Clarifications on Collapse

[kmo]

This stems from a comment thread on Doug Lain's Facebook page:

The bold items are Doug's first attempt to summarize my position on collapse.

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One: Social Collapse is very likely because of our reliance on fossil fuels.

I think society can and probably will survive the decline of industrial

Comments

[kingofeagles]

I think that these discussions between the two of you have been very interesting. I've re-listened to them recently and have a few comments. First, there was a discussion about whether the economy is a part of nature. It seemed to me that you guys were hung up on a false dichotomy. Economy is both natural and artificial. Every living thing has a personal economy, that is, it's give and take with its environment. Our economy is built upon the natural world and everything that we have comes from the Earth. However, the term "economy" and our conception of it is an artifice. An apple that you pick off of the tree and eat is a natural act of economy. An apple that is grown on a farm, purchased as a commodity, handled by a dozen middle men, and sold halfway around the world at a profit is an act of artificial economy. The more abstract the transaction gets, the more artificial it becomes. The more artificial it becomes, the more energy it requires to maintain

[kingofeagles]

Thanks for the response, Doug

[kmo]

This essay is not a reply to your essay above...

That's good, because that would be the exact opposite of what you agreed to do in this exercise.

...but was inspired by it and I thought I'd share a link.

I'm going hold off on reading it until after our Extraenvironmentalist conversation.

[kmo]

Thinking it over I don't believe I can recapitulate all of the conversations in your book Conversations on Collapse. I can respond to what you've written here, I can summarize it, but your request that I listen to and summarize your book is something I can only do in part.

Dude, please read my last paragraph again. What I've prepared for you is a collection of excerpts designed to summarize and distill the points I'm trying to get you to incorporate into your thus-far-unworkably-simplistic understanding of what I'm trying to communicate. The total running time is 1 hour and 3 minutes, only slightly longer than a single episode of the C-Realm Podcast. Is that really more than you can manage?

http://www.archive.org/details/ConversationsOnCollapseClipsRoughCut