Wilderness Arising

I can’t sincerely call this pessimism, being of the bicycle commuting elitist class, but I believe that the high fuel prices we are seeing now are here to stay and to get even higher. The price increase just seems too structural — there haven’t been any evident major shocks to the market to account for it. Lately, I’ve reading a good bit from The Oil Drum, a joint blog about energy and the future. A couple of linked tidbits:

This article describes how high fuel prices are calamitous for isolated rural towns. These levels of fuel prices are causing a lot of suffering in the short term — people simply cannot change their livelihoods in the near term. Speculating about the long term is fascinating — what will happen in say the twenty-five year span.? My guess is that a lot of these rural communities will simply cease to exist — they are too dependent on people being able to afford to make long-distance supply runs. Swaths of the countryside then revert to wilderness.

On another note, here is an interesting post about peak oil, technical societies, and learning from amateur radio, from somebody who just dived in and passed all three of the FCC amateur radio licensing exams.