If you're not worried about the future of our civilisation, you obviously haven't been listening. You wouldn't be alone in that - this is an incredibly hard message for us to hear and we would prefer not to listen at all. Jeffrey Sachs says that one of the reasons American politics is controlled by big corporate interests is because ordinary citizens are disengaged and distracted. I suspect a desire to avoid facing our uncertain future is part of the reason. I've been reading Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future by Steve Hallett with John Wright, published in 2011. Hallett, who is clearly the lead author, is English by birth, currently associate professor of botany in Purdue University in Indianapolis and also had a stint teaching and researching at the University of Queensland just across the river from me. Wright, very much the silent partner, is a journalist and I assume his job was to make the work readable for a non-technical audienc
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson