GAIA Bites BACK

Although some call him alarmist, Mr. James Howard Kunstler at least reverences the Goddess Gaia and the Gaia Hypothesis. Mr. K. feels the Goddess is set to rough us up a bit:

[In] response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and invasion of the wilderness, the Earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it has a kind of protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo Sapiens.

Snip

[Without] cheap oil, auto-dependent suburbs and big cities will collapse, along with industry and mechanized agriculture; serfdom and horse-drawn carts will stage a comeback; hunger will cause massive "die-back"; otherwise "impotent" governments will engineer "designer viruses" to cull the surplus population; and Asian pirates will plunder California.... A "dazed and crippled America," he hopes, will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism....

Kinda cheery, isn't it? Well, at least the last part.

More reviews of Mr. K's 2005 The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century are HERE.

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thnx to jimpetr for the fine foto