[Heineken]

To all these books must be added "The World Without Us," by Alan Weisman, which was recommended to me by another PO.com member.

It's a sort of "peak everything" book. Peak time, even.

It's a "thought experiment" about what would happen to an Earth from which all people suddenly disappeared---what would happen to what's left of the natural world (a rennaisance) and what would happen to our long deep footprint (slow erasure).

What I most took away from the book was a more devastatingly complete picture of the damage we've done, and how brief the human era is likely to be as a result.

Get this book. But be warned---it will change you, either into a doomer or into a more intense doomer.

[chuck6877]

Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon"

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[dohboi]

Along with all these good suggestions, there's a new book out by a Pat Murphy called "Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change."

It has a good overview of PO and GW, then goes into the need for more realistic responses than "Sustainable Development." His favorite word (besides 'communitiy') is 'curtailment.'

A bit more realistic than the "Plan B" folks, but not totally doomerish.

We should all probably be writing books. Each person has a different perspective that might reach a different kind of audience. Is anyone planning anything in this direction?

Oh, another book I'd like to mention is "Ecological Debt: The Health of Planet and the Wealth of Nations" by Andrew Simms. More GW than PO oriented, but the proposals would address either. His favorite words are "contraction and convergence."

"The Common Good" by John Cobb and Herman Daly is good about the role of standard economic theories in creating a world depleted of resources and full of degraded environments.

Has anyone mentioned "Eating fossil Fuels" by Dale Allen Pfeffer?

Jenab, thank for the recs on books on wild edibles. I hadn't thought about Euel Gibbons in quite a while.

And don't let anyone come between you and your most cherished hatreds and prejudices, ever

[killJOY]

I''m glad someone bumped this thread, as it provides a chance to look back over the years and to reassess.

My conclusion: Not much has happened literarily over the last three years of any note.

My top three are still:

1. "Beyond Oil," Deffeyes

2. "Twilight In the Desert," Simmons

3. "Blood and Oil," Klare.


I have completely become a turncoat as far as Ruppert and his 9/11 minions go. I read his tome, found it interesting, but in the interim have concluded that it is a mass of paranoia. I was misled by the chapter on peak oil, which was excellent. It led me to think the rest of his theorizing must be valid. Something tells me Dale Pfeiffer had a huge hand in making the oil chapter so good.

Thom Hartmann is an idiot. I hated his book. He's a believer in the Hundredth Monkey phenomenon and how that could save us.

As far as the other lay writers go, I've cooled on both Heinberg and Kunstler (especially Kunstler, the guy who uses his fame to defame the poor and the ignorant),

In their place, I opt for Dmitry Orlov. His "Reinventing Collapse" is a very compelling read. I've already read it twice. He's funny and intelligent, and his paralleling of the "US" and the (former) "SU" works wonders for my doomerocity.

[whatpeak]

1. The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski

See the chapter on the Eurasian Balkans.

[kiwichick]

Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer

Profit from the Peak by Chris Nelder and Brian Hicks

[canuckinczech]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PhebaAndThePilgrim', ' ')
Just remember to take time out to read X-Files, or whatever, when it all gets to be too much.
Pheba

[NoahsDove]

This maybe the best book out there:


The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age


Product Description

SeattleOil.com The Internet writings of John Michael Greer - beyond any doubt the greatest peak oil historian in the English language - have finally made their way into print. Greer fans will recognize many of the book's passages from previous essays, but will be delighted to see them fleshed out here with additional examples and analysis.The Long Descent is one of the most highly anticipated peak oil books of the year, and it lives up to every ounce of hype. Greer is a captivating, brilliantly inventive writer with a deep knowledge of history, an impressive amount of mechanical savvy, a flair for storytelling and a gift for drawing art analogies. His new book presents an astonishing view of our society's past, present and future trajectory--one that is unmatched in its breadth and depth. Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Descent-User ... 0865716099



He was on Coast to Coast AM. You can find this podcast if you know where to look.


http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic45464.html

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2008/11/08.html


http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/


----------------------------------------------------

Sample of his essay:

The Long Road Down: Decline and the Deindustrial Future

John Michael Greer

For more than three decades now, the world has been on notice that the long afternoon of industrial society is drawing to a close. The Club of Rome's epochal report The Limits to Growth (1973), the first of many persuasive studies, warned that unrestricted economic growth would collide with hard planetary limits sometime in the early twenty-first century, unless expensive and politically unpopular steps were taken soon. Of course those steps weren't taken at all. A failure of vision and political will on the part of leaders and constituencies alike threw away the decades that could have made a difference. Today we live in the shadow of that failure.

Yet an odd blindness affects attempts to make sense of our predicament. People on all sides of the debate talk as though the future has only two possible shapes: progress or apocalypse, either business as usual for the foreseeable future or a catastrophic slide into savagery and mass death. Whether the topic is global warming, renewable energy, fossil fuel depletion, or anything else, the same claims repeat like a broken record. One side insists that technology will inevitably solve our problems and yield a better life for all, while the other side brandishes worst case scenarios and talks of millions of corpses. It should be obvious that these aren't the only possibilities. The fact that this isn't obvious at all is worth exploring.

Most people would notice something odd if two meteorologists, discussing tomorrow's weather on a wet autumn day, ignored all possibilities except clear weather or a sudden snowstorm. Yet the same sort of illogic goes unchallenged in debates about our future. Thus it's crucial to set aside our assumptions, and look at what actually happens when civilizations run into the limits of their resource base. That's happened many times in the past, but technological spurts and sudden collapses are rare. Far more common is a process nobody thinks about nowadays: decline.

http://www.oilcrisis.com/whatToDo/decline.htm

----------------------------------------------------

I don't know if anyone put Collapse up there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book)

[canuckinczech]

for some good perspective....

Civilizations by FilipeFernandez-Armesto

[kiwichick]

The Limits to Growth; the 30 Year Update

very readable and the conclusion is unavoidable

also Catton's OVERSHOOT

[Crazy_Dad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kiwichick', 'T')he Limits to Growth; the 30 Year Update

very readable and the conclusion is unavoidable

also Catton's OVERSHOOT

[kiwichick]

every day as we dump more GHG emitters on the planet (yeah some people call them babies ) we drive deeper into overshoot

the deeper we go into overshoot the lower we drive eventual
carrying capacity

the hole just keeps on getting deeper