Is Peak Oil Pessimism due to Men Coming to Realise How Useless They Are?

international | environment | other press

Wednesday December 06, 2006 17:54

by Terence

The Great Deskilling

There has been a great deskilling of the present and generation of people up to the mid 40s age or so and in a recent blog article Rob Hopkins asks:

Is Peak Oil Pessimism a Generation of Men Coming to Realise How Useless They Are?

In others we are all now so skiled in practical things, is that why Peak Oil scares to many people because they realize they no longer have the skills to go back to doing more practical skills.

This article raises some important questions because the whole issue of Peak Oil is as much about making cultural changes as a technical fix to supply more energy or use less of it.

What we have to face is that we have in the past 50 or 60 years undergo a huge cultural change to get to our present state. During that time this alien consumerist, throwaway and wasteful society has also brought about a great deskilling of us all but especially the present generation and those a bit older (i.e probably up to mid 40s or so age).

For those who find out about Peak Oil, read it up, understand it and recognise it's huge importance and likely impact, they eventually realize a new set of skills will be required to deal with it. In fact most of those skills are in fact old skills.

Here's some quotes from the article.

One of the main impacts of the Age of Cheap Oil, the great Petroleum Party so rapidly drawing to a close, has been the monumental deskilling that has gone on during that time. A friend of mine recently told me of a friend of his 14 year old son, who had grown up eating sliced bread, and was unable to actually cut a slice of bread from a loaf! How many people now know how to cook, garden, build, repair, mend, pickle, prune or scythe? In the space of two generations, we have lost so much basic knowledge and skills that previous generations learnt by osmosis without even thinking about it.

AND

A couple of years ago I went to London to a peak oil conference, and the evening before it I went to the pre-event social. I was struck by the fact that everyone there (with one exception) was male, aged 25-40, and, as far as I could tell, worked in IT. They were all very pleasant, intelligent, well read on the whole peak oil issue, and as able as anyone to argue that the peak is imminent and we need to act. There were however, almost no women, no gardeners, no builders, no foresters in the room, nor at the subsequent conference as far as I can tell.

And this article has inspired someelse to write another article called:
Post-peak pessimism: Looking for new tools
http://www.energybulletin.net/23335.html

And in it he concurs with Hopkins

"Does this resonate with you?" Hopkins asks. You bet. I think it is right on the money. I've thought so for years, ever since a startling personal experience opened my eyes....

And he goes on to give an account of his own personnel circumstances...

The original article is here:
http://transitionculture.org/2006/12/04/is-peak-oil-pes...-are/

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Is Peak Oil Pessimism due to Men Coming to Realise How Useless They Are?