Tuesday, August 16, 2005

While waiting...

...for my computer to be backed-up and then reformatted, then hopefully, fixed... I decided I'd take a stab at my newest book. Having finished Bono's biography a week or so ago, I felt a void in my life. Time for a new book!

I had ordered Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed several days ago. I got it for free from some book club. Sweet. I have wanted to read this book for some time.

I am only in the first few pages and I am already making connections. You see, earlier today, Jesse and I talked about the ever-rising cost of oil and its effects on us and others. I made some statement (that surely was borrowed) about how America is a society built on oil. Since the Industrial Revolution, oil has been the sustainer of the society. Everything seems to depend on oil in a very direct way, or a somewhat indirect way.

Well, here are some hanting words from Jared Diamond's first few pages:

It has long been suspected that many of these mysterious [societal collapses] were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended.

Not to be a doomsdayer, but wow, those are startling thoughts. And this connected to some of the stuff we're reading about in Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire make me really think about shaping an alternative imagination of how we ought to live. Hmm.

More to come for sure...

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