It was the Age of the Fossils ; it was the Age of the Moderns.
Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.
Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.
Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.
Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?
This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.
Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.
Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.
Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.
This era's energy will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.
The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.
I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.
That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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