Dream Themes

 I have sweeping, cinematic dreams with large casts and complex plots, but many dreams contain within them common themes that give voice to daytime fears and anxieties. These themes repeat themselves over and over in dreams with very different casts and plots. 

At the top of the list of themes, is the car that won't stay stopped. I'll be driving and come to a stop, even to park, but regardless of how hard I hold down the brake the car eventually starts to drift and roll very very slowly but inexorably into trouble. This theme happens so often when I am sleeping, that I sometimes have to remind myself that I have never actually had this problem in the waking world. IRL when I stop a car and put on the parking break it stays put. But in my dreams it's a different matter, it almost never stays put, and nothing I can do will stop it. So it drifts into people, other cars, buildings, streams and lakes.  I stopped having this dream for a few years after I retired, until Trump came into office then it came back. It disappeared again during the Biden years, only to reappear this year. In other words, this dream theme has clear connections to external situations, whether job related or political that cause feelings of loss of control and panic or anxiety. I had one of these dreams last night after learning what the new CDC guidelines for COVID vaccines were and realizing that we might have difficulty getting my husband vaccinated (I'm over 65, he is not). 

Another common dream theme is a house with too many doors to the outside and none of them will shut or lock properly. Commonly the door will be smaller than the doorway by an inch or two, so that the deadbolt or other locking mechanism does not connect with anything solid, just sits in the air gap. Or sometimes door frames are rotting and will not hold, or the doors or frames are severely warped and the hardware for locking does not connect. In the dreams I expend oodles of energy trying to jury rig some means of securing a door, but when I am successful, I suddenly discover that there is yet another door with outside access that will not shut or lock properly. I have never experienced this in real life, as far as I can remember. Every place I've ever stayed has had good solid doors and working locks.  Unlike the slowly drifting car theme, I have not been able to identify what events or conditions in real life are a trigger for this theme, although it clear seems to concern fears about boundaries and safety. 

There have been times when real life experiences have been transformed into dream themes of anxiety, fear, dread, worry, etc. In 1982-83 during my first full-time academic teaching position I lived in a rental house that turned out to have a leaky roof. Some months after I moved in, I had the occasion to go up to the attic to put some stuff in storage and noticed several big buckets placed around to collect drips. There was no standing water in them, so I didn't think much about it. However, that spring when we got very heavy rains for several days in a row, I was awakened one night by the sound of water. There not only were the buckets full, but they had overflowed and a literal waterfall was cascading down the attic steps into my the second story of my apartment. When called the landlords emptied the buckets, put them back and assured me that they would repair the roof "soon". After four more months of issues, I found a new rental, but for many years to come my dreams were haunted by the theme of water dripping from the ceilings. Nearly 20 years later my husband and I rented a double wide trailer whose roof also began to leak after we'd been there a few years. Needless to say anxiety still sometimes appears in my dreams as a leaking ceiling. 

So what about you? Do your anxieties, fears, or worries manifest in your dreams in predictable or regular ways? Share your experiences in the comments. 

I suck at Yoga and that's a wonderful feeling!

This is not bragging just a realistic assessment: I am a person with multiple intellectual and artistic talents. There are not many things that I have tried in life that I could not learn to do moderately well with a modicum of effort. 

There were two negative consequences to that: First, because I could do many things pretty well with a little bit of practice (like playing piano, or  understanding mathematics) with a few exceptions I rarely put in the kind of concerted, long term effort it takes to get really outstanding. I've been content with being above average on many things but not really excellent at anything.  Second, on the rare occasions that I encountered something at which I truly sucked (like playing guitar), I very quickly gave up. 

So yoga is a whole new experience for me.  I'm over Medicare age, morbidly obese, with extensive osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis; my disks are deteriorating, my rotator cuffs in both shoulders scarred from multiple injuries, and while my knees and hips aren't ready for surgery yet, it may not be long before they are. I haven't tried any exercise beyond walking since 1989. So I truly suck at yoga.  

My first yoga lesson (four weeks ago) was nearly my last. By the end of the first lesson, when I couldn't come near doing any of the exercises or postures - except for the breathing - I felt I had no right to take up space in a yoga class or the time of the yoga instructor. At the end of the class feeling depressed and humiliated I went up to the instructor to apologize for my miserable existence and say that I would not be back. But before I could get the first word out, the instructor (a truly amazing young woman) put her finger over my mouth and said "NO! Stop! You are NOT allowed to criticize yourself here." I don't remember everything she said next, but I left that room knowing that I would keep coming back and that it didn't matter if I continued to suck at yoga for years to come, as long as I got some benefit out of it. 

