Why is it that no one wants to talk about moving to a more simple life style? People had it pretty good in the 18th and 19th century without all the petroleum, the problem then, as now, was political ineptitude and greed leading to nationalistic war over territory and natural resources.Amen. However, I think it's important that we not over-idealize the immediate pre-petroleum period. Many of the problems we currently face existed then as well, simply minus the petroleum. For instance, whereas today we use electricity to light our homes, in the 19th century much of Europe used whale oil, leading to a predictable and disastrous population crash among whales from which no cetacean species has fully recovered. And instead of using gasoline and diesel to power transportation and industry, the 19th century world used coal. We'd still be facing global warming crises even if nobody had started pumping petroleum. And, as you allude to, colonial wars of the period led to people having it "pretty good" only in the colonizing nations. 18th and 19th century agrarian and industrial societies were destroying the world every bit as much as modern ones are, though not at quite the same pace.
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