Chapter 14: Playing Chicken with the Apocalypse

This was a very weird article, because on the one hand it predicted doom and gloom and yet by the end it was starting to offer a (hazy) way to combat said apocalypse. I think my reaction to the article was mixed. On the one hand, the stats that the author quoted scared the bejesus out of me, as well as the book he referenced (The Party's Over). But then he starts talking about how it's not entirely inevitable that our future is so preordained, even though he just got done saying that there's nothing we can do about it. Hmm...

In general, I'd say that the aim was to at once combat and verify any sense of pessimism the general public may have about our limited resources and the ways in which their eventual extinction will doom us all. Dystopian fiction thrives on the ways in which economic or enviromental upheavals throw off all controls on society. So in that sense, I'd say any optimism that the reader might gain from the article is in the fact that it hasn't happened yet (but the pessimist argument is that it will).

It's hard to be optimistic about resources, considering the finite nature of many and the ways in which we exploit and use those up (think about how much gas we'd save if we got rid of NASCAR and all forms of competitive racing...hold on, I think a hundred Dale Jr. fans are outside my door with pitchforks and fire). The message is (I think) best summed up by one of my favorite songs of all time: REM's "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Only thing is, I'm not sure what there is to feel fine about.