This essay (written a few days after September 11) has even more meaning today. Jean Houston wrote:  We are the ones who have the most profound task in human history–the task of deciding whether we grow or die. This will involve helping cultures and organizations to move from dominance by one economic culture or group to circular investedness, sharing and partnership. It will involve putting economics back as a satellite to the soul of culture rather than having the soul of culture as satellite to economics. It will involve deep listening past the arias and the habits of cruelty of crushed and humiliated people. It will involve a stride of soul that will challenge the very canons of our human condition. It will require that we become evolutionary partners with each other. … This is a huge test we find ourselves in. We have newly emerged from a century of war and holocaust. Our hopes for the new century, the new millennium were for a new way of being between nations and people, between the earth and ourselves, between spirit and matter. Those hopes still live, if anything, they have become more powerful, more necessary. For America it will mean a deep shift of our attitudes to other cultures around the world to one of service and support rather than exploitation and dominance. Yes, the perpetrators have to be found and dealt with through therapeutic law and international justice. They are not a nation, they are a cancer, and a cancer is rarely removed through a cycle of violence. Rather, as in holistic medicine, they have to be subdued by the strengthening of the healthy immune system, the envisioning of the pattern of health, and yes, the removal of the cancer wherever it can be excised. (04/08/02)
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Saddam Hussein has announced Iraq will stop oil exports for 30 days or until Israel withdraws from Palestinian territories. … Meanwhile, Libya has come out in support of Iran’s call for oil-producing nations to halt supplies to Israel’s western allies. … On Friday the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Islamic countries should stop supplying oil for one month to countries with close relations with Israel. (04/08/02)

David Fleming  writes in After Oil–Only one country has the potential for a serious increase in output, on a scale which could make a difference. The bad news is: that country is Iraq. Iraq’s oil geology is not fully explored, but there are some well-informed guesses. One estimate is that there are 110 billion barrels there–equal to more than three British North Seas, or more than one third of the total resource once possessed by Saudi Arabia. This oil could not be made immediately available, but it is on a scale to keep world oil production rising for a few more years. It lies, however, in a country which is armed to the teeth, consumed by loathing of the west, and just waiting for a US armed intervention to make its day. Iraq was prevented from selling off its oil during the 1990s, when prices were lower than they will ever be again; it will soon be well placed to apply its own sanctions to the rest of the world by fine-tuning its output and naming its price. … This is not a happy story. But the most shocking thing about it is that it is not a new one, either. The essential problem has been known for a long time. It is a fact, written up exhaustively in the literature, that the period around the turn of the millennium marks the end of growth in the world production of oil, and the start of its long decline towards depletion. In 1956, the geologist King Hubbert accurately forecast that the US’s oil production would peak in 1970. In 1970, Esso forecast that global production would peak in about 2000. In 1976, Britain’s department of energy said that North Sea production would peak at about the end of the century–the same time as the peak in world oil production. For this reason, the report concluded, it would be a good idea to be ready with alternative supplies of energy. … And the consequences? Worldwide, the two main purposes for which oil is used are food and transport. Agriculture is entirely dependent on oil for cultivation and for pumping water, and on gas for its fertilisers. And for every calorie of energy used by agriculture itself, five more are used for processing, storage, and distribution. This dependency on oil and gas could be reduced if the industrial world switched to a more labour-intensive and localised form of food production, and to renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power, at various stages in the sequence from farm to shop, but that brings us again to the minimum transition period of 25 years. In other words, the part played by oil in the provision of food is non-negotiable; this dependency will force people to go on buying the oil they need, to the very limit of their resources. (04/08/02)
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David Price writes: Before the appearance of Homo sapiens, energy was being sequestered more rapidly than it was being dissipated. Then human beings evolved, with the capacity to dissipate much of the energy that had been sequestered, partially redressing the planet’s energy balance. The evolution of a species like Homo sapiens may be an integral part of the life process, anywhere in the universe it happens to occur. As life develops, autotrophs expand and make a place for heterotrophs. If organic energy is sequestered in substantial reserves, as geological processes are bound to do, then the appearance of a species that can release it is all but assured. Such a species, evolved in the service of entropy, quickly returns its planet to a lower energy level. In an evolutionary instant, it explodes and is gone. If the passage of Homo sapiens across evolution’s stage significantly alters Earth’s atmosphere, virtually all living things may become extinct quite rapidly. But even if this does not happen, the rise and fall of Homo sapiens will eliminate many species. It has been estimated that they are going extinct at a rate of 17,500 per year (Wilson, 1988, p. 13), and in the next twenty-five years as many as one-quarter of the world’s species may be lost (Raven, 1988, p. 121). (04/08/02)
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Charles Galton Darwin wrote:  “The fifth revolution will come when we have spent the stores of coal and oil that have been accumulating in the earth during hundreds of millions of years.., it is obvious that there will be a very great difference in ways of life.., a man has to alter his way of life considerably, when, after living for years on his capital, he suddenly finds he has to earn any money he wants to spend . . . The change may justly be called a revolution, but it differs from all the preceding ones in that there is no likelihood of its leading to increases of population, but even perhaps to the reverse.” John F. Kennedy wrote: “What is clear is that as the Cold War fades away, we face not a “new world order” but a troubled and fractured planet, whose problems deserve the serious attention of politicians and publics alike… The pace and complexity of the forces for change are enormous and daunting; yet it still may be possible for intelligent men and women to lead their societies through the complex task of preparing for the century ahead. If these challenges are not met, however, humankind will have only itself to blame for the troubles and disasters that could be lying ahead.”  (04/08/02)
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Carl Sagan wrote: Two billion years ago our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. When we first venture to a near-Earth asteroid, we will have entered a habitat that may engage our species forever. The first voyage of men and women to Mars is the key step in transforming us into a multiplanet species. These events are as momentous as the colonization of the land by our amphibian ancestors and the descent from the trees by our primate ancestors. Fish with rudimentary lungs and fins slightly adapted for walking must have died in great numbers before establishing a permanent foothold on the land. As the forests slowly receded, our upright apelike forebears often scurried back into the trees, fleeing the predators that stalked the savannahs. The transitions were painful, took millions of years, and were imperceptible to those involved. In our case the transition occupies only a few generations, and with only a handful of lives lost. The pace is so swift that we are still barely able to grasp what is happening. Once the first children are born off Earth; once we have bases and homesteads on asteroids, comets, moons, and planets; once we’re living off the land and bringing up new generations on other worlds, something will have changed forever in human history. But inhabiting other worlds does not imply abandoning this one, any more than the evolution of amphibians meant the end of fish. For a very long time only a small fraction of us will be out there.  (04/08/02)
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