The current urban population of the world… is greater than the entire population of the world in 1960… — James Howard Kunstler
The current urban population of the world… is greater than the entire population of the world in 1960. Seventy-eight percent of the urban dwellers in the so-called developing world live in slums. From the West African littoral to the mountainsides of the to the banks of the , the , the , and the Irrawaddy, new gigantic slums spread like immense laboratory growth media, waiting to host epidemic disease cultures. , Nigeria, for example, grew from a city of 300,000 in 1950 to over ten million today. But Lagos, writes Mike Davis, "is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from to : probably the biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth." Most of the world's new, exploding slums have only the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements, open sewers running along the corridor-like "streets." In the slums of Bombay, there is an estimated one toilet per five hundred inhabitants. Currently, two million children die every year from waste-contaminated water in the world's slums. The enormity of this urban disaster is poorly comprehended in advanced nations like the United States, where the drinking water is still safe and even the poor have flush toilets connected to real sewers. But the slums of the world will… be the breeding ground of the next pandemic, and chances are, once it is underway, […] [we] will not be spared.
p. 183Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called “globalism.” It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputs—the ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy.
p. 219
Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, “a corporation… is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance… It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.
p. 186
It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the “affordable” range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy can’t be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its… technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws.
p. 194