Life Beyond the Tipping Point

I just started reading “Eaarth” by Bill Mckibben.   Holy crap. I have only gotten through the first chapter of this and have come to the quick conclusion that we're totally fucked. This is not a problem we're passing down to our grandchildren. This is a problem we've already inherited from OUR parents. We've crossed the tipping point (that being the magic number of 350ppm). Anyone want to join a book club? We can double it as a grief support group if you'd like. Count my words, life will force our hands within our life time, and it will, in no uncertain terms, resemble anything similar to what one might consider "a choice" by todays standards. I predict that life is going to look very different in the decades to come, especially when it comes to our often taken for granted technology. With society crossing the tipping point of peak oil in 2008, it will only be a matter of time before this pendulum we call "progress"* is bound to swing back in the other direction. It seems our world today is by and large, taken for granted as "a given" and progress has only to build upon itself indefinitely. This is an illusion and I believe the true psychosis or modern society. All the material things society finds so important and intrinsic to life today - from personal laptop computers and flat screen, high definition TV's to cel phones and digital cameras (which all mostly seem to have a maximum lifespan of 2 - 5 years these days) - will soon no longer be able to support the transient illusion of their permanence which has propped them up for so many years. Global climate change and peak oil aside, what most people often fail to think about - the fact that society truly does not have the means to support this ongoing level of "progress" indefinitely - is the traumatic shock that is inevitable as reality comes crashing down all around us in the decades to come. We will have to be content with less and that's something I don't believe the American psyche is truly prepared for or even willing to think about at this time. We will have no choice but to face this fact in the future.

* [I use the term "progress" as it's often used today, which I believe will lose it's meaning in time as well, as the world comes to associate it with a "global lack of foresight" if not blind hubris. I believe that in the future, our unrealistic pinning over these so called ideals of progress, when viewed from the eyes of hindsight, will be more clearly seen for what it was - the main seed that has been planted in our collective psyche (mostly through a corporately influenced culture of disposable consumerism), that has enabled humanity to be the true architects of its own destruction].