Peak oil and the psychology of work

The following is a guest post from Vinay Kumar, who lives in the small coastal town in Southern India. Vinay has a Phd in Neuroscience from M.I.T. and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University. He works as a systems engineer and volunteers on an organic farm that he helped to create. He also provides technical help to local community organizations in India that are fighting polluting industries. Vinay is a friend of one of Herman Daly’s former graduate students in India which is how he came across TheOilDrum. The below essay on the implications of oil depletion for human labor is a great example of the cross disciplinary ideas that can emerge at the intersection of the internet and education .

This is a preliminary attempt to explore the relationship between the current predicament facing humanity arising out of an exploding population facing planetary resource limitations, in other words known as overshoot, and the psychology of work inherent in the human species. One reason to explore this connection is that the question of overshoot is normally framed in standard Darwinian terms. In the Darwinian framework overshoot begins with the availability of abundant resources that allows the population of a species to increase exponentially. This exploding population eventually depletes irreversibly the very resources that sustain the population and this leads to a large scale die-off and a precipitous fall in the species population sometimes leading to extinction. In this rise and fall, the behavior of the individuals of the species is often typical of any organism seeking to maximize its chances of survival and procreation.

http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6066