The incredible thing is that even though I still can't do anything at all the way it's suppose to be done, I can see tiny improvements and I feel so good at the end of each lesson, despite sucking so completely. It feels like a huge life victory to keep doing something even though I'm terrible at it.  

Nuclear Nightmares

When I was growing up in a blue collar neighborhood in California I was aware that my experience of the world was very different than that of the children around me. I was preoccupied with issues and concerns to which most of my neighborhood playmates seemed oblivious.  A few decades ago I read Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, and was taken aback to discover that Dillard too had little awareness as a child of the international and national economic and political issues of the 1950's and early 1960's.  

One topic obsessed me more than any other between 1956 and 1963: nuclear war. My father possessed a huge volume of photographs collected by Life Magazine that included thousands of pictures of the death and destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (it also contained many photos of the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe but that's a story for another day).  The images of cities utterly flattened by atomic bombs, and picture after picture with piles of bodies haunted me day and night.  

http://records.photodharma.net/notices/the-bombing-of-hiroshima

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/atomic-bombing-hiroshima-nagasaki-69-years-gallery-1.1892958?pmSlide=1.1892944

Along side my father I watched dozens of television documentaries on the use of atomic weapons in World War II, the current testing of atomic weapons, and the future possibilities of nuclear weapons. Supper conversation often involved discussions about the cold war and the likelihood of nuclear weapon use.  Sometimes family Sunday drives in the late 1950's and early 1960's included visits to local bomb shelter retailers.

Every week when my parents took me to the public library, in addition to the children's fiction I checked out each week, I would sneak copies of all the pamphlets on the librarians desk about how to recognize the signs of nuclear attack, what to do in case of attack, and how to fashion a bomb shelter in your garage. I read each of these pamphlets repeatedly and memorized every smidgen of information they contained.  (I am grateful that I did not know as a child how absurd and futile such advice was). 

Each night, I would lie in bed awake, wondering if each plane that flew over head was an enemy bomber carrying nuclear weapons. Since my house was positioned near the landing approach for San Francisco International Airport, there were dozens of planes passing overhead every night.  I would freeze motionless, listen to the sound of the engines, trying to guess which one might be delivering death from above.  Any flashes of light, or distant rumbles made me imagine that a bomb had been dropped nearby. 

As I lay awake I thought my way through constructing shelters from lumber and plywood (which we had) and sandbags (which we did not).  Sometimes I would hunch in bed under the covers in the "duck and cover" position that we were taught in school during earthquake/bomb drills.  

At some point, after the nuclear scare of October 1962, the intensity of my fears faded.  The sleepless nights and nightmares slipped away. But I never lost my anti-nuclear, anti-war convictions, which translated in adulthood into political action and advocacy. 

confessions of a former optimist

I have always been an optimist. Or perhaps I should say I was always an optimist until the last few years. This has little or nothing to do with my personal life experiences. I maintained an optimistic outlook during unemployment, poverty, cancer, divorce, and many other personal trials, and recent years have been kind to my husband and I in many ways. 

Moreover, my optimism had was not based on ignorance of the worlds problems and issues. My parents brought me up to be highly aware of the dire circumstance of poverty, war, brutality, pain and suffering that others in the world suffered. I was brought up to care about and fight for equality, freedom, and opportunity for others. I was a realist optimist. 

I can remember reading Linda Goodman's Sun Signs in high school and she had this very apt description of Aquarius that fit me to a "T": 

"Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What’s more, he’s taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn’t easy to believe in something after you know what it’s really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code." 
Goodman, Linda (2011-02-23). Linda Goodman's Sun Signs: Aquarius (Linda Goodman's Sun Signs Set) (Kindle Locations 175-178). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition. 

Later few years later in college I read Yevegeny Yevtushenko's A Precocious Autobiography  and identified strongly with this passage: 

"My optimism which had been all pink, now had all the colours of the spectrum in it, including black, this is what made it valid and genuine." 

I made my career in sociology a discipline focused on understanding the realities of social life; and I focused on topics of inequality (wealth and poverty), economic and political power (its uses and misuses), and environmental problems. I became more and more versed in what was wrong with human societies, and still I retained optimism that if people properly understood the sources of those problems they could struggle together to make a better world. 

