ISO ECONOMIC HISTORIAN
Like many people, I do all of my best thinking in the shower.1 This morning I was wondering about petroleum.
Here we have have some stuff, a resource that up until about 150 years ago was little used. Then someone figured out a way to use this stuff more efficiently, and it replaced all of the other burning oils (animal fats, generally) in use. And then came cars and then came plastics, and the rest, they say, is history.
And now there is some concern that the wells are running dry, and we’re having wars over oil and can’t afford to fill up our cars and trucks and OMG WHERE’S THE OIL!?!! LET’S DRILL EVERYWHERE AND SUCK DOWN THE LAST DROP SO NO ONE ELSE CAN HAVE IT!!!!1!!
We neeeeeed it!
What other thing have we (broadly defined as “historical peoples”) needed, have only known recently that we needed it so much, and yet we used it up so completely that our economic society was completely transformed into something else, and what was that something else?
Was it caves -> lack of room for our burgeoning population -> built dwellings? Was it grazing lands -> deserts -> irrigation? Those, I think are long, slow changes. I could see climate changes having a large local effect in a short period of time, but then the people move (like the Anasazi, perhaps). Is there a pattern we are following, that perhaps we can learn from, or break free of?
And then what is the next thing, corn?
- Sometimes that’s the only time I think at all — the rest of the day I’m on autopilot.↩
