Time to Wake Up

My recent post Energy Constrained Learning was a whopping 4800 words and covered a lot of contentious territory, including peak oil, climate change, futurist scenarios, implications for learning and education, and my own conclusions based on 2 months of sustained reading and thinking about these topics. It was also seriously documented with footnotes. Not easy reading.

Starting tomorrow I will serialize the post as six smaller posts, one each day for six successive days.

The crux of Energy Constrained Learning is that the industrial world has backed itself into an untenable situation with no easy way forward. We are about to be slapped silly my Mom Earth. Education and learning won’t be spared.

Anyone concerned with educational change will benefit from considering the limits and possibilities that may exist tomorrow.

Here’s a quick overview of the six posts:

1. Introduction: Sets the context. From a recent journal on public health: “.. the ways in which we live, eat, travel, vacation, work, recreate, trade, manufacture, and consume will all likely be very different from today.”
2. Peak Oil and Climate Change: Makes the mainstream point. From the International Energy Agency: “Cutting emissions sufficiently to meet the 2°C goal would require a far-reaching transformation of the global energy system.”
3. What’s the Concern? Makes the counterpoint. “Insufficient time exists to scale up non-fossil fuel energy sources to ensure safety from climate change and to also maintain current average standards of living in the world.”
4. Scenario of Scarcity Industrialism: Explores a feasible future. “[John Michael] Greer’s work provides a rich resource for thinking critically about tomorrow. It’s a thoughtful and well-written depiction of the near future that challenges readers to consider what happens to industrial societies that, in a mere 300 years, managed to blow away nearly one-half of the recoverable fossil fuels that it took nature half a billion years to make.”
5. Implications for Online Learning: Plays with limits. “In an age of scarcity industrialism, we need something simple, cheap, small-scale, decentralized, and modular for easy scalability. “
6. Reflections: Releases the inner me. “Mind deserves the same care and nurturing we give to other natural resources. Today this is far from the case. The world’s people lie woefully fallow.”

The issues raised in these posts are ones that everyone should consciously consider. Sleepwalking into tomorrow cannot possibly help.