But some where in the past decade, perhaps just the past five years I lost my way. I have come to believe that many of the problems the world is facing can not be fixed, at least not in a way that allows human societies to move forward from where we are now. The inequalities have become so huge, the gaps in power so large, and the many of the environmental problems irreversible without immediate, dramatic reversals in energy, transportation, and food policies that I know will not happen because of those overwhelming inequalities and power differences. 

It feels to me on a daily basis as if those in control of the multinational corporations and the worlds' wealth are deliberately driving humanity towards the edge of destruction, because they believe that there is more profit and more power in creating impoverished and powerless masses, and that the accumulation of vast wealth will some how exempt them from the disasters to come....and who knows, enormous wealth provides a lot of cushion against catastrophe so perhaps they are right. Whether they are right or wrong they are acting as if they, and their children and grandchildren will be immune. 

I do not believe humans are headed to extinction - even as we drive many other species to extinction - but I do believe that we are headed to a lot of hunger, disease and death, and the break down of much of modern industrial society.  

I also believe that within that disaster lies the possibility for vibrant, localized, lower tech, sustainable communities to come out from the other side of the disaster - perhaps many decades on the other side. I also believe that there are people around the world who are doing enormously good things to build social capital, make connections, create local food webs, advance new forms of spirituality  and environmental awareness, and to create support networks that may be the tenuous bridges that we will need to reach that sustainable future on the other side of disaster. 

I know some of those people doing good work and dreaming good dreams. Most of them are far away from me and I only have contact with them through Facebook. It is this lack of direct connection that I think has given birth to my despair.  I want to be part of the bridge building, but no longer know how to make the connections.  I know longer feel it in my soul the way I once did. I feel weighted down by the presence of so many whose response to the uncertainty and fear that they feel in their bones is to cling to a mythical past that never existed and demand that nothing change or that changes should be to a more restrictive, narrower, meaner, less inclusive future. 

The simplicity of childhood - NOT!!

I occasionally see an advertisement (such as a recent one for Weight Watchers) or a post on social media that expresses the idea that childhood is a "simpler" time, that children are carefree and joyous.  Children are not in control of their own world, big people control it; children lack the skills and the resources to do many things that they wish to do.  I'm not saying that children are never carefree or joyous, but even the best loved, well cared for child experiences enormous amounts of frustration and anxiety. I was reminded of this truth by the Facebook post of a friend - a young mother with three children, the youngest of whom, Story, is about three years old. Here's what she posted about Story today:

Reasons Story has cried today include but are not limited to:She ran out of chocolate soy milk; Seth let her play with a salamander and let it go; Seth found her another salamander and she couldn't bring it inside; The salamander didn't wait on her on a rock while she went potty; She was cold; She couldn't find her Lotso Bear; The cat wouldn't let her choke it;  She ate one hot dog and the other one wasn't magically cooked before she got done; She ate the other hot dog and it was the last hot dog; She cried so hard for another hot dog she remembered she wanted chocolate soy milk; She cried so hard for soy milk she peed herself; She cried because her pants were wet.

Not all children react so emotionally to the world, but all children experience fear, worry, anxiety and frustration on occasion. It has become common place to use children's fears - whether of the monster under the bed or in the closet - as the basis for humor, but to the child those fears are very real and sometimes immobilizing. 

Sometimes those fears are of something quite real, if ultimately unlikely.  I spent most of my childhood fearful and worried about nuclear war. I lay awake each night for long periods of time listening to every plane that flew over (and since we lived under the approach to San Francisco International Airport there were a LOT of planes) wondering if each one was the one that would drop the bombs.  Every time I went to the public library I gathered pamphlets about how to make fallout shelters.  I would devote hours to trying to figure out how to build a shelter in our garage.  I did not know then that all such advice for shelters was absurd and nonsensical. I took it seriously and made many careful plans about how my family might be saved from obliteration. 

The questions of HONY

One of my daily addictions these days, along with millions of other people around the world is "Humans of New York" (fondly known among fans as HONY) the photography and interview project of Brandon Stanton. Brandon is a genius at capturing people both visually and through their words. You can view his work on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork or his blog at http://www.humansofnewyork.com/. Brandon also has a top selling book of his photographs interviews available everywhere. 

Brandon has developed a series of stock questions that he has found help unlock the interesting stories of people's lives. Among them are:

"What was the happiest moment of your life?"
"What was the saddest moment of your life?"
"What was the most frightened you've ever been?"
"What's your greatest struggle right now?"
and finally "If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people what would it be?"

Spending time reading the life stories that Brandon elicits, has gotten me to thinking about my own answers to those questions. I woke up this morning about 4:30 AM and spent the next ninety minutes thinking about those questions. Here's what I concluded:

"What was the happiest moment of your life?"

