Life Changes

With higher energy costs driving up the price of everything — driving your car as well as eating — and warnings that Earth’s increasingly hostile climate is only going to reduce man’s capacity to produce food, what some yearn for is the promise that this is all just a temporary setback.

That your cruise-controlled, climate-controlled, shrink-wrapped, fossil-fueled lifestyle isn’t going away.


Don’t expect such reassurances from Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute, 2440 E. Water Well. He’s not dazzled by the miracles technology has wrought, in the field or the factory. What he sees over the past 200 years is raw, unchecked growth, fueled by coal and oil.

Petri dish economics is what Jackson calls it — hypergrowth that occurs when lower life forms meet surplus energy. It’s just that Jackson expects a more considered response from humans.

“I don’t call it progress to be moving toward the edge of the petri dish,” Jackson says. “This idea of growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Salina Journal