Mindsets & Adaptability

Notes on an alternate world, a World Without Oil.

It amazes me that even today the majority of the people here in the park and elsewhere do not understand what has happened to energy supplies in this world. Expectations remain high that we will (somehow, sometime) return to what we had, and they just know there must be someone who is responsible for the mess we are in. Their mindsets are rock-solid and crystallized.

It's like years ago when I had several intense discussions with my Dad. I told him he was killing himself and Mom by smoking. He told me to go to hell; his mind was resolute that smoking was not a problem to either his or Mom's health. He died of a heart attack shortly after his third heart bypass, before the lung cancer they found when doing the bypass surgery could become serious. Mom died five months later of a mixture of problems, including COPD symptoms.

Another of his mindsets was that global warming was hogwash, absolutely not true. It was a plot made up by a bunch of eco-terrorists who wanted to destroy our country. His ideas were solid as a rock and could not be changed. I gave up trying, and spent our last few months just loving him as he was.

I recently said that the world of the future would be a no-growth society, a direct result of the depopulation of the world that would result from a shortage of energy. One response I heard was that there was no way could that be, and once we were through the coming depression, the US economy would grow again. It looks like a majority of the people in this park echo that sentiment: growth is necessary and inevitable. It is a mindset set in granite.

I do not like what I am saying about the future; emotionally it is getting me down, As a corporate executive I once believed that growth was the inevitable future of working very, very hard. My mind was strong in that belief, but that belief has been shaken over time as I analyzed what is going on with climate, resources, and population: warming, depletion, and overshoot.

Today I try to find holes in my logic or inconsistencies in my thinking. I check the data and suspect the statistics that are published by the researchers. Sometimes I pray that I am wrong in my estimates of the future. But my rational mind keeps telling me my former mindset has been broken -- my only choice today is to plan for an energy-short, no-growth future and adapt to it.

The real key to survivability in this new world without oil is adaption. If you can, change before it becomes a problem. That means you must look ahead and try to best-guess where things will go wrong.

Take suburbs, for example. For years some ecologists have been worrying about the spread of urban centers, resulting in longer and longer commutes, poor use of land, decay of culture to TV watching, remoteness from resources like food, and many other problems. The attendant problems have been lack of public transport, cost of building and maintaining roads, pollution, etc.

Growth has meant that more and more suburbs are created, more land is paved or covered with big flat houses, commutes get longer. How can the young folks of today adapt to a world where this kind of activity does not make sense?

The first step must be to break the mindset that growth is necessary, that suburbs are necessary, that big is necessary, that over-indulgence is necessary. Kick yourself in the side of the head, and think about an alternative approach. Adapt.

Sam
the Prudent RVer

Comments

[Gala_Teah]

I don't really think we are in a low-energy, no-growth world. Electrical energy will continue pretty much as before, once they work out how to maintain the system on less oil. Electrical power is more expensive, but not unaffordable. Growth will continue also: it continues in countries that could not afford oil even before the crisis. The limiting factor there is food.