The summer of 2009 when I got to paint a mural for my college. Everything about my life was good, my parents were still alive, my husband and I were happy and healthy, and I got to spent an entire summer rediscovering the art that I loved so much (and getting paid!). It had been years since I'd done any painting, but it all came back to me, and I created something of beauty that will endure for years and be appreciated by many. 

"What was the saddest moment of your life?"

March 2012 when my mother and my dog Rosie died exactly one week apart. My mother was 89, had severe dementia and she frequently expressed the wish to die, so there was some sense of relief but still of course sadness, then when our beautiful, young dog suddenly became very ill two days later and died exactly a week after my mom the sadness simply overwhelmed me for weeks. 

"What was the most frightened you've ever been?" 

This is actually a toss up between two things. The first was in May 1982 on a Tuesday morning when I was told I had melanoma and that I had to report to the emergency room for surgery within two hours. The trauma of the diagnosis and immediate surgery was multiplied by the emergency room setting, where while I was being operated on with a local anesthesia an older woman in cardiac arrest was brought in to the cot next to mine, and I was totally aware of the doctors' unsuccessful efforts to revive her; she was declared dead and removed all while I was still being operated on. I was never more aware of my own mortality.

The second was probably a more sustained terror. In May 1980 in fear of my life, I had to move out of my apartment in the middle of the night (with the full cooperation of my landlords) to escape an alcoholic boyfriend who had suddenly turned violent. For several weeks I lived in fear that he would find my new apartment. He never did and life settled down.

"What's your greatest struggle right now?"

This is the easiest answer: making the changes in diet and activity to get a handle on my diabetes and improve my health so that I can look forward to enjoying the rest of my life and actually do all the things I've been planning for my retirement. 

and finally "If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people what would it be?"

It's the same advice I give myself every single day: Each day is a gift, even the most difficult days. Do not pray for the day to end, do not wish your life away. Pray instead for the strength, patience and wisdom to live fully in each moment." 

 So now, even though its unlikely I'll be going to New York City any time soon, or even less likely encountering Brandon Stanton, I have my answers ready!

the time for uncivilization has come

For many years I have believed that we humans, especially those in the advanced, capitalist nations like the United States, were living on the edge of something, a precipice perhaps, or a chaotic whirlpool. We have been brought to this edge by gross disregard of the human and ecological consequences of our civilization's economic, technological and political actions.

In recent months, I have come to believe that we are no long on the edge, but have already crossed over and we are already falling or swirling in uncharted, unfamiliar territory, where the old rules and principles no longer provide us with trustworthy answers (if they ever did).

I believe that a majority of Americans know this in their bones, although they cannot bring themselves to recognize it consciously. It is the source of the profound anxiety, anger, and fear of our age, that manifests itself in a vulnerability to demagoguery, obsession with self-protection ("got to that gun with me to get a cup of coffee"), and xenophobia.

I was pleased to discover yesterday, that there are also a growing number of people who are consciously aware of our crossing over, and the need to respond in transformative ways not driven by fear, but reaching out for community. One place for such people to connect is the Dark Mountain Project whose manifesto is reproduced below:

‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
   
2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
   
3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
   
4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
   
5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
   
6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
   
7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
   
8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

"Dark Mountain" photograph by sgreerpitt June 2008, is a mountain top strip mine in Letcher County Kentucky.

New House Day -- I hope

The calendar and the beautiful bare-limbed trees say it is really November, but it did not feel like November at seven AM, when the porch thermometer read 64 degrees--warmer than when I fed the porch cats last night.

The temperature and wind foreshadowed rain, which came pouring down in sheets within moments after a morning walk with Rosie dog.

Today is the day, that our new double-wide house is suppose to be delivered--having signed away our financial life for the next twenty years yesterday. Neither of us could sleep much last night. Anxiety and anticipation mixed in equal amount. Much to be excited about, much to be grateful for, yet there are worries, too.

This is necessary. The old house is becoming unlivable (toilets that don't work properly, plumbing that springs major leaks every six months or so, floors that are rotting with more and more holes covered with temporary boards, major ceiling leaks, an oven that stopped working, an old furnace on its last legs), but experts say that renovation is not appropriate, given that the house was improperly installed more than 30 years over an open 2 to 3 foot pit where a lake of water sits most of the year.

