the worse here, too, as fuel and rice prices continue to climb. Most of the food in the supermarkets comes from the US, so we're also at risk if supply discontinuities in the US should ever occur.

Lately I've seen some LNG taxis, and even a few electric police cars in the richest parts of the city, but none of this will amount to anything if oil prices continue to rise, dragging food prices with them. All transport trucks are old, and fuel efficiency hardly makes the list of priorities when it's still topped by "must have four wheels, an engine that runs and preferably a windscreen".

There are probably millions of people in this city just scraping by, "feeding" themselves on less money per week than I'd pay for a coffee and bagel at Starbucks, and I don't know how they will be able to continue to find food as prices keep rising. Charity will indeed be put to the test.