I’ve been reading Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog for over a year now, and have found most of his predictions to come true. Most of what unravelled this Fall he wrote about last Winter. Thus, it is with little trepidation that I recommend last week’s column, despite the dire news it foretells. Better to be informed with a plan, than to be caught flatfooted. Read on and plant your gardens.
Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler:
The big theme for 2009 economically will be contraction. The end of the cheap energy era will announce itself as the end of conventional “growth” and the shrinking back of activity, wealth, and populations. Contraction will come as a great shock to a world of conventionally programmed economists. They will toil and sweat to account for it, and they will probably be wrong. Unfortunately, this contraction will do its work in unpleasant ways, driving down standards of living, shearing away hopes and expectations for a particular life of comfort, and introducing disorder to so many of the systems we have depended on for so long. People will starve, lose their homes, lose incomes and status, and lose the security of living in peaceful societies. It will become clear that the Long Emergency is underway.
My hope for the year, at least for my own society, is that we will transition away from being a nation of complacent, distracted, over-fed clowns, to become a purposeful and responsible people willing to put their shoulders to the wheel to get some things done. My motto for the new year: “no more crybabies!”