We are excited about a new house, where everything works, and cold drafts don't sift through every room. But we've become accustomed to life without a house payment in the last couple of years, and suddenly taking on new payments, significantly higher than the old ones has us scared. It's been so many years (4 now) since the community college faculty and staff have had any raises.  It's hard to imagine that they will ever come again. Thus, anxiety tempers the elation of something new.

Life is so fragile.  Within the past months, several of my friends, students and former students have lost a spouse suddenly in devastating events (homicide, drunk driver accidents, work accidents). By comparison our anxiety over the financial burdens of a new house seem trivial--and so we will muddle on through I'm sure, and nights of good sleep will ultimately return.

Footers in the rain (10 AM)

fear

Every day at seven PM I call my mother. It is four PM her time on the California coast, but despite that time difference we are both generally at about the same place in our day -- dinner time. Most days the call lasts for ten minutes. Some days when we both have a lot of say, it can last half an hour.

Every day at seven PM I am witness to my mother's decline into dementia.  Her doctor and health care workers use the term Alzheimer's, but because I am not there I cannot ask them more detailed questions. I know from reading that not all dementia is Alzheimer's, and what is happening to her does not fit the way I have seen Alzheimer's described or depicted in the ubiquitous commercials for drugs and products. But then I know very little, and the disease progresses differently in different people I am told.

The most obvious symptom to me through our daily phone calls is the aphasia. She loses words. She knows what things are and what they do and what they are for, but she can no longer retrieve the names for them. Common everyday objects, events and actions escape her. She is acutely aware of this problem and struggles. Sometimes I will try to supply a word here and there, but mostly she seems to prefer to just provide round about descriptions (such as "that nosy box with pictures in the living room" for TV). She has also forgotten how to do things, like all but the most simple cooking, and can only write a check with substantial assistance from someone. Numbers and arithmetic are almost completely beyond her. She never learned to use a calculator and certainly will not now.

The biggest crisis in my mother's life at this particular point in time is that the company that provides municipal garbage and recycling pickup for her California suburb, has suddenly decided to entirely change the rules. They have delivered three big huge wheeled containers, one green, one blue and one black, and detailed written instructions on what can and cannot go in each one. My mother is utterly bewildered by this.

She has daily assistance, and I imagine that Jennifer has a much firmer grasp on what is required for properly filling these new containers. But my mother wants to be able to understand this herself, and she simply cannot get her mind around how they will store and dispose of the various types of recyclables, trash and garbage.

I feel for my mother, and her pain and anxiety. But am comforted by the knowledge that Jennifer and my brother Charlie are there to take care of the actual logistics of this particular crisis.

There is however, my own growing fear that I too am slipping down the long slippery slope to cognitive disorder.  My mother is 86, and I am only 59, but I believe I see the signs and symptoms in myself. 

I have had problems with word loss for more than 15 years, and it has been getting worse. Nothing like my mother. But  a couple of times a week, I will be lecturing in class or talking to my husband, and suddenly will be unable to capture the right word -- not every day nouns and verbs like my mother now has difficulty with, but everyday, routine concepts of my discipline and the social sciences in general, and with descriptive adjectives and adverbs. Some weeks, when I am tired or stressed, are worse than others.

The other thing that frightens me, is my reaction to new and novel situations or the disruption of routines. I become mentally flustered, and sometimes panicked, and have the unfortunate tendency to lash out angrily at those around me (primarily my wonderful, patient husband, who deserves far better than he's gotten of late). Within moments of my outburst, I feel remorse, but the damage is already done.

If there is time to think about some thing new, figure out what is going on, what needs to be done, and then act, I'm fine. It's the situations that require an immediate response that throw me. Yet, everything I read tells me that what I need is more novelty.  I need to get out of my ruts, challenge myself with new tasks, meet new people, try new places and activities -- especially physical activities -- to stimulate my mental "muscles."

Unfortunately my actual physical muscles -- or more specifically my joints -- are undermining efforts in that direction. The RA seems to be progressing. After two years, my medications no longer seem to prevent the end of the day exhaustion. Daily housework chores like dishes and feeding cats overwhelm me.  Weekly chores like house cleaning and laundry -- well, it's been a long time since those were actually done on a weekly basis.  It seems clear to me that it will not be long before I will need to have more help around the house than John can provide, even if he were to provide more than he already does.

How long do I have before I become like my mother? How long before I can read the words but no longer make sense of the content? How long before I can no longer remember how to work my computer, send e-mail? How long before I can no longer have a normal conversation?

