Bøger af Warren Johnson

Most Americans cannot imagine getting by with less, or that it could be an easier and more relaxed way of life while using less of our diminishing supply of resources. Our descendants will thank us if we do that. But it won't be easy, given the many changes in our ways of life that it will involve, and will benefit the environment too without the harm it would have done to our descendants without it, and also the more relaxed ways of life that we can live in the times ahead, rather than causing the collapse that we are moving toward now. The world is much too beautiful to risk that, as we are doing now. This is the subject that is being written about ever more frequently now, especially as the climate changes have become ever more damaging, with higher summer temperatures and winds, colder winter temperatures, and more extremes of all of them, and will become steadily more difficult to overcome, as has already become the case.

Mr. Johnson’s thesis can be summarized without much difficulty: after generations of extravagant and reckless industrial expansion, we are clearly entering an age of economic scarcity. While human demands continue to rise, natural resources, especially the non-renewable kind, become harder to find and more expensive to extract, process, transport and distribute. This simple brute fact is the basic cause of inflation, despite the inability of most professional economists to see it. (The “dismal science” has never been more dismally obtuse than it is today.) The law of diminishing returns is coming into effect. Technological developments can delay the process but not halt or reverse it; nor can we rely on government or big business to save us. Planning for further growth delays the adjustments that must be made, makes a fair sharing of necessary sacrifices more troublesome, and if carried too far will make more severe and painful, because rapid, the inevitable decline of the international economic machine. The best way to deal with the end of affluence is to accept it—not fight it—and to begin, here and now, the unavoidable adaptations, on an individual, family, and community basis. Piecemeal, experimental, and muddling.