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Future Shock and the Greening of America
Future Shock and the Greening of America
What I find fascinating is our limited ability to make sense of trends unfolding in real time.
During our recent breakfast meeting in Berkeley, author/blogger Jim Kunstler suggested that the coherence of eras waxed and waned, and the present era was incoherent. By this he meant the narratives being propagated by the status quo no longer align with reality, and often conflict with one another, resulting in incoherence.
There is a time lag of many years between fast-changing events and our ability to make sense of them, i.e. construct a coherent account or narrative of what we collectively experienced.
Each era has its Big Events and trends, but the last era with truly ground-shifting changes that affected virtually everyone in the nation in one way or another was the 1960s. 9/11 increased airport security but other than that, the changes wrought by the Global War on Terror (GWOT) only heavily impact narrow slices of the state and populace–the armed forces and security agencies.
The same can be said of the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09: the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) destroyed the yield on savings, but the daily-life effects on most people have been relatively restrained compared to far more disruptive eras; some have seen their portfolios skyrocket in value, but most households have seen their real net worth decline. Social welfare did its job of providing a safety net for those who lost their jobs in the recession.
The 1960s visibly changed society in a few short years, and less visibly, the economy. Two books published in 1970, at the end of the tumultuous 1960s, attempted to weave a coherent narrative of what everyone was experiencing: Future Shock and The Greening of America.
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Future Shock – Crash Course Chapter 25 | Peak Prosperity
Future Shock – Crash Course Chapter 25 | Peak Prosperity.
Here at the penultimate chapter of The Crash Course, everything we’ve learned comes together into a single narrow range of time we’ll call the twenty-teens.
What this chapter offers is a comprehensive view of how all of our problems are actually interrelated and need to be viewed as such, or solutions will continue to elude us.
Each of the many key trends and threats mentioned earlier in The Crash Course will take many years, if not several decades, to address. And yet, we find them all parked directly in front of us without any serious national discussion or planning.
With every passing day we squander precious time while the problems grow larger and more costly, if not thoroughly intractable. Buying time, as the central bankers and politicians the world-over have opted to do, is not a strategy. Simply hoping for better times has a much different probability for success than having a well thought-out plan. The mark of a mature adult is someone who can manage complexity and plan ahead. The same description applies to an entire society. Here at Peak Prosperity, our opinion is that with precious few exceptions, the current political and corporate leadership of this country are not adequately managing the complexity of the situation. And they are not planning ahead.
Simply put: We’ve lived well beyond our economic, energetic and ecological budgets. It’s time to change that.
It is time, to return to living within our means. We need to set priorities, set budgets, and stick to both.