What do I need to do to provide security for myself and John before that day comes? What things is it essential for me to do and say before that day comes? What legacy do I still have to leave before I can no longer communicate with the world in a meaningful fashion?

how shall we live? part 1

My attention has returned in recent days to a theme that has long concerned me, a theme that has popped up in several very interesting blogs.

Will of Zen Agnostic sums this theme up nicely in this quote:

"most of what the doctors are calling mental illness, clinical depression, neurotic behavior - this not illness. It is a natural reaction to an insane culture and a dying planet....Part of the problem in this insane screwed up world is that people can't be open about their grief and anger. Our emotions are natural and healthy - but society at large labels us as unhealthy if we don't put on a smile every day and joke about the weather and sports and the latest celebrity DUI arrest. Simply writing about it, naming it, not hiding from it, is an act of resistance."

Over at CommonDreams.org Robert Jenson writes:

"To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse."

And Dave Pollard at how to save the world writes of the dissonance between the messages from our bodies (physical survival, avoidance of pain, procreation of our genetic material), our culture (values, beliefs, attitudes and norms), and from our environment or biosphere which he labels gaia. Dave argues that:

"this dissonance is paralyzing; it renders us ill, physically and mentally, and ultimately we get exhausted trying to handle it so we become desensitized, shut down."

Like these three bloggers, everything I know, everything I study as a sociologist, as a observer of human society and culture, suggest to me a world in collapse, that has already "overshot" the material basis (resources, food, energy) on which its existence depends. I strongly recommend reading the work of Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth (1972), Beyond the Limits (1992) and The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (2004). Meadows, Randers and Meadows wrote in their first book (1972) that:

"If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrolled decline in both population and industrial capacity."

By 1992, Meadows, Randers and Meadows were convinced that those limits had already been reached in several areas (for example world wide grain production peaked in the 1980's), and by 2004 the conclude that we were approaching other limits much faster than their original hundred year time line.

Most people in modern industrial societies have lost awareness of how deeply the health of society is tied to the health of the environment. They think of our technology as lifting us above the vicissitudes of weather and changes in climate. Yet all one has to do is examine the extent to which "normal" daily activities in our society are fouled up and even stop dead, when it gets too snowy or too hot, or when a hurricane stops the pumping of oil for the Gulf, to realize that our technology has made our societies more rather than less vulnerable to changes in our environment.

We are on a path that is unsustainable in human social terms, not just in environmental terms. The two are so intimately intertwined that we cannot deal with one without dealing with the other. Our economy is not only unsustainable in terms of its use of resources and energy, but it is unstable and unsustainable in terms of the ever increasing disparity between the tiny percentage whose wealth is growing and the other 95 percent whose wealth is declining. We are impoverishing our people and our society as well as our ecosystems and biosphere.

[I realize that this is a larger topic than I can do in one post, given all the other immediate deadlines in my life, so I'm going to make this a multi-part post, with this installment just identifying the problem and linking to some great blogs. more on the actual question posed in the title another day.]

a truly pessimistic view

I have begun to wonder what if the leak caused by the blow out of the Deepwater Horizon rig is never capped or contained. What if, as some fear, the pressures have caused fissures in containment below the surface? What if dozens of leaks arise that simply cannot be contained?

So I wondered, how long could this go on? How long before all the oil would be gone? What kind of world would we be living in if it kept on?

Today, the technical committee empaneled by the federal government has increased estimates of the size of the flow from this accident to closer to 40,000 barrels of oil a day (up from an estimate of 12,000 to 19,000). This new estimate was necessary, because the new containment "top hat" and new riser installed June 3, made it possible to measure fairly accurately the amount of oil flow being captured -- which is about 16,000 to 17,000 barrels of oil per day. Given that there are still huge billowing clouds of oil that are NOT being captured, that pushed the overall estimate of the flow upwards. See the live images at http://globalwarming.house.gov/spillcam for confirmation.

The amount of oil proven reserves under the Gulf of Mexico is 3.655 Billion barrels of oil. I realize that these proven reserves are not all in one continuous field, but on the other hand, pro-drilling advocates have argued for years that 3.655 Billion barrels was only the proven reserves, that that were was probably much more oil under the Gulf.

So for the sake of argument let's imagine that the oil field that the Deepwater Horizon had tapped into is some 3 billion barrels of oil, and that the rate of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico is 40,000 barrels of oil a day. How long could that continue to flow at rate? About 205 years, that's how long.

So the deeply pessimistic side of me wonders, what if the Gulf of Mexico turns into a continuous, poison petroleum swamp for more than a 100 years? What happens to us then?