Very thoughtful and hopeful article. I hope for the best as this is my country and he is my president too. Please name one president in the last 40 years that did not fall prey to special interests?
The people of America are the only ones that can lift us out of our selfish mindset that we are all owed something for nothing. When we start trusting politcians we are always let down.

I’m hopeful that Obama may be different. At least he is saying different words; the inaugural address seemed like a call to sobriety.

I’m learning to farm and plan to teach my children, my grandchildren, and as many others as I can.

Is anyone going to Powershift at the end of the month, or to sit in at the coal plant with Wendell Berry and Bill McGibbon on March 2? Maybe it’s the right time for such a ritual.

Sorry, one more: about the possible sources of energy – yeah, nuclear is good for business, it creates so much cancer, lots of jobs there. I’d think twice before tapping the earth’s core heat – you think we can’t use it up, but in New Zealand they started to exceed the available geothermal power and had to cut back. Sustainable ethanol and wind and solar, better. Why didn’t this person even mention conservation, insulation, the “low-hanging fruit?” We need a lifestyle change!

I live in Montana, and I would welcome more Jewish neighbors, especially if they are anything like you

I’m joking, but only sorta.

Sharon

“But that way lies tyranny, and moral failure. To do so represents the tyranny of the present over their posterity – the extraction of resources that will be urgently needed by your daughters and my sons and their children. ”

“It isn’t merely tyranny, though, although that would be bad enough. It is also impossible to accomplish.”

Look, the only things that are genuinely 100% unsustainable about our civilization are our energy sources and our CO2 emissions.

But neither of those are insurmountable problems. Yes, we desperately need to get off of non-renewable fossil fuels. But there’s lots of other options. Nuclear is one, solar/wind/etc can take off some of the load. If you don’t like nuclear, there was a really interesting study done at MIT recently that pointed out that in about 1/2 the landmass in the USA, if you drill down 2 km, you get rocks at 200 degrees C. If you drill down 3 km, you get rocks at 300 degrees C. Run two holes, one takes water down, the other brings steam up, this has to be cheaper than nuclear power plants. Clean and renewable. And the oil industry regularly drills down 10km, so it’s not a big deal to drill down 2 or 3 km.

So that takes care of electricity, what about transportation?

Bio-diesel from algae could replace all the fossil fuels in the USA by using about 1-5% of the landmass of the lower-48 states. That could be just a small fraction of land that’s otherwise undesirable, because it’s desert.

So, none of the problems of our high-energy, high-technology are intrinsically unsolvable by some sort of physical limit. We have the technology to transform our civilization from one based on soil and aquifier depletion and fossil fuels to one that’s genuinely sustainable. This is with tech that’s available, today.

All of our problems are in the political sphere.

Now, I don’t want to in any way downplay just how difficult the political problems are in the political sphere. For example, if we’re going to replace all oil usage with biofuels from algae, well, that also means incidentally shutting down the oil industry, and I don’t imagine that they’ll go quietly. We still have people in the USA who don’t believe in global warming. The political problems are bigger than anything seen since the civil war, maybe bigger.

But, we have not yet any sort of ‘carrying capacity’ physical constraint that would make our civilization unsustainable by the laws of thermodynamics or something.

Nice twist the reference to the Deep South.

Perhaps there is some more in it.

They were unable to maintain their lifestyles without the cheap source of energy.
Destruction of the social, financial and commercial infrastructure put them on course for abject poverty.

Our society is now seeing destruction of the financial infrastructure as well as the beginnings of a faltering of supply of cheap energy.

Perhaps there is a reflecting picture in the South of the past?

all the best!