KURT COBB

As I watched the recently released film about Amelia Earhart, I couldn't help thinking about parallels between her journey and ours as an industrial culture.

Much of the migration we are seeing today is from countries which export resources to wealthy nations. In other words, we are seeing mass migrations from resource exporting countries where carrying capacity is being systematically undermined toward countries that are importing that carrying capacity.

According to an often cited saying, "If you want peace, work for justice." But, most economic justice work is currently premised on the view that greater economic equality requires continued economic growth. This constitutes a wholehearted embrace of a cornucopian future; it recognizes no limits to growth that are implied by climate change, world peak oil production, and the rapid depletion of other resources including metal ores, water, soil and fish.

The price of oil has more than doubled from its nadir of $30 a barrel earlier this year. To explain the resilience of oil prices in the face of a severe economic slump, the oil optimists have turned to an old standby argument: resource nationalism.

At turning points most market observers and participants are of the same mind. That doesn't mean the bear market in natural gas can't continue, perhaps for quite a while yet. But the idea that gas will remain cheap and plentiful for decades because of technological breakthroughs sounds too good to be true, and it probably is.

It is John McPhee, that fabulous writer about the geology of the United States, who has given me the insight as to what the "true" purpose of humankind is....to alter the landscape and the atmosphere to such a degree that we bring about wholly new conditions on Earth.

As the fossil fuel age winds down, will the public be so amenable to setting aside additional landscapes, keeping them out-of-bounds to extractive industries? Will it even be willing to defend the national parks we already have?

As the troubling realities of future oil supplies begin to penetrate offficial circles, the oil optimists are making even more outlandish claims.

Burning natural gas to extract and process oil from the Canadian tar sands has been likened by one industry insider to burning Picassos for heat. But the bidding at the "Picassos for heat" auction may go even higher as those involved in tar sands and oil shale development push for nuclear power to fuel their projects.

Modern humans often imagine themselves invincible, living as a species forever into the future, colonizing space, and perhaps even escaping the destruction of the Sun many billions of years hence. This kind of thinking--grounded in neither geology nor paleontology nor ecology I might add--has created the rather cavalier attitude demonstrated by modern leaders and their citizenry toward the daunting dangers of climate change, resource depletion and ecosystem collapse.