Chapter 17: Hello Doomsday My Old Friend

To be honest, I had a bit of trouble with this article at first. It was hard to follow and there were a lot of terms in it that I didn’t understand. After reading it again though, I understood where the author was going. Basically, he was detailing how societies, including many of our own, can collapse through their own negligence. We should beware of becoming like Easter Island. Easter Island is really interesting because their culture was so sophisticated until it ran out of natural resources, and then the civilization was torn apart. There are several reasons why a society might collapse that way, but our generation must be especially aware of running out of natural resources.

After watching Why We Fight, this definitely makes sense to me. To see how dependent our economy is on producing weapons and continued military operations, it’s no wonder that we’re running out of the oil and cheap energy needed to sustain it. The amount of oil and other natural energy sources that we consume combined with the fact that we aren’t actively seeking other, possibly more expensive, ways of fueling our world will result in the collapse of our society. That’s not to say that our society will collapse, in fact it is entirely possible that we can turn ourselves around. However, we have to actively seek alternate energy sources and we need to do it now.