I am working on this essay slowly. Feel free to read it as far as I've completed it. Every time I start writing it, I seem to suffer writer's block.
In about 2004 I learned about peak oil. It wasn't too surprising to me that a non-renewable resource would "peak" - i.e. reach the point where extraction became expensive and more difficult, but I never had considered the consequences of what this could mean, because I assumed it would happen after I died. I also had never considered the fact that petroleum, the resource that peak oil is concerned with, was used to create virtually all the modern trappings of our "civilized" and consumer life.
Peak Oil was scary, but I've concluded it (along with most of the other environmental and resource catastrophes we are experiencing or about to experience) are only the symptoms of the most pressing issue, which is overpopulation. There are simply too many humans, and at some point we went into biological overshoot, exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. We haven't suffered a massive die off (as other species do) because our clever natures have managed to grow us yields of crops that we never could have managed without fossil fuels.
It led me on a journey, however, and I think I'm happier because of it. There are times I'm not sure.
Peak oil is only part of the tip of the receding iceberg and vanishing horizons of our culture.
It turns out civilization itself may be the culprit. From the moment we began to try to control our environment using our large brains and opposable thumbs, we may have sealed a long term fate that could not be foretold the millennia ago that we embarked upon human civilization. Alternatively, it may be that even without our civilizing cultures we would have ended at the same place, though probably a lot later.
All complex species on the earth eventually become extinct, either through evolution or else environmental changes. Are we possibly close to that as human beings?
