The Next Real Revolution

By Lance Olsen, Unfiltered 6-07-06

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"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil."
Sheikh Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's oil minister in the 1970s.

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THE NEXT REAL REVOLUTION
by Lance Olsen

The world has seen a Stone Age, followed by a Bronze Age, followed by an Iron Age. People living just before these transitions had little idea of the great changes on their horizon.

We humans live hand-to-mouth in many more ways than one. Tied up in what our senses can deliver in the moment, our thinking is, to borrow a term from psychology, "stimulus-bound".

The world has also seen a Tool Making Revolution, followed by an Agricultural Revolution, followed by an Industrial Revolution. These were real revolutionary changes, making petty political revolutions like the Reagan and Khomeini revolutions pale to relative insignificance.

The next real revolution will be build on at least eight basic foundations. Each of the eight makes an interesting story in its own right, but their revolutionary power lies in the fact that they are all unfolding at once.


1- THE END OF THE OIL AGE
2- THE BEGINNING OF A LESS HOSPITABLE CLIMATE
3- THE END OF THE HUMAN POPULATION BOOM
4- CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH
5- AMERICA: THE SELF-ENDANGERED SUPERPOWER
6- CRIMELORDS GAINING CLOUT
7- FUNDAMENTALISM
8- TOXIC PLANET


1- THE END OF THE OIL AGE
The Oil Age is dying -- the cheap and easy stuff is gone, or about to be gone, and so we will simply end up leaving the costliest goo in the ground. Something new will follow the dying Oil Age, but, no matter how desperately we drill the world today, the costliest oil will always be there, turned useless by the simple fact that it isn't worth the costs of drilling.

But the most compelling thing about this simple change in human history is that it is part of a pack, one of eight major changes capable of shaking the world.


2- THE BEGINNING OF A LESS HOSPITABLE CLIMATE
Simultaneously with the end of the Oil Age, we are seeing the beginning of a new and less hospitable climate. This change of climate (brought on by the past hundred years' binge of burning cheap fuels) will be the most lingering momento of the Oil Age --scientists have calculated that, even if we had stopped burning ALL fossil fuels yesterday, the atmosphere and oceans are already set up to keep on warming for at least another one to "a few" centuries into the future.

The pairing of these two stories only begins to set the scene for the next big change in human history, because the Oil Age brought a tripling of the human population.


3- THE END OF THE HUMAN POPULATION BOOM
Already, demographers are revisiting their calculations for our population's future. Just a few years ago, the demographers were estimating that the number of people on the planet would jump from 6 billion to twelve billion. Lately, they've made what may have been the first adjustment in many to come -- now they think that we'll get to the nine billion mark instead of twelve billion.

The big question in demographics -- and in many others -- is whether we'll hit 9 billion and stall there, or fall back to 6 billion and possibly fewer. Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daly guess that 2 billion people would be about the optimal number, and of course those 2 billion would be about 3 times richer than 6 billion if we only look at their increased per-capita wealth in the likes of water and wood, soil and foods.

Changes of oil, climate, and population add up to a big story. Because cheap oil has translated to lots of cheap food, a lot of us have noticed that it was oil that boosted our population boom. And that a human-friendly climate played a major part of its own. For us, it is not a question of whether the human population can keep growing, or hit a peak and stall, but instead a question of just how far we'll fall.

Some of us will fall faster than others, and partly because of another big force of change. All across the planet, economic strategies have been diverting money into fewer and fewer hands.


4 - CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH

The division of haves and have-nots is not new on this earth. But the extent of it today is raising eyebrows galore as it stirs social tension -- tension which just happens to be rising at the end of the end of the Oil Age, the beginning of a new climate, and an entire population under unprecedented pressures.

George Soros says the global financial system is like a circulatory system, with a heart pumping money out to the peripheries and then taking it back from the peripheries to circulate it again. But he warns that, at some point, trouble out at the far peripheries (a slashed wrist, for example) can pose serious threats to the heart. Should the circulation of money be imperiled, it would be happening at the same time as the end of cheap oil, the beginning of a new climate, and the likely shrinkage of the human population.


