Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [16]
Oil has been our adolescent growth hormone, enabling this massive growth spurt to an exploding population and planetary civilization. Oil has generated a worldwide transportation industry that fosters cross-cultural contact and connection. Oil has enabled a worldwide trade economy that brings the latest technologies of Japan to the slums of India, trucks bananas from the jungle, flies cheap toys from China and perfume from France, affecting nearly every economy on the planet. Through the distribution of televisions, computers, and cell phones, oil has made possible—for the first time ever—a global network of communication, wiring up the global brain. Oil is a common ingredient in the products and packaging of most everything we buy, enabling large-scale food production and delivery. Without oil, multi-cultural bodies, such as the United Nations, could not bring together political dignitaries to meet face to face and address global issues.
But just as an adolescent’s growth hormone doesn’t last forever, our oil-based growth spurt is nearing its end. Not only have we reached our adult size as a population, but the demand for cheap oil has already outpaced its production, and the supply will eventually run out—even if population stabilizes. We simply won’t have the fuel necessary to continue the endless consumption that is destroying the environment, the frenzied activity that generates stress, and the irrational compulsion toward imperial conquest that requires an oil industry to support it. With the means now in place for maintaining a global network of intelligence through cyberspace and a growing understanding of our entangled fields of consciousness, our growth will now be more spiritual than material: more about information than products, access rather than ownership, networks rather than markets, service rather than exploitation, personal awakening and health as more valuable than fame and fortune. Instead of using the environment to feed our personal ego-system, we can live in service to our common ecosystem. As the oil hormones settle down, not only will the skies be clearer, but perhaps our sanity will return, and we can begin to enter the beginnings of our future adulthood.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that getting from adolescence to adulthood isn’t easy. It usually involves a challenging initiation that contains separation and loss, challenges and ordeals. Like all rites of passage, it asks us to transform or die. With a global economy and lifestyle addicted to oil, the machinery that drives our civilization will either transform to a new technology or grind to a halt—and the jury is out as to which will occur first. The oil situation, and the “oiligarchy” that rules it, is clearly coming to a head—like the embarrassing pimples on a teenager’s face—revealing the impurities within. When combined with the other environmental crises looming on the horizon, the end of oil will bring an urgent and wrenching shift to all aspects of life as we know it. But the problems we face—deforestation, air pollution, global warming, disappearing topsoil, and the ability to subject distant cultures to the terror of warfare—all are fueled by the use of oil.
Initiation has distinct stages: separation, loss, confinement, challenge, transformation, and rebirth. Our impending crises are evolutionary drivers that will drive us through each of these stages into our emerging awakening—perhaps the greatest awakening in the history of our kind. In the stage of separation, we step back from the cultural trance to awaken to new possibilities. We may choose this voluntarily, or it may be thrust upon us through the collapse of economic and social structures we take for granted, bringing the loss of home through fire, flood, or mortgage crisis or the loss of a