'Modern' life

I read "Sons and Lovers" by D H Lawrence at school as a teenager and loved it. It seemed profound and beautifully written even though, given the nature of its themes rather outside the realm of my experience, I didn't understand some of its deeper currents.

Recently I decided to take "Lady Chatterly's Lover" down off my bookshelf and read it for the first time. It's not much of a secret that Lawrence was not overly keen on the increasing mechanisation of society but I found a segment that I read today that, though written in 1928, seemed prescient for our way of life today, so here it is:

Forty years had made a difference in the neighbourhood. The iron and coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of material disintegration!

What will become of miners, and oil and gas workers when we can no longer burn fossil fuels because the idiocy of us destroying our own liveable environment for comfort will be seen for what it is? They will be no more necessary to life for most of us than a farrier would be today. Our fossil fuel burning extravaganza is so woven into our lives that it seems impossible that it will not always be there, but it must have seemed too that horses would always fill our streets, that most people would work on the land and that blacksmiths would have plenty of work to do, yet they have been cast aside by the reshaping power of black gold. But its time too is passing and I believe that the wheel will turn again to activities more human-scale and what seemed history may well become our future.

'Normal' postings may be resumed soon. Or not.

Got any unattractive natural resources?

This is just great and from the same people that brought you the crazed weather woman video.

I love the sultry voice and the general weirdness of the whole thing

Reports of Peak Oil's death are greatly exaggerated

I gave about 6 or 7 talks about Peak Oil when I lived in Brighton to alert people to something I felt, and still feel, is critically important for us to address. Oil powers a huge proportion of what makes our current minority world lifestyle possible and so examining how much we have, may have and how much it will cost seem worthwhile areas of investigation to me. Sadly, discussion of it in the mainstream media is almost zero (unless faces with a price spike or embargo) and so we lumber on towards a crisis. As usual.

If Peak Oil means absolutely nothing to you (which is very likely) then you can read a good overview here - his site's not been updated since 2009 but nothing of material significance has changed since then to alter its essential message. There are many other sites where you can find up to date information. A recent column in the Daily Telegraph this July put it well:

While there's lots of hype about tar sands and shale fuels, these new technologies often expend more energy than they create, while causing horrendous environmental and water-supply problems. Conventionally-produced crude will remain absolutely critical, and demand for it will spiral, until mankind bans the internal combustion engine, outlaws ammonium-based fertilisers, dismantles the global pharmaceutical industry and learns to live without plastic. I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Me neither!

Here's a short video by Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute about why Peak Oil has not gone away, even if George Monbiot seem to think so.

It's worth a watch.