5 - AMERICA: THE SELF-ENDANGERED SUPERPOWER

The United States had no sooner become the planet's sole surviving superpower than some fanatics flew planes into the twin symbols of its increasing economic clout. But Americans were not the only ones horrified by what had happened.

All over the world, in cities of Iran and France, Russia and others, millions poured into the streets in shared shock. Magazines printed photos of thousands in the streets of Moscow and Tehran, carrying candles, murmuring slogans of solidarity with the slain. A leading Paris newspaper, Le Monde, ran a headline saying "We are all Americans now."

But then the US swelled its chest and declared an endless war, one financed by borrowing from abroad, making the mighty nation dependent on the savings of people in other nations at the precise moment when other nations were wondering if the Americans had gone mad. As bad or worse, the world's good will toward America vanished with news that it had used torture, evaded treaties on chemical and light weapons, suppressed its own scientists' reports, and commenced snooping on its own citizens' emails and phone calls.

The end of the Oil Age, the beginning of a new climate, an increasingly vulnerable human population divided along lines of wealth, and a superpower turned wobbly each create opportunity for the ones most likely to thrive off of crisis.


6- CRIMELORDS GAINING CLOUT
American University's Louise Shelley has already testified before the US Congress that "... transnational organized crime will be one of the major problems facing policy makers in the 21st century. It will be a defining issue of the 21st century as the Cold War was for the 20th century and Colonialism was for the 19th."

Dr. Shelley told Congress that, already, the 1980s had shown that even major nations such as Italy and Japan could come close to being taken over by organized crime.

"Timber mafias" from Malaysia to Pakistan already endanger the forests of the world. Black markets in light weapons spur bloody wars from Africa to the Balkans. And the market for buying and selling people is on a worldwide roll.

In his final State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton said that global crimelords will be working in alliances with terrorists, creating a combined threat the security of the United States.

U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that at least some nations are already at danger of being virtually owned and operated by what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius once called "the scariest people on earth."


7- FUNDAMENTALISM
Whether we look at the Middle East or Middle America, hard-core fundamentalists are digging in, taking firm positions, staking out their claims on everything from womens' bodies to the contents of books. Whether Islamic or Christian, they believe they have God on their side, and that they must wage war on the others they see as evil.

While some have mostly feared a re-ignited conflict between Christian and Muslim, possibly on a scale similar to ancient Crusades, the plausibly-bigger story today is that Muslims are killing Muslims and Christians have launched culture wars based on dread of sex and science, simultaneous with a death-wish based on a delusional scheme of "Rapture".



8- TOXIC PLANET
Here, we have another old story growing worse. For example, scientists discovered lead in the ice of Greenland. Wondering where it came from, they traced it to the factories of ancient Greece.

The process of polluting the planet has never ended. As a result, the planet's total mass of living tissue may now be the planet's biggest toxic waste dump, rivalling all the rusty barrels behind barbed wire fence.

Nowadays, according to the Pesticides Action Network, the stereotypical American Thanksgiving dinner is poisoned material, carrying 38 pollutants into the bodies of people who sit down for an annual family rite.

Some pollutants now building up in human bodies can perform de facto abortions when the fetus is a boy. Other pollutants s are clearly implicated in cancers. Fish, one of the most valuable foods on the planet, now carry dangerous concentrations of some of the scariest pollutants on the planet.


SUMMARY:
The above 8 changes aren't the only changes happening on this earth. But, singly or together, they matter. Their combined impact will linger well into the 21 Century -- and beyond.

And their revolutionary clout is that they are all unfolding within the same period of history. It will be difficult for people living today to grasp their combined importance for the world that lies ahead. In the election campaigns of 2006, no politician even dares hint of the total emerging trend.

Lance Olsen is Project Director of the Missoula, Montana-based Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers. He can be reached at lance@wildrockies.org

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