Reddit reviews Not the Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of Progress

For two podcasts in a row, KMO has had JMG on to talk about his new book, Not the Future We Ordered.

This sounds A LOT like Morris Berman's book Reenchantment of the World written in 1981. They even used the phrase "Reenchantment of the World in last week's podcast! (edit not sure who used this phrase, it was possibly James Howard Kunstler, who KMO says uses the phrase in this World Made By Hands* novels) They also talk about Gregory Bates's study, and how it relates to our culture (as did Morris Berman in his book!)

Morris Berman wrote this trilogy on human consciousness, and Reenchantment was the first book. The next two were Coming to Our Senses and Wandering God.

I wonder if JMG has read these books, and just doesn't give credit for taking the ideas and repacking them, with a bit of peak oil mixed in.

edit Morris Berman in his books cites influences extensively. I learned about many thinkers/writers just through Berman's books. Berman is reviewing all these past thinkers, and then adding his own original take on the situation. He isn't rewriting books from the past and claiming the ideas as his own.

Good article, except for this part:

> There are two obvious solutions to that problem:

> -Planned use of resources with intense recycling and heavy dependence on management of renewable resources, or;

> -Getting into space in a big way to expand the resource pool and put off much of the problem for centuries (at which point, hopefully, we figure out a better solution, or go to the stars).

About the first "obvious" solution:

Recycling (I assume the author is referring to things like metals and plastics) isn't a long-term solution because it's energy-intensive and not 100% efficient.

It would be nice if humanity could live within the Earth's yearly budget of renewable resources, but we've demonstrated absolutely no ability to do so, and we're already heavily dependent on renewables like forests, topsoil, fisheries, etc. If anything, we need to lower our dependence on all types of resources.

About the second "obvious" solution:

This one is ridiculous, and plays into our civilization's dominant mythology of "going to the stars." John Michael Greer devoted an entire book on this subject.

It's funny how so many people seem to have a blind spot for the one obvious (and unmentionable) solution, which is to drastically lower our population and consumption, but that will never happen, so the author is correct when he says:

> The complete inability of our society to deal with obvious consequences of our actions is what has doomed it. This society will not survive. The questions are only “How many people will it kill going down?” and “What will the next society look like in the ashes of a world left to us by this one?”