Peak Everything
A growing number of books are addressing the need for a greater focus on renewable resources and simplicity as instruments of survival. Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Centrury of Decline by Richard Heinberg helps make inroads.
In Peak Everything, author Heinberg puts forward a variety of arguments that are not unusual. Over the last half decade, a new wave of books warning of catastrophic social crisis have helped many people come to greater awareness about the use of resources and foreign policy errors. Heinberg delivers a knockout of his own with Peak Everything, which is built on the premise that, more than just peak oil, the United States is faced with a situation in which massive demand of goods and services has taxed supply into retreat.
The author is quick to acknowledge this topic isn’t exactly cheery dinner conversation. Mainstream media reporters, often wrapped up in tabloid headlines, seem to glaze over when one brings up sustainability or the potential societal crash many scientists and others have long warned about. Heinberg is undaunted, however, and brings up a variety of engrossing theories, from phasing out coal to the nudge of enlightened individualism as a tool that is depoliticizing our cultural climate. This approach makes Peak Everything effective.
Heinberg succeeds where others struggle by making his tale one in which copious data, political and social theory, history, technology and nuanced concepts of language and consumerism emerge united as wolves in sheep’s clothing — plagues that seem like boons, creating a false sense of security, even justifications for excess. Heinberg’s prose is methodical and stirring. He flits from discussing capital’s great proponents to current studies to political theory with ease. Peak Everything is infinitely readable and interesting.
