Peak Shit! How Oil Spilled the Economy – 2
(Read Part 1 )
By Stanley Ravi, POI member
As I said last time, my exposure to Peak Oil made me realise a few things:
– We are approaching the ‘Limits to Growth’
– Growth is dead
– Oil will be gone
– The world is going to come to a grinding halt.
I took on Maslow’s Pyramid – “Food, Clothing and Shelter.” Even today, we can see how flawed this food, clothing and shelter business is, but it’s been accepted as gospel and translated into every language in the world. But the fact is that food, clothing and shelter are not as basic as we are told: I won’t die if I skip a meal, I won’t die when I am naked, I won’t die if I’m not under shelter, particularly in the tropical climates.
Such thoughts eventually turned me into a preacher of sorts, advocating water conservation and water consciousness. The result? My wife asked for a divorce. My relatives thought I had lost it. My friends shied away from me. No one could tell what had happened to me, or why I was talking like this, except one close friend, who listened and argued with me about Peak Oil.But armed with this “knowledge,” I managed to sell myself as a ‘soft skills trainer’, because I went around telling the world that you just need the five elements to live, and not money! I was probably the cheapest soft skills trainer on the planet, fearing nothing and no one, coming for almost free with a range enviable of skill sets. I was the best find for any employer.
I taught management students, the skill I had was a prerequisite of sorts for entrepreneurship. I was afflicted with a sort of psychological disorder, but at that time it wasn’t even known. I used to read Energybulletin.net (now Resilience.org), the peak oil primer, like it was a holy book. It took more time before I found Peak Oil Blues, and realised that there were others too afflicted by the same ‘disorder’.
I moved out of Bangalore to Dubai again for a job with Emirate Airlines. This time, I lasted on the job only for 45 days and came back to teach English in rural Andhra Pradesh, in Narsipatnam, 100 kms off Vizag. I was comfortable despite having no salary. The organisation provided Maslow’s essentials: food, clothing and shelter. It was the year 2007, and soon after, when the global recession hit our shores, one of the few people who was not shocked was me. Something else I had read from a book, Graffiti III by Nigel Rees was now showing up on the horizon:
– Konstantin Jireček
(To be continued… )