1st Edition

Not the Future We Ordered Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of Progress

By John Michael Greer Copyright 2013
    158 Pages
    by Routledge

    158 Pages
    by Routledge

    For well over half a century, since the first credible warnings of petroleum depletion were raised in the 1950s, contemporary industrial civilization has been caught in a remarkable paradox: a culture more focused on problem solving than any other has repeatedly failed to deal with, or even consider, the problem most likely to bring its own history to a full stop. The coming of peak oil-the peaking and irreversible decline of world petroleum production-poses an existential threat to societies in which every sector of the economy depends on petroleum-based transport, and no known energy source can scale up extensively or quickly enough to replace dwindling oil supplies. Not The Future We Ordered is the first study of the psychological dimensions of that decision and its consequences, as a case study in the social psychology of collective failure, and as an issue with which psychologists and therapists will be confronted repeatedly in the years ahead.

    The unmentionable crisis , The religion of progress , The psychology of the progress myth , Peak oil as deviance , The five stages of peak oil , Facing an unwelcome future

    Biography

    John Michael Greer