by tom_s2 » Sat Oct 24, 2015 10:59 pm
I actually bought the book this morning, and I've read about half of it. It's pretty good. Some of it is less convincing; for example, the stuff about the peak oil idea being an attempt to reinstitute traditional gender roles, was kinda out there. However there were other more valid connections drawn in the book, such as the connections between the peak oil movement and the "back to the land" movement and survivalist/doomsday movements from the 1970s. Many of the classics around here such as "Limits to Growth", "Overshoot", and so on, were written in the 1970s.
I also don't see it as an attempt to "to reinstitute traditional gender roles". I've never sensed that it was anything more than an 'organic' artefact of the issue, and that many of us are middle-aged males, perhaps, because younger white males were reading the kinds of books you mention back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and that some of us hoped the future offered us something more 'real' than the dehumanising, increasingly financialised, lives we were being offered, or perhaps that some of us have always simply had a sense of adventure. This sort of thing has been part of our culture since Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Shit, I travelled Western Europe and the Soviet Union at 16, came back, quit high school, left a cushy upper middle-class life, and hopped freight trains around the country. No way I was going back to a life in a cubicle and be happy.
What's more adventurous than the beginning of the end of a civilization? "Peak everything" is a damned good excuse, and a mandate, to take back some semblance of control of our lives. Sitting in traffic the rest of my life certainly wasn't the kind of adventure I was interested in. Better ways to waste a life, eh?
I've always been surprised that this group never got much academic or media attention. Granted, it got some brief media attention back in the heyday of peak oil prepping around 2007 or so. Back then, there were articles in Harper's Monthly, the NY Times magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Right after that, however, peak oil just dropped off the radar. It was never mentioned after that, in any conventional media outlet. The only remark I heard after that was from Paul Krugman (of NY Times op-ed fame) who opined in 2010 that peak oil was probably upon us but would definitely not cause the collapse of civilization. He devoted a few sentences to it, then moved on.
Probably doesn't sell so well; easier to mention it in passing, then dismiss the whole thing. Most folks would rather get their doomer porn from fictional hollywood portrayals where everyone dies except the heros, or silly TV shows where stupid 'preppers' broadcast their 'secret' preps to the whole planet. Bedsides, not so sure cognitive dissonance is marketable at scale.
This group has never really had any kind of retrospective on what it meant. There was an entire social group consisting of thousands (or even tens of thousands) who were preparing for doomsday, and it was just ignored by everyone else. When civilization didn't abruptly collapse circa 2009, most peak oilers (it seems) just quietly dropped it and went back to their lives. Most of the big peak oil websites closed down without much commentary, and the whole thing was forgotten.
My reason for being here is that I find doomsday groups to be fascinating. What I find particularly interesting is how groups will respond when their predictions have clearly failed, especially when those predictions were made in a tone of total certainty or were believed without hesitation ("it's just a matter of basic thermodynamics", etc). To be sure, most members leave the group when the predictions fail, but some people stay. I always wondered why.
I'm glad somebody wrote a book about this. Otherwise the peak oil doom thing from 2005-2010 could have been just forgotten about, or lost to history. A lot of people are unaware of just how MANY doomsday groups there have been in the US over the years. It's interesting as history.
People, by-in-large, have short attention spans, and BAU provides an almost infinite variety of powerful lures. It saturates our lives. Conversely, 'The Long Emergency" will continue to play out long after any of us are around. Responding requires adopting a completely different world view, forming new and quite different habits. Not so sure many folks have a long enough view and the commitment (courage?) to put in the effort, and deal with the social repercussions and lifestyle changes to respond in a complete way to big changes that occur over decades. And many folks simply didn't (don't) have the skills or wherewithal to make drastic changes. I personally, gave up a lot of cool things. Easier to go back to the herd. The herd is calling you back.
In short, peak everything was just a fad for most, like so many things.
-G