Jan Lundberg: Counter argument for ”Stimulus,” growth and employment

It is not clear where we are headed in terms of a society impacted by ecological destruction and the end of globalized consumption. I for one am not sure I want to see the result. However, as things are not so bad now compared to where they seem to be heading — with too many mouths to feed and no social safety net or ecological capacity up to the challenge for avoiding big pain — I continue to soldier on, so to speak. I try to serve the greater good while I worry about my own survival and that of my loved ones. I also have a good time when I can, but things are getting weirder for me as they seem to be for most of us.

I keep in mind my former career-training as an oil-industry analyst and my generalist knowledge gained, in order to try to make sense of our changing, swirling world. It’s what I learned after leaving the industry and government that ultimately allowed me, I believe, to find out more or less fully what is going on, and thus feel I can offer ideas on what needs to be done. That is not to say I know everything or am prepared for any direction the human experience may take. But some things I know for sure from experience and meditating on the forces of both history and the universe.


Predictions

In the 1980s I was making widely reported gasoline price and supply predictions. After leaving industry I made more interesting predictions. In 1991 I wrote in the Spring 1992 edition of Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, that the U.S. socioeconomic failure would be worse than the Soviet Union’s collapse, because we were so petroleum-dependent compared to the Russians who on the household level were growing their own potatoes. Through the 1990s I predicted collapse of the U.S. economy due to the coming global peak of oil extraction, in our Auto-Free Times magazine which became Culture Change. I have also predicted an eventual Ecotopian outcome, even in the U.S. that I’ve jokingly called the United Paved Precincts of Amerika.

I have learned that the kind of economy and social structure we have been living under is lacking in any sound foundation for long-term continuity. In fact, our survival is threatened by our present system. The political solutions that have been allowed to circulate are really economic band-aids that do not threaten the power structure. This is a prime reason it is so hard to predict where we are going to end up as a people. Our culture and Western Civilization are so threatened from within — the system’s own contradictions and failures — that collapse prevents us from imagining in much detail what kind of new (or traditional, close-to-nature) culture or society can be around the corner. Likewise, technology worship and clinging to material things hold us back.

For my whole adult life I have yearned for and worked for — except when I was mostly serving corporations — a better world that left war, greed and pollution behind. The paradox is that when one wants fundamental change enough to take action and look deeply at the obstacles, the positive vision is tempered by unpleasant realism and truth that others may call negative or doom-and-gloom. But the sum of positive alternatives — to ecocide, war and unequal treatment — is in one’s heart and not suppressed everywhere at all times. Here I leave the style of first-person writing and lay out the rest of my argument.

Culture Change